Imre Kertész - Fiasco

“I fear the same way as our comedy: a happy end!” because, after many vicissitudes, interruptions, and fresh beginnings, the comedy had, indeed, now begun to take shape, with Köves usually working on the dialogue in the South Seas, so that at least when he was trying to write a comedy he was not haunted by the depressing spectacle of mourning perpetually accorded him by Mrs. Weigand since her son’s suicide, her eyes long not the limpid pools that Köves had once seen them as, but now covered by frozen sheets of permanent ice, his ears catching through the walls, night after night, the stifled sound of her sobbing. Besides which, Köves anyway found it easier to write a light comedy in the racket of the coffeehouse than in the loneliness of his own room, where he was constantly in danger that his attention would wander and escape his control, with foreign figures intruding onto the stage out of nowhere, such as an old man with a little dog tucked under one arm and a suitcase in the other hand; or else he was supposed to be hammering out the comedy’s ditzy, exciting, flighty, and adorable female character, but suddenly into her place other girls would push forward on whom he did not recognize those characteristics, at most their dearth — the factory girl, for example, who had been waiting for the death of her aunt from cancer and, for all he knew, might still be waiting now. Images would come vaguely to mind, memories lurk in waiting, all images and memories which had no place in a comedy and, as Köves thought, would probably not have come to mind if those empty white sheets of paper were not staring up at him, and if he did not have to sit there facing them. In his excruciating dreams (Köves had recently been sleeping poorly, indeed having bad dreams), like an alluvium which was continually sinking only to keep stubbornly resurfacing, he would sometimes make out a word, a word that, although not written down anywhere, he could nevertheless almost see, somehow starting with the letters of his name, but longer— követelés : “demand”? or maybe it was kötelesség : “duty”?—and then, if he looked closer, was not even a word but a drowning man, tumbling around amidst the waves, and Köves felt he ought to fling himself in after him to rescue him from the current before he drowned. Then, all at once, he was seized by a fit of rage: “Why me?” he thought in his dream, but it was no use looking around, he was on his own, facing the drowning man. He almost jumped, though he feared it would be a fateful jump, and the drowning man would pull him down into the maelstrom — then, fortunately, he would wake up in time, but the unpleasant atmosphere of the silly dream would trouble him for the whole day.

One afternoon, Köves was sitting at the table in his lonely room — not long before, a late-summer light shower swept over the city, so, as he had no wish to get drenched, Köves had set to work at home — and probably even he thought he was debating whether he should make a start on the sketch that needed to be delivered for the Firefighters’ Platform, or should he write the newspaper article that was due, or should he get on with the light comedy, when, all of a sudden, he caught himself writing something that seemed most likely intended as the opening lines of a letter:

Lately, I have been thinking of you constantly. To be more specific, not so much of you as of what you read out; or to be even more specific, not so much of what you read out as of … You see, it’s precisely about this that I want to write. How can that be? That’s simple. Because I have picked up certain experiences which will certainly come in very handy for you, whereas I don’t know what to do with them. In short, I want to be of assistance to you, because you can’t deny that you are stuck. I believe you when you say that “the construction is ready to hand,” but there is something looming up between the “man of intellect and culture” and 30,000 corpses — maybe it too is just a corpse, but in any event the first, and thus the most important, because the question is whether it can be stepped over or ultimately presents an insurmountable barrier. Yes, that definitive first act which subsequently “proves to be an irrevocable choice,” if I rightly recall, just because it happened, and because it could have happened, indeed nothing else could have happened, and although it happens under the pressure of external compulsion, it does so in such a way that the external compulsion happens not to be present at the time, or is present merely as a circumstantial factor (with your permission, I would tag on the latter). It is governed by a purely helpful intention, then, though possibly also a little by one of protest; no, I can’t think of a better word for it at present than “protest,” though I don’t know what it is I am protesting against. I bow to your superior learning, but as I have already said many times, your learning lacks the colour of life, which usually shades into grey. You see, how precisely you visualize the extremes, but you get stuck on the simple, grey, absurd motive which leads to the extreme, because you are unable to imagine the simple, grey, absurd act, and the simple, grey, absurd path leading to that act. Just between the two of us, it’s not easy to do so; indeed, I’d go so far as to say it’s almost impossible.

So listen!

Let’s start with me being called up by the army. I was reluctant to comply with the call-up order, in the way one is always reluctant to fulfil one’s personal destiny, all the more so as one usually does not perceive it as such. Every possible and impossible get-out crossed my mind, even including the idea of jumping off a high point in such a way that I would break a leg, but a friend (a fire officer) informed me that there was no sense in that, because they would simply wait until the fracture had mended, then whisk me off to be a soldier.

So, I went off, dazed and apathetic like a lamb to the slaughter, and, before I knew what was what, I was being fitted up in a uniform. You can’t expect me to fill you in on the horrors of barracks life, which may be rather well known, but still strike one as new if one experiences them personally. What I might say about them, perhaps, is that it is a complete absence, indeed denial, of one’s uniqueness, coupled with the incessant and intensified delights of physical being. It’s not true that one’s personality ceases to exist; it’s more that it is multiplied, which is a big difference, of course. And incidentally, to my no small surprise, when it came to physical performance I held my ground splendidly, often in the most literal sense, which as time went by filled me with almost a sense of self-satisfaction, as though the space vacated by my uniqueness had been occupied by the soul of a racehorse, which, in the intervals between being disciplined and made to run around, spots a good breather in the collective dormitory, in the steaming body-warmth, the loosening, eerily familiar atmosphere of frivolity and banishment. The barracks town was situated in some unknown part of the country, on a desolate plain, where the wind whistled incessantly and bells from the distant settlements tolled incessantly, and I well remember one dawn, when I was standing in line in the open air, in front of the kitchen, holding a mug for coffee: the sun had just risen, the sky was hanging dirtily and shabbily above us; my underpants (in which, just beforehand, I had been performing physical jerks to orders that had been barked out through megaphones) were clinging, clammy from rain and sweat, to my skin when, all of a sudden — through an indefinable decaying stench, compounded of ersatz coffee, soaked clothes, sweaty bodies, fields at daybreak, and latrines — broke a memory, though it was as if the memory was not mine, but somebody else’s whom I seemed to remember having seen once in a similar situation, some time long ago, somewhere else, a long way away, in a sunken world lying far beyond the chasms of all prohibitions, dimly and by now barely discernibly, a child, a boy who was once taken away to be murdered.