Imre Kertész - Fiasco

“Don’t you have a home to go to?” the girl asked, and Köves, coming round from his dreams as it were, could only echo the question:

“Home?” as if he were surprised by the savour of the word, as well as the thought that he ought to be going home to somewhere. “No,” he then said, and the girl, averting her eyes as though she were not even addressing the question to Köves but to the trees lining the street:

“Don’t you have a wife?” she asked; that, it seems, is what interests girls everywhere and at all ages equally.

“No,” he replied, and the girl now fell silent, as if she wished to be left on her own for a while with Köves’s answer.

A little later she said:

“It’s still early.”

“For what?” Köves asked.

“To go up to my place,” the girl responded, and the promise implicit in those words was distant enough for Köves to win time, but on the other hand sufficiently enticing to make him restive and spur him to some sort of action: Köves felt his arm moving and encircling the girl’s shoulder.

Later on, Köves recalled a restaurant, a kind of beergarden where a third-rate Gypsy band squeaked and squealed stridently as a clutch of shirtsleeved men at some table or other defiantly bellowed some song, their faces red as lobsters, while at other tables solemn, overweight families sat stiffly, wordlessly, stricken in their incommutable presence as it were; it was here that Köves — his head now starting to throb, which may well have made him somewhat preoccupied — learned that the girl had come to the city from somewhere farther afield, against the will of her parents, who had intended their straitened peasant fate for their daughter, but she had run away from her parents and the future that had been lined up for her by starting work at the factory:

“You have to start somewhere, don’t you?” she said, and Köves keenly approved, even though every nod he gave sent a pain shooting through his head. They later got on a tram which jolted along, taking them farther out of the city, where they alighted somewhere and the girl led Köves among squat, newlybuilt housing, which, in the uncertain glimmer of the sparsely sited street lamps already — perhaps on account of all the planking, sand heaps, and unfilled holes that had been left there — looked like ruins, until they turned in at a gate, climbed a dark set of stairs, and the girl groped with her key to open a door and in the hallway signaled Köves to remain quiet, which he, although not knowing the precise reason, accepted as self-explanatory, as if there was no way of reaching the place he and the girl were approaching other than stealthily. In the end, they slipped into a tiny side room, where the girl switched on a table lamp with a pink shade and Köves cast a fleeting glance across the objects which, so to speak, consummated the room’s perfection: a cracked mirror, a rickety wardrobe, crocheted doilies, a grinning rubber dog sticking out its tongue under the lampshade, a line, discreetly strung up in a dark corner, from which hung a few pairs of stockings and items of underwear, an artificial flower poking up from a chipped vase, a chair, a table, and, above all, a fairly broad but springy bed which would presumably be squeaking later on, while his nostrils were assailed by the smell of poverty, cleanliness, some cheap perfume, and adventure, though he had a hunch that the latter was the sole volatile scent among all the other durable odours.

After which, the next thing Köves caught himself doing was making love — despite everything and over and beyond everything that he had shared in there, how was it possible that he had been made to forget that he was a man? All at once, he now awakened to his insatiable primeval thirst: it was as if he were seeking to douse his throbbing, burning member, yet finding it had plunged into bubbling lava, which burned it even more, with the girl, to start with whispering but then aloud, as it were, egging him on, Köves, like someone in whom a protective concern had suddenly awakened with the passing of the initial half-hours of recurrently erupting self-oblivion, so to speak, asked the girl:

“Aren’t you worried about having a child?”

The look the girl gave might have been, if anything, more worrying for him:

“Why should I be worried?…,” she asked, but she was unable to follow on as she had heard a noise (Köves did not notice it), and she now bid Köves to be quiet, quickly slipped out of the bed, her body white before Köves’s eyes as she bobbed down here and there to search for an item of clothing, which she then draped round her shoulders before dashing out of the room, though her nimble feet soon brought her back, as if she did not wish to leave Köves on his own for too long in the bed, lest he be overcome with loneliness or a fit of absurdity and fear, and she uninhibitedly discarded her negligee, leaned over Köves, and switched off the lamp before nestling up to him with a total confidence which t slightly astonished Köves, like a discreet assault, yet at the same time also disarmed him.

“It was the old lady,” he heard the girl say in the dark.

“Which old lady?” he asked.

“The old lady,” the girl repeated.

“I see,” Köves murmured.

“She was thirsty,” the girl said, then after a brief pause added: “She has cancer; she’s dying,” the girl’s voice rang firmly, almost optimistically, and on hearing her Köves himself did not know why he winced a little. The girl, though, as if she now wanted quickly to interpose herself between Köves and the questions that were assailing him:

“Don’t worry, she’s already gone to sleep. She won’t disturb us any more,” she whispered, and after some wavering hesitation Köves meekly sensed that he was again gradually being suffused by a wave of ardour.

Köves was called in; he was just in the middle of filing away when the foreman came over to him to say that he was urgently wanted upstairs, in the office. What sprang immediately to Köves’s mind was his recent lateness, and although the foreman insisted that he should drop everything and get his skates on, Köves — who after all was merely a worker there (he could hardly sink much lower than that), but then it was precisely through this that he had attained his freedom, even if that freedom did not consist of much more than not having anything to lose — reckoned he was in no hurry to be hauled over the coals. First of all, therefore, he put down the file he was holding, shook the iron filings from his trousers and shoes by stamping a few times, wiped his hands on an oily rag with a few big, easy movements (the way he had seen real machine fitters in the nearby workshops do it), and only then, having as it were disposed of the more important matters, did he set off out of the workshop at a leisurely, ambling pace, responding to the girl’s questioning look only with a wink of the eye: since the first time, Köves had several times spent the night at the girl’s place, reaching the point that they had breakfasted together in the pocket-handkerchief kitchen and set off together for the factory, with the girl delighting in covering the short stretch from the tram to the steelworks hand in hand, although Köves usually found some pretext (such as an urgent need to blow his nose) for withdrawing his hand from the girl’s. In the meantime, Köves learned that the old lady, whom fortunately they never encountered, was some distant relative of the girl’s; the old lady had taken her in, and the girl looked after her in return, and when she died the girl would get the authorities to hand over to her the big room in which the old lady was presently living, and in point of fact, it would be possible to obtain the whole apartment, or at least there would be a greater chance of that if the girl had a family, and especially a child; to all of which planning Köves listened with approving nods, but always in the manner of a well-disposed outsider who, although of course not indifferent to the girl’s life, was nevertheless not, by any means, a part of it, and yet it seems that this did not dampen the girl’s spirits: she just smiled at Köves, as if she knew something better than he did. The previous night, indeed, Köves had not spent with the girl, excusing himself on the grounds that he needed to pay a visit on an uncle, but tossing and turning in his bed, unable to get to sleep, he had been surprised to find himself missing the girl. Yes, if he was a worker, then (so it seemed) he needed a wife; but then, on the other hand (it crossed Köves’s mind), if he had a wife, that would turn him into a worker for good, not that it made such a big difference (he was already one as it was) — Köves no longer knew, in his restless half-slumbering state, where he stood even with his own affairs. In the end, the girl would be right: if she gave it time, that would tie him, without his noticing it, to the girl’s life, and that in turn to the works and promotion, as they waited for the cancer-stricken old lady’s death, and meanwhile along came children, one after the other.