Imre Kertész - Fiasco

That morning, Köves made his way alone along a by now deserted street from the tram toward the steelworks; at the gates, the head gatekeeper asked him sternly, as if he had never seen him before (which might have been the case, of course, given the number of workers in the factory), who he was looking for, while Köves, perhaps in the irrational hope that he might sneak past without attracting attention, tossed out while he was still in motion:

“A worker from the machine shop,” flashing toward the gatekeeper the entry permit with his photograph that he had been given not long before.

“You’re late, you mean,” the gatekeeper stated, blocking Köves’s path and taking his card away from him so as to note down the details for the report he would have to file on Köves’s late arrival, whereas Köves — well aware that lateness was treated severely, almost more severely, in his experience, than work itself, as if some general inclination (or its lack) could be deduced from it — tried pleading, albeit without much conviction:

“Not by a lot,” which only obliged the head gatekeeper to look at the clock.

“Three minutes,” he said, stepping into his glass box and sitting down at the desk, whereupon Köves, who remained standing in the doorway and rested against the frame as if he were already tired out, badly and massively tired, though the day had not even started, remarked, more due to his overwrought state than in any hope of pulling a fast one on the head gatekeeper:

“It wasn’t my fault,” though he immediately regretted it, because in response to the head gatekeeper’s question:

“Whose then?” he was not really in a position to give an answer that would have dispelled any doubt. There is no denying that at that moment Köves would have been hard put to say whose fault it was that he was late: perhaps himself most of all, since, from the head gatekeeper’s point of view, he, Köves, should undoubtedly have been honour-bound to push aside — whether politely or rudely, but in any event citing the punctuality expected of him — all those standing in his way, shake them off, cut his way through them, and set off for the factory, having given deeper weight to the thought that the head gatekeeper was hardly going to appreciate the emotions that had nonetheless been surging through Köves to detain him in the stairwell. What weighed still more heavily in the scales was the fact that Köves felt he was unable to set forth his reasons, would simply have been unable to relate to the head gatekeeper that morning’s events, at least the way they happened — there, by the head gatekeeper’s desk, where everything was impelling him to the crucial and the rational, Köves suddenly saw that this story was simply untellable. If he were to come out with it all the same, he would probably lose the thread, being forced into all sorts of evasions in the course of which his true feelings would come to light (those feelings now appeared to Köves as if it were not he who was feeling them and they were only importuning him like some evil-minded gang in order to make him their accomplice, although Köves was guilty of nothing, of course, unless of being late), so what he said in the end was:

“I got caught in a traffic jam,” but fortunately the head gatekeeper did not notice his discomfiture (he had very likely had a shrewd idea what the answer would be, having heard a more than a few excuses of that kind over the years), and now that he had finished writing, he got up from the desk:

“You need to be prepared for that. The next time set off half an hour earlier,” he advised Köves and handed back his pass.

Not much later, Köves was standing by a workbench and trying to file the upper surface of a lump of steel level, filing — so it seemed — being the key concomitant of the machine fitter’s craft, for Köves had signed on at the steelworks as a machine fitter, even though he was not a machine fitter, and if he were to be a worker, he had no wish to be a machine fitter; Köves had his own notions about that, until of course he came up against the reality of it. In his mind’s eye, Köves had seen a big, clean space and, in a well-lit place at one of the workbenches, himself, possibly in a white overall, surrounded by minute tools and tiny precision machines, where, possibly with a magnifying lens in one eye (the spectacle of Pumpadour, whom he had seen so many times in the South Seas, may have been somewhat instrumental in this), as he fabricated some tiny device that would then move, tick, whirr, or spin. It turned out, however, that it was useless his hankering after that sort of work, the factories in the city were mostly steelworks, and a steelworks devours manpower, so they were always taking people on, and at the employment office Köves was advised to sign on as a machine fitter. Köves was none too eager, on the grounds that if there were fitters, what was the point of a machine fitter, why not a locksmith, who — Köves imagined — produced locks, keys, fastenings, that kind of thing, and for whom a day would come when he could set off on a stroll round the city, or so Köves imagined, and from time to time peep into the entrance to an apartment block, maybe even walk round the outside corridor, and have the modest satisfaction of being able to tell himself that he had made this or that lock, or whatever, but there they were: those were objects that preserved, albeit anonymously, a trace of his handiwork. Köves had barely any idea about machine fitting, or at most no more than he had acquired once, a long time ago — long, long ago, it seemed to Köves, when he was still a small child — at a railway station, that having been a time when Köves took an extraordinary interest in locomotives, and at the station two black men (everything about them was black: their clothes, their tools, their faces, and their hands) had banged on the wheels of a locomotive with big hammers, prompting Köves to ask his companion (no doubt one of his parents) who they were and being told: machine fitters, and henceforth whenever machine fitters crossed his mind (and of course they rarely did cross his mind) he would visualize them as, so to say, fairytale monsters of that kind, a sort of cross between a giant and a devil. It soon became clear, though, that this was the only opening on offer at the employment office: what had been brought to Köves’s attention at his first word, as a piece of good advice, proved, as such, to be more of a command for him, he only had to sign a bit of paper that — to Köves’s amazement — was already waiting for him, completed, as if the office had already been counting on his coming by: of course it is possible that it was just some impersonal form onto which they would subsequently enter the precise particulars (Köves did not see clearly what they thrust in front of him then snatched away immediately after). Afterwards, he even haltingly brought up the objection that he knew nothing about the craft: never you mind, they had replied, they’ll teach you within six weeks. Köves had left the office with mixed feelings (he was supposed to report early the next day at the steelworks); he felt a degree of incredulity over the notion that within six weeks he would become proficient in all the ins and outs of a craft which could hardly be simple, on top of which he shuddered at the thought that he might have to serve an apprenticeship among trainee kids.

As luck would have it, there was no question of that; the people around Köves learning the machine-fitting craft were all adults, some learning for one reason, some for another (in most cases the exact reason never emerged, and making enquiries, for which Köves had neither the time nor the inclination, seemed to be frowned on there), but in any event next to Köves a slim man with a moustache and a pleasant outward appearance was filing, engrossed in his work and silently, in shirtsleeves and a peaked cap of a kind that at most Köves might have seen abroad, had he been interested in equestrian sports, as well as gloves that an expert eye would have been able to recognize, despite the wear and tear, the stains and holes, as being made of buckskin. Had he been fired from somewhere? Or was some guilt burdening his conscience (like Köves’s, too, in all probability), and had he become a machine fitter as a punishment or, for that matter, out of clemency? Or had he perhaps originally had an occupation which had now simply lost relevance, become unnecessary, like that of the sluggish, slightly burly figure who was filing away a bit farther off, whose closer friends would sometimes, within earshot, call “Mr. Counsellor?” Köves had no way of knowing.