Imre Kertész - Fiasco

He was therefore all the more surprised when, on getting to work that morning, he found the press chief, the senior staffer, and the typist all in the office (they were standing in a group as though they had nothing else to do that day other than, for instance, wait for him), and then his own expansive good morning was met, instead of by the expected reciprocation, by a frigid silence lasting several seconds, finally broken by the question with which the press chief greeted Köves:

“What time is this?”

Köves told him approximately, and not without some misgiving, whereupon the press chief — that morning again with a white flower in his buttonhole — asked:

“When does the working day start?” to which Köves (what else was he supposed to do?) specified a time-point roughly an hour and a half before.

“Where have you been up till now?” was the press chief’s next question, to which Köves, who had of course not for the first time officially set off for some steelworks (in reality he simply expropriated the time for himself, employing it for sleep or pottering about, possibly even for private purposes, with no-one having reproved him so far for doing so, the press chief least of all), replied that he had gone off to one of the steelworks the first thing that morning on the matter of some extraordinarily important performance results, or to be more accurate: he ought to have visited it, but he had been prevented from doing so by certain reasons, very serious reasons at that, in point of fact the matter of his health, as he had awoken that morning to find that he felt dizzy and queasy, and he may have had a fever as well.

“And are you feeling better now?” the press chief asked, and after some hesitation Köves considered that even if he was not yet feeling absolutely fine, at any rate it was better than earlier on.

“In that case,” the press chief now brought out the hand that up till then he had been hiding behind his back and which was clutching a sheaf of paper, and Köves, if he was not mistaken, was horrified to recognize his own writings, all the many, many assignments he had written and handed over to the press chief since arriving there—“in that case, try to devise some useable communiqués out of this dog’s dinner,” with which he tossed the entire bundle onto Köves’s desk (for he had a desk of his own in the ministry), but he misjudged the swing, or maybe he deliberately released the bundle from his hand prematurely, so that the unclipped sheets drifted and wheeled and flittered in all directions about the room, obliging Köves virtually to give chase and gather them one by one.

While he was doing that, the press chief set off to see the current chairman of the Supervisory Committee for the purpose of holding important talks, as he averred to the typist, whereas the senior staffer likewise informed the typist that he was awaited in a locomotive works on a matter that would brook no delay, and Köves, who had by then been seated at his desk for a while, staring at the untidy stack of papers that had piled up on it, all of a sudden became alive to a distinctly stimulating sensation coming from behind the nape of his neck — not a touch, more just a gentle puff, warm, exhilarating and fragrant, like an insinuation of the proximity of a female body. Köves hesitated for no more than a moment — it was not really a hesitation, just a cautious, as yet incredulous recognition — before raising his arm and, without even turning round, with unerring accuracy seized a soft, little hand which, in the midst of strange, and even to his ears alien, hiccuping and lonely sounds — it seemed the press chief’s incomprehensible manner of treatment must have been telling on her a little, after all — she started not so much kissing as more like tearing and mauling him, like a hungry animal would a prey which has unexpectedly come its way. And while a light arm snaked round his neck from behind, and a pliant, warm, living weight fused to the nape of his neck, Köves practically sensed with his hair how sounds are formed within a female chest and rise ever higher as tickling vibrations:

“Poor darling!…” the typist said, or rather whispered in a deep, emotion-laden voice.

It still took a long time before Köves, that afternoon, was able to hold this creature who had been hiding all the while, up till then, behind a wall of taciturn industry, whom he had mentally compared every now and then to a smart, graceful, nimble little squirrel, but who, with a single act, so outgrew that humble simile that for the rest of the day Köves could only be amazed at his own blindness; nor did he remember anything else of that day — at most its length as they strove to avoid, rather than seek out, each other’s looks, like people who have already reached agreement on the one essential matter, and now all that was important for them during these dreary hours until the time was their own was to spare each other, to quell their painfully mounting impatience, for they barely existed, and even if they did, they were never able to feel they were alone. So that by the time he was able to take her arm — this was in a side street into which they each turned separately on the way from the ministry, hurrying along the pavement, keeping their distance from each other like strangers, until the woman finally looked round, slowed her steps and allowed Köves to come up alongside — the reined-back feelings had well-nigh cooled and died in them, rather like a limb going to sleep.

“My room’s not far from here,” Köves spoke almost morosely.

“Then let’s go to my place, I have a whole apartment,” the typist responded in roughly the same tone that Köves had so often heard her using on the telephone on office business.

Once the door had closed behind them, however, they had only just enough time to swiftly get out of their clothes, but not to make the bed as well: they sank onto the gaudy, threadbare carpet, snatching, tumbling about, panting, moaning, as though all they had been doing for centuries, no, millennia, was wait, wait and endure, oppressed and, even under the blows which battered body and soul, concealing within themselves, secretly and as it were slyly, a hope, however preposterous, that their torments would one day, just once, be obliterated by rapture, or if it came to that, that all their torments would one day melt into rapture, from which they would groan just as they had from their torments, for throughout their lives all they had ever learned, ever at all, was to groan.

As a result, in respect of the whole day and the night that later greeted them, Köves precisely recalled certain words, moods, touches, and various situations, but much less their sequence and connections.

“What actually happened between the two of you?” the girl asked, but whether that was in the office, in the street, or in bed, Köves couldn’t say, because later on they did, after all, let the sofa down and got into bed in the slowly gathering twilight, as into a castle moat or a ship’s cushioned casemate, perfectly safe from the outside world, and flinging their intertwining bodies about over and over again were nevertheless able to get even for the ill treatment they had suffered. “Did he take you into his confidence? Let you in on his secrets?”

“What secrets?” Köves asked.

“That’s his way,” the girl said. “First he pours his soul out to you, then he murders you …”

“All he did with me is read out a short story,” Köves protested.

“What was it about?”

“It was nonsense. I couldn’t even tell you if I tried,” Köves shrugged his shoulders.

“Try,” the girl implored, so Köves did try, though it wasn’t easy, of course, because at the time he had not paid sufficient attention, and so now he was unable to remember much; what he was able to sketch most vividly, to the girl’s great amusement, in which Köves fancied that he could detect some hints of impatience, almost of deterrence, if he was not mistaken, was his own alarm when, on the afternoon of the previous day, he was summoned by the press chief into his room on a matter that Köves had no doubts about for even a second and yet, instead of the usual folded sheet of paper, had this time pulled a whole bundle from his desk drawer.