Imre Kertész: Fiasco

“Well now,” the old boy got up and began, with the pliable wax plugs in his ears muting the sound of his tread to the velvety glide of a panther, to pace up and down between the west-facing window and the closed entrance to the east (sidling a bit in the constricted space formed by the curtain made from an attractive print of manmade fibre covering the north wall of the hallway and the open bathroom door) (a door which was constantly open, for purposes of ventilation, since the bathroom was even more airless than the airless hallway), “It starts off as if it were aiming to be some sort of confession,” he muttered. “Not bad as such, but it can still go off. The trouble is that it’s honest. Not the happiest sign. Nor the subject either.”

Well indeed, if he had to write a book (any old book, just so long as it was a book) (the old boy had long been aware that it made no difference at all what kind of book he wrote, good or bad — that had no bearing on the essence of the matter), at least let it be a book on a happy subject.

Certainly his subjects so far had not been too happy.

As the old boy saw it, the reason for that — on the rare occasions he gave it any thought — was that he probably had no fantasy (which was quite a disadvantage, considering that his occupation happened to be writing books) (or rather, to be more precise, things had so transpired that this had become his occupation) (seeing as he had no other occupation).

As a result — for what else could he have done? — he drew his subjects, for the most part, out of his own experiences.

That, however, always ruined even his happiest subjects.

On this occasion he wanted to be on his guard.

“It was dumb of me,” he mused, “to get out my papers. Best pack them away again.”

“Only,” he mused further, “they’ve got my interest now.”

“I feared as much,” he added (musing).

Rightly so, because for once we can now report the restoration of an earlier situation, itself only temporarily modified by the pacing back and forth: the old boy was sitting in front of the filing cabinet and reading.

… with the guilty conscience of a thief … to present my public … and myself with renewed royalties—

But this is getting me nowhere. In the final analysis, it is just a story; it may be expanded or abbreviated but still explain nothing, like stories in general. I can’t make out from my story what happened to me, yet that is what I need. I don’t even know if the scales have just now fallen from my eyes or, on the contrary, are just now dimming them. These days, at any rate, I am caught off guard at every turn. Take the flat in which I live. It takes up twenty-eight square metres on the second floor of a comparatively not too ugly Buda apartment house of fairly human proportions. A living room and a hallway that lets on to the bathroom and the so-called kitchenette. It even has belongings, furniture, this and that. Disregarding the changes that my wife held to be necessary every now and then, everything is just the same as yesterday, the day before, or one year or nineteen years ago, which was when …”

“Nineteen years!’ the old boy snorted.

“… or nineteen years ago, which was when we moved in, under circumstances that were not without incident. Yet, recently some sort of perfidious threat issues from it all, something that makes me uneasy. At first I had no idea at all what to make of this since, as I said, I see nothing new or unusual in the flat. I racked my brains a long time until I finally realized that it’s not what I see that has changed: the change comes just from the way I see. Before now, I had never properly seen this flat in which I have lived for nineteen years …”

“Nineteen years,” the old boy said, shaking his head.

… and yet there is nothing puzzling about that if I think it over. For the fellow with whom I was once, even just a few months ago, identical, this flat was a fixed but nevertheless provisional place where he wrote his novel. That was this chap’s job, his express goal, who knows, perhaps even his purpose; in other words, however slowly he might actually have done his job, he was always rushing. He viewed objects from a train window, so to speak, in passing, as they flashed before his gaze. He gained at best a fleeting impression of the utility of individual objects, taking them in his hands and then putting them down, going through them, pulling them, pushing them about, bullying them, terrorising them. Now they no longer feel the power of the controlling hand they are having their revenge: they present themselves, push their way before me, reveal their constancy. How indeed to take account of the panic which grips me on seeing them? This chair, this table, the sweeping curve of this standard lamp and the shade, scorched in the areas near the bulb, that hangs submissively, so to speak, from it — each one of them now jostles me and surrounds me with sham meekness, like forgiving, mournful nuns after some king of drubbing. They want to convince me that nothing has happened, though as I recall it, I have lived through something with them, an adventure, let us say — the adventure of writing, and I supposed that in pursuing a certain path to its very end my life had altered. But nothing at all has altered, and now it is clear that with my adventure it was precisely the chances of altering that I forfeited. This twenty-eight square metres is no longer the cage from which my imagination soared in flight every day, and to which I returned at night to sleep; no, it is the real arena of my real life, the cage in which I have imprisoned myself.

Then there is another thing: the strangeness of mornings. There was a time when I would awake at dawn; I would restlessly watch the light prising the cracks in the window blinds, waiting until I could get up. Over breakfast tea I exchanged only a few obligatory words with my wife; subconsciously I was just watching out for the time when I would finally be left to myself and, having completed the indispensable ablutions, be able to devote myself to the stubbornly waiting and perpetually recalcitrant paper. These days, however, out of some peculiar compulsion, it seems as if all I do is excuse myself; at breakfast I talk to my wife, and she is delighted at the change, not suspecting its cause; and when she leaves I catch myself anxiously following her in my thoughts …

At this point, the old boy thought that he might have heard the telephone ringing, but, having loosened one of the pliable wax plugs, ascertained that it was merely the noises from Oglütz as well as The Slough of Deceit swirling about him, perhaps just at a somewhat higher frequency than usual; and this bit disturbance may explain why he had to search for the continuation, and also why — as the lack of this continuity indeed demonstrates — he must have skipped a few lines of the text at this point:

I sense all kinds of traps opening up beneath my feet, I compound one mistake after another; every perception I make, everything that surrounds me, serves only to attack me, to cast doubt on and undermine my own probability.

I wonder when it was that these nuisances began. I don’t know why: it seems a person finds it reassuring to discover a starting point, some possibly arbitrary reference point in time that he can subsequently designate as the cause. Once we believe we have discovered a cause, any trouble appears rational. I suppose I never truly believed in my own existence. As I have already hinted earlier, I had good, sound, one might say objective, reasons for that. When I was writing my novel, this deficiency paid remarkable dividends as it became practically a work tool for me; it was worn down in the course of my daily activity, and when it had tired of my converting it into words, it did not bother me further. The trouble only started up again when I had finished my novel. I can still remember how those last pages were written. It happened three a and half months ago, on a promising May afternoon. I sensed that the end was within my grasp. It all depended on my wife. That evening she was due to visit one of her woman friends. During dinner I was tensely alert to whether she might be tired, not in the mood … I was lucky; I was left on my own. A sudden attack of diarrhoea delayed me from setting to the paper straight away. I had to ascribe this annoying symptom to a motus animi continuus , an onward sweep of the productive mechanism in which, as we know from Cicero, the quintessence of eloquence resides. That spirit is nothing but a certain state of excitement, but it can have an effect — with me, at any rate — on the entire body, including in all likelihood the digestive system. I finally sat down at the table, after all, and then finished off the text just as speedily as I was able to glide pen over paper. I got the last sentence down as well: finished. For days after that I kept on tinkering with it, scribbling in something here and there, correcting some words, deleting others. Then there was nothing more that could be done: that was it, the end. I was overcome by a somewhat idiotic feeling. Suddenly, something that had been a rather good diversion over many long years had folded, it seems. I only came to realize this later on. Up till then I had presumed I was working and had set to it, day after day, with a corresponding, contrived fury. Now that had been drained from me. The daily hard slog had been transfigured into a heap of paper. Now I was left with empty hands, plundered. All at once I found myself confronting the immaterial and formless monster of time. Its gaping mouth yawned witlessly at me, and there was nothing I could shove down its maw.