Imre Kertész - Fiasco

“What’s the idea?!” she asked in her strangled, hoarse voice. “That you can simply come over here and take a seat at my table just like that?!” thus forcing on Köves a cheekiness he was reluctant to affect:

“Why, anything against it?” he asked provocatively. At bottom, there wasn’t, so Köves took a seat; he even ordered several rounds of slivovitz and got slightly tipsy as he listened to the woman’s somewhat halting disquisition about how the world, themselves included, did not exist, and existence was taking place somewhere else, the world was just an obstacle to existence, so it had to be done away with, because it was not reality, only appearance, to which Köves — his wit sharpened by the drink, apparently — commented, after a time, that it would no doubt be necessary to pay for the slivovitz in reality, whereupon the woman gave a sharp laugh and familiarly placed a warm, dry hand on Köves’s thigh. And although the woman’s proximity did much to ease Köves’s burning torment (as though by now he no longer saw in her a stimulus, more an obstacle to the realisation of his longing for women), maybe the disconcerting incongruity manifested between her blonde hair, her softly contoured chin, and her determined, impudent nose nevertheless induced him to follow the woman on the night-time tram, then a series of streets right up to her dwelling. This was another side room, like all the other rooms on which Köves had paid private visits so far, and although it was true that this time he was not enjoined to be quiet, all the same the stuffy gloom of the hallway intimated the presence of sleeping people somewhere, but rather, on entering the room, veritably to freeze in horror, for in the glimmering semi-gloom (the room gained its mysterious illumination, as he later discovered, simply from the light of a street lamp on the other side of the road) there were phosphorescent eyes staring at him from every side, and Köves even fancied he could hear the heavy breathing of the beings to which they belonged, until the imagined sound was broken by a squeal of laughter from the Transcendental Concubine: “Bet that scared you!” she choked with laughter, toppling over onto her half-made bed. “Dolls’ eyes,” she eventually got out, but then her high spirits seemed to be replaced in a trice by a despair which seemed to be just as bottomless. “Yes, indeed,” she complained in an odd, frail, baby-talk tone: “My landlady constructs dolls’ eyes …,” and it was only now that Köves noticed the innumerable as yet sightless dolls and teddy bears lying on the floor, shelves, and table. “For that ugly, fat man …,” she carried on, her mouth set to whimper: “The Uncrowned … You know him?” she looked up at Köves from the bed, the setting with all those fixed glass eyes revealing her to be particularly talkative.

“Of course,” Köves replied.

“Then come closer,” the woman burbled, and when Köves complied, once again, as in the restaurant, he felt her fervent hand on his thigh, only now a little farther up.

“Where’s the bathroom?” he inquired, perhaps to win time, even if he could not know for what.

“What do you want from the bathroom right now?” The Transcendental was evidently none too willing to let him go, but since Köves, almost incomprehensibly even to himself, like a drunk clinging irrationally to an obsession which has occurred to him out of sheer whimsy, dug his heels in, it was again the accustomed, slightly hoarse voice which irritably snapped out: “So, go if you must! You’ll get to it in the end!” In the bathroom, a trap stuffed full with towels, tooth-glasses, and a blotchy mirror, Köves — who, it seemed, really had drunk more than was good for him — deliberated on whether he should spend the night there by locking the door on himself, or preferably slip unnoticed out of the dwelling, but in the end, like an escapee who remorsefully returns to the site of his sins, he stole back to the room, where the woman — and it was more just her outlines stretched out on the bed that Köves saw in backlighting which was filtering in through the window — betrayed by the even, slightly whistling sound of her breathing that she had in the meantime — more than likely just as she had been: fully clothed — had fallen asleep. Köves waited around longer, in case she woke up (although, admittedly, beyond waiting, he did nothing to facilitate that), then on sobering up, somewhat offended and slightly relieved, yet at the same time ashamed at seemingly not having the strength to give way to his own weakness and in the end, having so stingily and fruitlessly preserved what had been there to be squandered, he left the dwelling nice and quietly, and the next day the Transcendent seemed not to recollect a thing: the usual spirits glasses in front of her, she herself with her usual distant gaze, was listening to what Pumpadour, flowingly silver-maned and passionately rugged of face, was obviously saying with some force, leaning close to her face, and she returned Köves’s cautious greeting with no more than a fleeting, preoccupied, and totally disinterested nod. Köves likewise soon tore his gaze away from the musicians’ table if it accidentally strayed that way, almost out of habit, in the hope of coming across his old friend, the pianist, whom he had not seen since the day he bumped into him here, in the revolving door of the South Seas. One evening — an evening when Sziklai happened to be running late — Köves was unable to put up with it any longer, so he got up and went over to the musicians’ table and, having first begged pardon for the disturbance, inquired of a bald, slightly puffy-faced man with drooping bags under his eyes (Köves seemed to recall once hearing that he played a wind instrument, maybe the saxophone) whether he knew anything about the pianist. To Köves’s great astonishment, however, the saxophonist seemed to have not even the slightest inkling who he was enquiring about, even though the pianist’s appearance was hardly what one would call unobtrusive, on top of which Köves seemed to recall having seen him and the saxophonist many a time in earnest conversation, from which he had deduced that they must be good friends, or at least close acquaintances.

“He plays piano at the Twinkling Star,” Köves tried to jog his memory.

“At the Twinkling Star?!…” the saxophonist registered surprise. “But there is no pianist there. The Tango String Band plays at the Twinkling Star!” As though to forestall any incredulity on Köves’s part, he turned to his neighbour, a gaunt, dark-haired man whose shaven face carried a hint of blue and who exuded a whiff of hair oil: “Does the Twinkling Star have a pianist?” but the man was just as amazed as the saxophonist had been.

“How could it?! The Tango String Band plays at the Twinkling Star!” he said, looking at Köves with something that verged on indignation.

“There, you see!…” said the saxophonist, as though that had served to refute Köves definitively, so Köves quickly thanked him for so obligingly setting him straight and went back to his seat; he still saw the blue-shaven man passing some irritable comment to the saxophonist, who in turn spread his arms, pulling a face and shaking his head as if by way of an apology, and Köves sensed it was most likely on account of his importunity. A minute later, Uncle André, the Chloroformist, in his elegant dark suit, a long cigarette in his hand, passed by Köves’s table, gracefully bowing his grey-templed head at Köves’s greeting. Then, as if something had suddenly sprung to mind, stopped short and, with an urbane smile somehow at odds with the confidentially hushed tone of his voice, said:

“I heard you were asking about Tiny, the pianist, just before.”

“Yes,” Köves said, startled: he did not recall having seen Uncle André around when he was speaking with the musicians, though of course it could well be that he had not taken a hard enough look around. “Does that mean you know something, perhaps?”