Imre Kertész - Fiasco

“I’ve written a short story,” he announced to Köves with a modest yet somewhat defiant smile.

“Oh good! A short story!” Köves enthused (in reality, of course, he was aghast).

“Perhaps,” the press chief amended his previous words with a somewhat meditative expression, “I might better call it a ballad, a prose ballad.”

Köves then related to the girl how the press chief had put on the eyeglasses that he rarely used, set them straight on his nose, pulled down with a few vigorous wriggles of his outstretched arms the cuffs of his shirtsleeves, which, it seems, had ridden up, smoothed the sheets of paper, cast another scrutinising glance at Köves, cleared his throat, then finally launched into reading out in an oily, sentimental voice, while he, Köves, who had by then acquired sufficient practice as to how to adopt the role of attentive listener, settled down with his elbows placed on the chair’s armrests, the palm of one hand cupping his chin and over his mouth (thus allowing him to discreetly cover any yawns that welled up), and was mainly preoccupied with weighing up the quantity of sheets of paper lying in front of the press chief and meanwhile thinking uneasily about the promise made to Sziklai to meet up that evening at the South Seas at an earlier time than usual. He had consequently abjectly failed to catch the title of the short story, and likewise its opening lines: all he remembered was a fogginess about when the story took place, the total absurdity of its location, and the antiquated, tortuous, indeed (or so Köves considered) defective language of the tale. In short, it was about the press chief, or rather not the press chief, not a bit of it: the protagonist of the story, a “Wanderer” of some sort (Köves tried to call him to mind) who was roaming around a desert of some kind and all at once arrives at a tower of some kind (as to why precisely a tower, or what sort of tower, the typist should not ask, because that never became clear, Köves explained), and in the tower he spies a marvellous woman (come to think of it, it was more than likely the woman’s singing which had drawn him to the tower in the first place, it occurred to Köves), who now came down to him and led him into her garden, though of course no indication had been given that a garden was to be found there at all. That was then followed by a lavish, one might even say lush, description of the garden, Köves retailed, the lawn with its bushes, the mirror-smooth little lake, the fragrant, carmine, fleshy-petalled blossoms which thirstily imbibed the dew-drops quivering on them, not to speak of a fountain which boldly shot up its jets on high. Anyway, he carried on, while the woman is leading him along these paths, the press chief, or Wanderer (though Köves could only ever imagine the latter amidst the garden scenery in the form of the diminutive, immaculately dressed press chief in some outrageous costume), notices that the woman has heavy shackles on her hands and feet. He remarks on it, promising the woman that he will secure her release from them, but all the woman responds, oddly and brusquely, is: “I like the shackles.” Then they sit down somewhere, at the foot of some tropical plant (sadly, on the spur of the moment, Köves was unable to recall its splendid, resounding name: maybe a magnolia, though possibly a eucalyptus), the moon rises, and in its light the press chief notices weals, scars, and signs of whiplashing on the woman’s shoulders and breasts (quite why was unclear but, somehow or other, the woman had disrobed, it seems). “Do you like being whipped?” the press chief asks the woman, but this time she remains silent and merely looks at him enigmatically with deep, dark eyes “like the water of nocturnal wells,” Köves recited. The press chief is then overcome by a disagreeable presentiment, except that by now a sense of compassion, to use a mild and by no means accurate word for it, has been awakened in him, and this has stifled more sober considerations, so that he starts to kiss the woman’s wounds, and she, in an enigmatic manner, stands up, takes the press chief by the hand, leads him back to the foot of the tower and there, on the moonlit lawn, submits to his passion. At this point there ensued certain details (Köves inferred that, rather than the expected fulfilment, the press chief, or rather Wanderer, had experienced some sense of let down, as if he had found the woman’s ardour too little: grim light was soon to be thrown on this, as well as his presentiments. Because a horrifying cry resounds, and a strapping, sinister man in black appears in the doorway to the tower, a cat-o’-nine-tails in his hand — the man of the house and the woman’s husband, who in all probability has seen everything from one of the tower’s windows. There now followed painful scenes of betrayal, cruelty, and fornication, Köves warned the girl, with misgivings that he jokingly exaggerated somewhat. The man of the house “sets his servants and hounds loose” on the press chief. The woman pleads for mercy, first for the two of them but, as the man raises the lash on her, forgetting the press chief, for herself alone, at which the man pulls the woman up and clasps her to his chest. The press chief, who in the meantime has been struggling with “the servants and hounds,” now catches the woman’s glance, reading compassion from it and something else: “stolen rapture”. His strength then fails him, and he yields to “the servants and hounds”. He possibly even dies, or at least the woman and the man suppose so. Nevertheless, he can still see and hear. He sees the woman’s smile, the gesture her hand makes as she strokes the muscles of the man’s arm and chest, even his lash, and he hears her voice as she extols the man’s strength, and he sees the man eyeing with grim delight the press chief’s corpse and his living wife. The woman, for her part, elatedly returns the man’s gaze. The sinister couple now sink to the ground and try to make love on the lawn, glimmering in the silver of the moonlight, right next to the press chief’s corpse. The man might have triumphed, but to no avail; the woman tries out in vain all the tricks and secrets of love that she has just learned from the press chief, so in the end they clamber to their feet on the turf and stand there, broken and overwhelmed with shame, tears glistening in their eyes. “Not even now?…,” the woman asks gently. “Not even now,” the man replies, his head lowered. In despair and anger, he is about to grasp the lash again, but the woman knocks it from his hand with a single blow. She takes the shackles off herself and uses them to fetter the man. The woman, indeed, goes further by attaching smaller chains to the man’s nose, lips, and ears, with the man submissively, mutely enduring all this as though he had been vanquished. Taking the chains in her hands, the woman then leads the man into the house and up the tower, and the mortally prostrate press chief hears the rattle of irons from up above, from the man’s window — presumably he has been chained to the wall.

At this point, having spoken ever more haltingly for a while, Köves fell silent for good, it seemed, indeed for a moment he might even have dozed off, because he started up at the sound of the girl’s insistent:

“And then …?” to which Köves replied that that was essentially the end of the story. The man was clapped in irons, the woman goes up the tower again, and the press chief hears her striking into song again: Ah! So this woman never sleeps, he thinks in horror, quickening his steps, for in the meantime he has somehow pulled himself together and, evading the vigilance of servants and hounds, made good his escape, and with his “lacerated wounds” he is now moving around outside anew, in the desert maybe, but free at last.

“Free!” the typist’s unexpected, unduly shrill exclamation brought Köves round, almost making him jump. “The wretch!.. He’ll never be free,” she added bitterly, leaving Köves, who felt his reason was beginning to slip away again (his exhausted, contentedly tingling senses demanded a break, sleep, a deep, unconscious dreaming, as if he were inebriated) and, offhand, maybe could not even have said whether it was still the dying evening or already the first glimmer of daybreak which was shimmering in the window, asked with a thick tongue: