Imre Kertész - Fiasco

“Yes, the fire brigade,” Köves confirmed.

“And you still did nothing to consolidate your position,” the girl chided him.

“What was I supposed to do?” Köves asked, like someone who was finally starting to take some interest in his own affairs, albeit belatedly of course, and therefore not so much with an eagerness to do something about it as out of the idle curiosity of a resigned regret.

“Open your eyes and find your way around the chain of command!” she girl told him.

“Is that so?” Köves muttered, as though the idea of doing that dispirited him even in retrospect, even undone. “And what would I have gained by going that?” he inquired nevertheless. For instance, he would have understood the press chief’s novella, the girl answered. He would have known what everyone knew: that a power struggle was going on between the press chief and the minister’s secretary, and also who was the instrument of that rivalry. She would be curious as to whether Köves was aware of that, at least, but of course he wasn’t. Well, it was the highly esteemed current chairman of the Supervisory Committee, and at one and the same time the minister’s secretary’s bitch of a wife, yes, her! — through her each kept a tight grip on the other, they literally clashed with one another over her body. On the surface, of course, the secretary’s position was incomparably the more favourable, both as the woman’s husband and as the minister’s secretary, who could simply stamp the press chief underfoot, pulverize him; but then, on the other hand, and the three of them were well aware of this, he didn’t do that precisely because he could. She could guess what sort of face Köves was pulling in the dark: an ignorant face, because he wouldn’t understand this, his mind worked on different lines — she wasn’t saying that disparagingly, but, quite the contrary, appreciatively, in some respects with outright admiration for Köves’s turn of mind, but it was still true, that’s what power was like, that’s how it operated: if it could not be exercised, then it wasn’t power. Ah! What did Köves know about that sort of thing: nothing, less than nothing! One fine day, for example, the press chief would receive a cold, unmerciful break-up letter from the woman which cruelly trampled in the dust all the feelings they had hitherto professed for each other. He had no clue what had happened; for days he had roved around the office pale as death, incapable of hiding his pain, wincing from the suffering and humiliation, trying to call the woman up, or to get calls put through to her, but not reaching her, finding she was not available, by pleading sickness, maybe not setting foot in the ministry for days on end, until, let’s say a week later, there would be a telephone call, or a letter would arrive, in which, for instance, the woman would inform him that every word of the previous letter had been dictated to her by her husband, the secretary, because he had come across something — a telltale piece of paper had popped up, or some fresh rumour had reached his ear — so, out of dreadful necessity, she had put down what had been dictated purely in order to avert the momentary threat, but with every word she had written she had suffered agonies of pain. Which was all very well, but in the meantime the press chief had been put on the rack: although this was not the first time it had happened — oh, by no means the first, nor even the second — he had nevertheless believed every word of what was in the letter, imagining he had been betrayed, deserted, indeed conspired against, and any moment might find himself struck down by the secretary’s avenging fury; pictured them in the marital bed as, for the sake of their spent love, they wring new stimuli for themselves out of his existence, so to say, and maybe at the climax of their pleasure they vilified his name; indeed — though he could not seriously have believed it, yet there were precedents — he even imagined they would murder him; yes, he had even played with that thought, had voluptuously pictured for himself a scene in which the secretary returned home with bloody hands, confessed to his wife, and the woman merely said: “Thank you.” That was the sort of thing he dreamed up, so it was genuinely painful to see him in such distress, torturing himself. How downcast he looked sometimes, destitute, that one was left not knowing what to do, how to console him, how to pull him round, when … when it was just power, a power game, nothing else. That was how it went, these were its laws; that was what it looked like when it was exercised, and she, the typist, would be mighty curious to know whether the press chief really did love the minister’s secretary’s wife in the way he himself imagined he did, or rather, as she herself, the typist, now thought, as a result of much head-scratching and her ruminations during many a sleepless night, the prey that the woman’s person represented for him. Otherwise what would the woman be worth to him if he did not have to claw her away from the minister’s secretary; and similarly, what would the wife be worth to the minister’s secretary if there was not the constant suspicion, if there were no cases of her being caught red-handed; if he could not order her to heel like a whimpering dog time and time again; and if he could not always use those occasions to give the press chief a kick. As to the woman, what would all this mean to her if she could not feel that she had two men in her power; in other words, all three of them had become so intertwined that they no longer knew who was controlling whom, who was on top and who the underdog, and why they were doing it at all — they were just doing it because they started doing it at one time, and now they were unable to do it any other way …

That, then, was how things stood, and anyone who did not know that, and was unsuspectingly fooled by appearances, or by the press chief’s words, like … well, like Köves by that novella:

“No doubt you made some pronouncement about it,” the girl queried, or rather asserted.

Certainly he had, Köves replied, since the press chief expected that of him; that’s why he had read the story out to him.

“And what did you say?” the girl wanted to know, and Köves, who no longer recalled much, it seemed, replied that it had been nothing in particular, little more than empty phrases, stock words of praise, like how interesting it was, how original, things like that.

“Nothing else?” the girl was unconvinced.

“Oh, yes!” it seemed that Köves now recalled more. “I told him that I considered it to be a symbolic story, but it still showed the mark of a lived personal experience.”

“There you are,” the girl’s voice was all gentle, comforting triumph. “He must have believed that you knew his secret, and now he has surrendered for good, put himself in your hands for good,” the girl spoke in an almost caressing tone, her hand finding Köves’s face in the dark and stroking it as if he were a little boy. “Oh dear, that’s ignorance for you,” she reproved him.

“Yes,” said Köves, “it seems that I don’t nurture the same interest in him that you do,” and the hand now stopped on the face, then pulled away, as if by making the remark Köves had withdrawn himself from their joint concerns and joint subjection to step onto a separate path and had thereby possibly offended her.

“How much you know about him,” he went on, all the same, his voice revealing not surprise so much as almost wonder. “You know him in the way that a person can only know her tormentor,” he added.

“My tormentor …? Why would something like that occur to you? How dare you say anything like that?” the girl asked indignantly, in that almost injured tone of voice people use who are offended only by the truth.