Imre Kertész - Fiasco

“… and I immediately thought of you,” he heard a muffled female voice through the loosened wax plug. “The book is just right for you; only four hundred and fifty pages, and you would have a six-month deadline. If you really want, you could go two months over that.”

In point of fact, the old boy also undertook translation work.

He was a translator from German (German being the foreign language that he still did not understand the best, relatively speaking, the old boy was in the habit of saying).

The money for translating might not be a lot, but at least it was dependable (the old boy was in the habit of saying).

Right now, however, he needed to be writing a book.

On the other hand, it’s true, he also needed to earn some money (maybe not a lot, but at least dependable).

Besides which, the old boy did not have so much as a glimmer of an idea, little as that may be, for the book he needed to write.

If he were to accept the translation, he could kill two birds with one stone: he would earn some money (maybe not be a lot, but at least dependable) and also he wouldn’t have to write a book. (For the time being).

“Yes, of course,” he spoke into the telephone.

“Then I’ll send you the book, along with the contract,” he heard the muffled female voice through the loosened wax plug.

“Yes, of course. Thank you,” he heard his own muffled voice (through the loosened earplug).

“It was stupid of me to accept,” he mused afterwards (stuffing the wax plug back into his ear).

“But now I’ve gone and accepted it,” he added (mentally) (as if there were no choice in the matter) (though we always have a choice) (even when there is none) (and we always choose ourselves, as one may read in a French anthology) (which the old boy kept on the bookshelf on the wall above the armchair standing to the north of the tile stove that occupied the southeast corner of the room) (but then who chooses us, one might ask) (justifiably).

… and — through my lack of foresight … I suddenly found myself in the fairly strange and — through my lack of foresight — surprising situation of having become a hostage to the two-hundred-and-fifty-page bundle of paper that I myself had produced.

“To be sure,” the old boy said.

… I don’t suppose that I could have seen distinctly then what even today is not entirely clear to me — what sort of trap, what an amazing adventure I had let myself in for. To the best of my recollection, I made do with a fleeting suspicion. It seems my character is such that I am only able to free myself from one captivity by instantly throwing myself into another. I had barely finished my novel and I was already scratching my head over what to write next. Nowadays at least I have an idea of what purpose it all served: it was my way of avoiding worries about tomorrow’s looming proximity. As long as I succeed in arranging a fresh set of homework for myself, I can again confuse the passage of my time and the events which occur within it with the will that I have harnessed to the yoke of my goals. In this way infinity can once again open up before me, even though all I have done is conjure up refractions of light in a real perspective.

But I still did not know what I should write. I ought to have seen that as a suspicious symptom in itself. To tell the truth, in not one of my lessons that might be counted as such did I manage to sense that significance — what one might call the necessity which sweeps every sober consideration before it — in the way that I did then in that novel; but that, I knew, albeit with a certain sorrow, was by now behind me, once and for all.

In the end, the spur was given by a trifling street incident. I have always been a believer in long walks, since they allow me to organize my thoughts as I go along. For these purposes I favour cheerful, meditative surroundings such as the banks of the Danube or the hilltops of Buda, where I can yield in delight to the enchantment of each unexpectedly unfolded panorama that brings me to a halt. Before me a hazy blue vista: the built-up flat terrain of the Pest side; here and there a high-rise building, a dome, a glinting roof, or row of windows; in the mid-ground the gleaming ribbon of the river with the arches of the bridges over it. Behind me the grey-green compactness of a hillside, villas, building blocks, the contentment of tranquil homes, the distant television tower. The day in question, as I recall, was humid and stifling hot, the sun beating down viciously on the back of my head out of a white sky. I was bathed in sweat by the time I had crested a highway with a strip of grass running down the middle. The exasperation I felt from the heat, a dull headache, and my indecisiveness had been wound to exploding point by a thousand little things en route: the abrupt switching-on of a screeching siren just as an ambulance had drawn alongside me; the inexplicable outburst of rage from a dog which unexpectedly hurled itself at the railings as I passed by, its demented, hoarse, rancorous barking, which unremittingly accompanied my steps; a half-wit in a boater, short-sleeved shirt, and, dangling on a leather strap that reached from his neck to his belly, a pocket radio which appeared to be equipped with every gadget that a modern radar-detector vessel might need, the crackling howl from which I didn’t seem able to get rid of; my choking and sneezing and my eyes stinging in the dense, black exhaust cloud from a truck that rattled past — in short, the sort of impressions which are inconsequential of themselves but which collectively, and coupled with a degree of mental turmoil, take such a hold on people in big cities as to drive them to unpredictable excesses, individual perversions, anarchistic thoughts, bomb throwing. I had just cut obliquely across the street — quite against the regulations, as a matter of fact. I could hear a bus at my heels, but having got the worst of so many indignities already, I was overcome with an unusual fit of obstinacy: “Screw you! Either pull out or just run over me,” I thought to myself. A blast of the horn, a screeching of brakes: I leapt like a grasshopper which is just about to be trampled on. A torrent of curses broke over my head from the door which opened next to the driver’s cabin. I screamed back. We filled the impartial air with an unproductive cacophony of foul language. I suspect it did us both good: it gave us a chance to vent our accumulated impersonal venoms.

Once I had been left to myself by the roadside, I came to the cheerily satisfying conclusion that I was a cheat, as I had only dared to take the risk because I had complete trust in the driver.

Of course, he could have run me over — through a mechanical fault, let’s say. But I fully appreciate that bus drivers have excellent road skills. He might also have run me over because the law would have been on his side: I was crossing the road illegally. On the other hand, without being personally acquainted with this particular one, I am well aware that bus drivers are loath to kill people under certain circumstances. Driving over a limp body — that is the privilege of tanks. Murder is something else, and mass murder something different again. In that way I was reminded again of an earlier idea of mine: a plan for a dissertation, on a not too ambitious scale, concerning the possibilities for an aesthetic mediation of violence.

“Now we’re talking,” the old boy nodded.

“It was stupid of me …”

… on a not too ambitious scale, concerning the possibilities for an aesthetic mediation of violence …

“For Christ’s sake!”

“You ought to get out for a bit.”

“I shall,” the old boy replied, placing back in the filing cabinet the grey file, and on top of that the likewise grey, albeit a darker grey, lump of stone that served as a paperweight, so to say.