Imre Kertész - Fatelessness

It was seven o’clock; by now the day shift would be starting in the oil works. The buses were no longer bringing any new boys, and the policeman now asked if any of us were missing. “Rosie” counted us and reported that we were all present. The policeman reckoned it would be better if we didn’t hang around there, by the side of the road. He seemed troubled, and I somehow had the impression that he had been just as little prepared for us as we were for him. He even asked, “Now what am I going to do with you guys?” However, there wasn’t much we could do to help him on that, of course. We gathered around him exuberantly, giggling, as if he were a teacher on some school excursion, with him in the middle of our group, pensively stroking his chin. In the end, he proposed we go to the customs post.

We accompanied him over to a solitary, shabby, single-story building close by, next to the highway; this was the “Customs House,” as a weather-beaten inscription on the front also declared. The policeman produced a bunch of keys and picked out from the many jingling keys the one that fit the lock. Inside we found a pleasantly cool and spacious, though somewhat bare, room furnished with a few benches and a long, rickety table. The policeman also opened the door to a considerably smaller office room of sorts. As best I could see past the gap left by the door, inside were a carpet and a writing desk with a telephone handset on it. We even heard the policeman making a brief call. Though one could not make out what he said, I suppose he must have been trying to hurry the orders along, because when he came out, carefully locking the door behind him, he said, “Nothing. Too bad, we’ll just have to wait.” He urged us to make ourselves comfortable. He even asked if we knew any party games. One boy—“Leatherware,” as far as I recollect — suggested paper, scissors, stone. The policeman, however, was not too keen on that, saying that he had expected better of “such bright kids” like us. For a while he swapped jokes with us, though meanwhile I had the feeling that he was striving at all costs to keep us amused somehow, maybe so we would have no time for any of the unruliness that he had already mentioned out on the highway; but then he proved fairly out of his depth with that sort of thing. Before long, indeed, he left us to our own devices, having noted that he had work to attend to. As he went out we heard him locking the door on us from outside.

There is not much I could tell about what ensued. It seemed we were in for a long wait for the orders. Still, as far as we were concerned, we didn’t look on this as the least bit urgent; after all, we were not frittering away our own time. We all agreed it was nicer here, in the cool, than to be sweating at work. There was little shade to be had at the oil plant. “Rosie” had even managed to wangle the foreman’s permission for us to strip off our shirts. This did not exactly conform with the letter of the regulations, it’s true, since it meant the yellow stars would not be visible on us, but the foreman agreed all the same, out of common decency. The only one to suffer a bit had been Moskovics with his paper-white skin, as his back had turned red as a lobster in the blink of an eye, and we had a big laugh at the long tatters of skin that he peeled off it afterward.

So we settled down on the benches or on the bare earth of the customs post, but I would find it hard to say exactly how we spent the time. Certainly, plenty of jokes were cracked, cigarettes were brought out, and then, as time went on, packed lunches. The foreman was not forgotten either, with people remarking that he must have been a bit mystified this morning when we didn’t turn up for work. Some horseshoe nails were also produced for a game of jacks. It was there, among the boys, that I learned how that goes: each player throws a nail up in the air and the winner is the one who can snatch the most from the nails still in front of him in the time it takes to catch the first nail. “Fancyman,” with his slim hands and long fingers, won every round. “Rosie,” for his part, taught us a song, which we warbled through several times over. The curious thing about the song was that the lyrics can be rendered in three languages using exactly the same words: by sticking an es at the end of the words, it sounds German; an io , then Italian; and taki , then Japanese. All this stuff was just silly, of course, but it kept me entertained.

After that I took a look at each of the grown-ups as they came in. They too had been rounded up by the policemen from the buses in just the same way as us. That, in fact, is how I realized that when he was not with us, he was out on the highway, engaged in the same pursuit as in the morning. One by one, there must have been seven or eight of them who were collected that way, all men. I could see, however, that they were giving the policeman a tougher time, with their expressions of bewilderment, shaking of heads, explanations, showing of documents, and nitpicking questions. They pumped us too: Who and what were we? Later, though, they tended to keep to themselves; we gave up a couple of the benches for them, and they huddled on or hung around these. They talked about all sorts of things, but I didn’t pay much attention. They attempted mainly to figure out what could be behind the policeman’s action, and what consequences the episode might have for them; from what I could hear, though, there were about as many different views as there were men. On the whole, as far as I could tell, it depended mainly on what sort of documents they had on them, because as best I could make out, they too all had some paper giving them leave to head for Csepel, some on private business, others — just like us — out of public duty.

I did, however, take note of a few more interesting faces among them. One of them, I noticed, did not join in the conversation, for instance, but instead merely read a book that, it seems, he just happened to have with him. He was a very tall, gaunt guy in a yellow windbreaker, with a sharp slit of a mouth stretching between two deep, ill-tempered-looking furrows in his bristly face. He had chosen a place for himself at the very end of one of the benches, beside the window, legs crossed and back to the others; it was that, perhaps, which reminded me somewhat of a traveler who is so used to railway compartments that he considers every word, query, or the habitual introductory chitchat that accidental travel companions exchange a waste of time, enduring the wait until the destination is reached with bored indifference— that at least was the kind of impression he gave me.

A somewhat older, elegant-looking man with silvered temples and a bald spot on the crown of his head caught my attention the moment he arrived, not long before noon, because he was highly indignant as the policeman ushered him in. He even asked if there was a telephone that “he might make use of.” The policeman made it clear, however, that he was very sorry but the device “is reserved purely for official purposes,” at which the man fell silent, an angry scowl on his face. Later on, from the answers, laconic though they were, that he gave to inquiries from the others, I gathered that he, like us, also belonged to one of the Csepel manufacturing establishments; he styled himself “an expert,” without going into further details. Otherwise he came across as very self-confident and, as far as I could tell, his take on things must have been similar to ours by and large, except that he seemed to be offended at being detained. I noticed that he was invariably disparaging, even somewhat contemptuous, in his pronouncements about the policeman. He said that the policeman, in his view, “may have some general instruction, it appears,” that he was probably “executing overzealously.” He reckoned, though, that obviously “the competent authorities” would eventually act on the matter, adding that he hoped that was going to be soon. I heard little more from him after that, indeed forgot all about him. It was only getting into the afternoon that he fleetingly attracted my attention again, but by then I was tired too and noticed little more than how impatient he must be, now sitting down, now standing up, now folding his arms over his chest, now clasping them behind his back, now checking his watch.