Imre Kertész - Fiasco

People of all sorts were there, though, from the mysterious to the simple, from those who were upright to the more slovenly, indeed uncouth; there were even a few female machine fitters — on Köves’s other side, for instance, there was a girl filing away, and highly competently too: Köves would occasionally watch enviously, yet at the same time with a tinge of smiling acknowledgement, how in her eagerness her lithe body would quiver all over, her headscarf would slip away from the glossy black hair, tiny beads of sweat would appear on her upper lip, and the girl would sometimes catch him looking, smiling the first time secretively, later on more boldly, and by now sometimes throwing out the occasional remark to Köves, to which Köves, his attention wandering, yet still like someone withstanding the challenge, would toss back some repartee. At other times, he would fasten his gaze on a pair of identical men — at any event both were stocky and balding, both were wearing brand-new blue overalls, which in Köves’s eyes unaccountably looked like the external mark of some resolve, not unlike new penitents who don a monk’s cowl yet, out of old habit, still get it made by their own tailor, filed away with dour assiduity: they were there in the morning, they disappeared in the evening, and they spoke not a word either to others or to each other; Köves heard that they had been dismissed from somewhere, but they considered that this had been a blunder and were now waiting as machine fitters for light to be cast on that blunder, and the reason they were so guarded was that they were afraid a fresh blunder might befall them, or even that they themselves might commit one.

In short, Köves was making do there (to some extent, being present as if he was not present at all, or as if it was not he who was present: an illusory feeling, since it was he after all), and he had already been touched to cheery wonder by the obscure minor delights of a worker’s life: those of the lunch hour, the end of the shift, even of a job of work well done, though the latter was not entirely unalloyed, given that, to tell the truth, Köves had little success with the file; he would never have believed that to smooth a lump of steel immaculately level could be so beyond his powers. Köves regarded filing as almost a matter of honour, and it had got to the point that he now dreamed about it: he stood transfigured at the workbench, iron filings falling from under the file in a flurry of grating, scraping noises, but to no avail, as the foreman — a stout, flaxen-haired man who walked up and down good-naturedly, though somewhat lethargically, among the people bent over their vises and from time to time, with a gesture that was patient but showed little in the way of encouragement, would make an adjustment to the way Köves was holding his elbow or hand — with the aid of a tiny, gallows-like measuring tool was always able to point to some bump or hollow, disfigurement or crookedness on the lump of steel on which Köves had laboured with such furious care.

Köves derived some solace from drilling: that went well for him, one might even say splendidly, as unlike others he never snapped the bits, while he was also able to look forward to plate-shearing with definite confidence — they had tried it out that afternoon, with the gentleman-rider taking a turn at the metal shears before Köves and the girl after him, with the girl calling something across to him with a smile (Köves did not understand it: it sounded as though it were meant to encourage or spur, even urge him on, but in any case Köves had thrown back some facile comment while he set the metal plate in position, then gave a self-confident heave on the steel handles of the shears, heard a cry and was astonished to see the girl’s horrified expression, only after which did something warm pour down his forehead: it seemed he must have stood the wrong way at the machine, and as he had heaved it toward himself the handgrip had banged on his head.

As to what happened to him and around him after that, Köves was only able to follow it with a docile absent-mindedness, like someone who has laid down his arms and allows himself to be swept along by events (which are none too important anyway). Out of the hubbub which arose around him he could again clearly pick out the girl’s appalled yet almost boastful exclamations of “it’s my fault it happened, my fault for telling him to get a move on,” after which a white handkerchief was held to his forehead — more than likely that too was the girl’s. Köves stained the handkerchief quite profusely with his blood, then they lay him down on a bench to staunch the flow, and after that they got him to his feet after all, when they decided that he needed to be taken to the factory’s doctor. As well as he could remember, Köves did not see the girl among those who accompanied him, having sought her in order to return the handkerchief, so he stuffed it in his pocket, even though in doing so he had no doubt daubed blood all over his pocket. They crossed various courtyards before finally reaching the surgery, where the factory doctor pronounced that, the shock aside (though he was not in the least bit of shock), there was nothing seriously wrong with Köves, at which the escort (somewhat disappointed, he thought) left Köves to himself with the doctor and the nurse working alongside him. With rapid, skilled movements, they carried out several procedures on his head (Köves caught the pungent smell of disinfectant and felt some stinging), as a result of which a plaster, rakishly slanted and not too large, ended up on Köves’s brow, directly under the hairline. The doctor told him that he had “stitched” the wound and, enunciating clearly so that Köves, being a simple worker, should be able to understand him, made him promise not to touch the plaster and to come back for it to be treated in three days’ time. He could return to work the next day, he added; the wound did not justify his being put on the sick list. Köves was then allowed to lie for half an hour on the surgery’s couch, and by the time the half hour was up, the shift had also ended.

Köves nevertheless went back to the locker room, partly in order to change, but mainly so as to get a shower: he was able to wash down every day in the steelworks shower room, and there were times when he was in low spirits and felt that the only reason it had been worth getting a job there was for the sake of its shower room, though now of course he had to twist his head about so as not to get the wound wet. While he was dressing, several people patted him chummily on the back, after which he was soon joining the human flood pouring out of the factory.

At the gate, or maybe even before (he was unsure), Köves found that the girl had appeared beside him. Everything that happened to them after that Köves accepted, without any particular surprise, assent or dissent, as a well-organized and self-explanatory process, as a fact that had long been decided and only needed them to recognize it so they might submit to it, even though to some extent that still depended on them, and to that extent Köves might have been mistaken all the same. It began with some teasing (what lodged most in Köves’s memory was the girl’s opening remark: “What an elegant plaster!”), after which somehow neither of them boarded the tram but instead they wandered around in what, for Köves, was the unfamiliar realm of the outer suburbs, where they came to some sort of park, then all of a sudden Köves found he was strolling with a good-looking, dark-haired girl under the leafy boughs of an avenue of trees, and from far away, with a somewhat astonished yet indulgent smile he was beholding a strange and unfamiliar thing happening to him — precisely the fact that he, Köves, was strolling under the leafy boughs of an avenue of trees with a good-looking, dark-haired girl. He was nagged by a vague anxiety, perhaps a presentiment of imminent danger, but defiant urge kept welling up in boiling waves to give way to her and perish.