Imre Kertész - Fiasco

Impatience was gradually beginning to curdle into irritation for Köves. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“It’s not who I’m referring to that matters,” said Berg, “but what he said.”

“Well then,” Köves pushed, “what?”

“That all this be accomplished.” Berg smiled, whereas Köves, in whom the last vestiges of politeness were swept away by this smile, contrived in its raggedness, and this way of talking, with its riddling and quackery, and who was now aroused to unconcealed exasperation, remarked almost aggressively:

“It’s all very well that the person in question said that, but you — forgive me! — you are sitting here, on a comfortable café seat, and you’re not sipping vinegar but scoffing petits fours, and with great relish too, as I can see.”

Berg, though, was not perceptibly in the least put out by Köves’s irritation, if he even noticed it:

“Don’t blame me for that,” he said, almost appeasingly. “They seem to have forgotten about me.”

“Who has?” Köves regained his self-control, all that was left of his irritation being an unspoken aversion, though that aversion was somehow still thirsting to be satisfied. His question, however, was succeeded by silence, and Köves had given up on an answer — he had also nearly polished off his supper and was hankering only for the beer that he had ordered — when suddenly, in a sonorous tenor voice, his head bowed so that Köves could hardly see his face, Berg started to speak after all:

“In the room where they run through the list of names, from time to time, and they reach my name, which is quite soon, given that my initial is B, someone will cry out: ‘What! Is he still around?! Let’s get rid of him.’ His colleague will just wave that aside, saying, ‘Why bother?! He’ll snuff it of his own accord anyway!’ ” at which point he looked up suddenly, though not to look at Köves but at a small dish Alice had set down in front of him, this time with a white-coated petit four on it, while Köves got his beer and promptly emptied it in one draught. Whether it was because of the drink going to his head, or because the question, against his will, had been ripening in his head and now wanted to pop out, he asked smilingly, like someone who, purely for the fun of it, of course, was going along with the game:

“And what they will decide in that room about me, for example, do you suppose?”

“You see, that’s the big mistake people generally make.” Berg too now smiled, and all at once everything strange now peeled off him (or maybe it was precisely his strangeness which had now become familiar to Köves), though he was suddenly struck by the queer, albeit possibly deceptive hunch that Berg was also a foreigner — who knows, possibly an older compatriot who had fetched up there longer ago and therefore knew the ropes better than he did. “It’s you who has to decide,” Berg went on. “Here they merely give you the opportunity, and then what they do in the room is take cognizance of your decision.”

“And do you suppose,” the scene that Berg had, as it were, painted for him seemed rather incredible, yet — possibly through its very vividness — it still gripped his imagination, “do you suppose that such a room really exists?”

“It may be that in reality it doesn’t exist,” Berg shrugged his shoulders almost absent-mindedly, “But the possibility exists. And the worry is: What if it exists after all, and adding to that the uncertainty over whether it does, indeed, exist? — that’s enough.”

“For what?” Köves asked.

“To permeate every single life.”

But Köves was not satisfied with that answer:

“It’s not enough for me,” he said. Then after an interval, pensively and showing his puzzlement in confidence to Berg, he noted, “I don’t see any method here.”

“That is precisely what is methodical about it,” Berg countered immediately, his face twitching slightly as if he were offended by Köves’s doubts.

Köves, however, resolved that he was not going to be won round as easily as that:

“The fact that I don’t see it,” he asked, “or that it is unmethodical?” Berg’s response to which:

“The two together”—only dissatisfied him even more.

“That is just an assumption, he said, “empty words, no evidence. It lacks something …,” Köves searched for the word. “Yes,” he eventually said, “it lacks life.”

“Life?” It was now Berg’s turn to look surprised. “What’s that?” Köves was frank in quietly admitting:

“I don’t know.” But he added straightaway: “Perhaps no more than that we live.” Glimpsing in the corner of his eye that the man in the uniform was taking his leave of Sziklai, and Sziklai was already searching round for him, Köves suddenly got up from the table:

“I’ll see you!” he said, to which Berg nodded without a word, plainly not seeking to hold him up, whereupon he hurried over to Sziklai and beheld, with a warm, cosy feeling, the way his friend’s face was transformed by the laughter which was wrinkling his countenance:

“I’ve joined the fire brigade!” Sziklai relayed his news.

“How’s that?” Köves joined in the laughter as Sziklai related that the “guy” with whom he had been “negotiating” just beforehand was the city’s deputy fire chief, whom he, Sziklai, had got to know quite some time before:

“When I was with the paper, I did him a few favours,” he said. “At the fire brigade they have now woken up to the fact that fighting fires is actually a daring, hazardous and heroic calling that the public at large, and even the firemen themselves, are not fully alive to: they just put out fires, but in effect without being aware of what they are doing. In short, every trick of the letter, the word and conceptual impact has to be mobilized to awaken a sense of self-esteem in them, and public esteem toward them, to which end they would be willing, moreover, to allocate a substantial sum of money, if they were able to find an appropriate expert.”

“Which would be you?” Köves enquired.

“Who else?” Sziklai laughed. “Born for it, I was.” The guy, he related, offered him the rank of lieutenant, but he would only have to wear the uniform on official and festive occasions.

“I have a hunch,” he mused, “that for him I’ve come at just the right moment.”

“How’s that?” Köves asked.

“Because I’ve been fired and it’s the only chance I’ve got,” explained Sziklai. “Don’t you see?” he looked at Köves, at which Köves admitted:

“Not exactly.”

“Get away with you!” Sziklai fumed. “They need the publicity, they have the cash for it, money to burn, but he can’t get at it directly, so what do you think he wants?”

“Aha!” Köves said, just to be on the safe side, and:

“There you are!” Sziklai too finally regained his composure. “Now all we have to do is find something for you,” he continued.

“Me?” said Köves, “I’ll find a job tomorrow.”

“Where’s that?” Sziklai was surprised, with Köves replying:

“Anywhere,” and recounting that two men had been asking after him. “They were from customs,” he added. Sziklai scratched his head:

“Yikes!” he grimaced. “Let’s try to think it over,” he suggested, though Köves reckoned:

“There’s nothing to think over,” and Sziklai had to concede, albeit grudgingly, that he was right.

“All that worries me,” he fretted, “is that you’re going to vanish, that you’ll be lost to me in the depths of somewhere.”

And as if the smile with which Köves had greeted his words were bearing out his anxieties even more emphatically, he exclaimed:

“And what’s going to become of the comedy?!” Yet evidently, even now, he could not have read anything encouraging from Köves’s expression, because he went on: “I won’t forget about you; I’ll definitely find something for you sooner or later,” he hastened, agitatedly, to assure him. Köves expressed his thanks, and they agreed that “whatever might happen” they would continue to meet there, in the South Seas, after which Köves said good-bye, saying he wanted to get up early the next morning, paid Alice for his supper, then came to a halt for a moment by the exit, because at that very moment the revolving door spun and in came Tiny, the pianist, who greeted Köves with an expansive and overdone gesture.