Fiasco

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The old boy was standing in front of the filing cabinet. He was thinking. It was midmorning. (Relatively — getting on for ten). Around this time the old boy was always in the habit of having a think.

He had plenty of troubles and woes, so there were things to think about.

But the old boy was not thinking about what he ought to have been thinking about.

We cannot know precisely what he was thinking about: all one could see was that he was thinking, not what he was thinking. It could be that he was not thinking at all. But then it was midmorning (relatively — getting on for ten), and he had got used to being in the habit of having a think around this time. By now the old boy had acquired such a routine of having a think that at these times he was capable of giving the impression of having a think even when he was not thinking, and perhaps even when he imagined he was thinking. That’s the honest truth, not to put too fine a point on it.

So the old boy stood thinking (absorbed in his thoughts) in front of the filing cabinet.

At this juncture we can hardly avoid saying something about the filing cabinet.

The filing cabinet was a direct descendent of one of those corner bookcases the two wings of which occupied the southwest corner of a west-facing room, precisely from the southern edge of the longitudinally north-south window surface to the corner, and from a chest of drawers placed along the line of the longitudinally east-west wall to the same corner, against a roughly 50-inch-wide protrusion of the wall the purpose of which no one had ever been able to establish and which was covered over (out of bashfulness, so to speak) by a glued-on (and very messily glued-on at that) wooden board (an appurtenance of the bookcase, as it were), if not quite up to the ceiling, then at least to the full height — a good six feet, in other words — of the bookcase.

If we are going to go into this level of detail, we cannot pass over the fact that the above-mentioned bookcase itself had been put together from the linen drawers of two former divan-beds through the ingenuity of a neighbourhood carpenter, whereas a more distant upholsterer had fashioned from the upholstery of the divan-beds two modern sofas, which were still standing, re-covered to be sure, in the western and eastern corners of the room’s north-lying wall.

It may be recollected that it was in the midmorning (relatively — getting on for ten). We are now in a position to supplement that with further details: it was a splendid, warm, slightly humid but sunny late-summer (early autumnal) morning.

While the old boy at this relatively midmorning hour — getting on for ten — was standing in front of the filing cabinet and thinking, he was fleetingly subject to a temptation to close the window.

He didn’t have the heart to do it, however, because the warm, slightly humid but sunny late-summer (early autumnal) morning outside was so splendid.

It was as if a pale azure-tinted bell jar had been overturned onto the old boy, standing and thinking in front of the filing cabinet, and his wider environs.

That simile, like apt similes in general, is aimed at heightening sensitivities through the associations it evokes. For what we must also imagine are the countless sources of noise and smells in a very busy street under a tightly sealed bell jar, because that was the sort of street overlooked by the window, slightly to the south of which — or to the left, if we stand facing him — the old boy was standing and thinking in front of the filing cabinet.

It was an odious street.

The Slough of Deceit, as the old boy called it.

In reality it was just a side street. (Officially speaking).

Nonetheless, jammed as it was between two main thoroughfares, the side street was very busy coping — how could it not have been? — with the traffic from the two main thoroughfares.

On the kerbs of the sidewalk, which ran in a longitudinally north-south direction, were mounted various signposts (so many flagrant symbols of futility), whereas the southern debouchment of the street, at the junction of one forking main thoroughfare and three converging side streets, was closed off by a traffic lamp, which behaved as if the street were indeed a side street, so that out of the herd of cars of every conceivable size, from midget minicars to the giant towing units of heavy-goods vehicles (along with the corresponding exhausts and harmonics) (the latter sometimes in surprising discrepancy, yet more often than not proving to be proportionate, to the size), which honked, vroomed, and tremulously fumed before it, its permitting a mere two or three at a time to proceed before changing back to red.

Officially no trams ran along the street.

Unofficially, however, all trams travelling to or from one particular depot along one of the two main thoroughfares in point of fact effected their route, as if it were nothing to make a fuss about, by progressing via this side street jammed between the two thoroughfares.

A bellowing, rattling, grinding, rattling, screeching, and unbridled tumult boiled up from the Slough of Deceit as from the depths of a bubbling cauldron, among exhaust gases that were sometimes blackly louring, sometimes merely grizzling, whereas after the onset of evening (before the onset of winter) (for thus far we have not seen fit to so much as mention the chimney stacks) turning more a torpid bluish — until toward the dawn hour of 3:30 the first harbinger of the swarms of buses that would be emerging from their garages made its appearance (and with it a fresh day’s fresh black gases), hurtling at breakneck speed and twitching its empty rear-end like a mare in heat, at the northern debouchment of the street.

This street, running in a longitudinally north-south (or south-north) direction, was lined by not more than ten or fifteen buildings, yet an entire historical epoch had stamped its mark on even that relatively small number of buildings — a mark which, curiously enough, found chronological expression, going spatially in a south-north longitudinal direction.

The first half of the Forties had fallen on the middle of the street’s eastern side.

Those years had been characterized by the war, its buildings by an urgent investment of capital and the attendant corner-cutting and wartime material shortages.

The old boy lived in one of these buildings, in a second-floor flatlet (a bed-sitting room with hallway, bathroom, and kitchenette, 28 m² in all, rented council property, at a monthly rental which had grown, in line with the general inflation of rents, from 120 forints to currently still just 300 forints), registered temporarily for decades by right of marriage (since his permanent residence permit was valid, by right of his being an immediate family member, for his mother’s apartment, though he never lived there, not even temporarily, but seeing that it was ultimately inevitable that the old lady, for all the hopes that she would carry on to the extreme limit of human life …) (in short, on being left vacant as a consequence of this ultimately inevitable event, the apartment would, by virtue of this subterfuge, pass on to the old boy) (provided this subterfuge, as could be anticipated on grounds of customary law, was respected by the competent authority within the council) (and despite the fact that it too was just a single room, albeit a large room with all amenities and in the green belt, on account of which this apartment where the old boy was registered as a permanent resident, though he never lived there, not even temporarily, was undoubtedly more serviceable, if only as the basis for a swap).

Since the furnishings of the flat — the one in which the old boy lived permanently, albeit registered only as a temporary resident — had been kept to the bare necessities from the first, one may confidently hope that those items that we shall pick out below as the most necessary of the bare necessities are at least not unnecessary in the context of our story.

The hallway running in the east-west longitudinal direction (from the entrance), which led, on opening a hammered-glass door bisected at its middle by a painted wooden strip (or, to be more precise, on sidestepping the door, since it was always open in view of the hallway’s airlessness), to the living room, was bounded on its south side by doors to the kitchenette and, to the west of that, the bathroom, with the remaining approx. 30 inches of wall still farther to west providing space for a hall stand (with hat rack).

The northern wall of the hallway was covered along its entire length, from doorframe to doorframe, by a curtain made from an attractive print of manmade fibre, behind which a clever system of racks and shelves strove to efface the memory of two ungainly, disparately-sized wardrobes that had once stood there, long defying the steadfast antipathy of the old boy’s wife, and which, as is allegedly the wont of materials, did not disappear but were merely transformed into said clever system of racks and shelves; indeed a 3 × 3 inch chunk originally from one of the wardrobes (noteworthy for the wax seal that was visible on it) (though the inscription on the wax seal had been rendered almost illegible by a yellowish-white layer of paint from repeated decoration) could still be found, at the time of our story, in one of the old boy’s boxes of papers (though which one, even he didn’t know).

This brings us to the hammered-glass door bisected at its middle by a painted wooden strip on opening which (or, to be more precise, on sidestepping which, since the door was always open in view of the hallway’s airlessness) we can enter the living room.

In the southeast corner of this room (which faced westward on the street side) was a tile stove, and both north and west of the stove, allowing for adequate gaps, were single armchairs (of the Maya II model, constructed from beechwood, nitrocellulose lacquer, HDP straps, foam rubber, furnishing fabric, quality in compliance with the specifications of Hungarian Standards 8976/4/72 and 8977–68, PROTECT FROM DAMP!), between the armchairs (slightly north-west of the stove) a sweepingly curved standard lamp (its shade changing roughly every five years) and, a little farther to the northwest, a tiny, rickety thingamajig, resting on stick legs, which according to its Quality Certificate was a child’s mini-table, 1st-class special ply of 1st-class sawn hardwood, but which in regard to its actual function was more a kind of tiny smoker’s table.

After the armchair to the north of the stove (allowing for an adequate gap) was another gap, and then the hammered-glass door — or to be more accurate, since the door was always open due to hallway’s airlessness — a door-sized aperture, then the hammered-glass leaf of the hammered-glass door, behind which was a gap and, after the gap, in the northeastern corner of the room, the narrower side of one of the sofas, then the corner itself, after which came — now along the northern wall — the longer side of the sofa, space, a low chest of drawers, space, and finally the second sofa, the longer side of which snuggled up to the west wall, stretching north-to-south right under the window where, still more to the south, there was a space, then a table (to be more precise, the table, the only real table in the flat) stretching farther southward, almost to the southwestern corner of the room, the sole obstacle to reaching which was an item of furniture standing in this corner, and which by now should certainly no longer be entirely unfamiliar to the observant reader.

Our job is a good deal easier if we start from the armchair standing to the west of the stove (allowing for an adequate gap) and proceed along the room’s southern wall, because here there is just another gap then, more to the west, a low chest of drawers (an exact copy and pair of the chest of drawers opposite it), with a gap beyond which was the wall protrusion (the purpose of which no one had ever been able to establish), and lastly, in the southwest corner of the room, that hybrid, the bookcase — filing-cabinet centaur (if such a catachresis may be entertained), before which, one splendid, warm, slightly humid but sunny late-summer (early autumnal) morning — which spilled over him and his wider environs like an impenetrable bell jar — the old boy was standing and thinking.

To guard against any definitive fixing of notions which no doubt have already begun to form, our hitherto neutral use of words probably calls for some clarification at this juncture.

Just as the filing cabinet, for example, was not really a filing cabinet, or, to take another example, the old boy’s side street (the Slough of Deceit, as the old boy called it) was not really a side street, the old boy was not really old.

He was old, of course (for why else would we call him the old boy). Still, the old boy was not an old boy for being old; that is to say, he was not an old man (though he was not young either), (for why else would we call him the old boy).

In all probability it would be simplest just to say how old he was (if we were not averse to such exceedingly dubious specifics, changing as they do from year to year, day to day, even minute to minute) (and who knows how many years, days and minutes our story will arch) (or what twists and turns that span may span) (as a result of which we might suddenly find ourselves in a situation where we may no longer be able to vouch for our rash assertions).

So, for want of better, let us fall back on an observation, though in itself it is by no means a particularly original one:

If a person is weighed down by a good half-century, then he either sinks under the burden or somehow withstands it, comes to a standstill (on the hook of time, as it were) (a hook which may, of course, drag and pull him ever further into the wasteland of the other shore, into a shadowy, desiccated abstraction amidst succulent colours and palpable forms), and an enduring moment supervenes which is as if it were not even here, or in other words, tempts us with the deceptive appearance of something still not having been definitively decided (whether or not the rope is strong enough, so to speak) (why wouldn’t it be? nevertheless we are all aware of the circumstance that, for sake of a more secure grip, it gives a little may, in itself, give rise to misconceptions) (above all in the sort of person who has already succeeded in severing the rope once) (but let us not anticipate our tale).

If in what follows we continue to maintain — and we shall — that the old boy was old, obviously we shall have to find another way of justifying this usage (which neither the old boy’s appearance nor even the superior knowledge of a registry office official peeking beneath the surface of things puts in our mouth).

Nothing easier.

For the old boy thought of himself — we can hardly dispute that he had every reason to do so — as old, as someone to whom nothing more could happen, nothing new, whether good or bad (with a proviso for the far from consubstantial chances of the just slightly better or slightly worse) (although this made essentially no difference to the essence), as someone to whom everything had already happened (including what might still happen or might have happened), someone who had outwitted — transiently — his death, lived out — definitively — his life, gained his modest reward for his vices and strict punishment for his virtues, and had long been a permanent figure on that grey list that is kept, who can tell where, and in accordance with what sort of promptings, of those who are excess to headcount; someone who, despite all that, wakes up day after day to the fact that he still exists (and doesn’t find it so unpleasant at that) (as he might, perhaps, have felt) (if he always took everything into consideration) (which he did not do at all).

For that reason, then, there are no grounds at all for us to believe that these were the things being thought when the old boy was standing in front of the filing cabinet and thinking.

No, all that’s at issue is that it was midmorning (relatively — getting on for ten), and that around this time the old boy was in the habit of having a think.

That was how he ordered his life.

Every day, when ten o’clock (or thereabouts) came around, he immediately started to think.

This was an upshot of his circumstances, since before ten o’clock he would not have been able to start thinking, whereas if he only set about it later on, he would have reproached himself for the lost time (which would have only led to further loss of time, or held him back even further, if not — in extreme cases — completely obstructed him from thinking).

Thus at ten o’clock (or thereabouts), so to speak automatically and quite independently of the intensity of the thinking, or even of whether or not he thought at all (the old boy was so much into the routine of thinking that he was sometimes capable of creating the appearance of being in thought even when he was not thinking, possibly even when he himself might have imagined he was thinking), the old boy stood in front of the filing cabinet and thought.

For at ten o’clock (or thereabouts) the old boy was left alone in the flat (which for him counted as a precondition for thinking), as his wife would earlier have set off on the long journey to the bistro on the city outskirts where, as a waitress, she earned her bread (and occasionally the old boy’s as well) (if fate so willed it) (and it certainly did so will it more than once).

He had also done with his ablutions.

He had also drunk his coffee (in the armchair to the west of the tile stove) (allowing for an adequate gap).

He had also already smoked his first cigarette (pacing back and forth between the west-facing window and the closed entrance door to the east) (sidling a bit in the constricted space formed by the curtain made from an attractive print of manmade fibre covering the north wall of the hallway and the open bathroom door) (a door which was constantly open, for purposes of ventilation, since the bathroom was even more airless than the airless hallway).

These were the preliminaries, if not reasons (though most certainly preconditions), for the old boy to be standing in front of the filing cabinet and thinking at ten o’clock (or thereabouts) on this splendid, warm, slightly humid but sunny late-summer (early autumnal) morning.

The old boy had plenty of troubles and woes, so he had something to think about.

But the old boy was not thinking about what he ought to have been thinking about.

Yet we cannot assert that his most topical care — that is to say, the one he ought to have been thinking about — had not so much as entered his head.

Indeed we cannot.

“I’m just standing here in front of the filing cabinet and thinking,” the old boy was thinking, “instead of actually doing something.”

Well certainly, the truth is — not to put too fine a point on it — that he should long ago have settled down to writing a book.

For the old boy wrote books.

That was his occupation.

Or rather, to be more precise, things had so transpired that this had become his occupation (seeing as he had no other occupation).

He had already written several books as well, most notably his first one: he had worked on that book (since at the time writing books had not yet become his occupation and he had written the book for no obvious reason, just on an arbitrary whim, so to say) for a good ten years, but had subsequently seen it into print only after a fair number of vicissitudes — and the passage of a further two years; for his second book just four years had proved adequate; and with his other books (since by then writing books had become his occupation, or rather — to be more precise — things had so transpired that this had become his occupation) (seeing as he had no other occupation) he merely devoted the time that was absolutely necessary to get them written, which was essentially a function of their thickness, because (since things had so transpired that this had become his occupation) he had to aim to write books that were as thick as possible, out of carefully considered self-interest, since the fee for thicker books was fatter than that for slimmer books, for which — since they were slimmer — the fee was correspondingly slim (proportionate to their slimness) (regardless of their content) (in accordance with MoE Decree No.1/20.3.1970 concerning terms and conditions for publishing contracts and authors’ royalties, as issued by the Ministry of Education with the assent of the Treasury, the Ministry of Labour, the president of the National Board of Supply and Price Control, and the National Trades Union Council).

Not that the old boy was burning with longing to write a new book.

It had simply been quite some time since a new book of his had been published.

If this were to continue, his very name would sink into oblivion.

Which, in itself, would not have concerned the old boy in the slightest.

Except that — and there was the rub — he had to be concerned about it in a certain respect.

In not so many years he would reach the age at which he might become a retired writer (in other words, a writer who had earned enough from his books not to have to write any more books) (though he could do, of course, if he still had the wish to).

That, then — if he stripped away all the vague abstractions, and he was a stickler for the concrete and tangible — was the real goal of his literary labours.

But in order not to have to write any more books, he would still have to write a few more.

As many more as he could.

For if he were not to lose sight of the real goal of his literary labours (that is, that he might become a retired writer, or in other words, a writer who had earned enough from his books not to have to write any more books), then it was to be feared that the degree of oblivion into which his name was falling might affect — to wit, adversely — the factors determining his pension (about which factors he had no precise information, but he reasoned, perhaps not entirely illogically, that if a bigger royalty was to be expected for a thicker book, then more books should yield a bigger pension) (which, in the absence of more precise information, as has already been indicated, was just speculation, if not entirely illogical speculation, on the old boy’s part).

So that was why the old boy had to be concerned, even if in other respects he was not in the slightest bit concerned about the fact in itself, that his very name was sinking into oblivion.

Consequently, despite not burning with any longing to write a new book, he ought to have settled down to it long ago.

Only he had no clue what. (This, incidentally, had already happened to him on other occasions, though only with any regularity since writing books had become his occupation (or rather — to be more precise — since things had so transpired that this had become his occupation) (seeing as he had no other occupation).

And yet it was a just a question of a single book.

Any old book, just so long as it was a book (the old boy had long been aware that it made no difference at all what kind of book he wrote, good or bad — that had no bearing on the essence of the matter) (though as to what he meant by the essence the old boy either knew only too well or had no idea at all) (at least we are forced to this conclusion by the fact that, standing and thinking in front of the filing cabinet as he was, this thought, among others, was running through his head, though he gave not the slightest sign of wishing to clarify the essence of this notion — of the essence — if only for his own purposes).

But 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.

Despite having done truly everything in his power as far as he was concerned (for, as we have seen, at this very moment he was standing in front of the filing cabinet and thinking).

In recent days he had already gone through every one of his old, older, or still older ideas, sketches and fragments, which he kept in a folder furnished with the title “Ideas, sketches, fragments,” but either they had proved unusable or else he had understood not a word of them (even though he himself had been the one who noted them down some time before, or some time before that, or still further back in time).

He had even undertaken lengthy walks in the Buda hills (contemplative walks, as the old boy called them).

All to no avail.

Now, with his ideas, sketches, fragments, and walks (contemplative walks, as the old boy called them) in turn, one after the other, all having come to nought, all that was left was his papers.

It had been a long time since he had seen his papers.

Not that he wished to see them.

He had even hidden them in the farthest depths of the filing cabinet in order to avoid somehow catching sight of them.

So the old boy had to be in a very tight spot indeed to be driven, for once, to place his ultimate trust — if previously it had been on a stroke of good fortune (which, for known reasons, we might better amend to the virtually impossible), then on the his ideas, sketches, fragments and his contemplative walks — in his papers.

But at this juncture it is to be feared that if we do not break away a bit from the old boy’s train of thought, we shall never get to see in the clear light that is indispensable to what follows the subtle, but not inconsequential, difference between ideas, sketches, and fragments, on the one hand, and papers, on the other.

It may be that we shall not be forced into too lengthy an explanation.

Specifically, ideas, sketches, and fragments are only produced by someone who is driven to those resorts by imperative and pressing reasons; someone — like the old boy, for instance — whose occupation happens to be writing books (or rather, to be more precise, for whom things had so transpired that this had become his occupation) (seeing as he had no other occupation).

Papers, on the other hand, everybody has. If not a number of them, then certainly one: a scrap of paper on which one noted down something at some time, presumably something important that was not to be forgotten and was carefully put away — and then forgotten about.

Papers which preserve adolescent poems.

Papers through which one sought a way out at a critical period.

Possibly an entire diary.

A house plan.

A budget for a difficult year ahead. A letter one started to write.

A message—“Back soon”—that may later have proved to be portentous.

At the very least a bill, or the washing instructions torn off some undergarment, on the reverse side of which we discover minute, faded, unfamiliar and by now illegible lettering — our own handwriting.

The old boy had a whole file of such papers.

As we have perhaps already mentioned, he kept them in the farthest depths of the filing cabinet in order to avoid somehow catching sight of them.

Now that he wanted the exact opposite — namely, to catch sight of them — he first had to lift out of the filing cabinet his typewriter, several files — among them one labelled “Ideas, sketches, fragments”—as well as two cardboard boxes which held a miscellany of objects (both necessary and unnecessary) (at all events only the occasion of the particular moment could assign a firm ascription to those designations) (as a result of which the old boy could never know for sure which of these objects were necessary and which unnecessary) (a distinction that became all the more unclear, as years might go by without his opening the lids of the two cardboard boxes and so casting even a single glance over the variety of objects, necessary and unnecessary alike).

This, then, was his way of ensuring that he caught sight of the ordinary, grey, standard-sized (HS 5617) box file containing his papers.

On the grey file, as a paperweight, so to say, squatted (or swaggered) (or sphered) (depending on the angle from which one looked at it) a likewise grey, albeit a darker grey, stone lump; in other words, a stone lump of irregular shape about which there is nothing reassuring that we might say (for instance, that it was a polygonal parallelepiped) (anything, in fact, that can soothingly reconcile the human soul to the world of objects, without its ever truly comprehending them, insofar as they at least match a familiar construct, thus allowing the matter to be left at that), seeing that this particular lump of stone, by virtue of its still extant or already worn-down edges, corners, roundings, bumps, grooves, fissures, projections, and indentations was as irregular as any lump of stone can be about which one cannot tell whether it is a mass from which a smaller lump has been broken off or, conversely, the remnant small lump of a larger stone mass, which in its turn — like a cliff face to a mountain — was in all certainty part of a still larger stone mass (but then every lump of stone instantly entices one into prehistoric deliberations) (which are not our aim) (difficult though they are to resist) (most especially when we happen to be dealing with a lump of stone which diverts our failing imagination toward ulterior) (or rather primordial) (beginnings, ends, masses and unities, so that in the end we retreat to our hopeless) (though it is at least invested with the alleged dignity of knowledge) (ignorance regarding which, for this lump of stone as for so many other things, one cannot tell whether it is a small lump broken off from a larger stone mass or, conversely, the remnant small lump of a larger stone mass).

The situation pertaining at the start of our story, to which we have consistently adhered all along — not at all out of obstinacy, merely due to the ponderousness of the old boy’s decision-making process — has now been modified as follows:

The old boy was standing in front of a wide-open filing cabinet, in whose half-emptied upper drawer only a grey box file, upon which, as a paperweight, so to say, a likewise grey, albeit a darker grey, lump of stone is visible, and was thinking:

“I’m afraid,” he thought, “I’m finally going to have to get my papers out.”

Which, by the way, is what he proceeded to do.

And then, out of orderliness (for what other reason might we discern) (unless we take the shortage of space into consideration) (or perhaps as a way of setting a seal on the irrevocability of the decision), he tidied the typewriter, several files — among them one labelled “Ideas, sketches, fragments”—as well as the two cardboard boxes back into the upper drawer of the filing cabinet.

It may be found to be more than sheer prolixity if we were now to report, as briefly as we can, on a further modification to the situation pertaining at the start of our story, already modified as it is:

The old boy was standing in front of the filing cabinet and reading.

“August 1973

What has happened, has happened; I can do nothing about it now. I can do as little to alter my past as the future implacably ensuing from it, with which I am as yet unacquainted …”

“Good God!” the old boy uttered aloud.

“… Yet I move just as aimlessly within the narrow confines of my present as in the past or the time which is to come.

How I got to this position, I don’t know. I simply frittered away my childhood. There are no doubt deep psychological explanations for why I should have been such a poor student in the lower classes at grammar school. (“You don’t even have the excuse of being dumb, because you have a brain, if only you would use it,” as my father often stressed.) Later, when I was fourteen and a half, through a conjunction of infinitely inane circumstances, I found myself looking down the barrel of a loaded machine gun for half an hour. It is practically impossible to describe those circumstances in normal language. Suffice it to say that I was standing in a crowd which was sweating fear, and who knows what scraps of thoughts, in the narrow courtyard of a police barracks, the one thing which all the individuals had in common being that we were all Jews. It was a crystal-clear, flower-scented summer evening, a full moon beaming up above us. The air was filled with a steady, low throbbing: obviously Royal Air Force formations flying from their Italian bases and headed for unknown targets, and the danger which threatened us was that if they should chance to drop a bomb on the barracks or its environs, the gendarmes would mow us down, as they phrased it. The ludicrous connections and imbecilic reasons on which that rested were, I felt then and also since then, absolutely negligible. The machine gun was mounted on a stand rather like the tripod of a cine camera. Standing behind it, on some sort of platform, was a gendarme with drooping Turanian moustache and impassively narrowed eyes. Fitted onto the end of the barrel was a ridiculous conical component, rather like the one on my grandmother’s coffee grinder. We waited. The drone’s rumbling grew louder and then again faded to a low buzz, only for each quiet interval to give way to a renewed intensification of the rumbling. Would it drop or wouldn’t it, that was the question. Gradually the gendarmes let the deranged good humour of gamblers take control of them. Is there any way I can describe the unforeseen good spirits that, after I had got over my initial surprise, coursed through me as well? All I had to do to be able to enjoy the game, in a certain fashion, was to recognize the triviality of the stake. I grasped the simple secret of the universe that had been disclosed to me: I could be gunned down anywhere, at any time. It may be that this …”

“For fuck’s sake” the old boy suddenly broke off his reading at this point as he lifted himself partway from his seat to reach over to the filing cabinet.

The reason for this curious development lay in an event that, although it had not been anticipated, could not be categorized as unexpected (because it occurred regularly, practically every single day), but even the frequent repetition of the event had not robbed it, as we have seen, of its original, elemental impact on the old boy (indeed, quite the opposite, one might say).

Obviously, it would be wrong for us to hold back on providing a satisfactory explanation.

Still, this obligation undeniably puts us somewhat at a loss.

It hardly serves as sufficient explanation for the words which erupted from the old boy’s mouth, for the mild cramps which constricted his stomach, or for the ever-so-slight nausea that shot up with a hurtling and a dizzying jolt, like some kind of elevator, through his chest and throat to slam against the back of his neck, for us merely to say — sticking to the bare facts — that a radio had been switched on above his head.

It is not without purpose (indeed, we are admittedly thinking of easing our task as narrator) that we now leave the old boy’s papers where they are and, in their stead, open a not overly bulky book with a green half-cloth binding that the old boy had been leafing through frequently, and to great advantage, in recent days, evidencing especially appreciative relish for the following lines (on page 259 of the volume) (at which page, incidentally, the green half-bound volume fell open, almost as if by pre-arrangement, once the old boy had lifted it down from the bookshelf occupying the northeast corner of the room) (although, as a further safeguard to unerring location, the yellow bookmarking ribbon of artificial silk had also been inserted at the same page) (on which page the following lines) (for which the old boy evidenced especially appreciative relish) (may now be read by us too, bending over his shoulder, so to speak):

True enough.

Oglütz is what the old boy called it.

The Unsilent Being.

Not female, not male, not beast, least of all human.

Oglütz is what the old boy called it.

Whether due to unlimited listening to radio and television or as a consequence of some hormonal imbalance (the explanation for which imbalance lay, perhaps, in unlimited listening to radio and television) (though a copious intake of foodstuffs should not be overlooked), the Being proliferated not only in the old boy’s brain but across the entire 28 square metres above his head.

The old boy lived below a female Cyclops which fed on noise. (Although this particular Cyclops had two eyes, two tiny rhino eyes.)

All day long the old boy was helplessly tossed about on the heavy swell of its sounds. He heard the appalling slam of the door each time it got back to its lair; a burst of quickfire thuds and rumbles, perhaps (the old boy conjectured) through dumping the haul of spoils that it had brought back home; a broken, jarring rhythm of heavy bumps — training bears, as the old boy was in the habit of commenting; and soon enough the bellowing wild beast of some broadcast service or other, either the radio or the television.

Oglütz is what the old boy called it.

Nothing could be done about it.

One had to resign oneself to it.

Some time long, long ago, at the beginning of time, the old boy had willy-nilly surrendered himself into admitting that the noises disturbed him (indeed, had requested that they be moderated). Since which time it had kept an unremitting watch above his head.

He had got to know its habits.

It waited for him to strike the first key on the typewriter keyboard.

It sensed infallibly when he was in the habit of standing in front of the filing cabinet and having a think.

Nothing could be done about it.

One had to resign oneself to it.

The course of long years had built up a set of automatic defence reflexes in the old boy (rather like, for instance, opening his umbrella when it rained).

The above-cited lines from the not overly bulky, green half-bound volume (for which the old boy evidenced especially appreciative relish) may likewise be classified as one of those defence reflexes.

This wholly spiritual consolation and source of strength would have been to little avail, however, without his considerable collection of earplugs of fusible-wax, which took up almost the entire left rear — southwest — corner of the lower drawer of his filing cabinet (as it was not always possible to procure them, since they were of foreign manufacture) (OHROPAX Noise Shields, VEB Pharmazeutika, Königsee) (on account of which, during periods when they were procurable, the old boy laid in such a stock of them, that his earplugs) (like Josef K.’s shame) (would in all likelihood outlive him), from which stock a pair of wax balls, in a cylindrical glass phial, lay constantly ready for use at the front of the next drawer up in the filing cabinet, so that in the event of need (and the need almost always arose, with clockwork regularity), after a certain amount of preparatory softening work with the palm of the hand, they could be instantly inserted into the old boy’s ears.

During the preparatory softening work, the old boy was in the habit of reciting, in an undertone, yet another longer or shorter text — more in a mechanical sort of manner, sacrificing, as it were, the vital emotion which had once provoked the words (just as, with frequent repetition, the essence dwindles even from the ritual of prayer, making way for dutiful distraction) — the length, or shortness, of which longer or shorter text varied with the season: in winter he recited a longer text than in the summer, which finds a simple explanation in the physical fact that wax softens more rapidly in the warmth than in the cold.

And so it was that on this splendid, warm, slightly humid but sunny late-summer (early autumnal) morning, all that the old boy intoned, unhurriedly and syllable by syllable, was “You fucking miserable, scummy, old Nazi bag …”, while carefully shaping the by now softened wad between his fingers as he crammed it into his ear, thereby placing himself beyond the reach of Oglütz, the Slough of Deceit — the entire world in effect (by virtue of which the modified situation is once again modified a bit, insofar as the old boy now carried on with his reading with two wax plugs in his ears):

“… the simple secret of the universe that had been disclosed to me: I could be gunned down anywhere, at any time. It may be that this, by the way not particularly original, perception disturbed me a little; it may be that it left a deeper impression on me than was justified, for how many countless others went through exactly the same mass justice, whether on the same spot at the same time or at other times and other places in the big, wide world. Perhaps I was an oversensitive child, and even later on was unable to rid myself of my subtlety: possibly some sort of short-circuit occurred, a disturbance in my normal metabolic relationship with my experiences, even though I could only lay claim to essentially the same normally grubby experiences as any other normal being. Many years later — and many years before now — I knew that I would have to write a novel. At the time I happened to be hanging around, completely indifferently, in some indifferent office corridor when I heard an indifferent sound — of steps. The whole thing was over in a trice. In recollecting that moment, which I am otherwise incapable of recollecting, I have to suppose that if I had been able to preserve within myself its lucidity, some kind of distillate, as it were, of its content, then I would probably be able to grasp the thing that was truly always of greatest interest: the key to my existence. But moments pass and do not recur. I therefore supposed that I ought at least to remain faithful to its intimation; I started to write a novel. I wrote one and tore it up; I wrote it afresh and again tore it up. Years went by. I kept on writing, writing until I felt that I had finally hit upon a possible novel for me. I wrote a novel, in the meantime producing dialogues for musical comedies, each more inane than the last, in order to obtain a livelihood (hoodwinking my wife who, in the semigloom of the theatre auditorium at “my premieres,” would wait for me, wearing the mid-grey suit specially tailored for such occasions, to take my place before the curtains in a storm of applause and would imagine that our beached life would finally work free from the shoals after all); but I, after assiduously putting in appearances at the pertinent branch of the National Savings Bank to pick up the not inconsiderable royalties due for my claptrap, would immediately sneak home with the guilty conscience of a thief to write a novel anew, and in the years that I have just put behind me this dominating passion grew to be an obstacle even to my being able to present my public, avid for entertainment, with fresh comedies and myself with renewed royalties …”

“Well now,” the old boy got up and began, with the pliable wax plugs in his ears muting the sound of his tread to the velvety glide of a panther, to pace up and down between the west-facing window and the closed entrance to the east (sidling a bit in the constricted space formed by the curtain made from an attractive print of manmade fibre covering the north wall of the hallway and the open bathroom door) (a door which was constantly open, for purposes of ventilation, since the bathroom was even more airless than the airless hallway), “It starts off as if it were aiming to be some sort of confession,” he muttered. “Not bad as such, but it can still go off. The trouble is that it’s honest. Not the happiest sign. Nor the subject either.”

Well indeed, if he had to write a book (any old book, just so long as it was a book) (the old boy had long been aware that it made no difference at all what kind of book he wrote, good or bad — that had no bearing on the essence of the matter), at least let it be a book on a happy subject.

Certainly his subjects so far had not been too happy.

As the old boy saw it, the reason for that — on the rare occasions he gave it any thought — was that he probably had no fantasy (which was quite a disadvantage, considering that his occupation happened to be writing books) (or rather, to be more precise, things had so transpired that this had become his occupation) (seeing as he had no other occupation).

As a result — for what else could he have done? — he drew his subjects, for the most part, out of his own experiences.

That, however, always ruined even his happiest subjects.

On this occasion he wanted to be on his guard.

“It was dumb of me,” he mused, “to get out my papers. Best pack them away again.”

“Only,” he mused further, “they’ve got my interest now.”

“I feared as much,” he added (musing).

Rightly so, because for once we can now report the restoration of an earlier situation, itself only temporarily modified by the pacing back and forth: the old boy was sitting in front of the filing cabinet and reading.

… with the guilty conscience of a thief … to present my public … and myself with renewed royalties—

But this is getting me nowhere. In the final analysis, it is just a story; it may be expanded or abbreviated but still explain nothing, like stories in general. I can’t make out from my story what happened to me, yet that is what I need. I don’t even know if the scales have just now fallen from my eyes or, on the contrary, are just now dimming them. These days, at any rate, I am caught off guard at every turn. Take the flat in which I live. It takes up twenty-eight square metres on the second floor of a comparatively not too ugly Buda apartment house of fairly human proportions. A living room and a hallway that lets on to the bathroom and the so-called kitchenette. It even has belongings, furniture, this and that. Disregarding the changes that my wife held to be necessary every now and then, everything is just the same as yesterday, the day before, or one year or nineteen years ago, which was when …”

“Nineteen years!’ the old boy snorted.

“… or nineteen years ago, which was when we moved in, under circumstances that were not without incident. Yet, recently some sort of perfidious threat issues from it all, something that makes me uneasy. At first I had no idea at all what to make of this since, as I said, I see nothing new or unusual in the flat. I racked my brains a long time until I finally realized that it’s not what I see that has changed: the change comes just from the way I see. Before now, I had never properly seen this flat in which I have lived for nineteen years …”

“Nineteen years,” the old boy said, shaking his head.

… and yet there is nothing puzzling about that if I think it over. For the fellow with whom I was once, even just a few months ago, identical, this flat was a fixed but nevertheless provisional place where he wrote his novel. That was this chap’s job, his express goal, who knows, perhaps even his purpose; in other words, however slowly he might actually have done his job, he was always rushing. He viewed objects from a train window, so to speak, in passing, as they flashed before his gaze. He gained at best a fleeting impression of the utility of individual objects, taking them in his hands and then putting them down, going through them, pulling them, pushing them about, bullying them, terrorising them. Now they no longer feel the power of the controlling hand they are having their revenge: they present themselves, push their way before me, reveal their constancy. How indeed to take account of the panic which grips me on seeing them? This chair, this table, the sweeping curve of this standard lamp and the shade, scorched in the areas near the bulb, that hangs submissively, so to speak, from it — each one of them now jostles me and surrounds me with sham meekness, like forgiving, mournful nuns after some king of drubbing. They want to convince me that nothing has happened, though as I recall it, I have lived through something with them, an adventure, let us say — the adventure of writing, and I supposed that in pursuing a certain path to its very end my life had altered. But nothing at all has altered, and now it is clear that with my adventure it was precisely the chances of altering that I forfeited. This twenty-eight square metres is no longer the cage from which my imagination soared in flight every day, and to which I returned at night to sleep; no, it is the real arena of my real life, the cage in which I have imprisoned myself.

Then there is another thing: the strangeness of mornings. There was a time when I would awake at dawn; I would restlessly watch the light prising the cracks in the window blinds, waiting until I could get up. Over breakfast tea I exchanged only a few obligatory words with my wife; subconsciously I was just watching out for the time when I would finally be left to myself and, having completed the indispensable ablutions, be able to devote myself to the stubbornly waiting and perpetually recalcitrant paper. These days, however, out of some peculiar compulsion, it seems as if all I do is excuse myself; at breakfast I talk to my wife, and she is delighted at the change, not suspecting its cause; and when she leaves I catch myself anxiously following her in my thoughts …

At this point, the old boy thought that he might have heard the telephone ringing, but, having loosened one of the pliable wax plugs, ascertained that it was merely the noises from Oglütz as well as The Slough of Deceit swirling about him, perhaps just at a somewhat higher frequency than usual; and this bit disturbance may explain why he had to search for the continuation, and also why — as the lack of this continuity indeed demonstrates — he must have skipped a few lines of the text at this point:

I sense all kinds of traps opening up beneath my feet, I compound one mistake after another; every perception I make, everything that surrounds me, serves only to attack me, to cast doubt on and undermine my own probability.

I wonder when it was that these nuisances began. I don’t know why: it seems a person finds it reassuring to discover a starting point, some possibly arbitrary reference point in time that he can subsequently designate as the cause. Once we believe we have discovered a cause, any trouble appears rational. I suppose I never truly believed in my own existence. As I have already hinted earlier, I had good, sound, one might say objective, reasons for that. When I was writing my novel, this deficiency paid remarkable dividends as it became practically a work tool for me; it was worn down in the course of my daily activity, and when it had tired of my converting it into words, it did not bother me further. The trouble only started up again when I had finished my novel. I can still remember how those last pages were written. It happened three a and half months ago, on a promising May afternoon. I sensed that the end was within my grasp. It all depended on my wife. That evening she was due to visit one of her woman friends. During dinner I was tensely alert to whether she might be tired, not in the mood … I was lucky; I was left on my own. A sudden attack of diarrhoea delayed me from setting to the paper straight away. I had to ascribe this annoying symptom to a motus animi continuus, an onward sweep of the productive mechanism in which, as we know from Cicero, the quintessence of eloquence resides. That spirit is nothing but a certain state of excitement, but it can have an effect — with me, at any rate — on the entire body, including in all likelihood the digestive system. I finally sat down at the table, after all, and then finished off the text just as speedily as I was able to glide pen over paper. I got the last sentence down as well: finished. For days after that I kept on tinkering with it, scribbling in something here and there, correcting some words, deleting others. Then there was nothing more that could be done: that was it, the end. I was overcome by a somewhat idiotic feeling. Suddenly, something that had been a rather good diversion over many long years had folded, it seems. I only came to realize this later on. Up till then I had presumed I was working and had set to it, day after day, with a corresponding, contrived fury. Now that had been drained from me. The daily hard slog had been transfigured into a heap of paper. Now I was left with empty hands, plundered. All at once I found myself confronting the immaterial and formless monster of time. Its gaping mouth yawned witlessly at me, and there was nothing I could shove down its maw.

“Did you get any work done?” the old boy’s wife enquired after she had returned from the bistro where, as a waitress, she earned her bread (and occasionally the old boy’s as well) (if fate so willed it) (and it certainly did so will it more than once).

“Of course,” the old boy replied.

“Did you make any progress?”

“I pushed on a bit,” said the old boy.

“What do want for dinner?”

“I don’t know. What’s the choice?”

His wife told him.

“All the same to me,” the old boy decided.

A little later the old boy and his wife sat in front of the filing cabinet to eat their dinner (with due regard, naturally, to the circumstances that have already been touched upon) (thus when we say that the old boy and his wife sat in front of the filing cabinet to eat their dinner, this should be understood to mean that although the filing cabinet was facing them, in reality they were seated at the table, to be more precise, the table, the only real table in the flat) (and eating).

The old boy’s wife had got into the habit during dinner of relating what had happened to her in the bistro.

They would be making stock check soon; the managers were afraid that shrinkages would show up (not without reason, as they pilfered far too much) (and most unprofessionally at that, most notably the Old Biddy) (the chief administrator, to give her her official title) (though certain members of staff were no better) (but then there was much greater opportunity for the managers) (most notably the Old Biddy — the chief administrator, to give her her official title — who wanted to make up all the shrinkages through the tap beer and, more especially, the lunch menus) (what in the waitresses’ jargon was dubbed “pap”) (“pap” being the meals consumed mainly by children whose parents, not wanting, or possibly not being in a position, to cook for them, paid a weekly sum to the bistro for the lunch menu, or “pap” in the jargon) (although, as the old boy’s wife never omitted to remark, she had yet to meet the parent who checked up on what their children ate, or whether they even ate at all) (despite which the children did put on weight and, in time, would indisputably grow up into adults, who quite possibly would condemn their own children to lunch menus for want of time to fuss about with household chores) (that being the way of the world, what one major but highly suspect mind called eternal recurrence) (about which, as about many other things, he was mistaken, let it be noted): in short, veiled hints and open insinuations were already being expressed on the matter of the prospective stock check.

“Apart from which,” the old boy’s wife added, “blood is being spilt over the shift rota.”

The point was that the old boy’s wife always worked the morning shift.

The bistro, on the other hand, stayed open until late at night (during which late-night hours the bistro was frequented by an army of customers who, by the late evening hours, were transformed into exceptionally generous, open-handed beings).

In accordance with the worthy, fair-play rule of equal opportunity, which was also enshrined in law as a labour right, the bistro’s employees shared alike the clientele for the lunch menu in the mornings and afternoons (pap-eaters in the jargon), as tight-fisted as their time was rushed, and the late-night clientele who, by the late evening hours, were transformed into exceptionally generous, open-handed beings.

Nevertheless, the old boy’s wife, at her own request, as confirmed by signature, only ever worked in the mornings (so that the old boy would also be able to work in the twenty-eight square metres during the mornings) (and also because she could not abide the late-night clientele who, by the late evening hours, were transformed into exceptionally generous, open-handed beings but at the same time mostly drank themselves stupid or to the point of causing a nuisance).

Thus the late-night shift hours (as well as the by no means inconsiderable benefits that went with them) to which the old boy’s wife would have been entitled on the worthy, fair-play rule of equal opportunity, which was also enshrined in law as a labour right, were almost automatically assigned to a certain colleague called Mrs. Boda; however, most likely as a result of long habitude and also, perhaps, the greater inclination that human nature shows toward what, no doubt, is — if we may put it this way — a more instinctive attitude to legal practice than the worthy rules of fair play (even when also enshrined in law as a labour right), this certain colleague called Mrs. Boda (whose first name was Ilona) had already long regarded the benefits that had been assigned to her not as assigned benefits but entitlements.

One must take all that into account in imagining the effect produced by the announcement made by the old boy’s wife that very day that from now on she too wanted to work in the evenings.

“Why?” the old boy asked.

“Because as things are I hardly earn anything, and now you are not going to earn anything because you have to write a book.”

“That’s true,” said the old boy.

That evening the old boy declared, “I’m off for a walk.”

“Don’t be too long,” said his wife.

“All right. I need to think a bit.”

“There was something else I meant to tell you.”

“What was that?” The old boy paused.

“It’s slipped my mind for the moment.”

“Next time write it down so you won’t forget.”

“It would be nice if we could go away somewhere.”

“Yes, that would be nice,” the old boy said, nodding.

On returning from his walk (his contemplative walk, as he called it), the old boy asked:

“Did anyone call?”

“Who would have called?”

“True,” the old boy conceded.

“That tin-eared, clap-ridden, belly-dancing bitch of a whore …” the old boy intoned, unhurriedly and syllable by syllable, while carefully shaping the softened wad between his fingers as he crammed it into his ear, thereby placing himself beyond reach of Oglütz, the Slough of Deceit — the entire world in effect.

… Yes, if I had been consistent I might never have finished my novel. But now I had finished it none the less, and it was inconsistent of me to be surprised that it stood ready. But that was how it was. I’m not suggesting I was unaware that, if I were to write a novel, then sooner or later a novel would come out of that, since over long years I had striven for nothing else than that. So as far as being aware is concerned, it’s not a question of my being unaware; it’s just that I forgot to prepare myself for it. I was too preoccupied with writing the novel to reckon on the consequences. So there it lay before me, more than two hundred and fifty pages, and this pile, this object, was now demanding certain actions on my part. I had no idea how to get a novel published; I was totally unfamiliar with the business, I knew nobody; as yet no prose work of mine, as it is customary to call it, had been published. First of all, I had to get it typed, then I stuffed it into the one and only press-stud file I possessed, which I had acquired by not altogether innocent means during a visit to my mother at the head office of the export company where the old lady supplemented her pension by doing shorthand and typewriting for four hours a day. Then, with the file under my arm, I called on a publisher I knew was in the business of publishing novels by, as it was phrased, contemporary Hungarian authors, among others. I knocked on a door marked Secretariat and enquired of one of the ladies working there, who emanated that mysterious, so hard to define aura of being in charge, whether I might leave a novel with her. On her giving a positive response, I handed the file over to her and watched her place it among a stack of other files on a table at the back of the room. After that I made my way straight to the open-air swimming pool …

“My God!” exclaimed the old boy.

… straight to the open-air swimming pool, as I hoped — and was not disappointed — that the weather, being sunny but cool and windy, would deter the crowds from flocking to the pools that day, and I swam a twenty lengths with long, leisurely strokes in the cold water.”

“My God!” exclaimed the old boy.

Subsequently, a good two months later, I was sitting with a chap who was something or other at the publisher’s. I had already paid a visit on him a week previously since, according to the lady in the secretariat, “he will answer any enquires about your novel.” As it turned out, he had heard neither about me nor about my novel.

“When did you submit it?” he asked.

“Two months ago.”

“Two months is not so long,” he assured me. The chap was grey-faced, with a gaunt, harassed, neurotic look about him, and silvered sunglasses. On his desk there were piles of paper, books, an appointment diary, a typewriter, a manuscript bundle covered with scribbled corrections — manifestly a novel. I fled. For preference I would have gone straight to the open-air swimming pool …

“My God!” exclaimed the old boy.

… but now that it was the height of the heat wave I had no hope of being able to have a swim.

On the next occasion he showed himself to be more talkative. By now he had heard both about me and about my novel, though he personally had still not read it. He offered me a seat. Fascism, (he turned toward me and away from his typewriter, in which I could see he had inserted a sheet of the firm’s headed letter paper) was a huge and ghastly subject about which there had already …

“Aha!” the old boy exclaimed aloud as he started to rummage agitatedly in the file until he spotted a sheet of headed letter paper among his papers.

It was an ordinary, neat business letter, with fields for date (27/JUL/1973), correspondent (unfilled), subject (unspecified), reference number (482/73), and no greeting:

“Your manuscript has been assessed by our firm’s readers,” the old boy started to read.

On the basis of their unanimous opinion … We consider that your way of giving artistic expression to the material of your experiences does not come off, while the subject itself is horrific and shocking. The fact that it nevertheless fails to become … the main protagonist’s, to put it mildly, odd reactions … While we find it understandable that the adolescent main protagonist does not immediately grasp what is happening around him (the call-up for forced labour, compulsory wearing of the yellow star, etc.), we think it inexplicable why, on arrival at the concentration camp, he sees … More passages in bad taste follow … It is also incredible that the spectacle of the crematoria evokes in him feelings of …“a kind of student jape,” as he knows he is in an extermination camp, and his being Jewish is sufficient reason for him to be killed. His behaviour, his gauche comments … annoyed … the novel’s ending, since the behaviour the main protagonist has displayed hitherto … gives him no ground to dispense moral judgements …

“Aha!” the old boy commented aloud.

The old boy was now sitting in front of the filing cabinet and thinking.

“I ought to read the book again,” he was thinking.

“But then again,” he continued his thought, “why would I do that? I am not in the mood for reading about concentration camps.”

“It was dumb of me,” he mused, “to get out my papers,” he added (mentally).

Upon which the old boy sat in front of the filing cabinet and resumed reading:

… was a huge and ghastly subject … a sheet of the firm’s headed letter paper …(he turned toward me and away from his typewriter, in which I could see he had inserted a sheet of the firm’s headed letter paper) was a huge and ghastly subject about which there had already been much written by many authors. Yet, he added, as it were reassuringly, he was by no means suggesting that the subject had been completely exhausted. He then informed me that it was the publisher’s normal practice to have three readers assess a manuscript “before a decision is made about its fate.” He was a little coy: they were not in the habit of initiating authors into the publisher’s affairs, but he did not exclude the possibility that he might be the third reader for my novel. He fell silent.

“Isn’t it a trifle bitter?” he suddenly asked.

“What?”

“Your novel.”

“Oh, indeed,” I replied.

My response manifestly threw him into confusion.

“Don’t take what I said for granted; it’s not an opinion, as I haven’t even read your novel yet,” he explained.

It was now my turn to be confused: the indications were that, to the extent he might feel my novel was bitter, it would probably not be to his taste. This would obviously be a black mark and might set its publication back. Only then did I see that I was sitting opposite a professional humanist, and professional humanists would like to believe that Auschwitz had happened only to those to whom it had happened to happen at that time and place; that nothing had happened to the majority, to mankind — Mankind! — in general. In other words, the publishing man wanted to read into my novel that notwithstanding — indeed, precisely notwithstanding — everything that had happened to happen to me too at that time and place, Auschwitz had still not sullied me. Yet it had sullied me. I was sullied in other ways than were those who had transported me there, it’s true, but I had been sullied none the less; and in my view this is a basic issue. I have to recognize, however — how could it be otherwise? — that anyone who takes my novel in his hand in good faith and innocently starts to read it will thereby, it is to be feared, also be dragged a little bit into the mire.

I can therefore readily understand why my novel might irritate a professional humanist. But then, professional humanists irritate me because they seek to annihilate me with their cravings: they want to invalidate my experiences. Yet something had happened to those experiences through which, I was taken aback to perceive, they had suddenly turned to my disadvantage, for in the meantime — somehow or other — they had been transformed within me into an irrevocable aesthetic standpoint. The difference of views between me and this man plainly arose from differences in personal convictions between us; but the fact that my novel lay between us, at least symbolically, spoilt everything. I felt that my personal opinions, which my novel exposed utterly, were starting to look inauspicious from the viewpoint of my concerns. On top of which, those concerns, which happened to be embodied in the objective form of the novel, were attached to other factors, less prominent certainly but not negligible for all that — among which were my financial prospects …

“Aha,” the old boy brightened up.

… the question of my future, my social status, if I may put it that way.

“Ha-ha-ha,” the old boy chuckled.

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

“To be sure,” the old boy said aloud.

… I myself had produced.

“To be sure,” the old boy said aloud once more.

… I don’t believe that I saw distinctly then what even …

The telephone.

This time the old boy had no doubt about it. Nevertheless, he did not get up straight away but merely loosened the wax plug in one ear.

Indeed it was.

“No, of course you’re not disturbing me,” the old boy declared (by now into the telephone).

The old boy was standing in the southeast corner of the room, next to the child’s mini-table, 1st-class special ply of 1st-class sawn hardwood (which in regard to its actual function was more a kind of tiny smoker’s table), and holding a telephone conversation.

“… 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.

At the same time, he took out the cylindrical glass phial from the front of the third drawer down in the filing cabinet and loosened the pliable wax plugs from his ears.

Oglütz.

“That …,” the old boy started to say.

“It’s not worth it, I’m going out anyway,” he reflected. In the series of the various stations of torture the old boy had passed beyond that transitional state when a person attempts to rise above his situation by propounding universal theories. At one time he had decided that Oglütz (and the old boy’s starting to call Oglütz Oglütz may have dated from this decision) embodied a qualitatively new form of being, namely, a visual (or auditory) (or audio-visual) being (which differed radically from, for instance, the) (nowadays in any case barely realisable) (art-loving being, in that Oglütz’s watching) (or listening) (or watching and listening) (habits both in prose and music were confined exclusively to the products, so to speak, of the light-entertainment genre, quiz and game shows, gala evenings, current-affairs programmes, advertisements, or at most, natural history documentaries); and if it is questionable whether this form of existence is satisfying in every respect, there can be no doubt that it is extremely comfortable, because instead of our having to live a many-sided life, it constantly swarms before our eyes — true, only on a screen, and all we can do is be diverted or angered by it, but not influence it, guide it, intervene in it or accept its consequences — yet in that respect, and in that respect alone (not in what happens on the screen), does it not resemble some of our lives? and as a last resort the old boy would even have been able to imagine a pure visual (or auditory) (or audio-visual) being in the shape of someone who has spent decades in front of the screen, so that even in its last moments, when death arrives to summon it, it does not question that it leaves behind a rich, action-packed and varied life …

“Did you get any work done?”

“Of course.”

“Did you make any progress?”

“I pushed on a bit.”

“There was something else I meant to tell you.”

“What was that?” the old boy paused.

“It’s slipped my mind for the moment.”

“Next time write it down so that you won’t forget.”

“Did anyone call?”

“Who would have called?”

“True.”

… As a matter of fact — and this was my point of departure — the composite notion of blood, lust and the demon has always upset me in the form that one encounters it in certain works of art. The image that these works of art present, in connection with certain historical periods and events, of some sort of extraordinary, unbroken witches’ Sabbath, incompatible with human nature in general and dolled up, so to say, with a festive character, simply does not tally at all with my own experiences. Murder in some degree, over a certain time span and beyond a given number, is after all tiring, systematic, and harrowing work, whose daily continuity is not vouchsafed by the participants’ likes or dislikes, bursts of ardour or onsets of disgust, enthusiasm, or antipathy — in short, the momentary mood, or even cast of mind, of single individuals, but by organisation, an assembly-line operation, a self-contained mechanism which does not permit so much as a moment’s time to draw breath. In another respect, there can be no doubt about it, that is what put paid to tragic representation. Where would personalities who are grandiose, exceptional, and extraordinary even in their awfulness fit in? Richard III wagers that he will be evil; the mass murderers of a totalitarian regime, by contrast, take an oath on the common good.

On the other hand, I pondered further, we have impassive, cool, objective reporting of bare facts. Except that this does not really bring us any closer to the subject either. The problem with facts, however important they may otherwise be, is that there are too many of them and they rapidly wear fantasy down. Instead of our coming to terms with them and mingling in their world — ultimately an indispensable requirement for an aesthetic mediation — we are ever more alienated as we gawk at them. Cumulative images of murder become just as lethally tedious and discouragingly tiring as the attendant work itself. How can horror be the subject of an aesthetic if there is nothing original in it? In place of exemplary death, the facts can only serve up mountains of corpses.

At that very time I happened to be reading about the deaths of 340 Dutch Jews in the stone quarry at Mauthausen. On the arrival of the contingent, Ernstberger, the camp’s second officer, made it clear to political prisoner and block clerk Glas that the order was none of them should remain alive more than six weeks. Glas objected: he was sentenced to a beating of thirty lashes, then replaced by one of the criminals. The next day the Dutch Jews were herded off to the stone pit. Instead of using the 148 steps, hewn into the rock, which led down to the bottom, they were forced to slither their way down over the naked stone rubble of the precipitous rock walls. Down at the bottom boards were loaded on their shoulders, onto the boards, massive boulders, and they had to carry these at the double up to the top — albeit this time by way of the 148 steps of the stairway. At times the boulders would slide off the boards with the first few steps on the stairway, crushing the feet of those pressing behind. An accident meant a beating. Already on the first day a number of the Dutch Jews threw themselves into the stone pit from the edge of the rock face. Later on, groups of nine to twelve were to leap together, holding hands, into the chasm. The civilian employees at the quarry put in a complaint to the SS: the shreds of flesh and brain tissue which were clinging to the rocks, they objected, “afford too gruesome a sight.” The rocks were hosed down by a labour squad with powerful water jets: from then onwards prisoner functionaries were posted to stand guard and deal out exemplary reprisals on further offenders. Death wishes, one might say, were here punishable by death. Any of them who did not wish to die with the rest were also killed. It took only three weeks, instead of six, to dispose of them.

I closed the book and put it aside with the feeling that this fact, which I came across at random among 400 pages of further facts (which in themselves are but a modest fraction of a complete list of facts which would take up who knows how many tens of thousands of pages), that these 340 deaths on the rocks, for instance, might rightly find a place among the symbols of the human imagination — but on one condition: only if they had not occurred. Since they did occur, it is hard even to imagine them. Rather than becoming a plaything, the imagination proves to be a heavy and immovable burden, just like those boulders in Mauthausen: people do not want to be crushed under them. That, however, leaves us at risk of falling behind our times: we live our lives without being enriched by the experiences of our era. Yet maybe, I pondered, it is the obsessive monotony of those experiences with which the imagination wrestles ineffectually. At the time I was reading a novel published under the title The Long Voyage, and in it came across Sigrid, the beautiful blond fashion model who, I read, was

I stopped reading. There it was, blood, lust, and the demon encapsulated in a single figure, indeed, a single sentence. Even as I read, it offered definitive forms: I can fit them with no trouble at all into the ready-made tool box of my historical imagination. A Lucrezia Borgia of Buchenwald; a great sinner, worthy of Dostoievsky’s pen, settling up with God; a female example of Nietzsche’s horde of splendid blond beasts, prowling about in search of spoils and victory, who “go back to the innocent conscience of the beast of prey …”

Yes, indeed yes, our thoughts are still held captive by the delusions of dove-conscience intellectuals, a more balanced era’s simple-minded visions of the daring grandeur of depravity, although they never pay the required attention to the details. There is some kind of unbridgeable discrepancy here: on the one hand, drunken paeans to the first blush of dawn, a revaluation of all values, and a sublime immorality, and on the other, a trainload of human cargo which has to be disposed of as rapidly — and most likely as smoothly — as possible in gas chambers that never have enough capacity. What business does lacerated, devil-may-care intellectual toil have here? Too solitary, too fussy, too passive, too far-from-average, unherd-like, uncorporate — just too immoral: what is needed here is an ethic — a straightforward, easily understandable, readily usable work ethic. “ ‘And does Herr General Globocnik not think,’ ministerial counsellor Dr. Herbert Lindner poses the highly practical question to SS-Brigadeführer Globocnik, ‘that it would be more prudent to burn the corpses instead of burying them? Another generation might take a different view of these things!’ To which Globocnik replies, ‘Gentlemen, if there is ever a generation after so cowardly, so soft, that it would not understand our work as good and necessary, then, gentlemen, National Socialism will have been for nothing. On the contrary, we should bury bronze tablets, saying that it was we who had the courage to carry out this gigantic task!’ “

Yes, I wove my thoughts further, maybe the demon is lurking hereabouts: not in the fact that man kills but that he proclaims its indispensable virtues into a world order of killing. I took down a documentary compendium from my bookshelf and leafed through it for a photograph of Ilse Koch. The face, though it may once have been steeled with a hint of female allure, was certainly here ordinary, sullen, doughy-skinned, piggish — quite incapable of convincing me that I was beholding a figure of a stature who was grand even in her excesses, someone who had transcended good and evil and whose life had run its course in terms of a ceaseless, implacable challenge which spurned all morality. For Ilse Koch had not, in truth, opposed a moral order; quite the contrary, she herself epitomized it — and that is a big difference. Nor did I find in that documentary compendium any evidence that she took a special pleasure in music — Beethoven in particular — or that she had given herself to prisoners. She picked her lovers from the staff-officers — the camp doctor, Dr. Hoven, nicknamed ‘Handsome Waldemar,’ and SS-Hauptsturmführer Florstedt — as befitted her logic. Manifestations of her inventiveness were restricted to customs that were practices of the time. Shrunken heads and decorative articles of tanned human skin ornamented the villas and office desks of many officers in Buchenwald, and Ilse Koch too possessed a number of these. Possibly more than others, but then that would only have been her right — after all, she was the camp commandant’s wife, the “Kommandeuse.’ She generally owned more of everything than the wives of subordinates: bigger villa, more opulent household, more privileges. Giving free rein to her fantasy — bolstered by who knows what kinds of reading matter just a few years before, when she was just a stenographer in a tobacco and cigarette factory — took her as far as bathing in Madeira wine and having a riding hall of four-thousand-square-metres constructed for her own use, none of which bears the least stamp of a solitary moral renegade. It is unlikely it ever crossed her mind that if there was no God, then everything was permitted; on the contrary, she needed a god above all else — more specifically a god who would set down in writing everything that he permitted her. Indisputably, the moral world order offered by Buchenwald was one of murder; but it was a world order, and that was good enough for her. She never went beyond the bounds of its logic: where murder is a commonplace, a person becomes a murderer out of zealotry, not revolt. Killing can become just as much a virtue as not killing. The spectacle of so many corpses, and so much torture, no doubt had its reward, now and then, in an exceptional moment of elation about existing, and simultaneous gratitude and pride in service.

But wasn’t that its function? I continued to brood. Is it not possible that a predetermined state of affairs — the state of affairs of a camp commandant’s wife — goes together with, so to say, predetermined feelings and actions that are prescribed in advance? That one and the same state of affairs — give or take a little, perhaps — could have been filled by essentially anybody else with similar feelings and actions, or would that person suddenly find himself in some other, likewise ready-made state of affairs, like political prisoner Glas, who was unwilling to conform to his state of affairs in 340 stony deaths, and for that reason ended up in a punishment brigade? One state of affairs created Buchenwald; Buchenwald — among numerous other states of affairs — created a state of affairs for the camp commandant’s wife; that state of affairs created Ilse Koch who — let us put it this way — gave her life for that state of affairs, and thereby she too created Buchenwald, which now is no longer imaginable without her. How many more states of affairs were there just in the totalitarian world of Buchenwald alone? I hardly dare pose the question that lurks, seemingly inescapably, in my mind: whose handiwork, in the end, were those skull paperweights, the lampshades and bookbindings of tanned human skin?…

I laid Ilse Koch’s photograph aside. I shall never know what she herself thought about her own life as ‘Kommandeuse.’ Since she kept silent about it, she barred herself from interpretability. I shall not become acquainted with her mundane experiences and grey everydays among the bondsmen of murder. I shall be unable to discover whether it was libido or boredom, fulfilled ambition or irksome minor frustrations which preponderated in her emotional balance, unable to unravel her wholly personal neurosis, her compulsive psychosis — in a word, the secret of her personality. I can view her as a humdrum sadist who found a home for herself in Buchenwald and was at last able to give free run to her repellent instincts. Or, if I want, I can also imagine her to have been a more complex being: perhaps she only tried to order her unexpected and incomprehensible state of affairs with even more unexpected and incomprehensible gestures simply to make it cosier, more habitable for herself, and see the proof, day by day, of how it is possible to live the unliveable, how natural the incredible …

None of this is a bit important. Ilse Koch fits a mean that can be extracted between her and her state of affairs, a formula in which she herself is not necessarily present. Yes, her character is only interpretable if we abstract her, look at her separately, so to say, from herself. The greater we imagine her significance, the more we downgrade what surrounded her: the reality of a world equipped for murder, because the essence that we would be attributing to her could only be abstracted by taking it from that reality.

Perhaps it is this, I speculated, this lack of essentiality, which is the tragedy. Except that, from another angle, this dashes to pieces any attempt at interpretation which insists on imposing figures. Because tragic figures live in a world of fate, and tragedy’s perspective is infinity; the world of violence of totalitarian systems, by contrast, is a circumscribed and insuperable world, whereas their perspective is merely the historical time for which they happen to endure. How, then, could one hope to interpret an experience that cannot, and does not even wish to, transmute precisely as experience because the essence of their states of affairs — states of affairs that are at once all too abstract and all too concrete — is an inessential and at any time exchangeable figure which, in relation to the state of affairs, has no beginning, no continuation, and no analogy of any kind — and in relation to reason is thus improbable? Perhaps, I mused, one should construct a device, a revolving machine, a trap; the characters who fall into its grasp would scurry about ceaselessly, just like electronic mice, on tracks that look labyrinthine but are actually always unidirectional, pursued by a single automaton. Everything would be wobbling, rattling, everyone trampling on one another, until the machine suddenly explodes; then, after a pause for startled, dazed astonishment, they would all scatter in every direction. That still leaves the secret, figuring out the principle on which the machine operates, which is both too simple and too humiliating for them to listen to, and that is the mechanism for the pursuing automaton utilizes the energy derived from their own rushing about …

But I had better break off here before my pen runs away with me, as they say. Why am I poking around, anyway, in those exercise books which I put aside long ago, that impressive-looking pile of dog-eared notes? Why am I copying out the outline of this never-to-be-completed essay? As a symptom, a characterisation of my state at the time. I had just then started to think these things over, but to publicize the mere fact that I was thinking had never even crossed my mind until then. Obviously, I had written my novel out of some sort of conviction, but not with any aim of convincing anyone about anything. I had written my comedies without any conviction at all, yet was paid money for them. But now a theoretical work: to pore over things, to form an opinion with knowing superiority and self-confidently step forward with that opinion — to do that I also had to possess the added conviction needed to convince others. And so I have to suppose that after finishing my novel some sort of change has taken place within me, or at least the proclivity for such a change was present within me.

Yes, carefully disguising my goal, bit by bit, cunningly and surreptitiously, I set about making definitive preparations for a delusion. I can discern a motive for it, in the end, if I think about it. Plainly, I wanted to forge some necessary consequence from a now irremediable act — the writing of a novel — that had swallowed up irreplaceable years of life, but meanwhile I had quite overlooked the possibility that my very uncertainties might have brought the novel itself into existence through me. I have the feeling I was almost beginning, at least secretly, to consider my destiny as a writer’s destiny; even if I did not overtly reckon with it, I was almost beginning to invest my thoughts with some kind of property which sustained an unconditional need for their communication by me and for their reception by others.

Who could know where all this would have led. During that period I may have felt myself ready to regard my future life as an inexhaustible source of ideas for public display; to set down the fruits of my reflections straightaway onto paper; to call on editorial offices and publishing houses with duplicate copies of this triumphant act; and to watch out for signs on people’s faces, or even in their lifestyle, of changes wrought by the influence of those ideas. Amidst a deafening fanfare of portentous pronouncements, authoritative views, and unappealable opinions, I too would have blown on my own toy trumpet. Once released on the mirror-smooth surface of paper, my hand would have glided at breakneck speed on the skate-blade of my ballpoint pen. I would have written as if I were seeking to avert a catastrophe — the catastrophe of not writing, obviously. In other words, I would have written for fear that, God forbid, I wouldn’t write; I would have written so as to kill every minute of time and to forget who I am: an end-product of determinacies, a maroon of contingencies, a martyr to bioelectronics, a reluctant surprised party to my own character.

The old boy was sitting in front of the filing cabinet and doing nothing.

He was not thinking.

He was not even reading.

“It was stupid of me to get those papers out,” he eventually thought to himself.

… In this respect, and in just this one respect, the letter I received two days after the last visit I had paid to the publisher chap arrived at a fortunate moment.

“Aha!” the old boy exclaimed, picking up the ordinary, neat business letter (with the firm’s letterhead and fields for date—27/JUL/1973, correspondent — unfilled, subject — unspecified, reference number—482/73, no greeting) that he had already once picked up and scanned cursorily, but which we too, bending over his shoulder, as it were, may now read in full:

Your manuscript has been assessed by our firm’s readers. On the basis of their unanimous opinion we are unable to undertake publication of your novel.

We consider that your way of giving artistic expression to the material of your experiences does not come off, whereas the subject itself is horrific and shocking. The fact that it nevertheless fails to become a shattering experience for the reader hinges primarily to the main protagonist’s, to put it mildly, odd reactions. While we find it understandable that the adolescent main protagonist does not immediately grasp what is happening around him (the call-up for forced labour, compulsory wearing of the yellow star, etc.), we think it inexplicable why, on arrival at the concentration camp, he sees the bald-shaven prisoners as “suspect.” More passages in bad taste follow: “Their faces did not exactly inspire confidence either: jug ears, prominent noses, sunken, beady eyes with a crafty gleam. Quite like Jews in every respect.”

It is also incredible that the spectacle of the crematoria arouses in him feelings of “a sense of a certain joke, a kind of student jape,” as he knows he is in an extermination camp and his being a Jew is sufficient reason for him to be killed. His behaviour, his gauche comments repel and offend the reader, who can only be annoyed on reading the novel’s ending, since the behaviour the main protagonist has displayed hitherto, his lack of compassion, gives him no ground to dispense moral judgements, call others to account (e.g. the reproaches he makes to the Jewish family living in the same building). We must also say something about the style. For the most part your sentences are clumsy, couched in a tortuous form, and sadly there are all too many phrases like “… on the whole …,” “naturally enough,” and “besides which …”

We are therefore returning the manuscript to you.

Regards.

… The letter at least granted me a morning charged with emotions; I recall it even today with a certain sense of nostalgia. If I was surprised, it was no more than the way a person is surprised to bang his head on a protrusion in the wall he had long ago noticed was too low, and he would undoubtedly bang his head on it sooner or later. At least I would encounter a certain amount of passion and perspicacity, albeit only the perspicacity of anger and injustice — at any rate sentiments and senses worthy of the subject!

Then, as I recall, I was exceedingly amused, for instance, by the gesture, that self-assured, firm dismissive wave of the hand, with which the purpose of an endeavour I had undertaken, for motives which were problematic, and far from clear even to myself, was being expropriated, so to speak, only to be immediately destroyed; because the letter presumed, if I was following it correctly, that my sole reason for writing the novel was for it to end up in a publisher’s office where decisions are taken about these sorts of commodities. The comic aspect of this absurd loss of proportions was enough to set even my diaphragm aquiver. For I could not deny it, in the end I had taken my novel to the publisher. But that had been intended purely as a temporary resting place in a whole chain of events, which since then had already been overhauled by time and further events occurring within that time — such as this letter that had been delivered to me. “And so?” I ask myself, “Does that somehow obliterate what I have accomplished?” On the contrary, it has set a seal on it, because — and this fundamental factor had not escaped my watchful eye — that dismissive motion is, at one and the same time, also the first real, one might say, authentic proof that my novel actually exists. Yes, I may have told myself, the unstructured time which now lies behind me has gained its definite outlines precisely in the light of this letter; until now I have never seen my situation so simply — as one that, in point of fact, can be summarized in a single clear sentence: I had written a novel, and it had been rejected, presumably through ignorance and lack of courage, as well as evident spite and stupidity.

It may be — indeed, as I now know, it is quite certain — that I made a mistake when I left …

“Was that the doorbell?”

The old boy loosened the pliable wax plug in one ear.

“I already rang once before!” the old boy’s mother complained indignantly as she traversed the east-west axis of the hallway with brisk (and somehow martial) steps which belied her advanced age and, after swerving to avoid the hammered-glass door (which was now, as always, open, in view of the airlessness of the hallway), popped up in front of the filing cabinet (with due regard, naturally, to the previously described surroundings) (which it would therefore be superfluous to describe again here) (so let us merely make it clear that when we say the old boy’s mother popped up in front of the filing cabinet, this should be taken to mean that although she was, indeed, facing the filing cabinet, she actually popped up in front of the table — or, to be more precise, the table, the only real table in the flat) and (exchanging her street glasses for her reading glasses in a lightning-quick movement) was reading.

The old boy didn’t like it when other people started dipping into his manuscripts.

“I don’t like it,” he said, “when other people start dipping into my manuscripts.”

“Why?” the old boy’s mother asked. “Are they secret?”

“Well as a matter of fact …” the old boy scratched his head.

“I can see you are busy again with your private affairs,” his mother declared.

“Yes,” the old boy conceded.

“Did they reject your novel?” his mother enquired, no doubt more out of stringency than malice.

“I haven’t even written it yet,” the old boy muttered.

“But I see here that you wrote a novel and they rejected it!”

“That was another novel. Wouldn’t you be more comfortable in an armchair?” the old boy ventured.

“And what’s this?” The old boy’s mother picked up from the edge of the grey file the likewise grey (albeit a darker grey) lump of stone that served as a paperweight, so to speak.

“It’s a lump of stone,” said the old boy.

“Even I can see that; I’m not senile yet, thank God. But what do you need it for?”

“I don’t exactly need it, if it comes to that,” the old boy muttered.

“Well then, what’s it for?”

“I don’t know,” said the old boy, “It just is.”

The old boy’s mother was seated in the armchair situated to the north of the tile stove, behind the 1st-class special ply contraption of 1st-class sawn hardwood (child’s mini-table) (which in regard to its actual function was more a kind of tiny smoker’s table):

“There are some things,” she said, “I could never understand with you.”

“Would you like a coffee?” the old boy ventured.

“Yes, I would. For instance,” his mother swept a glance around the room, from the bookcase-filing-cabinet centaur (if such a catachresis may be entertained) standing in the southwest corner, which had been created from a bookcase assembled from the base of a former linen drawer, across to the (relatively) modern sofa occupying the northeast corner, “you are capable of giving up every demand you have just to avoid having to work.”

“But I do work,” the old boy remonstrated (though not with an entirely clear conscience) (since he should have sat down long ago to writing a book now his had become his occupation) (or rather, to be more precise, things had so transpired that that had become his occupation) (seeing as he had no other occupation).

“That’s not what I mean,” said his mother, “But why don’t you find yourself a proper job? You could still easily go on with the writing.”

“But I’m no good at anything; you forgot to get me trained in some well-paid profession.”

“You always were the comedian,” his mother said.

“There was a time when that’s what I lived off,” the old boy reminded her.

“Why don’t you still write comedy pieces now instead?” his mother asked

“Because I don’t want people to laugh. It makes me envious.”

“That rubber seal needs to be changed,” the old boy thought to himself as he was percolating the coffee.

“Aren’t you going to ask why I came?” his mother asked.

Indeed, the old boy’s mother was not in the habit of calling at his place; rather it was he who was in the habit of visiting her (more specifically, once a week, between seven o’clock and half past nine on Sunday evenings) (the weekly intervals being complemented by daily telephone conversations during which the old boy was able to keep abreast of his mother’s state of health as well as the) (important or not so important) (but in any case significant) (events which had happened to her) (as well as to her personal belongings or household objects) (which current events gained significance precisely because it was to her) (or her personal belongings or household objects) (such as water heater, wall hangings, kitchen tap, etc.) (that they happened).

“Well, anyway,” the old boy’s mother continued, “I finally got a serious response to my advertisement.”

The old boy’s mother had, in fact — as may be gathered from this announcement — placed an advertisement in the newspaper.

Through the advertisement she had dangled the prospect of a room (a big room, however, in the green belt and with all mod cons) in exchange for an undertaking to look after her.

For the old boy’s mother had to make ends meet (or rather, to be more accurate about it, she was unable to make ends meet) from her pension.

To supplement her pension, the elderly lady did shorthand and typewriting for four hours a day at the head office of an export company.

But now, with the passage of time, not only the old boy but also his mother was getting old (albeit more slowly, to a lesser degree, and more reluctantly, than the old boy) (although she had been forced to acknowledge its symptoms nevertheless) (such as the backache she got while typing) (on account of which she had given it up — the typewriting, that is to say).

Nevertheless, the hard fact of the matter — namely that the old boy’s mother needed to find an extra two thousand forints a month (to supplement her pension) — remained unchanged.

And the old boy did not have two thousand forints a month extra (indeed, there were times when he was that much short).

Which was why, through an advertisement, and in exchange for an undertaking to look after her, she had dangled the prospect of a room (a big room, however, in the green belt with all mod cons) (which is to say the apartment where the old boy was registered, by right of being an immediate family member, as a permanent resident, though he never lived there, not even temporarily) (and from which he would now have to transfer to the apartment where he had been temporarily registered, by right of marriage, even though he had been permanently resident there for decades) (thereby yielding place to a caregiver who, by right of being the caregiver, would be permanently registered but, on the basis of the agreement, would not reside even temporarily in the old boy’s mother’s apartment) (patiently waiting in his or her present place of residence, which presumably did not meet his or her requirements, for the ultimately inevitable fact that the old lady, for all the hopes she would carry on to the extreme limit of human life …) (in short, on being left vacant as a consequence of this ultimately inevitable event, the apartment would pass on to him or her) (which for both of them, caregiver and cared-for alike) (after careful weighing up of the expected costs and the number of years that might come into consideration) (and bearing in mind the end-result, might yet prove, on human reckonings, to be a rational and mutually profitable business transaction).

“So you will have to arrange to be deregistered,” his mother said.

“Fine,” said the old boy.

“As soon as possible; not the way you generally arrange your affairs,” his mother added.

“Fine,” said the old boy.

“You surely can’t be expecting me to do without in my old age.”

“God forbid,” the old boy said.

“It’s not my fault,” his mother carried on, “You ought to have ordered your life differently.”

“No question about it,” the old boy acknowledged.

“I wanted to leave the apartment to you.”

“Don’t worry about it, Mama,” said the old boy. “Was the coffee all right?”

“Your coffee is always too strong for me.”

“Well, that’s my day gone already,” the old boy thought to himself after his mother had left.

“I ought to change that rubber seal on the coffee percolator,” he continued his train of thought.

“But where the hell are the seals?” he then puzzled (not finding them in their usual place) (that is, the place he imagined to be the usual place for the seals).

Thus it was that the old boy came to be standing in front of the filing cabinet and holding in his hands a flat, square-shaped piece of wood.

This chunk of wood, about 3 × 3 in. in size, rough on one side and on the other covered with a layer from multiple daubings of white paint (which had yellowed over time), had come to light from one of the old boy’s two cardboard boxes in which he kept a miscellany of objects (both necessary and unnecessary), among which, or so he imagined, he might chance upon the rubber seals needed for the coffee percolator.

Instead of them, however, he came across the remaining original piece of one of the two ungainly, disparately-sized wardrobes which had once stood there, long defying the steadfast antipathy of the old boy’s wife (and noteworthy for the wax seal that was visible on it) (though the inscription on the wax seal had been rendered almost illegible by the yellowish-white layer of paint from repeated decoration).

“So much for their saying care would be taken to spare the wax seal,” he fumed (mentally).

For which reason, at this point in our story — as the old boy was standing in front of the filing cabinet and holding in his hands a piece of wood (noteworthy for the wax seal which was visible on it) — out of the group of letters arranged in a circle only the fragments SE, ST, and, in front of that, a dot-shaped nubble, as well as — further on, with a bit of imagination — TY could be made out from the original inscription (SEALED BY STATE SECURITY AUTHORITY), the purpose of which inscription, as its sense suggests, was to keep the doors of the hallway wardrobe under seal (not, however, ruling out the possibility that the plywood sheet which formed the back of the hallway wardrobe might be prised open) (which, incidentally, is what happened) (because, whatever the subsequent, by then patently obvious evidence, what else would have explained the fact that when, one summery evening, the old boy’s wife) (at a time when she was not yet the old boy’s wife) (and the old boy was not yet old) (indeed, they had not yet met each other) (anyway, on that summery evening the old boy’s wife-to-be had tried fruitlessly to open the door to her own apartment with her own key and thus, since she saw a light on inside, was reduced to ringing the doorbell) (what else would have explained the fact that the unknown, short, stocky, somewhat piggish-looking woman who opened the door to the ringing was wearing a dressing gown, shortened and altered to fit her own figure, which belonged to her, the old boy’s wife-to-be — a fact which did not escape the old boy’s wife-to-be even in the brief minute while she introduced herself to the unknown woman, who then, after an indignant exclamation) (“What’s this?! You’re still alive?!”) (immediately slammed the door in her face) (in consequence of which, there being nothing else she could do, the old boy’s wife) (who at that time was not yet the old boy’s wife) (and as far as meeting him goes first met him only somewhat later) (faced with the unappealing prospect of spending a summer’s night on the street) (and an even more uncertain tomorrow) (before long returned to the place whence she had set off for her apartment) (that is to say, the State Security Authority) (where she was obliged to ask the officer who had released her earlier, accompanied by the official paper, to provide her with accommodation for the night — if nowhere else, then in her old cell, where the old plank-bed and blanket were certainly still waiting) (a request that it turned out to be impossible to fulfil now that she had been released, accompanied by the official paper) (so that the officer had only been able to offer the leather couch in the corner of his room, while he himself went off duty for the whole night, accompanied by the official papers, and in the morning) (worn out, dehydrated, gaunt, and nicotine-stained from his whole night off-duty) (like one of the countless cigarette butts which had overflowed his ashtray in the course of off-duty nights) (set off with her to the housing office of the competent local authority in order to discover how they could have allocated an apartment that the State Security Authority had sealed off) (a matter that in itself was to be treated as a state secret) (consequently there were grounds for suspecting that behind not just the procedural irregularity, but also the very leaking of the address there no doubt lay a criminal act of bribery) (though in the end no light was ever thrown on that) (and only after a year of litigation was the apartment itself restored to the rightful ownership of the old boy’s wife) (whom we may now refer to as the old boy’s wife without reservation) (even if the old boy was not at all old at the time) (and his wife was not yet his wife) (but by then they at least knew each other) (indeed, they were sharing a household) (insofar as their joint household could be called a household, that is).

This, then, was the reason why even today, at this late point in our story, the old boy was fuming that — contrary to all the advance warnings he had given — care had not been taken to spare the wax seal (which the piece of wood in his hands preserved).

“After all, a memento is a memento,” he continued to fume.

“And this piece of wood is the only thing that’s left of it all,” he carried on fuming.

“It was rather embarrassing,” his face suddenly brightened (as if touched by some memory) (a memory which was evidently bound to the humorous) (yet rather embarrassing) (though the two are by no means mutually exclusive) (indeed their simultaneous presence is the spice of all genuinely funny episodes) (assuming one is capable of valuing the funny side of a rather embarrassing episode) (as when it turns out, for instance, that one actually has no objective proof of any kind for an event that one has held to be so decisive in one’s life, and thus it exists purely in one’s unverifiable memories) (so in short, the brightening of the old boy’s face was evidently bound up with this episode which was simultaneously humorous and rather embarrassing).

For in point of fact, years later — and now years (many years) before the present moment — the idea had struck the old boy that his wife should in any event (and here the word should be understood in the strict sense, which is to say an event that may be pure supposition, but it does no harm to be prepared for it) (if it holds logical water to be prepared for something we haven’t the faintest idea about), so in any event should apply to get her name cleared (as is only right and proper) (if we do not wish that the mere fact of our having been punished is to be held against us as a crime that we have committed).

They were visited by a detective.

He introduced himself.

He sat down (not in one of the armchairs placed to the north and west of the tile stove) (since those armchairs did not yet exist at that time) (but presumably in the rush-bottomed chair, the rush strands of which were severed at the wooden frame, which, along with two backless seats with similarly severed rush bottoms and a stripped-wood colonial table, two sofas) (one of them padded out with books at its centre, where the spring had gone) (and two blankets, as carpeting on the floor, constituted the apartment’s furnishings at that time).

He asked to see the release paper.

This was when the abovementioned simultaneously humorous and rather embarrassing episode ensued, which was characterized by the helpless glances of the old boy (who was not yet old at that time) and his wife, a hasty pulling out of drawers, an agitated rummaging under bed linen until it was discovered that the sole authentic proof of release (and above all the committal to detention which had preceded it) — namely, the release paper — had, every sign indicated, been mislaid in one subtenancy or another (or perhaps along one of the routes from one subtenancy to another).

No problem, said the detective (a burly but kindly chap in a raincoat), he would look into the matter and track down the files.

A few days later he (the burly but kindly chap in the raincoat) duly turned up: he had found the files.

He sat down.

He was troubled.

“Madam,” he said, “it looks like you were innocent.”

“Of course,” the (as yet not old) old boy’s wife agreed.

“There isn’t even a record of any interrogation,” the detective continued, “only of regular extensions of the period on remand. They never laid charges against you.”

“No,” the (as yet not old) old boy’s wife agreed.

“Not even, if I may put it this way … well, not even false charges.”

“No.”

“To say nothing of any sentencing.”

“No.”

“But that’s where we have a problem, madam,” fretted the detective (a burly but kindly chap in a raincoat). “Because … how can I put it?… We can only clear someone’s name if a trial, sentencing or at least a preferment of charges has taken place. But in your case … please try to understand what I am saying … in your files there is no trace of any of that, you aren’t suffering any consequences, you don’t carry a criminal record … in other words, there is simply nothing to be cleared.”

“And what about that one year?” the (as yet not old) old boy’s wife asked.

The detective spread his arms and lowered his gaze: it was evident that he took the issue as a matter of conscience.

He sat for a short while longer on the rush-bottomed chair with the rush strands severed at the wooden frame.

“We had trouble consoling him,” the old boy cheered up (mentally) at the memory.

… so simply — as one that, in point of fact, can be summarized in a single clear sentence: I had written a novel, and it had been rejected, presumably through ignorance and lack of courage, as well as evident spite and stupidity.

It may be — indeed, as I now know, it is quite certain — that I made a mistake when I left the assessment at that. I should have pushed on further to a final conclusion which brooked no going back. If I had grasped and embraced the role inherent in the situation, I would never have got to where I am today. For a writer there is no more ornate crown than the blindness that his age displays toward him; and it carries yet one more gem if that blindness is coupled with being silenced. But then, although I had written a novel, and meanwhile would have been unable to entertain the idea of my having any other occupation, in reality I never thought of it as my occupation. Even though that novel was a greater necessity for me than anything else, I never succeeded in persuading myself that I was necessary. It seems I am incapable of going beyond the bounds of my nature, and my nature is temperate, like the climatic zone I inhabit. My feelings recoiled from the precarious glory of failure. All the more because that place was already occupied by something else, a feeling which proved a good deal more determined than any enthusiasm of a purely abstract kind: the guilt I felt when I also showed the letter to my wife.

“Perhaps that bit ought not …” the old boy winced.

… This shift was so unexpected that even I was surprised. I couldn’t decide where it came from. Did I have a guilty conscience because my novel had been rejected, or because I had written a novel in the first place? In other words, to be more precise, would I still have had a guilty conscience if the publisher had happened to inform me that my novel had been accepted? I don’t know, and now I never shall find out; but I was taken aback that subversive processes were under way in some deep recess of my brain, as if battle positions were being drawn up behind which ramifying arguments were being concentrated in order to swing onto the attack at a designated point in time. But my wife, with wordless self-control … I know that little, silent smile of hers … No whisper of an assuaging reproach that … I felt the importance of every novel and publisher in the world, as well as my own self-justification, fading away. I was deeply offended; dinner was consumed sullenly.

It could be that already then I suspected what I had lost. Now, with the benefit of a wider perspective, I can measure more precisely not just how right I was, but my comfort too. As I say, it all depended on whether I would grasp or repudiate the role inherent in the state of affairs. To repudiate it would have been at once to repudiate destiny by opening the door to time and ceaseless wonderment. While my destiny was with me — which is to say, while I was writing my novel — I had no experience of these kinds of concerns. Anyone living under the spell of destiny is liberated from time. Time still marches on, of course, but its duration is irrelevant: its purpose is solely to accomplish that destiny. One is not left with much chance: all that’s needed is to know how to be ruined and to wait. And I knew. Once I had received the letter, it should just have become even easier for me: my time was up — if you like, there was nothing further for me to do. Destiny — since that’s its nature — would have robbed me of any future which was definitive and thus could be contemplated. It would have bogged me down in the moment, dipped me in failure as in a cauldron of pitch: whether I would be cooked in it or petrified hardly matters. I was not circumspect enough, however. All that happened was that an idea was shattered; that idea — myself as a product of my creative imagination, if I may put it that way — no longer exists, that’s all there is to it.

Yet that is not the way I had planned it. Oh, the plan was simplicity itself; I saw nothing irrational in it. If I have now regained my freedom, I want to pass judgement on my novel myself, to decide its true quality, good or bad — that was what I thought. The exercise seemed practicable enough. The next morning, when my wife had set off for work, I took out the press-stud file and set it down in front of me then, brimming with cheerfully disposed and somewhat ceremonial expectations, I opened the cover to read my novel. After about an hour and a half of resolute struggling, I had to admit that I had taken on an impossible task. To start with, I was pleased at each well-fashioned sentence, each apt epithet. But all too soon I caught my attention wandering, and my having to leaf back incessantly because my eyes were just grinding through pages that were divested of sense, devalued into emptiness. I reproved myself, tried to concentrate, but perversely I relaxed, made myself a coffee, took a break. Nothing helped; I was overcome by irresistible bouts of yawning. I had to admit that I was bored: at every line I knew what would follow on the next; I could anticipate every twist, knew in advance every paragraph, every sentence, indeed every word, while the train of thought offered nothing new for me, nothing surprising. One can’t read a novel that way.

Since then I have racked my brains a lot over this phenomenon. I fell into a trap, there is no question. In order to make an objective judgement, I would have needed to see with a stranger’s eyes, so I tried reading it with someone else’s eyes — without even a thought that this other, imagined scrutiny was just my own. I tried cheating, but it didn’t work. It seems I am unable to trick myself into soberly examining, with adequate detachment, the shadow that I cast on the reaches beyond me. Which means I shall never know whether my novel is good or bad. Fine, I can live with that. In truth, I came to realize, it doesn’t even matter to me. The novel is the way it is, and it’s that way because it could be no other way — that much, at least, I had understood while I was reading: it is the way it is, and in that capacity is a finished and ready article that I am unable, and probably it is not even possible, to alter any more.

The big stumbling block, though, is why is that article no longer mine? To put it another way, if I am incapable of looking at it with a stranger’s eyes, why am I unable to read my own novel with my own eyes? Within the novel, for instance, a train is moving toward Auschwitz. Crouched in one of the wagons is the subject of the story, a boy of fourteen and a half. He gets up and in the crush squeezes a place for himself by a window slit. Just at this moment the summer sun climbs red and balefully into the periphery of his field of view. While I was reading, I recalled precisely how much difficulty and racking of brains both this as well as the passage which follows it had caused me. Somehow the events of that sweltering summer morning just would not unfold under my hand onto the paper. It was abnormally gloomy here inside, in the room, as I toiled over the text; from the table I looked out on a foggy December morning. There must have been some traffic disturbance on the roads, as the trams were constantly rattling by beneath my window. Then all at once, with astonishing suddenness, the sentences fell into place and enabled the train to arrive and the subject of the story — the fourteen-and-a-half-year-old boy — finally to leap out of the stifling gloom of the cattle truck onto the blazing hot ramp at Auschwitz. As I was reading this passage, these memories came alive within me, and at the same time I was able to verify that the sentences fitted together in the organic sequence I had envisaged. That was all very well, but why had not what existed before those sentences, the raw event itself, that once-real morning in Auschwitz, come to life for me? How could it be that those sentences for me contained merely imaginary events, an imaginary cattle truck, an imaginary Auschwitz, and an imaginary fourteen-and-a-half-year-old boy, even though I myself had at one time been that fourteen-and-a-half-year-old boy?

So what had happened here? What is it what the publisher’s readers had referred to as “your way of giving artistic expression to the material of your experiences”? Yes, what had happened to “the material of my experiences,” where had it vanished to off the paper and from within me? It had existed at one time, indeed it had happened to me twice over: the first time, improbably, in reality, the second time, with much more reality, later on, when I recollected it. Between those two time points it had lain in hibernation. It did not so much as cross my mind at that certain moment when I knew I had to write a novel. I had laboured with various types of novels, only to scrap them one after the other; not one of them had turned out to be a possible novel for me. Then all at once it had popped up within me, from some obscure place, like a brain wave. I suddenly found myself in possession of a body of material which at last offered a definite reality to my agitated, but until then constantly disintegrating, vision and which, solid, pliant, and shapeless, started forthwith to ferment and swell within me like a yeasty dough. A strange ecstasy took hold of me; I lived a double life: my present — albeit halfheartedly, reluctantly, and my concentration-camp past — with the acute reality of the present. My readiness to immerse myself in it almost scared me; even now I could not give a reason for the voluptuous feeling which attended it. I don’t know if memory itself is attended by that delight, irrespective of its subject, since I would not say that a concentration camp is exactly a bowl of fun; yet the fact is that during this period the slightest impression was enough to hurtle me back into my past. Auschwitz was present here, inside me, sitting in my stomach like an undigested dumpling, its spices belching up at the most unexpected moments. It was sufficient for me to glimpse a desolate locality, a barren industrial area, a sun-baked street, the concrete pilings of a newly started building, to breathe in the raw smell of pitch and timber, for ever-newer details, input, and moods to well up with something like the force of actuality. For a time, I awoke each morning on the barrack forecourt at Auschwitz. It took a while for me to realize that this perception was evoked by a constant olfactory stimulus. A few days before, I had bought a new leather strap for my wristwatch. At night I put the watch on a low shelf directly by the bedside. Most likely that characteristic smell, reminiscent of chlorine and a distant stench of corpses, had lingered on the strap from the tanning and other processes. Later on I even used the strap as a sort of sal volatile: when my memories flagged, lay low inertly in the crannies of my brain, I used it to entice them from their hiding places — smelling them to pieces, so to speak. I shrank from no means and no effort in waging my battle with time, wresting from it my due right. I crammed myself with my own life. I was rich, weighty, mature, I stood at the threshold of some sort of transformation. I felt like a wild pear tree which wanted to bear apricots.

However, the more vivid my memories, the more abjectly they were caught on paper. While I was remembering, I was unable to write the novel; but as soon as I started to write the novel, I stopped remembering. It’s not that my memories suddenly vanished, they simply changed. They transformed into the contents of some kind of lucky-dip tub into which I would reach, at the intervals that I deemed necessary, for a negotiable bank note. I would pick and choose among them: this one I needed, that one, not. By now the facts of my life, the so-called “material of my experiences,” only distracted, confined, and hampered me in my work of bringing into life the novel for which that life had originally provided the conditions for life and had nourished from first to last. My work — writing the novel — actually consisted of nothing else than a systematic atrophying of my experiences in the interest of an artificial — or if you prefer, artistic — formula that, on paper, and only on paper, I could judge as an equivalent of my experiences. But in order for me to write I had to look on my novel like every novel in general — as a formation, a work of art composed of abstract symbols. Without my noticing, I had taken a run-up and made a big leap, and with a single bound I had suddenly switched from the personal into the objective and the general, only then to look around me in astonishment. Yet there was no reason to be surprised; as I know now, I had already completed that leap as soon as I made the start on writing my novel. It was no use my trying to plod back to the intention, no use that my original ambition had been directed solely at this one novel and did not so much as squint at anything beyond it, did not extend beyond the pages of this manuscript: by its very nature, a novel is only a novel if it transmits something — and I too wanted to transmit something, otherwise I would not have written a novel. To transmit, in my own way, according to my own lights; to transmit the material that was possible for me, my own material, myself — for, overloaded and weighted down as I was by its burden, I was by now longing like a bloated udder simply for the relief of being milked, being interpreted … however, there was one thing that, perhaps naturally enough, I did not think of: we are never capable of interpreting for ourselves. I was taken to Auschwitz not by the train in the novel but by a real one.

That’s right, I had failed to reckon on just this one small matter. Meanwhile, while I withdrew into my private, indeed most private, life (my “private affairs,” as my mother used to say); while I was shutting myself off from everything and everyone else in order to be able to grub around peacefully in my own world of thoughts; while I did my utmost to insure that nobody else would be able to interrupt me in my solitary passion, I had started innocently, and with a heartfelt diligence, to write — for others. Because, as I now see clearly, to write a novel means to write for others — among others, for those who reject one.

Yet I could not reconcile myself to that notion. If that had been my goal, I had committed a huge blunder; I ought to have written something else, a more saleable commodity — a comedy, for example. But that had not been the goal, as I keep on asserting; it had only became that in the course of implementation, without my knowledge or consent, so to say, indeed without my even noticing at all. What did I care about those others for whom I may have written my novel but who did not so much as enter my head while I was writing it?! What kind of chance was it — and even as a chance, what kind of unforeseeable, inconsequential, idiotic chance — if our common business, my novel and their entertainment, happened to chime?! And however absurd, in practice — and purely in practice — that is precisely what I had been striving for; so now I have to declare that I did not achieve my goal — the goal that was never my goal. But in that case, what had been the original sense of my goal, my undertaking? I swear I don’t remember; it could be that I never thought about it; and now I shall never know, because that sense had become mislaid somewhere — who knows where — in the course of the undertaking.

I get up from the table. Almost involuntarily, like an automatic reflex, my feet start moving around the apartment. I cross the room, through the wide-open door into the hallway, strike my right shoulder on the open-door to the bathroom, and reach the end of the apartment. Here I turn about, skirt the open door to the bathroom, strike my right shoulder on the hallway wardrobe, cross the room and reach the window, turn again. A distance of about 23 feet. Relatively commodious for a cage. Up and down, up and down; turn at the front door, turn at the window. This had once been a regular habit of that fellow, the novel writer, the chap with whom once, just a few months ago, I had been identical. Those were the times when his most notable ideas sprang to mind. I didn’t have anything to think about. Yet slowly something nevertheless was taking shape inside me. If I distinguish it from the mild dizziness caused by walking and from other contingent impressions, I discover a definable feeling. I suppose my state of affairs was materialising in it. It would be hard for me to put it into words — and that’s exactly the point: it settles itself in spaces that lie outside of words. It cannot be couched in an assertion, nor in a bald negation either. I cannot say that I don’t exist, as that is not true. The only word with which I could express my state, not to speak of my activity, does not exist. I might approximate it by saying something like ‘I amn’t.” Yes, that’s the right verb, one that would convey my existence and at the same time denote the negative quality of that existence — if, as I say, there were such a verb. But there isn’t. I could say, a bit ruefully, that I have lost my verb.

I have had enough of my walk; I sit down. I snuggle down, nestle deep into the armchair, adopting a curled-up posture as if in some Brobdingnagian womb. Maybe I am hoping I shall never have to emerge from here, never go out into the world. Why should I? And then I am also a bit afraid of the stranger who will nevertheless struggle to his feet out of here in the end. In a certain sense, it will be someone other than the person to whom I have grown accustomed until now. Nor can it be any other way, for he has completed his work, fulfilled his purpose: he had flopped utterly. He had transmuted my person into an object, diluted my stubborn secret into a generality, distilled my inexpressible truth into symbols — transplanting them into a novel I am unable to read; he is alien to me, in just the same way that he alienated from me that raw material — that incomparably important chunk of my own life from which he himself had originated. I shall miss it, and perhaps … why deny it, perhaps I shall also miss the person who brought it all off. Yes, as I sit in the armchair a startling feeling suddenly passes through me: a bleak and chilly feeling of some irrevocable occurrence, a bit like the feeling when the last guest has gone after a big party. I have been left alone. Someone has departed, leaving an almost physical void in my body, and this very instant, with a malicious smirk on his face, is waving a final farewell from the far corner of the room. I stare impotently after him, I do not have the strength to detain him. Nor do I even wish to: I harbour a feeling of mild but firm resentment toward him — let him go to hell, he tricked me …

“That he did,” said the old boy, “that he did, the numbskull!”

“Did you get any work done?”

“Of course.”

New development in the bistro: the Old Biddy (the chief administrator, to give her her official title) had made a surprise assault on the bar counter and snatched away the order chits from the spike (checking up on the old boy’s wife) (as to whether, in point of fact, she had passed through the charges for all the meals on her tray) (as if, let us say, she was not always in the habit of doing so) (in proof of which postulate the risible) (and equally futile demonstration could end up showing nothing else than that the old boy’s wife had on this occasion) (as ever) (passed them through).

“If I really wanted to steal,” the old boy’s wife said indignantly, “she could scrabble after my orders as much as she wants. I could carry off half the kitchen under her nose without her noticing it.”

“I’m sure,” the old boy agreed. “So why don’t you do that?” he enquired almost absent-mindedly as he was spooning his soup.

“I don’t know. Because I’m stupid,” his wife said.

In any case (his wife said), that was evidently the sole result of today’s announcement (to the effect that from now onwards she too wanted to work in the evenings); and if one can perhaps also discern in it some explanation for the peculiar (yet for all that by no means logical) logic, as an outcome of her colleague, Mrs. Boda (whose first name was Ilona) recently taking, instead of greeting her, to looking the other way, for the harder (in fact, totally impossible)-to-understand reason why the Old Biddy (the chief administrator, to give her her official title) shared that grievance (unless, perhaps, the key to the mystery was to be sought in the bedlam of those wild hours when the Old Biddy would find urgent barrel-tapping and other tasks for the bartender to attend to in the cellar) (right at the height of the evening rush) (at which times, with obvious magnanimity and shrinking from no pains, she herself, in her white coat, would stand in at the bar) (like the captain of a ship at a hurricane-lashed helm) (at which times the colleague who was called Mrs. Boda was obliged, like her other colleagues, to pass through the orders for draught beverages directly to her) (if indeed she passed them through) (the only way of establishing which fact beyond a shadow of doubt would be to snatch the order chits right away from the spike) (the right to do which, however, was the sole prerogative of the Old Biddy — the chief administrator, to give her her official title).

“So that’s why there’s a deficit,” the old boy commented (shrewdly). “They’re pilfering.”

“That may well be,” his wife said.

“I’m going out for a little walk,” the old boy declared later on.

The old boy was sitting in front of the filing cabinet.

It was morning.

(Again.)

He was translating.

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

antwortete nicht—the old boy read in the book (from which he was translating).

did not answer—the old boy tapped onto the sheet of paper that had been inserted in his typewriter (onto which he was translating).

“For Chrissakes …!” the old boy stretched out his hand, half-rising from his seat, toward the filing cabinet.

“… That hairy ape of a tree-dwelling Neanderthal and all its misbegotten breed,” he (the old boy) said, stuffing the carefully formed plugs into his ears.

“I ought to change these ear plugs,” the old boy mused.

“They’re old,” he (the old boy) continued his musing.

“Dried out,” he mused further.

“They’re pressing too tight in my ear.” He fiddled with the plug in one ear.

“But then if it doesn’t press tight enough I hear everything,” he chafed.

“There, that’s it, perhaps …” the old boy stopped his fiddling.

The old boy was sitting in front of the filing cabinet and listening out for whether he could hear anything.

He couldn’t. (Relatively speaking.)

“Wonderful.” His face beamed.

“Come on now, this is no way to make a living.” His face darkened.

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

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

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.

… antwortete nicht.

… did not reply.

“That’s it,’ said the old boy approvingly.

He had not looked at his papers for days now. Nor did he have any wish to look at them.

He had tucked them away at the very bottom of the filing cabinet in order to avoid any chance of catching sight of them.

Sein Blick hing an den Daumen, wie festgesogen.

“Festgesogen,” the old boysaid, scratching his head.

Der Blutfleck unter dem Daumnagel hatte sich jetzt deutlich vorwärts bewegt. Er war von Nagelbett abgelöst, ein schmaler Streifen sauberes neues Nagelhorn hatte sich hinterdreingeschoben.

“What on earth is ‘Nagelhorn’?” The old boy would have reached for the dictionary (if he had known for which dictionary he should reach, as he had two of them) (or to be more accurate, three of them) (namely, the Concise Dictionary, at hand to the right of the typewriter, for which he scarcely ever had to reach) (but then it usually did not contain the word he happened to be after) (as well as the Unabridged Dictionary, in which he usually managed to find it in the end) (and thus pure considerations of economy would have advocated his reaching straight away for the latter) (except that this required him to perform an awkward twist of the upper part of his body, given that, alongside the book that was to be translated, the piles of blank as well as already typed paper, the typewriter, and the Concise Dictionary, there being no space left for the two volumes of this dictionary colossus, together weighing at least ten lbs., on the table) (to be more precise, the table, the only real table in the flat) (they found a place on the 1st-class special ply contraption of 1st-class sawn hardwood from the southeast corner of the room, which, its actual function being thus modified during periods of translating work, stood beside the old boy’s chair) (for which reason, when searching for a word, the old boy usually consulted both dictionaries) (if not all three volumes) (as he did on this occasion, when, having tried to find “Nagelhorn” first of all, hopefully, in the Concise Dictionary, then, more exasperatedly, in the first, A — L volume of the Unabridged Dictionary, he finally, and thoroughly incensed, picked up the second, M — Z volume — incidentally, without coming across it in any of them, after all, let it be noted) (which may have infuriated the old boy but did not succeed in embittering him, since the meaning of the word was perfectly obvious) (if he thought a little bit about it) (but until it was left as a last resort that did not enter into the old boy’s head) (most especially when he was in the middle of translating).

Sein Blick hing …—the old boy read.

His gaze—the old boy tapped—was fixed on his thumb as if

“Festgesogen,” the old boy said, scratching his head.

it were incapable of moving away.

“Hardly inspired,” the old boy said, scratching his head.

“And anyway not even accurate.” He kept on scratching.

“His gaze held fast to his thumb as if transfixed to it,” the old boy deliberated. “That might be more accurate.”

“The image is mixed up,” he deliberated further. “On the other hand, it’s more expressive—” he hesitated—“but then it’s rather forced,” he decided.

“Anyway, I’ve written it down now.”

“I ought to erase it and type over.”

“Not worth it.”

Der Blutfleck …

The blotch of extravasated blood had visibly moved further forwards. By now it had separated from the nail bed and in its stead afresh, narrow crescent of clean nail was emerging from the root.

“That’ll do,” the old boy deliberated.

“A little more long-winded than the original,” he deliberated further.

“But that’s the compactness of the German language for you,” he continued his deliberation.

“And anyway they pay by the word,” the old boy concluded his deliberations.

Die Natur. Etwas von mir, repariert sich. Langsames Wachstum, unbeirrbar. Löst sich ab, wie die Zeit, wie Nichtmehrwissen. Was vorher wichtig war — schon wider vergessen. Ebenso: leere Zukunft — das auch. Zukunft: was niemand sich vorstellen kann (wie mit dem Wetter) und was doch kommt.

“At least this bit is easy,” the old boy cheered up. “I don’t need a dictionary here,” he determined (almost gloatingly).

Nature—he tapped out briskly—

Something of me, a part of me, is restored again. A slow, unwavering advance. It works itself loose like time, like forgetting, no-longer-knowing. What was important previously — already forgotten. Just like the empty future — that too. The future: the thing that nobody can envisage (as with the weather) but which comes to pass all the same.

“Not a bad text at that,” the old boy enthused.

“The novel too.”

“A professional job,” he thought enviously.

“That’s the way to write novels,” he carried on enviously, “with secondhand material, objective formulation, a well-honed technique, three steps back, no autobiography, nothing personal, the author might as well not exist.”

“An issue of general interest, a guaranteed moneymaker.” His envy intensified.

The old boy’s gaze held fast to text as if transfixed.

“Hang on a second!” The old boy leapt up from his place without any apparent (that is to say, external) reason (unless it was something inapparent) (that is to say, internal) (that impelled him to do this) (such as something which suddenly sprung to his mind), and he snatched off the bookshelf on the wall above the sofa occupying the northeast corner of the room a not overly bulky volume in a green half-cloth binding (the very same as the one that in recent days) (as we have already had occasion to recount in the proper place) (the old boy had been leafing through frequently, and to great advantage, in which the old boy evidenced especially appreciative relish for certain lines on page 259 of the volume) (which we have likewise not passed up the opportunity of quoting in the proper place, so that repetition would be superfluous) (all the more so because at this point in our story the old boy) (leafing like greased lightning) (was evidently searching for something else in it, evidently on some other page) (though which one evidently he himself did not know).

“And even today writing comes hard to me because I have already had to write a lot of letters so that my hand is tired,” the old boy read.

“The future stands firm, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in infinite space.”

“That’s it,” the old boy enthused.

“As people were long mistaken about the motion of the sun, so they are even yet mistaken about the motion of that which is to come,” the old boy read on further (or, to be more exact, further back) (since the latter line stood before the previous one).

“it must only just then have entered into them, for they swear,” the old boy read on further (or, to be more exact, further back)

“in their bewildered fright”

“It is necessary.”

“Here we are,” the old boy said.

“It is necessary — and toward this our development will move gradually — that nothing strange should befall us, but only that which has long belonged to us. We have already had to rethink so many of our concepts of motion, we will also gradually learn to realize that that which we call fate goes forth from within people, not from without into them. Only because so many have not absorbed their fates and transmuted them within themselves while they were living in them have they not recognized what has gone forth out of them; it was so strange to them that, in their bewildered fright, they thought it must only just then have entered into them, for they swear never before to have found anything like it in themselves. As people were long mistaken about the motion of the sun, so they are even yet mistaken about the motion of that which is to come. The future stands firm, dear Mr.. Kappus, but we move in infinite space.”

The old boy stood firm, book in hand. After some time he moved after all (if not in infinite space, at least to put the book back in its place) (on the bookshelf on the wall above the sofa occupying the northeast corner of the room).

“I have the awful feeling,” he reflected in the meantime, “that I’m going to get my papers out again.”

“That would be really stupid,” he reflected further, now standing in front of the open door of the filing cabinet in the upper drawer of which (from which he had earlier removed the typewriter to work on the translation) could be seen several files — among them, one entitled “Ideas, sketches, fragments”—and two cardboard boxes which held a miscellany of objects (both necessary and unnecessary), behind which was a grey box file on which, like a sort of paperweight, was a likewise grey — albeit a darker grey — lump of stone (not visible).

“There’s still time to have second thoughts about this,” he continued his reflection (as if he could really have second thoughts) (that is to say, like someone who still has a choice) (but all the while knows full well that he doesn’t) (even though we always have a choice) (and we always choose ourselves — in the words of the French anthology to which we have already referred) (which the old boy kept on the wall bookshelf above the armchair standing to the north of the tile stove occupying the southeast corner of the room) (for this is what our freedom amounts to) (although one might ask in what manner such a choice could be said to be freedom) (if in point of fact we can make no other choice than ourselves).

On account of which the old boy was soon rooting again among his papers and, what is more, on this occasion sitting on the sofa occupying the northwest corner of the room — perhaps partly to emphasize the transience of this activity, the deferment for a merely fleeting interval of his more important work, but partly also because he was unable to take his proper place in front of the filing cabinet (or to be more precise, at the table) (or to be even more precise, the table, the only real table in the flat), it (which is to say the table) being covered with the accoutrements of his more important work (the book to be translated, the piles of blank as well as already typed paper, the typewriter, and the Concise Dictionary):

… This turn of events … sitting in the ar … irrevocable … I was left alone … robbed … I therefore face what stands before me without my past, without a destiny, without heartwarming delusions, robbed of everything I had. I see a billowing, grey, impenetrable bank of cloud and sense that I must force my way through it, though I have no idea in which direction I should strike out. No matter, in that case I won’t move and it can come to meet me, force its way over me, and then pass on, leaving me behind. This is time, what they call the future. Sometimes I scrutinize it anxiously, at other times I wait trustingly for it as for sunshine in foggy weather. Yet I am well aware that it’s all an illusion, and even now I am only deceiving myself, I am fleeing in just the same way that I once launched myself into infinity on the rocket of my goals: it’s not the future which is waiting for me, only the next instant, because there is no future, it is nothing other than the ever-continuing, eternal present. Not a single minute can be omitted, or at most only in stories. The prognosis for my future — that’s an attribute of my present. Yes, the time passing is me; and that — me — is exactly what I am least sure about.

If only I could say I made a mistake! Only I don’t know if it is not I myself who is the mistake. Now and again, my feet set me off on my accustomed meditative journeys — and not just in my apartment. I take an interest in nature — what else can I do? I contemplate autumn’s destruction with gloomy satisfaction, breathe in deeply the sparkling aroma of decay. The other day, I was just making my way down the hillside when I saw two old men. They were standing at the foot of a stone wall, faces turned toward the languorous warmth: they were sunbathing. They were snuggled up so closely to the no doubt lukewarm stone that at first I took the two grizzled heads jutting out from the grey wall to be stones too, unusually lifelike reliefs. It was only on coming closer that I saw they were alive. One had a long, ovine face with eyes like molten aspic and a red tip to his sheep’s nose; the other face was somewhat rounder, but a curving mouth, drawn into a half-smile under his square, grey moustache, lent him too a bit of the air of a faun. I don’t know why they fascinated me so much. I fancied that I discerned some indefinable yet completely identical expression on the two faces, an involuntary expression which was not tied to the moment, nor even to their words — they might have been talking about anything at all — but sprang from somewhere deeper, from some conduit of their existence, bubbling far below. When I passed by them they fell silent, as if they had some kind of secret — no, on the contrary, as if they had something to say, and it was precisely that which they were keeping secret, but it had already moved to their faces like the ruins of some defeat that they were reluctantly obliged to display to their fellow human beings, in part as a warning, in part out of weakness, somewhat maliciously and at all events improperly, yet beseeching a little attention. — Well indeed, if death is an absurdity, how can life have any meaning? If death is meaningful, then what is the purpose of life? Where did I lose my redeeming impersonality? Why had I written a novel and, above all, yes, above all, why had I invested all my trust in it? If I could only work that out …

I pay regular visits to my mother. I sometimes hear her tell stories about a young woman who had a little boy. On these occasions I usually listen politely, discreetly hiding my boredom. Yet nowadays I find myself paying attention to her, even watching out for what she says; I listen as if I were increasingly expecting her to suddenly unmask a secret. For in the end, the child in question once upon a time had been me. As the saying goes, the child is father to the man. Maybe I shall manage to catch out this sneaky brat, so passively ready to adapt to every circumstance, expose a word, a deed, anything which would hint at his future activity — writing a book. Yes, that’s how far it has gone with me, how low I am stooping, if you will; I would make do with anything — my astrological chart at birth, the critical DNA sequences of my genes, the mystery lurking in my blood grouping, anything, I tell you, to which I might give a nod of assent, or at least reconcile myself that this was the way it had to be, this was what I was born to be, as if I were not perfectly aware that we are not born to be anything but, if we manage to live long enough, we cannot avoid becoming something in the end.

I take a book down from the shelf. The volume exudes a musty smell — the sole trace that a finished work and a completed life can leave behind in the air: the smell of books. “It was on the 28th of August, 1749, at the stroke of twelve noon, that I came into the world in Frankfurt on the Main,” I read. “The constellation was auspicious: the Sun was in Virgo and at its culmination for the day. Jupiter and Venus looked amicably upon it and Mercury was not hostile. Saturn and Mars maintained indifference. Only the Moon …” Yes, that is the way to be born, as a man of the moment — of a moment when who knows how many others were likewise born on this globe. Only the rest of them did not leave a book smell behind and so they don’t count. The cosmic constellation arranged the lucky moment for a single birth. That is how a genius, a great creative figure, sets foot on earth — like a mythical hero. An unfilled place longs yearningly for him, his advent so long overdue that the ground is practically moaning out for it. Now all that has to be done is to await the most favourable constellation, which will assist him just as much through the difficulties of birth as through the uncertain beginnings, the years of hesitancy, until that shining moment when he enters the realm of recognition. Looking back from the pinnacle of his career, there will no longer be room in his life for any contingency, since his very life has assumed the form of necessity. His every deed and every thought is important as a carrier of the motives of Providence, his every declaration pregnant with the symbolic marks of an exemplary development. “A poet,” he pronounces later, “should have an origin, he must know where he springs from.”

I suppose he is right: that truly is the most important thing.

Well then, at the time I came into the world the Sun was standing in the greatest economic crisis the world had ever known; from the Empire State Building to the Turul-hawk statues on the former Franz Josef Bridge, people were diving headlong from every prominence on the face of the earth into water, chasm, onto paving stone — wherever they could; a party leader by the name of Adolf Hitler looked exceedingly inimically upon me from amidst the pages of his book Mein Kampf; the first of Hungary’s Jewish laws, the so-called Numerus Clausus, stood at its culmination before its place was taken by the remainder. Every earthly sign (I have no idea about the heavenly ones) attested to the superfluousness — indeed, the irrationality — of my birth. On top of which, I arrived as a nuisance for my parents: they were on the point of divorcing. I am the material product of the lovemaking of a couple who did not even love one another, perhaps the fruit of one night’s indulgence. Hey presto, suddenly there I was, through Nature’s bounty, before any of us had had a chance to think it through properly. I was a healthy child, my milk teeth broke through, I started to burble, my intellect burgeoned; I began to grow into my rapidly proliferating materiality. I was the little son in common of a daddy and mummy who no longer had anything in common with one another; a pupil at a private institution into whose custody they entrusted me while they proceeded with their divorce case; a student for the school, a tiny citizen for the state. “I believe in one God, I believe in one homeland, I believe in the resurrection of Hungary,” I prayed at the beginning of the school day. “Rump Hungary is no land, reunified Hungary the heavenly land,” I read from the caption on a wall map outlined with bloody colour. “Navigare necesse est, vivere non est necesse,”¹ I parroted in Latin class. “Shoma Yisroel, adonai elohenu, adonai ehod,” I learned in religious instruction. I was fenced in on all sides, my consciousness taken into possession: they brought me up. With a loving word here and stern warnings there, they gradually ripened me for slaughter. I never protested, I endeavoured to do what was asked of me; I languished with torpid goodwill into my well-bred neurosis. I was a modestly diligent if not always impeccably proficient accomplice to the unspoken conspiracy against my life.

But enough. It is not worth searching for my origins: I have none. I landed in a process that, thanks to my inborn sense of mistiming, I took for a beginning. Like everybody else, I have one or two anecdotes and a few personal memories, but what do they signify? At the right temperature, they dissolve without trace into the communal mass, unite with the inexhaustible material churned out in general hospitals and disposed of in mass graves or, in more fortunate cases, in mass production. In hunting for my origins I see nothing but a packed and never-ending queue, my century on the march. Blinded, now staggering, now breaking into a trot, I too stumbled along in the soporific warmth of the herd. But at some point — who knows why — I stepped out of the line: I did not go on further. I sat down beside the ditch and my glance suddenly fell on the stretch of the way I had put behind me. Could this be what literary men call “talent”? Hard to believe it. I had given no sign of any talent in a single act or word or other manifestation — unless it was in managing to stay alive. I did not dream myself into invented stories; I did not even know what to do with the things that had happened to me. Not once had my ears resounded to the biddings of vocation; the totality of my experiences could convince me only of my superfluousness, never of my importance. I was not endowed with the redeeming word; I was not interested in perfection or beauty, not even knowing what those are. I regard notions of glory as the masturbation fantasies of senile old men, immortality as simply risible. I didn’t start on my novel in order to have a verifiable occupation. If I were an artist, I would entertain or teach; my work would be of interest to me, not the reason why I had produced it.

Having got that off my chest, I can discern only one possible explanation for my stubborn passion: maybe I had started writing in order to gain my revenge on the world. To gain revenge and regain from it what it had robbed me of. Perhaps my adrenal glands, which I managed to preserve intact even from Auschwitz, are hypersecretors of adrenaline. Why not? After all, representation contains an innate power in which the aggressive instinct can subside for a moment and produce an equipoise, a temporary respite. Maybe that is what I wanted. Yes, to grab hold, if only in my imagination and by artistic means, of the reality that all too really holds me in its power; to subjectivize my perpetual objectivity, to become the name-giver instead of the named. My novel was no more than a response to the world — evidently the sole way of responding as best I can. To whom else would I have been able to address this response if, as we all know, God is dead? To nothingness, to my unknown fellow human beings, to the world. It did not turn out as a prayer but as a novel.

But let us not exaggerate: that is already literature. In the end it may yet transpire that I do, indeed, have some talent for writing, which would make me truly sorry since I did not start writing because I have talent; on the contrary, when I decided I would write a novel, evidently I also decided, by the bye, that I would become talented. I needed it; there was a job to be done. I had to aim to write a good book, not out of vanity but in the nature of the beast, so to say. I could not do otherwise: by some mysterious means, the necessity to give a response condensed within me into freedom, like a gas subjected to very high pressure. What was I supposed to do with this unformed and intolerable feeling? Freedom sometimes becomes purely a question of expertise. Even a bad novel can be freedom — it is just that the freedom is unable to reveal itself, precisely because the book prevents it. At least now I know it is no use my tugging at the halter of the writer’s fate; its diabolical irony will keep me in harness. Whatever my original motive, I can only justify the character of this personal business if I also offer others something at the same time. All of a sudden, I found that the aggrieved hand which had been poised to strike was holding a novel, and now with a deep bow I was trying to place it as a festive gift under everybody’s Christmas tree.

So that is how it happened. Lacking in certainty to the degree that I was, I somehow had to convince myself that I existed after all. I responded to the preserved murder attempts — both real and symbolic — now with neurasthenic apathy, now with aggression. However, I recognized fairly quickly (I am a rational creature, after all) that I was more vulnerable than the outside world. In the end, out of weakness and impotence, as well as out of a certain desperation and a sort of vague hope, I began to write. That’s it, it’s done: here is the answer to my question. And here I could also bring these remarks to a conclusion.

It is just that something inside me bristles against finishing. My remarks are at an end, but I carry on. I am running out of letters, and once again I shall be left standing at a loss for what to do with the seconds, hours, and days as they succeed one another. As you see, what should I pick again but exactly the same therapy, and again with exactly the same result as when I set to work on writing the novel. It’s not as if I were seeking a solution — I am well aware that there is no solution for life — but I find that a mere listing of symptoms is not enough. A medical report does nothing to help me: as the patient, it’s the pain that interests me. Not the diagnosis, but the process, the active disease. ‘The details. Above all, the details,’ as Ivan Karamazov, the instigator, says as he interrogates Smerdyakov, the killer. Just don’t finish, since nothing ever comes to an end: I have to continue, carry on writing, yes, confidentially and with sickening talkativeness, like two killers chatting. Yet what I have to say is as bleakly impersonal as a murder reduced to the soulless, to just another statistic which is just as super …

“Teleph …?”

“… fluous as writing a book …”

“For the love of …!”

“I was beginning to think you weren’t home!” the reproachful voice of the old boy’s mother drilled like a laser beam into mashed potatoes (a simile which cannot be said to be either graphically or logically apposite) (since what would a laser beam be doing drilling into mashed potatoes) (but in the heat of the moment that was what sprang into the old boy’s mind, and we have no right to concoct a better one in its place) (let alone a worse one) (insofar as we wish to remain faithful chroniclers of his story) (and what else might be our goal) into the plug of fusible wax.

“Where else would I be?” the old boy snapped.

“Who can tell with you?!.. Guess what has happened. The little glass shelf on which I keep my cacti has broken. The pots fell as well, and one of them is smashed, the earth is all over the floor. What should I do now?”

“Sweep it up,” the old boy suggested.

“I’m not exactly clueless!” the next laser beam pierced the old boy’s skull. “What I want to know is, where I am going to find a new glass shelf!”

“From a glazier,” hazarded the old boy.

“A glazier! It’s not as if the neighbourhood is crawling with glaziers!.. You wouldn’t happen to know of a good one, would you?”

“No,” the old boy said.

“Of course not. When did you ever know anything?!”

“If you put it like that …” said the old boy indignantly.

“Aren’t you even going to ask me how the accident happened?”

“Yes, of course,” answered the old boy hurriedly.

“I wanted to dust the picture which hangs above it, but I got up on the chair so awkwardly that my housecoat snagged on the corner of the glass shelf. I think that ripped too … I didn’t even look yet …”

“You shouldn’t be climbing on chairs at your age,” counselled the old boy.

“You don’t say!” a hand grenade exploded in the old boy’s auricle. “I don’t need others to tell me what I can and can’t do at my age … but since I’ve had my backache and can’t go into the office, I can only afford a cleaning lady once a week. It’s no use my asking you to come over and dust for me!”

“You could be right about that,” acknowledged the old boy.

“There you are! Did you arrange to be taken off the register yet?”

“No,” quailed the old boy.

“You’ve had so much else to do the whole week, I suppose?”

“There’s been enough,” the old boy bristled. “I’m working to a deadline; I have a translation to do.”

“You’re slipping lower and lower. You started off writing plays, then a novel, and now it’s translating.”

“And I’ll be a typist before too long,” the old boy remarked in annoyance.

“What you choose to make of yourself is your own affair, but you’re running out of time to decide. You’re not getting any younger either.”

“That’s nice of you,” the old boy muttered.

“But you have to get yourself off the register double-quick so I can get the maintenance contract signed.”

“All right,” said the old boy.

“I know your ‘all rights’ by now. You always put things off till the last possible moment. That’s exactly what got you where you are today,” was the parting shot from the old boy’s mother.

“That’s today shot to pieces,” thought the old boy.

“I ought to pack it in,” he pondered further.

“The whole thing, I mean,” he continued to ponder.

… I packed it all in …

“There you are.” The old boy cheered up (a little).

… I decided to go for a walk …

“Very sensible,” the old boy approved.

… which was how I came to be on Margaret Island …

“Big mistake,” thought the old boy peevishly.

… Who should I see at a table in one of the open-air restaurants, under the rustle of the languidly drooping leafy boughs, but Árpád Sas, with another fellow …

“Worse luck,” muttered the old boy.

… two exotically plumed male parrots under the horse-chestnut trees, two coloured shirts, two distinguished, elegant heads. I was about to give them a wide berth …

“Uh-huh,” the old boy perked up.

… but it was too late: Árpád Sas had already spotted me …

“He would, wouldn’t he,” gloated the old boy.

… invited me over to the table with an insistent wave of the hand:

“Aha! the prince of life! Come on and join us, my archduke, the very man we were waiting for!”

“Why don’t you go to hell?” I enquired in my friendliest fashion as I clambered over the flower tubs which enclosed the terrace. He did not reply to this but glanced in discreet triumph at the other fellow, who on my arrival had got to his feet by the table and was smiling broadly. He was tall and spindly, his hair flecked with grey, his spectacles round-framed, and at the sight of his yellowing big teeth between dark moustache and minute beard, long-deposited scraps of memory began sluggishly stirring within me, like grounds at the bottom of a cup of coffee.

“So? So?” he enquired with a slightly foreign accent.

“Hellfire and damnation!” as Jules Verne’s English sea captains say.

“Mijnheer Van de Gruyn, the Dutch cocoa plantationer!” I exclaimed.

“You idiot!” guffawed Gerendás Van de Gruyn, who was called Grün when he came into the world. “You haven’t changed a bit in seventeen years!”

That was debatable but this wasn’t the right moment to point it out. Instead I emitted a medley of sounds, ranging from joyous amazement to chummy familiarity. I immediately slipped into my role as into a long-discarded and unexpectedly rediscovered pair of slippers. I played myself, or to be more precise the good old pal whose image Gerendás had sustained. God knows who he was; God knows what possessed me to try to live up to an old photograph that, even in those days, was probably not faithful: perhaps it was that permanent fear we have that our image will in the end fade away forever.

Fortunately, I was not uninformed. Sas, whom I would run into every once in a while — in the street, at the cinema, at a bridge evening, but most often at the open-air pool — always kept me up to date: Grün’s success on Dutch television; the humorous articles Grün had published, one after the other; the West German production of a film with a screenplay by Grün; Sas, on the way home from a trip to London, stopping over at Grün’s villa in one of Amsterdam’s suburbs, where he cultivated tulips in his garden. Sas’s face at these moments displayed both pleasure and malice — the pleasure was meant for Grün, the malice for himself and, of course, no less for me. Sas had devised for himself a metaphysical view of life from which the metaphysics had been extracted, since he believed in consumer goods rather than in God. In his scheme of things, he himself lived in the Vale of Tears, albeit out of his own free choice, having condemned himself to it, probably through defeatism, but it comforted him greatly that, even if the chance had been blown for him, there nevertheless existed a more glittering other world in which he could have an occasional fling — whenever possible at the state’s expense.

“Of course, you never travel,” he was in the habit of reproaching me.

“Not I,” I would reply, sticking to the truth.

“Why not?” he would enquire.

“It’s not possible to get away from myself,” was one of the things I would say at this juncture.

Or else: “One can learn about the world even in a prison cell; indeed, one learns most of all there.”

Or yet again: “I don’t like it when the world from which we have been excluded is constantly portrayed as if it were ours.”

“You’re talking double Dutch. And I say Dutch because that’s the only language I understand not one word of.”

But I can see that he is nettled, and that’s enough for me. Sas, by the way, is a columnist for an illustrated weekly magazine, covering the major European languages as translator and discreetly, slyly, sensitively, and knowledgeably promoting the national line as feuilletonist and leader-writer for the inner pages. He had mentioned that Grün would be coming and wanted to see me as one of the relics of his former life. They had just happened to be discussing whether to call me by telephone.

To their great delight, I ordered a black coffee. I then rattled off a string of questions that I supposed one asks on such occasions. Mijnheer Van de Gruyn affected modesty: he had achieved a thing or two, to be sure, but he was not yet what one would call a big name. Sas let out a sharp guffaw at that. Family? Yes, a wife and a five-year-old daughter.

“Didn’t I tell you?” asked Sas.

“Of course you did. Just checking,” I tried to extricate myself. I was dismayed to sense that I was starting to run out of questions. Fortunately, Grün took over: he had heard from Sas that I was having success writing comedies, so he would like to see one of them.

“None of them is running at the moment,” I apologized.

Well in that case he would read them, he said.

“It’s not worth it,” I tried to talk him out of it. “They’re no good.” Grün let out a protracted guffaw at this and slapped me heartily on the back with his bony hand. He plainly thought I was joking.

“He hasn’t changed a bit,” he gurgled happily.

“There isn’t another person between the Yellow Sea and the Elbe who has sorted out his life as well as he has,” Sas bragged on my behalf with a paternalistic smile.

“The same for yourself,” I offered no less charitably.

“My dear chap,” Gerendás said, turning serious, “there’s a big demand for good comedies back in the West.”

Only then did I realize that I was sitting right in the middle of a farcical misunderstanding.

“I don’t write comedies any more,” I said.

“What then?” enquired Mijnheer Peeperkorn. The devil knows what got into me, but it seems the wish to open up got the better of me. Maybe I did it out of perplexity; after all, I was sitting among colleagues. But it could be that what fleetingly crossed my mind was Goethe’s good counsel that in order to preserve our poetic works from starvation, it behooves us to converse with well-intentioned connoisseurs about their origins, thereby bestowing historical value on them.

“I’ve written a novel,” I announced modestly.

“Aha!” enthused Van de Gruyn.

“And you didn’t say a word about it to me?!” Sas gave me an offended look.

“When is it due to be published?” Gerendás put his finger on the practical aspect of the matter.

“That’s just it: it won’t be published,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“The publisher rejected it.”

“Oh, I see, zo,” Mijnheer Gruyn remarked with a slight foreign inflection, his face meanwhile assuming a noncommittal expression.

Sas, by contrast, seemed to liven up: which publishing house had rejected it, and why, he wanted to know. I replied that I didn’t know the reason, but I had received a preposterous letter from which it was clear that they had either not understood, or not wanted to understand, the novel because, I explained, it seems they ascribed any marks that it hit as down to pure luck, its audacity to clumsiness, its consequentiality to deviation.

“What is the novel about?” Sas asked.

Whatever the reason, there was no denying my embarrassment.

“What any novel is about,” I said cautiously, “it’s about life.”

Sas was not one to be thrown off so easily:

“Let’s drop for once the high-flown philosophical expositions you normally give us,” he warned. “What I wanted to know is what, specifically, your specific novel is about. Is it set in the present day?

“No,” I said.

“Then when?”

“Oh … during the war.”

“Where?”

“In Auschwitz,” I whispered.

Slight silence.

“Of course,” Van de Gruyn remarked with grudging commiseration, as if he were speaking to a half-cured leper, “you were in Auschwitz.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Have you taken leave of your senses?” Sas had recovered from his initial astonishment. “A novel about Auschwitz! In this day and age! Who on earth is going to read that?”

“Nobody,” I said, “because it’s not going to be published.”

“Surely you didn’t suppose,” he asked, “that they were going to fling their arms round your neck?”

“Why not? It’s a good novel,” I said.

“Good? What do mean by good?”

“What else?” I stuttered. “Good means good. A self-explanatory whatsit … that is to say … good an und für sich, if I may put it that way.”

“An und für sich,” Sas glanced at Gerendás, as if he were interpreting my words, then slowly turned his elegant, narrow, sharp-beaked head back toward me, his half-closed eyes and the yellowish sideburns framing his ruddy face reminding me of a sad and sleepy, widely experienced fox. “An und für sich,” he repeated calmly. “But good for whom? What is anybody going to make of it?! Where are you living? Which planet do you think you are on?” he asked with growing distress. “Not a soul in the trade has ever heard of you, and you go and send in a novel, and to top it all one on a subject like that …”

“That Sas,” Mijnheer Gruyn attempted to smooth things over, “he hasn’t changed a bit. He was always such a … what’s the phrase … smart-arse, azes ponem,” he gleefully hit upon the words he had been seeking. “Do you remember when …”

But by now there was no holding Sas back; me neither, for that matter.

“In other words, I’m not entitled to write a good novel!” I heard the angry yelps of my own voice.

“That’s it exactly.” Sas was jubilant. “I couldn’t have put it better myself. No one is looking for a good novel from you, old chap. What evidence do you have that you can write a good novel? Even if we suppose that it really is good, where’s the guarantee for it? No expert, my dear chap, is simply going to believe the evidence of his own eyes! Your name is unknown,” he kept count of the points on his fingers, “You have no one behind you, the subject isn’t topical, no one is going to deal you the ace of trumps. What do you expect?”

“But what if,” I asked, “someone were to submit a brilliant novel?…”

“You’re obviously talking about yourself,” Sas pronounced.

“Let’s suppose,” I conceded.

“First of all, there’s no such thing as a brilliant novel,” Sas patiently enlightened me. “Secondly, even if there is, so much the worse. This is a small country; what it needs is not geniuses but honest, hardworking citizens who …”

“Yes, all right,” Van de Gruyn took pity. “But now that he’s gone and finished a novel … Possibly,” he ventured cautiously, “you could give it to me … I’m staying for another two weeks, I might be able to zip through …”

“That’s it!” I said, “You translate it and publish it in Holland!”

Mijnheer Gruyn seemed thunderstruck:

“I don’t have anything to do with translating,” he said, “I sometimes have need of help myself with the language.” In his agitation, his Hungarian was deteriorating. “That’s a complete … what’s the word … absurdity!.. Anyway,” he rallied gradually, “even back in the West it’s no pushover for novels. There you have top pros, you see, and they know what’s what. To make money with a subject like that, well you need to have something! With Anne Frank the Dutch have already got that particular subject, what d’you call it …”

“Sewn up,” I hastened to his assistance.

“Not quite that, but if you can’t bring anything new … add something … and even back in the West a publisher’s rejection slip is hardly a letter of recommendation for a novel … unless of course,” a pensive expression appeared hesitantly on his face, “the author is the sort of personality who just happens …”

“I’m not going to get myself banged up just for the sake of becoming a five-day wonder where you live!” I said.

“Some hope!” Sas gave speedy reassurance. “These days it’s not so easy to get slammed into prison for a book.”

“Whereas in the good old days!” Mijnheer Gruyn chortled in relief. “Do you remember when …”

“Nowadays they deal with those matters in a much more civilized manner here,” Sas carried on unruffled.

“Yes, so I hear everyone say,” the Mijnheer butted in. “Things are going very well here. The shop window displays are attractive, the people well-dressed … but where are all those classy Budapest women there were in the old days?”

“They’re still here,” said Sas, “it’s just you who doesn’t notice them. You’re not the dashing hussar of seventeen years ago either, old fellow …”

In short, the matter of my novel was finally drawing to a close, like a boring record. Sas offered a few more pieces of advice: I should write short stories and try to get a foothold in the literary magazines; that way they would grow used to me and might even start mentioning my name. Then I should join some literary group or other; it didn’t matter which one, he said, because those things were always unpredictable.

“A literary group,” he patiently instructed me, “is like a wave: now cresting, then crashing down, but it always carries the alluvium with it, whether on the swell or in the trough, and in the end washes it up in some harbour.” He referred to the examples of several authors who had come safely to port that way, some quickly, others more slowly. Some had dropped out of the queue in the meantime, becoming suicides or giving up or ending up in a psychiatric home; but others had made it and, after thirty or forty years, it transpired that they were great writers and, what is more, precisely on account of works to which nobody had paid the slightest attention. From then on, if they were still alive, it was all nicknames, celebrations, and pampering, and there was as little they could do to alter that as they had been able to do about their previous neglect.

“Or else,” he continued, “you have to hit the jackpot. In other words,” he said, “you have to keep an eye open for the issue, which is, so to say, just breaking the surface at the time. In that case it can happen that a previously unknown writer comes into vogue, because,” Sas said, “your book comes along at just the right time for someone, or somebodies, and they can make use of it either pro or contra, as a whipping-boy or a banner.”

The Mijnheer related that it was not much different in the West, although there was no question that the market gave a free run to success. But then the tricks one had to devise in order to get it to surrender to “the besiegers.” One person had stripped naked at a reception for the queen, others set new speed records, or they were constantly divorcing and then remarrying, or they joined suspicious sects, or had themselves carted off to hospital with a drug overdose — all just to get their names into the newspapers. He himself, Mijnheer Van de Gruyn, was fed up with funny stories and with constantly having to repeat himself. He had a subject for a serious novel and had even announced it to his agent. The agent had not raised a single word of objection but had simply placed two contracts before him. One was for the usual humorous pieces, except that the fee was one-third higher than usual; the other was for a novel, for starvation wages, and with the additional rider that the agent retained the right, on being shown the first half of the finished manuscript, to break even this miserable contract.

“I’m not saying that I won’t sign one day, but right now I can’t afford it.”

“That’s the way it is,” Árpád Sas noted, “One can’t always do what one would like.”

“Or else you have to pay the price,” added the Mijnheer. They had stopped speaking to me long ago. The two clever and worldly-wise men communed agreeably over the head of the mug sitting between them.

By then I was no longer paying much attention to them either. The restaurant terrace had filled up, the autumn sunlight seemed just as languid and distraught as my straying concentration. Other scraps of sound began to mingle with the blur of conversation from Sas and Gerendás. Plates clattered, outside on the street a bus roared past now and again. On my left an elderly fellow with a d’Artagnan moustache and a resolutely bright-patterned necktie was sitting opposite a well-preserved lady with a ready smile.

“I like some pictures,” the bloke said with a deeply meaningful glance, a sausage sandwich in his hand.

“Ai laik djor myusik,” said the lady in fractured English with a smile that went far beyond the content of her utterance.

“As I recall, two parcels were packed together,” a yapping voice came to my ears. It belonged to a diminutive old man in a circle of primped-up old ladies: with his enormous ears, his withered face, and the thin strands of hair twined into a crest on the crown of his head he resembled an irate hussar monkey.

Meanwhile I overheard just in passing that Sas had invited himself to Amsterdam for the coming spring.

“That may be precisely when I shan’t be at home,” said the Mijnheer. “Some time in the spring I have to fly to America. But of course one of the guest rooms …”

The d’Artagnan moustache was taking a dip in the foaming white bubble bath of a glass of beer.

A shrill cackling rose up at the old ladies’ table:

“You always know best!” one of them shrieked, her faced flushed and trembling with indignation.

“Indeed I do, I’m precisely informed about everything!” yelped the aged head male. The old crones suddenly settled down and fell silent. The old codger snorted loudly as he looked around at them, his lower row of dentures popping up threateningly before finding its place again.

At our table, in the meantime, the discussion had passed on to Sas’s English minicar, which very likely needed some spare part or other. In the ensuing conversation the suggestion came up that he would try to translate one of Gerendás’ non-political humorous volumes and find a publisher for it:

“At least I’ll learn some Dutch: I’ve already done translations from Norwegian. If I get stuck, you can help me,” he declared merrily.

I looked about. Everything around me was seething and bubbling, a chirping twitter of voices from all sides, as if carried by invisible telegraph wires on invisible telegraph poles; ideas, offers, plans, and hopes jumped across like flashing electric discharges from one head to another. Yes, somehow I had been left out of this vast global metabolism of mass production and consumption, and at that moment I grasped that this was what had decided my fate. I am not a consumer, and I am not consumable.

“I have to go,” I stood up.

They did not try too hard to detain me.

“Now I sit here at home.”

“The end,” the old boy registered surprise.

“There’s nothing more.”

“And yet they did publish me in the end.”

“Two years after that.”

“4,900 copies.”

“18,000 forints.”

“Did you get any work done?”

“Of course.”

“Did you make any progress?”

“I pushed on a bit.”

“What do you want for dinner?”

“I don’t know. What’s the choice?”

His wife told him.

“All the same to me,” the old boy decided.

Dénouement at the bistro: the guessing is going on as to who will go and who will stay, the old boy’s wife related.

The stocktaking was over now: there was a surplus rather than a shortage (which was generally praiseworthy, except when the surplus went beyond a certain surplus which was grounds for a reprimand at the very least) (since a surplus of that magnitude could not come about from anything other than practising systematic fraud on consumers over a protracted period).

The Old Biddy — or the ex-chief administrator, to give her her official title — had already put in an urgent request for what was in any case a long-overdue retirement, which the Company had immediately accepted (in a spirit of general equity) (and also in the hope of suppressing wider publicity) (which — the wider publicity, that is — would undoubtedly be more damaging for the Company than any surplus over and above a certain surplus) (which — the surplus, that is — was a profit after all) (it just had to be entered into the accounts) (of course).

Now the regular consequence of the not exactly rare cases of this kind (when a chief administrator falls, that is to say) was that the staff too were transferred to other business concerns, usually to worse ones, occasionally to similar ones, and exceptionally to better ones (even though the majority of the staff) (as is clearly stated in labour law as enacted) (bore no responsibility for the inventory; indeed, were not supposed to have any knowledge of what it comprised) (nevertheless the long shadow of crime is cast on everybody) (most especially on those who have committed none).

And so it was no more of a surprise than it was a secret that the tall, impassive, tight-lipped, blonde lady — the new chief administrator, to give her her official title — enveloped in scented clouds of perfume subtly blended with cherry brandy, a cigarette constantly dangling loosely from the corner of her mouth, was already preparing a blacklist in the office; and it was all the less a secret since she herself had declared in the presence of others, including the old boy’s wife, that she was “not going to work together with a bunch of thieving employees,” on account of which everything was uncertain, the only certainty being that the colleague known as Mrs. Boda (Ilona by first name) would be staying, whether thanks to the unpredictability of personal sympathies or to some more predictable factor (for instance, foresight on the part of the — by official title — new chief administrator for a time when fate might decree that she) (the — by official title — new chief administrator) (might likewise accumulate a surplus, in which case) (just possibly at the very height of the evening rush) (she too might take over in a white coat at the beer taps) (in the spirit of that way of the world — but by no means an unconditional necessity, let it be noted — that the earlier-cited highly dubious mind called eternal recurrence) (which naturally) (we must hope at least) (life always belies).

“So now I’ll have to look out for where I’m going to end up,” the old boy’s wife closed her words (in conclusion, so to speak).

“Oh yes,” the old boy said later on, “my mother telephoned.”

“What did she want?” his wife asked.

The old boy outlined the situation.

“So we no longer have any hope of eventually exchanging apartments,” his wife said.

“Not much, that’s for sure,” the old boy said, “For the time being,” he added (hastily).

“We are going to live our entire life in this hole,” said his wife.

“What can I do about it?” the old boy said. “I’m going out for a bit of a walk,” he also said besides that (later on).

The next morning, the old boy’s wife was sitting tousle-haired, in her night-dress and slippers, on the sofa occupying the northwest corner of the room and, with a look that was still somewhat unsteady from an abrupt awakening, made the following statement:

“I had an odd dream.”

“Not that I remember it precisely in every detail,” she continued.

“The main thing was that I was working in a huge catering complex. It was six storeys high and built of red brick, like a — hang on … like a prison. Yes, of course. Music was blaring out on every floor, mainly gypsy music. I was assigned to the roof terrace. It was packed. I was carrying dishes, those heavy Pyrex ones, I couldn’t get the twelve bottles of beer off my tray. The kitchen was on the ground floor; everything had to be carried up from there, and there were hardly any staff. We were behind with the orders, the people at the tables were bawling their demands, the ashtrays were full of cigarette butts, a lot of drink had been spilled on the grease-spattered tablecloths and was dripping onto the floor. There was such a peculiar reddish light, like you sometimes see at twilight in the summer. I was rushing from one customer to another, sweat was pouring off me, but at the same time I had the feeling that somehow none of it had anything to do with me.

“Mrs. Boda dashed by me in some Hungarian costume — red waistcoat, a cap on her head, a skirt in the national colours over that enormous backside she has. The tray she was carrying was so big that she was almost collapsing under the weight. ‘So how do you manage all this with a winter snowstorm chucking it down?’ she pants. ‘That’s your problem,’ I tell her. Only then do I notice that her cap has slipped almost down to her ears, sweat is pouring out beneath it and has washed the rouge and mascara from her face. I started laughing so hard that I had to put my tray on the floor and sit down. I unlaced my shoes — I was wearing my usual high-cut work pumps — because something was pressing hard into my feet. Well if it wasn’t a ten-forint coin which must somehow have slipped into the shoe in the commotion. A fellow then starts bawling at me: ‘Just you wait, I’ll get some order around here. I’m going to put your name down in the complaint book!’ I knew that he was a deputy commander but not what sort of commander he was a deputy for. I say to him: ‘You would be doing me a favour, sir. I’ve already been given my death sentence,’ and show him the paper. He takes it and reads it, but while he is reading it his eyes start to boggle in a really odd way, as if they were going to drop out. ‘That’s different!’ he said. He suddenly sprang to his feet, clicked his heels and seemed about to salute but instead gave a resigned wave of his hand. While he was doing this, he even winked at me, though it was somehow more in sadness.

“At that point the new, blond chief administrator popped up from somewhere, her face white as chalk, a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, and she hissed in my ear ‘You can’t resign! I have no staff and you have to keep going to the end of the day!’ I could even smell the stench of cherry brandy on her breath, just like in real life. I say to her: ‘And you can do me exactly the same favour. I’m free now, I already have my sentence!’ I took my apron off and hurled it at her feet along with the money that was rattling in the pocket. I was aware that this meant the ball was over. I had never in my life felt as light as I did then. I stepped over to the guardrail. I could see a vast crowd of people swarming down below, all wanting to get in to eat and drink. They were streaming along in long black lines, like ants, even in the far distance. It was already getting dark. The whole building was bustling and humming like a beehive; music was playing, people eating and drinking, and here and there some were already tight and warbling drunkenly. The staff was running ragged among them, slapping down the food and the drinks and then quickly disappearing down the stairs into the invisible kitchen. The food was flowing out from there faster and faster, and the oddest thing about it was that I knew all along that there were no staff in the kitchen, and it would only carry on until the bosses had cooked all the surplus …

“I can’t tell it the way I would like to …

“I’ve already forgotten many of the details …

“I have to get dressed or I’m going to be late after all that …

“It was actually a bad dream, but not as bad as having to wake up,” the old boy’s wife closed her words (in conclusion, so to speak).

A little later the old boy was standing in front of his filing cabinet and thinking that today he would not think.

In order to accomplish this plan (if, indeed, one may speak about a negative intention as a plan, and its occurrence as an accomplishment) (and what is more an intention which did not require any particular exertion on the old boy’s part since) (as we may already have mentioned)

(he had acquired such a routine of having a think that at these times he was sometimes capable of creating the impression of being in thought even when he was not thinking, and even when he himself might have imagined that he was thinking) he produced from the back right — northwest — corner of the lower drawer of the filing cabinet a small box of sorts, a case with a beige-coloured, pockmarked surface, seemingly of pigskin.

On an outer (undoubtedly at one and the same time also the upper) surface of the small, beige-coloured (pockmarked) box, in the middle of a round, embossed, stylized seal, in a beige darker than beige (one could say brown), the letter cluster MEDICOR could be made out (possibly the expedient abbreviation for a manufacturer of pharmaceuticals or medical instruments) (if we may place any reliance on pure logic, though) (in the absence of a more appropriate point of reference) (since the old boy himself had not the slightest idea when, why, or how it had come into his possession) (we can hardly do anything else), while its two inner compartments each contained a pack of regular playing cards (one blue and one red pack, each pack of fifty-two) (thus a total of one hundred and four) (red or blue playing cards) (each playing card bearing on its back surface a round, stylized seal, in a darker blue or red than that blue or red, in the middle of which was the letter cluster MEDICOR) (invariably in the matching colour) (it goes without saying).

The old boy took out the blue pack (since that had been used less).

After a brief shuffling the old boy laid out four sets of thirteen (thus a total of fifty-two) playing cards — dealing them singly and always right to left — before him on the table (to be more precise, the table, the only real table in the flat).

This activity intimated, however surprising it may seem, that he was preparing to play bridge.

For to play bridge one needs four people (no more and no less).

Bridge is an English mental exercise, the old boy was in the habit of saying (for the sake of weaker spirits).

Its essence (one might say, its specific feature) is that two partners sitting across from each other play against two other partners who also sit across from each other (which is why the English call it bridge) (though this altogether too simple explanation) (along with the English origin of the game) (has been placed in question) (by recent investigations in Hungary) (in accord with others abroad).

As a result of which — for what else could he have done? — the old boy by himself represented the other three missing persons; in other words, all the players in the rubber or, to use the technical terminology, both the declarer and the defenders, which had its own undeniable advantages — for instance, it significantly reduced the obstacles to understanding between partners — though one drawback which might be raised is that the open cards made it awkward for the old boy; this may have accounted for the fact that, after announcing as declarer an otherwise easily achievable contract of four hearts he relied on outscoring rather than on finessing the red cards — a tactic whose success could be predicted — and thus ended up losing on the black cards anyway (although, as partner, he had been aware of this well in advance), as a result of which one remaining issue was left to be decided — namely, whether he would rather identify with the losing declarer or with the winning defenders (after brief vacillation the old boy decided in favour of the winning defenders) (yet he was still annoyed at not achieving the easily achievable four hearts) — before he could put the pack of cards back in the small box, and the box in its place (the back right — northwest — corner of the lower drawer of the filing cabinet), shut the filing cabinet and allow his arms — now idle — to fall, by virtue of which what, in the end, was actually a well-established, customary — indeed, one might say, very nearly ritual — position was all at once restored, which is to say:

The old boy was standing in front of the filing cabinet. He was thinking. It was midmorning (relatively — getting on for ten). Around this time the old boy was in the habit of having a think.

He had plenty of troubles and woes, so there were things to think about.

The truth is — not to put too fine a point on it — he should long ago have settled down to writing a book.

Any old book, just so long as it was a book (the old boy had long been aware that it made no difference at all what kind of book he wrote, good or bad — that had no bearing on the essence of the matter).

So with a gesture of irritation (as though he now truly did not have too much time to squander) he snatched the folder furnished with the title “Ideas, sketches, fragments” from the upper drawer of the filing cabinet and then tugged out from roughly the centre of the pile of paper scraps and slips and scribbled sheets, practically at random (as though it did not matter to him whether he drew the ace of spades or the two of clubs) (or perhaps more accurately, as though he were well aware that he would not be able to draw either the ace of spades or the two of clubs, since he had shuffled the pack himself) (which already predetermines the strength of the cards that can end up in our hand) (with allowance for the far from consubstantial chances of the just slightly better or slightly worse) (and thereby leaving at least some scope, after all, for the action of the instantaneous planetary constellation) a sheet of note-paper that had already somewhat yellowed at the edges.

On the sheet of note-paper (already somewhat yellowed at the edges), written with a green felt-tip pen (a type he had not used for some time), he read the following note (idea, outline, or possibly fragment):

Köves had twice submitted a passport application and three times they had it turned down. Although it was obvious there must have been an administrative error, Köves nevertheless discerned a symbolic significance in the occurrence, so that he finally made up his mind: now he had to leave whatever might happen.

“So there it is,” the old boy muttered to himself.

“Just my luck.

“I remember.

“I didn’t have any job recommendations.

“That was a long time back,” he wandered away from the subject (mentally).

“But what in hell’s name can I make out of this?” he returned again to the subject (mentally).

“Although,” he thought a bit, “it’s not such a bad idea at that.

“There are some interesting elements in it.

“I could make a start with this.

“One can make a start with anything.

“What matters is what you aim for.

“So then what is Köves aiming for?”

The old boy sat down in front of the filing cabinet and pondered (evidently on the question he had posed himself, which) (as we have cited above) (was what Köves was aiming for).

“What could Köves have been aiming for, anyway?” was the next question the old boy posed to himself (and from the expression that gradually lit up his face it seemed he was beginning to guess the answer as well).

The upshot of which was that he got out the typewriter (from the upper drawer of the filing cabinet) (thereby leaving in the drawer only a few files, two cardboard boxes, and behind them a grey box file, on which there was, as a paperweight so to say, a likewise grey — albeit a darker grey — lump of stone), and at the head of the sheet of paper that he fed in, set in the middle, in uppercase type (as a person customarily does) (by general convention) (when writing down the title of something) (his book, let us say), he tapped out the following:

and beneath that, after some further pondering, he tapped:

“For fuck’s sake!” The old boy abruptly broke off his typing at this point, while raising himself halfway from his seat as he reached toward the filing cabinet.

“Let the old goat shove all seven turns of that rigid corkscrewed poker …” the old boy intoned, unhurriedly and syllable by syllable, while carefully shaping the softened wad of fusible wax between his fingers as he crammed it into his ear, thereby placing himself beyond reach of Oglütz, the Slough of Deceit — in effect, the entire world.

1 Plutarch: “It is indispensable to sail, it is not indispensable to live.”