Laszlo Krasznahorkai - War & War

The two of them were in the kitchen among the boxes, the woman lying twisted and spread-eagled, her face completely beaten in, the interpreter hanging on the central heating duct but the blood all over his face showing he had been shot several times with a machine gun at close range — and he couldn’t scream, couldn’t move, as he stood in the open door, but slowly opened his mouth without any sound coming out of it, and then he wanted to go back the way he came, to get out of there but his limbs simply wouldn’t move, and when he was eventually able to move his legs they took him forward, closer to them, ever closer, and he felt a terrible pain in his head, so he stopped and stood still once again rooted to the spot and remained there for ages, standing and staring, unable to take his eyes off them, his face filled with horror, suddenly aged, and he opened his mouth again still without success, still silent, and took one more step forward but stumbled over something, the telephone, and almost fell, but instead of falling squatted down beside it and slowly punched in a number and listened a long time to the busy signal before realizing that he had dialed himself, and then he began searching in his pocket, but whatever he was looking for in an ever greater panic he couldn’t find, not for ages, and then it was there, the business card; uh, he grunted into the receiver, repeating the sound idiotically, uh, uh, uh, they’re dead, the pair of them, dead, the young lady and Mr. Sárváry, the man at the other end telling him to speak up and stop whispering, to tell him clearly what the matter was, but I’m not whispering, Korin whispered, they’ve killed them, both of them are dead, the young lady’s waist is twisted right out of shape, and Mr. Sárváry is hanging there; then get out of there as quick as you can, the man shouted into the phone; uh, and everything is smashed up, said Korin, then held the receiver away from his mouth, looked up with a terrified expression, then rushed out onto the stairs, pushed open the door of the toilet, leapt onto the seat, raised the tile and removed the money, gripping it in his hands, then rushed back into the apartment, picked up the phone and told the man that he knew, he knew at last what must have happened and started telling him about his landlord’s new job, about all his shopping, about the money in his hands, about the packets of white powder and the place where they were hidden and how he had discovered them, babbling on in ever greater confusion, ever more terrified by what he himself was saying as the man at the other end asked him again to stop whispering because he couldn’t hear him properly, but it was quite certain now, Korin continued, and he never once thought it would be Mr. Sárváry, not while he …, and he began crying, uncontrollably sobbing, so whatever he said the other man could not hear him for the sobs, sobs that shook him and went on shaking him so he couldn’t even hold the receiver, but then he picked it up again and listened and there was the man at the other end saying hello, are you still there? and when Korin replied that he was, the man told him to get out, and seeing that he had the money, hold on to it and bring it with him, definitely bring it with him and not to touch anything now but to leave the place, leave it now and come to his apartment or anywhere else he wanted to meet, can you still hear me? are you still there? the question hanging in the silent petrified air a long time but not receiving an answer because Korin had put the receiver down, screwed the money up in his coat and had started backing away, continually backing and weeping once more, finally stumbling down the stairs and out into the street, walking a couple of hundred yards and then beginning to run, to run as fast as he could, rushing on with the business card in his hand, gripping it so hard that his hand was all the time shaking with the effort.

They were sitting in the three bucket chairs, the store dummy facing the TV, the man beside her and Korin beside him, and all was silent but for the hum of the television with the sound turned off and a washing machine in the bathroom grumbling, bucking and sloshing, none of them saying anything, the man having sat Korin down on his arrival and taking his place beside him but not asking anything for a very long time, just staring in front of him and thinking very hard, then eventually getting up, taking a glass of water and sitting back down again to reassure Korin that they would think of something but that first they had to clean his clothes because he couldn’t move a step dressed like that, and then he helped him strip the clothes off though it was obvious that Korin did not really know what was going on or why it was necessary which meant that it was only with the greatest difficulty the man succeeded in unbuttoning him, but eventually his garments lay in a heap at his feet, and the man gave him a bathrobe, then removed anything that remained in the clothes before taking them into the bathroom and putting the lot — coat, underwear and all — into the washing machine, starting it up, then returning to the armchair to sit there and think even harder; and so they sat there a whole hour until the washing machine in the bathroom, with one final gasp, came to the end of its cycle, and the man said he had better know, roughly at least, what had happened otherwise he couldn’t help to which Korin only answered that he had noticed the hiding place in the toilet before, but had believed one of the occupants downstairs to be responsible for it, since anyone could use the toilet on their floor, at which point the other interrupted him to ask what he meant by hiding place, and Korin simply repeated that it was a hiding place and that one day he found that the white packets in it had been replaced by money, and though the other tried to stop him asking what packet? which day? Korin went on saying he didn’t think it had anything to do with them, that it was so far from his mind in fact that he forgot to say anything about it, because suddenly there was all this chaos, a lot of people arriving at the apartment, taking everything away then returning the next day bringing things back, and this so confused the young lady that he felt he had to look after her, and he had no idea that it was the hidden stuff that was the cause of everything, and once again began to cry in the armchair, and was quite unable to answer another question the man put to him, so that he had to do everything himself, to look through his belongings, find his passport, examine it to check that it was valid at all, then spread the clothes out in the bathroom to dry and count to see how much money there was, finally working out what to do next, then sitting down beside him again, to tell him quite quietly there was only one solution, and that was that he should get out of the country as soon as possible, but Korin did not answer and just sat beside the dummy and cried.

There was just the one bed in the bedroom, a store dummy propped by the window as if looking out and in the kitchen nothing but a bare table and four chairs, one of the chairs occupied by another store dummy raising its right hand and pointing at something on the ceiling or beyond it; which left the sitting room with its TV, three armchairs, one dummy and the man, now replaced by Korin, the rest bare, practically empty, the walls alone being covered with photographs, or rather several copies of the same photograph, as was the whole apartment, one photograph in various sizes, large, middling and vast, but everywhere the same, each of them showing the same thing, a hemispherical structure clad in broken glass, and when the man, hearing a faint rustling, opened his eyes he saw Korin, fully dressed now in his overcoat, waiting, it seemed, to go, looking at the wall, examining the photographs, bowing a little to examine each of them, deeply absorbed in their contents, whereupon Korin, having noticed that the man had woken up, quickly sat down in the armchair again, next to the store dummy and fixed his eyes on the TV, not answering when the man got out of bed and asked him through the door if he wanted a cup of coffee, but kept staring at the silent TV, so the man made coffee for just one, filled himself a cup, added sugar, stirred it and sat down with it next to Korin in the vacant armchair, surprised to find that Korin was after all addressing him, asking where the woman he loved had gone, to which he replied after a long silence simply that she had gone away; and what about her? and the one in the kitchen? and the one at the bus stop? asked Korin nodding toward the various dummies, to which he answered that they all looked like her, slurped once at his coffee, stood up and took the cup out into the kitchen, and by the time he returned Korin seemed not to have noticed his absence and was absorbed in telling his story, describing the two children’s faces as they peered down at him threatening to call the ambulance, and how he had managed to slip away and took shelter in the subway for a while, though every part of him was aching, he said, especially his stomach, his chest and his neck, and his whole head buzzing so that he hardly had the strength to stand, but kept going somehow and got to another subway station, then to another and another, and so forth … but the man stopped him at this point to say, I don’t understand, what are you talking about, but rather than explain Korin stopped altogether and for a while all three of them were simply watching TV, cartoons and advertisements following close on each other’s heels, rapid, jerky, silent images, as if everything was under water, until the man repeated his advice that Korin should leave immediately because it was a tough city and you couldn’t hang around thinking that either someone would kill Korin or the cops would get him, which would be more or less the same thing, he said, and since he seemed to have vast amounts of money he should decide where to go and he, the man, would take care of it, but he needed to pull himself together now, he said, though he could see that Korin was still out of it and that nothing he said had got through, that he was simply frowning at the television, watching it for a long time as though it required all his concentration to keep track of the flickering images on the screen before eventually rising from the armchair, going over to the pictures on the wall, pointing to one of them and asking, and this? where is this?