Fiasco

Arrival

Köves came to with a buzzing in his ears; he had probably fallen asleep, almost missing that extraordinary moment when they descended from starlit altitude into earthly night. Scattered flickers of light showed on the borders of a horizon which tilted constantly with the turns of the aircraft. For all he knew, he could be watching a bobbing convoy of ships on the dark ocean. Yet below them was dry land; could the city really present such a pitiable sight? Köves’ home came to mind, the other city — Budapest — that he had left. Even though he had already been flying for sixteen hours, it now caught up with him for the first time, like a slight tipsiness, the certainty of the distance which separated him from the familiar bend of the Danube, the lamp-garlanded bridges, the Buda hills, and the illuminated wreath of the inner city. Here, too, he had glimpsed a faintly glistening band down there, more than likely a river, and above it the odd sparsely lighted arch — those were presumably bridges; and during the descent he had also been able to make out that on one side of the river the city sprawled out over a plain, while on the other side it was set on hillocky terrain.

Köves had no chance to make any further observations. The plane touched down, and there was the usual flurry of activity: the unfastening of safety belts, a few quick tugs at crumpled clothing, but Köves was a little unsettled by the aptly brief parting word to the English travelling companion in the next seat — the Englishman flitted all over the globe as a representative for some multinational company, and during the flight Köves had seen the great value of that travel experience — it was, after all, the first time he himself had crossed continents, and moreover he was the only one disembarking at this place. Besides which it seemed as if the strains of the journey were hitting him now, all at once; he could hardly wait to be relieved of his luggage — even though it consisted of just a single suitcase that he might still have need of, he would come back later to reclaim it, with the help of his renowned and affluent friend — and to relinquish himself to the attentions of the staff.

He waited in vain, however; no one ran up to meet him, the airport terminal was dark and looked completely deserted. What was going on here? Were they on strike? Had war broken out and the airfield been blacked out? Or was it simply apathy, foreigners being left to puzzle out where to go? Köves took a few hesitant paces in the direction where he fancied he could see more solid contours in the distance, just possibly the terminal building, but before long he lost his footing — evidently he must have strayed off the runway in the dark — and at the same time he felt as if he had suddenly been smacked in the face: it was the hard beam of a searchlight, directed implacably straight at his face. Köves screwed up his eyes in irritation. At this, almost as if it were acknowledging his indignation, the spotlight slid lower and, giving him a full-body frisk-over so to say, ran before his feet, darting a few yards ahead on the ground before again returning to Köves’s feet and starting all over again. Was this their way of showing him which way to go? A strange procedure at any rate; he could consider equally a courtesy as an order, and while he was pondering that, Köves caught himself already setting off — suitcase in hand — after the light beam dancing before him.

He had to walk rather a long way. The searchlight may have plunged everything around him into pitch-darkness, but Köves noticed that weed-overgrown soil alternated under his feet with further stretches of runway. These, however, seemed to be narrower, perhaps unsuited for jumbo jets of the kind on which Köves had arrived; perhaps, mused Köves, the runway for the latter had been constructed not long ago, which would explain why it had been laid farther off than these stretches. Or could it be perhaps — he pondered further — that the people here didn’t want foreign travellers to see everything clearly straight away?

The pencil of light was then suddenly extinguished: evidently he had reached his goal. for Köves now found himself in front of a lighted-up entrance and a person. To be more accurate, the silhouette of a human form, standing several steps higher than him, because the lighting at the entrance was again angled in such a way that Köves was unable to see anything for the glare of light. At least it was at last a person, and the sole reason Köves did not hail him is because in the heat of the moment he could not think of the language in which to wish him a good evening.

Assistance was soon at hand, though:

“Just arrived, have we?” the person inquired of him. The question sounded more like a friendly greeting, and the hint of an overtone that was hard to decipher — malicious glee of some kind, perhaps — Köves may well have just imagined.

“Just now,” he replied.

“Well I never!” said the man, and again with an overtone that — no doubt because he was unable to see the face addressing him — set Köves puzzling afresh. He was unable to decide if what he was picking out was derision, or even some sort of concealed threat, or just a plain assertion. That uncertainty is what may have triggered him into elaborating, though no one had asked him:

“I have come to see my friend,” he said. “Only I didn’t let him know in advance, so I could surprise him …”

“What sort of friend?” the man asked. “Sziklai he’s called … He later changed that to Stone … He’s now known as Sassone, the world-famous writer of comedies and screenplays,” Köves explained. Then, feeling the solid ground of facts beneath his feet: “You must have heard of him!” he added, much more firmly than before.

“You know very well that we cannot know of a writer by that name here,” came the reply.

“No?…” Köves queried, and since there was no response, he remarked: “I can’t say I did know, but I’ll bear that in mind.” He stood there in silence for a short while, the yellowish light pouring out of the entrance lengthening his shadow in an odd manner, displaying the suitcase dangling from his hand as an unshapely lump that was part of his body. Then, a good deal more quietly than before, so that after some introductory chat they might strike a more confidential tone, he asked, “Where am I?”

“At home,” came the answer. It was now the man’s turn to pause a little. Köves caught sight of the slight puff of condensation from his breath in the now-cooling spring night air — at last indisputable corroboration of the person’s physical reality — as the man again spoke. This time he asked Köves with unmistakable amiability, almost a measure of sympathy:

“Do you wish to turn back?”

“How would I do that?” Köves asked.

The man stretched out an arm in a gesture of solicitation, as if he were making Köves a wordless offer. Köves turned round: a row of tiny portholes twinkled almost indiscernibly in the distance. It might perhaps have been the plane in which he had arrived. He was suddenly beset by a rush of homesickness for the guaranteed safety of its passenger compartment, the warmth of its air-conditioned atmosphere, its comfortable seats, its cosmopolitan passenger list, its smiling air hostesses, the unfussy, pull-down-table rituals of the meals, indeed even his bored and close-mouthed English neighbour, who always knew from where it was departing and at where it was arriving.

“No,” he said, turning back toward the man. “I think there’d be no point in doing that. Now that I’m here,” he added.

“As you please,” the man said. “We are not forcing you to do anything.”

“Yes,” Köves acknowledged. “It would be hard for me to prove the opposite.” He pondered a moment. “And yet you are forcing me,” he resumed. “Just like the beam of light that was sent to meet me.”

“You didn’t have to follow it,” the man instantly retorted.

“Of course,” Köves said, “of course. I could have stayed out under a raw sky until day breaks or I freeze”—though there was perhaps a touch of rhetorical exaggeration in that, seeing as was spring.

He caught a swiftly suppressed burst of laughter from above him.

“Come on, then,” the man eventually said. “Let’s get the formalities over with.” He stepped aside, and Köves was at last able to get under way and climb the few steps.

Certain preliminaries

He stepped into an empty, lighted hall; only now did Köves see how deceptive the evening had been outside, for here inside he did not find the lighting anything like as bright; to the contrary, it struck him more as gloomy, even gap-toothed here and there, and all in all fairly dingy. The hall itself was large, but in comparison with the arrivals halls of international airports — as witness the deserted desks, empty cashiers’ windows, and all the other installations over which he cast but a cursory glance — it was provincially small-scale. Köves was now at last able to take a look at the man with whom he had been speaking up to now: in truth, he saw little more than a uniform. The man himself struck him as matching it so well and being so inseparable from it that Köves almost had the impression — obviously a false impression, of course, no doubt prompted by his tiredness — that this uniform had existed from time immemorial and would exist for evermore, and that at all times it moulded its transient wearers to itself. The uniform moreover seemed familiar to him, though without his recognizing it. “It’s not military,” he mused, “nor the police. Nor is it …” he caught himself in a thought that suddenly broke free, to which he could not have put a definite name. At all events, he therefore decided that he was dealing with a customs officer: when it came down to it, nothing — nothing so far, at least — contradicted that.

Meanwhile the man asked Köves to follow him. He showed Köves into a room which opened straight off the hall: all it was furnished with was a long table, behind which stood three chairs. The customs man, as Köves now called him to himself, immediately went around the table and took a seat facing Köves. Though it might have been an observation of no significance, it struck Köves that he did not occupy the middle chair that was naturally enough on offer, but one of those on either side. Köves had to hand over his papers and to place his suitcase on the table.

“Please be so good as to go outside, and take a seat,” the customs man then said. “We shall call you when we need you.”

So, Köves sought a nearby seat for himself; it was an armchair, though its uncushioned, fold-up wooden seat did not hold out hope of too much comfort. From this position he was able to see the entire hall, but while he had been in the office, something had changed out there — most likely in the lightning, it occurred to Köves: it was now darker, in the meantime some of the light bulbs had been switched off; maybe they were getting ready to shut down. Indicative of that was that in the far corners of the hall cleaning staff, with leisurely, listless movements, had swung into operation; a man in a cap and blue coat towed a vacuum cleaner along on the immensely long, worn-out, colourless strip of carpeting, but it was a machine of an antiquated kind that Köves had not seen around for a long time: its wheezy humming filling the whole hall with a monotonous drone. Now that nothing bothered him, or maybe because he was already getting used to it, the hall somehow seemed familiar to Köves. He was assailed by a sensation — absurd, of course — that he had passed that way once before, a sensation caused, perhaps, by all the fake natural stone — on the walls, the floors, every conceivable place — and the distinctive lines of the counters and other furnishings: the mark of a certain taste, one might almost say style, which in mid-century could still be considered modern, but which so easily became outmoded with the passage of fifteen or twenty years. Only this, and then the feeling of exhaustion which was again getting the better of him, could have produced the strange illusion that what he was seeing he had already seen once before, and what was happening had already happened to him once before.

For all that, he didn’t know what was going to happen; Köves was suddenly gripped by a lightheaded, submissive, almost liberated feeling of being ready, all at once, to accept any adventure — come what may, whatever might snatch him, carry him off, and engulf him, whereby his life would take a new turn: Wasn’t that why he had set off this journey, after all? Köves’s life over there — somewhere into the night, or even beyond that, in the remoteness of limitless tracts, maybe in another dimension, who knows? — had, there was no denying it, hit rock bottom. As to how and why, Köves no longer — or for a goodish while at least — wished to think about that. He had probably gone to ruin bit by bit, doggedly, as if he were moving ahead, by imperceptible steps then: he had lived a certain kind of life, stumbled into certain situations, ditched his choices; and finally the colours of failure had emerged out of it all, it had been impossible to deny it any more. It may have begun at birth — or no, rather with his death, or to be more accurate, his rebirth. For Köves had survived his own death; at a certain moment in time when he ought to have died, he did not die, although everything had been made ready for that, it was an organized, socially approved, done deal, but Köves had simply been unwilling to satisfy the circumstances, was unable to withstand the natural instinct for life which was working inside him, not to speak of the good luck on offer, so therefore — defying all rationality — he had stayed alive. Because of that he had been subsequently dogged constantly by a painful sense of provisionality, like someone who is only waiting in a temporary hiding place to be called to account for his negligence; and although Köves himself, probably on account of the delicate structure of his mind — generally the mind — had not been fully aware of this, it nevertheless poisoned his further life and all his actions — even though he was not fully aware of it in point of fact and only saw the bewildering result. In short, he loafed around as a displaced person in his own anonymous life as in a baggy suit he had not been measured for and had been lent to him for some obscure purpose until, one fine day, enlightenment had dawned. This had happened in the shorter spur of a neon-lit, L-shaped corridor (where he had wound up through an utterly immaterial accident), in less than ten minutes (while he had been waiting for something utterly different), from which (having also seen to his accidental business in the meantime) he had stepped out onto the street with a fully formed task to accomplish. That task was essentially — much later, in the civilized, international ambience of the aircraft, for instance, in the company of the muchtravelled Englishman in the neighbouring seat, Köves would have been ashamed to admit it even to himself — to write a novel. It had become clear all too soon, however, that Köves was not in possession of the prerequisites needed for the task: he had no familiarity with the practice of novel-writing, for instance; he saw only in big outlines, but not at all in the more precise details, what kind of novel he should actually write, and yet a novel is composed primarily of its own details; nor did he have a clue as to what a novel was at all, or as to why individuals would write novels, and why he would write one himself, or as to what sense that might have at all, most particularly for himself, and anyway who was he, in point of fact, and so forth — so many thorny questions, then, each on its own able to get a person snared for a lifetime. In the end, the novel had been completed in ten years, during which Köves lost touch with the world. The occasional income that he derived from the entertainment world — since writing the novel rendered Köves increasingly unfit to entertain people — had dwindled dangerously; his wife was forced into self-sacrificing breadwinning, and Köves was anguished to see her gradual acquiescence in a hard fate that she could do nothing to alter; meanwhile, he himself, staying shut up in his room — to be quite precise, the one and only room of their apartment — and lost in an abstract world of signs, practically forgot what life in the outside world was like. On top of all that, having used his last savings to get the novel copied by a typist with a reputation as the best in the business, then had it bound in a glossy folder, it was simply returned by the publisher. “On the basis of the unanimous opinion [of our readers], 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 on the main protagonist’s, to put it mildly, odd reactions”; “For the most part your sentences are clumsy, couched in a tortuous form”—those were samples of what was said in the appended letter to Köves.

It was not this letter that exasperated Köves; he had completed the task he set himself, and — write to him whatever they liked — he was left with no doubts on that score; as to whether the novel stirred or didn’t stir the reader, Köves regarded that as no more than an exasperating and superfluous matter that they simply wanted to foist upon him, though it had nothing to do with him. For all that, a concept like “the reader,” along with the maniacal self-importance of the publisher’s letter on the subject of this by no means clarified, yet — for him at least — completely abstract concept gave Köves no rest, and in the end made him conscious of a strange circumstance that suddenly appeared before him in an aspect of forceful absurdity, namely that he was a writer. Up till then, that had never occurred to Köves, or if it had, then in a different form; certainly not in the way in which he now, in the light of the publisher’s letter, glimpsed himself, expelled from, and yet at the same time objectified in, this wretched line of occupation. There was no getting away from it, he had written a novel, but only in the sense that he would have flung himself out of even an aircraft into nothingness in the event of a terminal disaster, if he saw that as the sole possibility for survival; all at once it became obvious to Köves that, figuratively speaking, he could now only hit the ground as a writer or vanish into nothingness. This, though, awakened the most peculiar questions and thoughts in Köves. Before all else, whether this was what he had wanted, or to put it another way, whether it had actually been his goal, when he had set the task for himself as a result of the dawning of enlightenment, to become a writer? Köves no longer recalled; the years had washed away the memory of the moment, the experience of enlightenment had turned into wearisome effort, one might say a kind of slave labour, its purport continued to operate in Köves merely in the form of an implacable command spurring him on to accomplish his task. As a result, clarification of the question called for further reflection from Köves. He imagined, for instance, that the publisher had not written that letter, but exactly the opposite sort of letter. What was more — and Köves had heard that this sort of thing had happened in times past — the publisher’s readers, the editor in chief at their head, would turn up at his home around dawn to assure him they had spent the entire night reading his novel in one sitting, passing pages from one to the other, and that the reader was indubitably going to be stirred to the core, so that they were going to bring it out right away. And then? — a sour note of scepticism resurfaced for Köves. What did one book signify, bearing in mind that at least one million book titles were published annually across the face of the globe, if not more? What could a reader’s fleeting emotion signify (in his mind’s eye, Köves saw the deeply stirred reader as, in search of a fresh stirred feeling, he was already stretching out a hand absent-mindedly to the shelf for a new book) as compared with the years that he, Köves, had dedicated to his task as he ruined his life, drained himself, and tortured his wife? And finally, how could he be reconciled to the practical outcome of his all-consuming task: a pitiful fee — to get to the bottom of all this, Köves had recently been making enquiries to this end — that could be earned within a few months in any branch of industry which was useful, unquestionable, and not subject to assessment by any publisher’s reader?

Nothing became clearer to Köves than the fact that he had reached a dead end; he had irretrievably frittered away his time, what was more. He grew sick of novel-writing for good; indeed, sobering up as it were from an unbroken drunken binge which had lasted ten years, Köves was now unable to grasp with a clear head how he could have gone in for such a crazy undertaking. If he could at least be acquainted with the reason, then — or at least so Köves felt — he might find some solace in necessity. Like everyone else, he had naturally heard that what supposedly swept a person onto the novel-writing path was talent. For Köves, though, that term had signified nothing tangible. It somehow struck him in much the same colouring as saying about someone that his face flaunted a charming wart. That wart could later, no question, develop into an ugly inflamed lesion, even a malignancy, or it could remain as an attractive blemish — that was obviously a matter of luck. Except that Köves had never discovered on himself any irregularity of that kind; he had never considered himself to be the owner, whether privileged or unfortunate, of any kind of proud, innate distinguishing mark. The fault had to be lurking elsewhere, Köves reckoned, somewhere deeper down; in himself, in his circumstances, in his past, maybe even — who knows? — in his character: in everything that had happened to him, in the whole course of his life, to which he had not paid sufficient attention. If he could at least have his time over again, begin again from the beginning, Köves had daydreamed, everything would work out differently; he would know now where he ought to correct and change it. All of which, as he had been well aware, was impossible, and that was when he had decided on the trip. Not that he wished to leave his wife, home, and homeland in the lurch, but he had felt that he was in need of new inspiration, that he needed to dip his toes in foreign waters in order to be rejuvenated: he longed to be far away in order to get closer to himself, so that he might discard all that was old and lay hands on something new — in short, in order to discover himself and so begin a new life on new foundations.

Köves dreams. Then he is called for

Köves was also spurred on by a dream — the sort of constantly recurrent dream which visits everybody from time to time. It began with floating: Köves in nothingness. It was a twinkling nothingness, with minute points of light all around, like stars, yet it was a nothingness, and the many tiny lights led Köves astray more than they set him in the right direction. That was followed by anxiety, a bitter consciousness of a sense of his own confinement in big spaces; yet he was not afraid of becoming lost, that he would, as it were, be dissolved and vanish into thin air: on the contrary, even in his dream Köves distinctly felt he was apprehensive of coming across something. He was looking for something, but did not wish to find it; or to be more accurate, he wanted to find something, but not what he was looking for. His uneasiness kept growing, then all of a sudden scraps of things were being cast in front of Köves, as if they had been thrown aloft by the invisible jets of a diabolical fountain: faces and objects that were familiar to him. A face he loved, an object he saw, or made use of daily, a belonging he wore every day. He tried, but failed, to touch them, take them in his hands; he felt the objects and faces were somehow reproachfully watching his forlorn clawing after them, which was why they had offered themselves to him, so as to force him to struggle and, as it were, demonstrate that he was unable to grab hold of them. Köves felt that their distressing helplessness, their slipping past him, their sinking back down and dispersion, was his own fault: yes, he felt it was a fault that he was struggling in vain for them, that he was unable to hold in his hands things, each and every one of which was longing for the warmth of his touch. Köves sensed that desire clearly, including the clumsy yearnings of inanimate objects, which was why he was fleeing from them. He finally left them behind, or they disappeared, whereas he entered some sort of cavity: a cave or tunnel of some kind. It was nice there, because the tunnel was safe, dark, and warm; it would have been nice to stay there, to hide in the gloom, yet Köves was driven by an involuntary momentum, over which he had no control, to carry on further, onward, toward the light glimmering in the distance. The tunnel widened out all at once, expanding into a circular area, and Köves could see flaming letters as a kind of mene, mene, tekel, upharsin on the wall opposite. At first glance, he was terrorstricken by them, but then he noticed it wasn’t so bad as all that; he was standing in a square that was well known to him — probably somewhere around the middle of the Grand Boulevard — and he was looking at the letters of a modern advertisement flashing in red, yellow, and blue neon, only these letters were varying their colours, indeed even their shapes, so quickly that in the end Köves, though he sensed they contained an extraordinarily important message of which everyone in the world, except him alone, was aware, was unable to assemble a single word out of them. While he battled with growing irascibility to make sense of them, the letters seemed to have suddenly gone mad, first starting to spin at an ever-crazier speed, after which the coloured lights blurred hopelessly together and faded, so that in the end Köves could only see a barely glowing sphere somewhere far below his feet, with himself again floating in nothingness. Only then did he notice how greatly the sphere resembled the Earth, with some sort of outline showing on it, though not one of the continents or oceans — rather a tangled contour, a peculiar shade which kept changing shape like an indolent marine jellyfish, assuming ever more dreadful forms. Köves sensed with horror that this incessantly moving shadow, these continually transforming lines, must resemble something, or rather: someone, moreover an inexpressibly important being, to whom Köves could not say offhand whether he was bound by fear or attraction, but who — and he was quite sure about this, by contrast — was projecting the dark, amorphous blot onto this milky-white globe. He had to puzzle out who it could be; straining every nerve, he racked his brains, then all at once, but in a voice which was almost earsplitting, he heard his own name called.

Only his dream could have intensified the voice so hugely, for it was the customs man calling him from the door, and in all probability he had been obliged to repeat the name twice or three times over until Köves at last grasped, with embarrassment, that he had fallen asleep while waiting, and he now leapt hastily to his feet in order to follow the customs man into the office.

Customs inspection

Although still slightly drowsy, Köves nevertheless noticed a number of changes inside the room. First and foremost, and it may have been an incidental circumstance, but it struck Köves with the very first breath of air he took, was that the room was now full of harsh tobacco smoke. He blinked in disgruntlement, the acrid air irritating him to cough: he was not used to tobacco like that — at all events, to something a cut better. Apart from that, there were now three people sitting facing him, with on each of the two outer chairs a customs man, one of whom was Köves’s acquaintance, the other and also another — Köves could hardly characterize them better than that, because although obviously differed from his colleague in respect of personal features, through his uniform and the indifference reflected on his face, he looked exactly the same, and he knew that his customs man was who he was from the fact that he had just seen him take his seat on the chair to the right. The person seated in the middle Köves would have taken, at first glance, to be a soldier had he not quickly established that nothing supported that assumption, apart from the fawn-coloured tunic and the shirt and necktie of military hue: he carried no insignia of rank, nor belt nor shoulder strap by way of trimming, and so, Köves concluded, could not be a soldier, after all. In the end he decided that he too was a customs man, though clearly a different type of customs man — some sort of chief customs officer. Before them, in the middle of the table, he saw his suitcase again.

As he stepped into the room — on the principle that one should always be polite with customs men — Köves gave a friendly greeting of good evening, then waited attentively for their questions. Yet whether because they had not yet decided what to ask, or for some other reason of which Köves could not be aware, they asked nothing. One was smoking a cigarette, the second was leafing through documents of some kind, the third was scrutinizing him; they merged together in his blurred gaze in such a way that Köves finally saw them as a single triple-headed, six-armed machine, and it was obviously attributable to a brain confused by exhaustion that he suddenly caught himself on the point of racking his brains for an excuse, like somebody whom they had seen through and whose secret they had discovered — secret or offence, it came to same thing — which they were about to spring on him as a surprise, as Köves personally was not yet clear what it was.

“I wasn’t given a customs declaration form,” he remarked in the end, rather brusquely, in order to restore a due sense of proportion and order as it were.

“Do you have anything to declare, then?” the man in the middle said, immediately raising his head from his documents.

“I don’t know what is dutiable here,” Köves replied with icy politeness. A number of articles were reeled off; Köves mulled them over conscientiously, even reciting certain items to himself, in the manner of a respectful foreigner, who is showing he does not overestimate the local authorities precisely by showing his esteem, indeed even permitting himself a degree of persnicketiness in order to emphasize his goodwill, but at the same time also his rights, before replying that to the best of his recollection his baggage did not contain any of the articles that had been enumerated. But, he added immediately, if they wished, they should convince themselves of the fact. Whereupon he was given the answer that it was up to him to know what was in his luggage, to which Köves inquired whether they wished to inspect his suitcase.

“Should I open it?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer, with a strange zeal that even he sensed was excessive but was no longer able to keep in check, as if someone else were acting on his behalf, he leapt toward his case in order to snap open the locks. His efforts were superfluous, however: the case was already open. And when he hastily raised the top, although he found his belongings more or less in order, they were nevertheless not in the lovingly careful, painstaking order in which his wife had packed them for him.

He stared in astonishment into his suitcase, as if something indecent had been concealed in it.

“But you’ve already inspected it!” he exclaimed.

“Naturally,” the chief customs man nodded. Without saying a word, he scrutinized Köves for a while, and Köves could have sworn he saw the shadow of a smile of sorts flit across the narrow, pallid face. “You are always acting as if you were surprised,” he added, and Köves noticed that he exchanged a quick glance with his own customs man: he had to suppose that the latter had already briefed his boss on how he, Köves, had conducted himself in the course of their earlier conversation.

A silence descended. Köves irresolutely stood his ground; he was ransacking his brains for a question that he just could not put his finger on, so instead of that he finally asked:

“What do you intend to do with me?”

“That depends on you,” the person in the middle replied forthwith. “We didn’t invite you; you arrived here,” and here it crossed Köves’s mind that he had heard something of the kind already from his own customs man.

“Of course I did. But then why’s that so important?” he asked.

“We didn’t say that it was,” came the answer. “But if it is important, then it’s not important for us. You should quiz yourself, not us.”

“About what?” Köves, grumpy from drowsiness, asked like a child.

“About what brought you here.” That wasn’t a question, nor was it an assertion, yet Köves still found himself cudgeling his brains for an answer, and like someone plucking an incoherent image at random from his fragmentary dreams, he finally muttered:

“I saw a beam of light, I followed that.”

His rambling reason, however, must have stumbled on the right words, because his answer was evidently judged favourably:

“Carry on following it,” the chief customs man said, nodding more mildly, indeed with a quiet, enigmatic seriousness that was suddenly transmitted to the faces of the two customs men on either side of him, the way these things do with underlings: somewhat exaggerating the original model, as a result of which an expression of some kind of rigid, implacable solemnity now appeared on the two outer faces, and Köves would not have been astonished — or at least that’s how he felt at this juncture — if they had risen to their feet and saluted or started to sing. Without turning their heads that way, their gazes slipped over toward the chief customs man; he, however, did not move, and he now carried on, once more in his earlier manner:

“Your papers are in order. We shall treat you as if you had been domiciled abroad. Obviously you will wish to continue your original activity. In this envelope,” and here he placed a brown envelope on the table before Köves, “you will find the key and the address of your apartment. Consider it an object that has been on deposit — as if you had left it with us and were now getting it back. Your suitcase will remain here. We’ll let you know when and where you can pick it up.”

He fell silent. Then in a tone which, apart from a certain conditioned mechanicalness, expressed nothing: no promise, but also no rejection:

“Welcome back!” and stretching out his arm he pointed toward the door.