Imre Kertész - Fiasco

“Of what? And who won’t?”

“Do you really know nothing?” the typist asked, and it really did seem that Köves knew nothing, nothing at all. “The current chairman of the Supervisory Committee!.. The bitch!…” the typist’s voice shrilled like an alarm at night, and Köves felt a warm, moist touch from the girl’s face on his fingers — in the dark she seemed to have buried her brow and tear-filled eyes for a second in Köves’s hand, but then she immediately snatched it up with an impetuous movement, as if she were seeking to throw far away the pain burrowing within it, shaking her head several times, making her swirling hair swish silkily, fragrantly, on Köves’s shoulder too.

“How long have you been working at our place?” she said, her voice still choking, like someone swallowing her tears, “and you still go around as if you had nothing to do with us, as if you were a foreigner: that’s what the boss was saying this morning, and I’m saying it too.”

“I can’t help it,” Köves muttered. And like someone whose tongue is loosened by approaching sleep or some other stupor, he added with uninhibited, cheerful determination: “None of you were of any interest.”

“I can believe that. There isn’t anything interesting about us,” he heard the girl’s quiet, bitter voice, and although she was now — it seemed like a long, long time already — lying wordlessly, stiffly beside him, Köves, even if he did not come completely to, also did not fall asleep; instead, on some unconscious compulsion, he moved and stretched out his hand questingly until the palm was caressing the at first bristling, but then ever-less-resisting, ever-more-melting female skin, and as if the warmth of the caressing fingers were also loosening her throat, the girl started talking quietly:

“The current chairman of the Supervisory Committee … you’d think, wouldn’t you, that was just one of those temporary titles, lasting only until it’s somebody else’s turn: that’s what you’d suppose from the name, isn’t it?”

“Indeed,” Köves agreed, even nodded, though probably pointlessly as it was dark and the girl wouldn’t have been able to see it.

“Well, it isn’t!” the girl cried out, as it were rebutting Köves’s assertion in a sharp tone of triumph. “Not a bit of it! She is permanently the current chairman of the Supervisory Committee; by pure chance she is always the current one, her, her, and no-one else, it’s been going on like that for years, and it will go on like that for still more years!.. Who is going to dare stand up to her husband?”

“Why? Who’s that?” Köves asked, more due to the pause that had ensued, which seemed to be demanding his voice, confirmation of his presence, rather than out of any genuine curiosity.

“The minister’s secretary,” the girl retorted with the same bitterness as before, though this time it carried a near-exultant ring of delight at being well informed.

“You mean there’s a minister?” Köves marvelled, but here it seemed the girl was almost angry at him:

“You can’t seriously be asking that,” she said, “when there’s a photograph of him hanging in every room, including ours, and right above your head at that.” Köves did, of course, remember the photographs perfectly well, though on the other hand, perhaps precisely because he had seen so many of them, he remembered the face itself only vaguely, like the sort of faces one recalls because they fleetingly pass before one’s eyes in specific places, at specific times, time and time again, but never recalling them for themselves, merely for those specific places and specific times, so he sensed that the girl had misunderstood his question, though as to what sort of doubts he wished to express thereby, maybe he himself had already forgotten, and therefore in order to preserve his authority all the same, he merely remarked:

“That’s not in itself proof he exists.”

“Oh,” the girl mocked, “so you’re an unbeliever! You need proofs, because if you aren’t suspicious, you feel stupid, and perhaps you even brag about your lack of faith, but meanwhile you have no idea about the real world, no idea about anything!”

With that dressing-down, Köves clammed up, and he listened without saying a word to the girl’s easy-flowing voice and fluent words as to the simultaneously refreshing and soporific patter of warm rain.

The minister — he existed all right, he was all too real! And even more real was his power, power in general. A ramifying thread which interwove everything and twitched everyone to do its bidding. There might be some individuals whom he did not reach, or who even did not see him — Köves for one, who therefore did not have the foggiest idea about him. And not through any stupidity: the girl had been watching Köves for a while and was convinced that he was not at all stupid. But then what could Köves be after? she had fretted, and she confessed that, to this day, she did not know. It was valid to ask, of course, whether it was possible to live like that, at least over a protracted period — outside the circle, that is. One thing for sure was that he was not going to get very far in life, though perhaps he would manage to preserve his intellectual independence, and at this point, after some groping in the dark, the typist squeezed her fingers over Köves’s lips as though she had concluded from his breathing that he was about to fly into a rage on account of her scathing words. Because, she continued, undeniably there was also something appealing about that independence: Was any further proof needed than the fact that Köves was in her bed right now? Of course not. Köves probably had not the slightest idea how weak, how vulnerable, how exposed, how defenceless he was. That morning, when “the humiliation occurred”—that, by the way, was bound to happen sooner or later, everyone knew that, everyone was waiting for it except Köves, of course — well anyway, that morning when all that happened in the end was what was bound to happen, she had nevertheless felt real pain, yes, literally physical pain, a sickly feeling, and, strange as it may sound, that sickness had told her what in fact she thought about him.

“And what would that be?” Köves asked, in a sharp, sarcastic tone, as though he were protesting not so much at what the girl was thinking about him but the very fact that the girl should be thinking about him; and the girl answered only after a pause, as if she had needed to wait until the hostility in Köves’s voice had died away everywhere, even in the room’s farthest recesses.

“That you are innocent,” she said.

“What do you mean?!” Köves rejoined promptly. “You think that someone who has committed no crime is automatically innocent?”

“Not at all,” the girl replied. “The way you live is already a big enough crime: your innocence is the same as a child’s — it’s ignorance,” and this time Köves maintained a silence, as if he were searching for counter-arguments, but so long was it taking that in itself it threw doubt on any refutation. Köves was not even aware, the girl continued, that his situation … and here she hesitated as if she were trying to find the appropriate words with which to alert Köves to his situation: his situation was the most precarious, the most fragile, in the department, he being the only person who was completely dispensable. The press chief, she enumerated, was indispensable, not just because he was the boss but because he was the minister’s speechwriter; it would not surprise her if Köves was unaware of even that. You see, she chortled, of course he was unaware. He might not even have heard the minister speaking as yet, might even be unaware that the minister occasionally gave speeches. Well then, it was actually the minister’s secretary who was supposed to write the minister’s speeches; however, he got the press chief to write them for him. Even if no one actually said it in so many words, that was basically the reason for maintaining the press office, even if there was also a certain amount of work with the press — but then the senior staffer took care of that. That was why he, too, was indispensable, because, to be honest, Köves did not do much to make the senior staffer dispensable. As far as she was concerned, every department always had need of a typist, though it was just the post that was indispensable, not herself personally, and she had no doubt that “some people would be glad to get rid of me,” she wouldn’t go into the reasons for that now, if … well, if it didn’t happen that it was actually she who wrote the minister’s speeches. She realized that Köves would now be pulling an incredulous face in the dark, but he should believe her that it didn’t call for any wizardry; the minister’s speeches were always constructed after the same pattern, one only had to recognize the pattern, though anyone was capable of that: it was pretty much like filling in empty boxes in a printed form. A speech was still a long way from being ready with just that, of course; the typist merely produced the “initial draft,” or in other words “collected, arranged, and outlined the material,” which she would then submit to the press chief, who would make his comments, then on the basis of those comments, she would reword the draft and again hand it over to the press chief, who would make any corrections that were seen as still necessary in his own hand and pass this on to the minister’s secretary. He, in turn, would read the whole thing through, likewise make comments and give it back to the press chief, the press chief back to the secretary, and the secretary now to the minister, who would make his own comments, give it back to his secretary, the secretary to the press chief, and he possibly again to her, after which it would again go on its way up the chain, possibly getting stuck for a longer or shorter interval, oscillating back and forth between secretary and press chief like a trembling compass needle, before finally reaching the minister, and it was possible that it would then be set off once more down, then again up … at this juncture the girl laughed out, in a deep, hoarse tone, as if she had never before dared to see the operation in the light in which she was now seeing it, in the dark: the purposeless and ridiculous shuttling up and down the official hierarchy, which the next day she would again be seeing in the colours of unrelenting seriousness, because that was how she had to see it; indeed, wished to see it: in just the same way as she would arise from a bed disordered by lovemaking to put on her clothes, another face, the inviolable armour of the secretary — and at this her naked body touched Köves’s, as if this fundamental insight had awakened in her a sensual desire that she had to quench rapidly, with rapid breathing. In short, she picked up later on, the department’s work was completely attended to by the three of them. Köves had only been taken on because there had been a need to do a quick favour for someone — the fire brigade, perhaps, as best she could recall.