Imre Kertész - Fiasco

Well anyway, this prisoner wasn’t eating, says Short-arse. Maybe he’s sick, I tell him. The hell he is: he’s up to no good, says he. Chummy, says I, there’s no need straight off to … Fine, says he, he’s already put in a report, I should make reports about further developments otherwise he would be obliged to report that I am neglecting to make reports. Screw you, I retort in friendly fashion. Just bugger off home, I’m the one on duty now.

We chatted something along those lines, and then I quickly forgot all about it. What did I find, though? He really didn’t want to eat. Neither at noon, nor in the evening.

I waited until lights out, and when the stillness of the night had descended on the prison — a special kind of tranquillity this is, a lit-up, timeless night, the everlastingness of the nether regions, filled with dull, mysterious, muffled hissing and bubbling underwater murmurs, so to say — I open up the solitary cooler rather like an inflamed wound, with a degree of indistinct hope. ‘So, tell me why …,’ I kick off, something like that, not really able to see his long, thin face, as it is covered by a long, wispy beard which ends in a long, wispy, ruffled tip (they’ll soon shear that off when they stick him over in a shared cell, I thought to myself with my supercilious prison-guard gloominess). He tosses out in a flip way something to the effect that his principles demanded it — and I very specifically recall him using the word “principles.”

“What principles are those, then?” I ask with a kind smile, because I had the feeling then that there was no principle on earth that I couldn’t refute. “That I’m innocent,” he snaps, and you see, I don’t even have to refute that, for which of us is not innocent, and anyway: what does it mean?

I said it out loud, or maybe only thought so to myself, I don’t know, but anyway I entered his cell, as it were dropping whatever prison-guard reserve I had. I soon had to realize, though, that my efforts were completely futile: he wouldn’t listen to my arguments, didn’t budge when I ordered him, indeed, did not utter a single word after that. He just kept running that dark, obdurate look of his over my face, like a blindly groping hand. Like someone who doesn’t allow himself to be deluded for one second by deceitful words, he searched about like a cornered animal which was ready to dive under the bunk or scurry away between my legs at the first suspicious sign. I could see he was ready for anything, looking on me as his enemy, or rather not even his enemy: a prison guard, a screw, a person with whom one does not enter a debate. His eyes were burning, with red blotches over his cheekbones; it was the second day that he had not eaten … I talked and talked; in the end I don’t know what annoyed me more: the look which obstinately banished him from the world of being understood and making himself understood, or the situation he had forced on me and which was slowly making a prisoner of me too, locking me in that cell, along with this prisoner, and all of a sudden, before I could escape, time would draw in on us and the night carry us away.

“Do you have the slightest idea what you can expect?” I asked him in the end — and, whatever the rules may say, I had long been addressing him in the familiar form, not out of any contempt, not at all, but driven purely by fraternal irritation, to be precise.

“You’re not eating?” I continue. “It’s just they won’t allow you that luxury here,” I laugh, though not out of any amusement. “You can starve, but only if they starve you. And if you don’t eat, they’ll make you, I can assure you. They’ll take you into the sickbay, push a tube down into your stomach, if possible scratching your gullet in the process — I’ve seen it happen,” I lie, though forgivably, as I had heard about what they did but, of course, had taken good care not to be party to such a spectacle. “And if you vomit it up,” I went on, “they run it in up your backside, or else they strap you down on a bed, stick needles into your veins, and push the nutrients in that way. And don’t go thinking that this somehow just happens, as if you were not there or not taking part in it. Or that you can sail through the whole thing without being tarnished by it. You’d be wrong, very wrong!” I exclaim, and perhaps even I am not aware what sorts of fragmentary memories my own words are reopening within me, or what images are welling up from the depths, as from the cellar of a ruined house when the wind whistles through them. “No one who is tortured,” I yell, “No one can remain untarnished — that’s something I know all too well, and don’t ask me how. Afterwards you won’t be able to speak of innocence any longer, at best of survival. And if you should have a wish to die, that isn’t permitted either. You think they’ll feel any pity for you? They’ll bring you back from death’s door seven times over, don’t worry! Dying can only happen in the permitted manner: with them killing you.”

That’s how I spoke, and my words appeared to be ineffectual. “Is this what you want?” I had another go. “You are doing nothing more than inviting them to commit these outrages, don’t you see?”

All of a sudden, something came to mind; I don’t understand how it had not occurred to me before, or could it have been precisely this that was secretly guiding me all along?

“Apart from which,” I carried on, “you’ll be dragging others into disgrace along with yourself. I’ll have to write a report on you,” slipped from my mouth before I had a chance to think better of it. “Do you give any thought to other people’s innocence?!” I can hear my own reproachful voice. “Here, I’ve never lifted a finger against anyone …,” I stutter and, for all that I’m a prison guard, I might even have got round to begging the prisoner had something not pulled me up. What was that? Now, pin your ears back, or keep your eyes open, because you’ll hear, or rather read, the most disgusting and, at the same time, most obvious thing, I might well say a flash of genius took wing here. Anyway, the beard covered up a lot, of course, but it seemed to me as though I spotted a scornful smile flitting over the prisoner’s face, at least briefly.

I have tried any number of times soberly to analyse that moment, and may I say in my defence that both analysis and sobriety have always turned out to be my downfall. The way I would like to remember it, the smile infuriated me to the point that I suddenly flew into a temper. However hard I try, however, I don’t recall that I was overcome by anger, especially an anger that would have deprived me of, or even just clouded, my judgement. No, all I felt was disgust, sudden despondency, resentment, and again disgust, which included this gaol-breathed prisoner, with whose, for me, all at once so extraneous wretchedness I had been locked together by the moment, through an equally extraneous series of causes, just as it included me. It was all, all, sweeping me toward the simplest solution, of course insofar as I can consider it a solution, to rid myself of that moment, with panic-stricken haste, and in the simplest possible way, as it comes. But I sensed a resistance, a stubbornly aloof, last-ditch, irrational resistance which is incomprehensibly and unfairly standing straight before me, when all I want is the light of reason, I am undoubtedly right as well; and then, abstractly as it were, I also sensed the disparity of incommensurable forces which pertains between a convict who is being stubborn and a prison guard, who, with the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to his elbows, shoulder belt running diagonally across his chest, pistol dangling on his haunch, and trousers thrust into soft top boots, may be the very image of high-handedness and terror, should his whim so will it.