Imre Kertész - Fiasco

“I can’t do a thing with him,” Mrs. Weigand complained, spreading her hands then letting them drop again in a gesture of helplessness, uncomprehendingly shaking her pallid, peaked face, tipped slightly to one side, its pools now quite without lustre. “Since the chess competition got under way I simply can’t do a thing with him,” she reiterated to Köves, who recently had sometimes found himself trying to stitch his ministerial press briefings together at home (as a result of which the time had duly come, after all, when he made use of the table to which the lady of the house had drawn his attention with such pride on the day he arrived there, which, long ago though it had been, had nevertheless remained fresh in Köves’s memory) and was forced to slam his pencil down angrily, he was so disturbed by the constant squabbling between mother and son which filtered into his room, especially the shriek of the boy’s breaking voice, like steam whistling through a valve under high pressure, though who could tell whether Köves might not secretly have been glad to be disturbed and whether he was not seeking, by that whole business with the indignation, the gesture of throwing down his pencil and leaping up angrily from the table, not only to conceal from, and justify to, himself his relief, for there was no denying that the moment a person began to write, at least in Köves’s experience, he would instantly find himself becoming mixed up in a whole tangle of unclarified and unclarifiable contradictions.

“Is it, perhaps, that the game’s not going well for him?” Köves inquired, with a hint of gloating, it could not be denied.

“Not as well as he would like.” The woman was still shaking her head as though to indicate that she herself disapproved of what she was saying: “Apparently, nothing has been decided yet, but one game has been adjourned and it’s now a life-and-death matter that he wins the next match …,” the woman fell silent, her pools hesitantly seeking Köves’s gaze.

“Life-and-death?” Köves cocked an eyebrow in amused astonishment.

“That’s what he says,” the woman complained, seemingly already a little bit calmer for being able to talk.

“Child’s talk.” Köves broke into a smile.

“Child’s talk,” said the woman. “But then he’s still a child.” Köves was assailed by a sensation of a conversation held long, long ago being reprised.

“Well then,” he therefore brought the conversation to an end, “if it’s that important to him, then no doubt he’ll win it,” and if Köves, once he was on the stairs, felt it was exceedingly doubtful whether this really had been the appropriate solace to bestow on the woman, it was time for him to set off for the South Seas, partly in order to dine, but partly also out of duty, so that he and Sziklai might continue to turn over the matter of the light comedy, though as far as that was concerned, their brain-racking so far did not have much to show for it, comedy writing proving, at least for Köves, an onerous, depressing, and not in the slightest bit joyful labour. As in the past, when their friendship was as yet free and easy, unclouded by any common interest, Köves and Sziklai would sit every evening at their regular table in the South Seas, trade jests with Alice — although the waitress was never at a loss for a snappy retort, it seemed as if recently this had come at the cost of some effort on her part, with the tragic furrows around her mouth also apparently more deeply set than before, so it was sometimes on the tip of Köves’s tongue to ask her why he never saw her “partner,” Berg, around in the restaurant these days, but for some reason he did not put the question to her, with Sziklai’s presence making him feel ill at ease on one occasion, while on another he would feel it was not opportune, and then again, who knows, maybe he feared what the answer might be — and amuse each other with their fire-brigade and ministry yarns, or single out a guest or party for comment, yet from the very first moment the comedy which was awaiting their attentions cast a shadow on their spirits.

“So,” Sziklai’s brow would darken on his arrival, for instance, an event that although expected nevertheless seemed to come as a surprise to him. “Given it any thought?!..”

“Too right I have.” Köves would pull himself together, as though he had been waiting all along solely to be able to impart at last all the innumerable thoughts that he was aching to get out.

“And?” Sziklai’s hard face gazed questioningly at Köves: “Have you come up with anything?”

“It has to have love as the starting point,” Köves declared adamantly.

“Fine,” Sziklai concurred, “let’s take love as the starting point. Then what?”

“There’s a boy and a girl,” Köves offered apprehensively, as though that was about as far as he was willing to push it at that moment and was worried — most likely with good reason — that it would be far from enough to satisfy Sziklai.

“What happens to them?” he could already hear the impatient voice. “What stops them from being happy?”

And since Köves subsided into silence with an expression which was intended to be pensive but in truth was more just dark, as of someone in whom murderous passions were already being stoked against the imaginary loving couple whom they were supposed to steer into a safe haven of happiness over the course of the comedy.

“Right, so you’ve no idea,” Sziklai established, as Köves admitted with his continued guilty silence.

“There, there! No need for hanging the head,” Sziklai relented. “We need to think up a good story,” he opined.

“Indeed,” Köves agreed.

“Let’s try to think,” Sziklai would propose, at which a longer-lasting, facilitative silence would settle in between them, and all Köves had to take care of was to preserve, like some sort of theatrical mask, a haughty expression of brightly musing yet simultaneously expectant communicativeness appropriate to light comedy, as though he would speak the moment the brainwave came to him, which could be in only a matter of minutes now. His gaze and his attention, however, would be freed to go their own ways, flitting about the room, coming to rest, every now and then, on a table or face — the Transcendental Concubine over there, behind her drained glasses of spirits, resting her elbows on the table and her chin in turn on her folded hands, her empty gaze seeming to be trained on Köves but without seeing him. Did she really not see him? Köves was somewhat troubled in dragging his gaze away from her: in truth, he had a tie to her through a rather embarrassing affair, though he had only himself to blame for that, if not the girl at the factory. There was no denying that memories of the girl kept flaring up in Köves; it was far from merely a taste for breakfast that the girl had quenched in him, for she had also awakened in him a wild animal in search of game. Yes, there were times when Köves longed for a woman’s warmth, and not in the abstract but very much the practical, palpable sense of the word: longed for a woman’s body-warmth, a woman’s silkiness, a woman’s sleekness, and not necessarily the girl’s (whom he could have located and placated, of course, had he not considered that too big a price), for Köves’s longing had no object; or to be more accurate, it was impersonal; or to be even more accurate, Köves longed for a woman, but no woman in particular, and that longing, or rather torment, might yet drag him into danger, Köves reflected. Perhaps it was precisely this that he was musing on that evening, Sziklai having gone away early, because he would have to get up the next day at dawn, because the fire brigade were holding an exercise, leaving Köves to linger solitarily over his beer, and while doing so he noticed that the Transcendental Concubine seemed to be sending him some message, first with her eyes, then by a slight quiver of a shoulder and hand; but when, with the deceitful smile that he laid out like a lawn, so to say, to cover his twinges of crude voracity, Köves got up and went over to the woman’s table, she appeared to be outraged all of a sudden: