Imre Kertész - Fiasco

“As you can see,” Berg cast a sullen glance at the table, “I’m working,” placing a hand on his papers as on a restless animal. Making his way round the table, he dropped his heavy, but not disproportionate body down onto the stool and, like a gaoler over his prisoners, ran his eyes, fleetingly, but severely and appraisingly, over the petits-fours:

“You’re writing?…,” Köves asked after a short lull, quietly and, involuntarily, with a degree of sympathetic tact.

Berg, spreading his arms a little and grimacing, made the irritated admission:

“Yes, I’m writing,” like someone who had been caught in a shameful passion that he himself deprecated.

“And what?” Köves probed further, after allowing another considerate pause to go by, to which Berg, in wonder, raised a glance, as it were, looking past Köves:

“What?…,” the question came back, as if this were the first time he had thought about it. “The writing,” he then declared, and now it was Köves’s turn to be surprised:

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“What would I mean?” Berg shrugged several times in what amounted to serene helplessness, any pretence at making an effort suddenly peeling off him, as if Köves were no longer making him feel uneasy: “One is always writing one’s writing,” he carried on, “or at least always should be writing it, if one writes.”

“Fair enough.” Although Berg seemed to have forgotten to offer him a seat, Köves nevertheless set himself down in the armchair diagonally opposite Berg, cautiously smoothing down the rush ends sticking into his thigh from its frame. “Let me put it another way: What’s the writing about?”

“Mercy,” Berg responded promptly, without a moment’s hesitation.

“I see,” said Köves, although he couldn’t really have seen as he followed it straightaway by asking: “And what do you mean by ‘mercy’?”

“The necessary,” came the answer, as swiftly as before.

“And what is necessary?” Köves plugged away, as though sensing that the moment was favourable and wishing to make use of it.

“You’re again posing the question badly,” Berg motioned, his hand suddenly dropping, like an irrevocable decision, cutting a swath through the petits-fours, his glance darting over the table, most likely in search of a serviette (there was no way of knowing, but maybe he imagined he was in the South Seas), which of course he did not find, so he was only able to clean his presumably sticky fingertips by fastidiously rubbing them together. “You should ask what’s unnecessary.”

“Right,” Köves conceded to Berg, as though it were a riddle he had posed: “What’s unnecessary?”

“To live,” Berg supplied the answer, with a frosty little smile playing around his mouth, as though after a cruel act, carried out with ruthless purposefulness, although — at least as far as Köves could ascertain — all he had done was polish off a petit-four.

“I have never heard of a single living soul asking whether it is necessary to live,” Köves objected, perhaps more sharply than he intended.

“The fact that people don’t pose it doesn’t mean that it’s not a valid question,” Berg said and shrugged his shoulders.

Maybe,” Köves pondered, “I would understand what you are saying better if I could get to know what you are writing.”

“And how could you do that?!” was Berg’s response, with a smile that bore a hint of an almost cocky excitement.

“I know one way,” Köves ventured. “You could read it,” he blurted out, a suggestion that was followed by a prolonged silence.

“To tell you the truth,” Berg finally spoke, “I was preparing to do that very thing when you rang the doorbell. You see,” and he seemed to hesitate, “… you see,” he carried on nevertheless, “one section has been completed and I … ah! What do I care what you think!.. I like to try out how it sounds when read aloud. But I had not been expecting,” he added, “to have an audience as well …”

“Maybe it would be more natural that way …,” Köves offered.

“How do you mean?” It was Berg’s turn to be flummoxed.

“I mean, if you’re already writing,” Köves tried to explain, “then it’s natural that … in short,” he broke into a smile, radiating jaunty reassurance, “it’s natural for an artist to have an audience …”

But he had slipped up, it seemed, because Berg’s face clouded over, as if the effect of the reassurance had been rather to put him out of humour.

“The natural instinct for man to be an artist is not at all natural any longer,” he muttered. Köves did not respond, whereas Berg launched into a series of little moves, not every one of which was familiar to Köves but which he recognized, in totality, as preparations for giving a reading, so he continued to hold his tongue. Finally, Berg broke the silence, though not at all in order to read:

“Would you like a petit-four?” was all he asked, in a dour voice, which, unusually for him, was trembling a little from an attack of stage fright.

“No thank you,” Köves declined. “I had breakfast just before.”

Berg then seemed to be struggling but in the end only took a sip of water, then, without taking any notice of Köves, articulating clearly in his sonorous voice, began reading very clearly, starting with the title, which in itself was slightly disconcerting, even startling:

Writing, Ladies and Gentlemen, that strange and inexplicable desire to give form and expression to our lives, is a seductive but dangerous temptation. We cannot, in any case, decipher the dreamy secret of our lives, so we would do better to observe a modest silence and step aside quietly. Nevertheless, something impels us to put ourselves forward, out into the limelight of public attention, and as greedy buskers we strive to grab a scrap of approval and understanding. What can what has happened and what has yet to take place do to change that?

I may, perhaps, count on your kind indulgence when concerns like this are used to preface my book, which will, in due time, comprise the true story of my life — or at least the authentic story of an interesting and instructive life. Every life, of course, is interesting and instructive. But it is not given to every life to be laid out before the world in a carefully considered analysis, with its contents enhanced by generalization. That, at any rate, is how I intend to speak about my life: this is what I decided during those sterile days when the idea — I might say: the compulsion — to write first arose within me, though I was still struggling and kicking against the temptation. An entire week went by like that, a valuable, irrecoverable week: having definitively resigned myself, I am beginning to value time now that I have so little of it at my disposal. That week — most likely last week, since today is Monday — was the week of decision, then, and with its throes it insinuated eventful variety into my life. But maybe I needed this week of lively hesitations and internal excitements, which set it off from the indifference of recent months and years, for my work, and my internal resistance to writing may have been merely a natural protective instinct, the desire to preserve my sure and, in its own way, comfortable mental attitude, from the siege of expression, which, against my inclination so to say, compels me to view everything vividly and freshly, at a high emotional temperature, and to live through again — even more vividly than in reality — things which have already happened once. That is what I said previously was a seductive but dangerous temptation.

And yet all the same, as you see, I am buckling down to it. I feel a little bit as though I were commencing everything afresh, even though I cannot move forward with any of the excitement of a new beginning, just the resignation of unalterability, on a path already trodden once — otherwise my writing could not lay claim to the moral credence of this is what happened and this is how it happened , and so of reality, but would be just as irresponsible a flight of fancy as any novel. I have to say, however, that the self-assured defiance which precisely this unalterability awakens in me means too much for me seriously to consider, even for a second, any other eventuality my life might take. No, I am not of a mind to change matters that have been settled — and that seemingly lazy expression is, on this occasion, very accurate, because I really do have no mind for it. Not that looking back offers so much joy: my life has not been joyful, but it is a life that has been settled and solved, indeed exemplarily solved. A life that is worth speaking about, or at least so I feel, though the right to the final word necessarily lies with the Reader. Because, Ladies and Gentlemen, in order for us to be able to speak about our lives, we need to know how to appreciate our fate, to wonder with childish enthusiasm over the career that we have taken. My book is the fruit of that wonderment, of the childish amazement that was won back during the tranquil months of my arrest and detention over what has been my life and what now, during the nebulously melancholy time of my captivity, affects me with such a peculiar magic ………