Fiasco

On waking the next day. Preliminaries. Köves sits down

Although he had been allocated his home, Köves did not spend the remaining hours of that night in his bed; as to exactly where he did spend them, in the first moments of starting up from an, in all likelihood, brief and light, yet nonetheless all-obliterating dream, maybe he did not know either. The sky had assumed a glassy brightness; his limbs felt stiff and numb, his shoulder blades were pressed up against the back of a bench in the park area of a public square, his neck felt as if it had been dislocated: it could be that as he was sleeping he had simply laid it on the shoulder of the stranger seated next to him, a basically well-built, tubby man wearing a polka-dot bow-tie.

“Woken up, have we?” the stranger inquired with a friendly smile on his moon face.

Since Köves was still staring at him wordlessly, and with the confused gaze of someone who has been awakened suddenly, he added by way of explanation:

“You had a good long sleep here, on my shoulder.” From which it seemed that they must have got onto informal speaking terms in the course of the night. But no, only now did Köves recall that the man had spoken in a familiar tone from the very start, had addressed him as if they were already acquainted — obviously confusing him with someone else — and he, Köves, had let it pass, not being one to stand on his dignity. Köves also recollected that his new acquaintance had called himself a bar pianist, who had come from his place of work, a nearby nightclub (Köves had been utterly amazed to note to himself at the time that — whatever next! — the place even has a nightclub), in order to clear his lungs of the bar’s smoky air here on the park bench.

How long could he have been asleep? A minute or an hour? Köves looked disorientedly around: the sparsely placed street lamps were still lit — green-flamed gas lamps on cast-iron posts with spiral ornaments, as in Köves’s happier childhood days — and electric lights were glowing here and there in the windows of the grey, shabby houses surrounding the square. Köves could practically hear the bustling going on behind them, the rushed and hasty noises of waking up and getting ready, and was almost waiting for the as yet closed front doors to spring open and people to pour out of the damp doorways and line up in order to be counted. He must have dreamed something, his irrational ideas were mostly likely still being fed by that, yet Köves was nevertheless seized by a disagreeable emotion, a sense of having omitted to do something: he had already been put on a roll call somewhere, he was missing from somewhere, and an irreparable silence would be the response to the strident announcement of his name.

“I have to go!” he suddenly jumped up from the bench.

“Where to?” The pianist registered surprise, and it occurred to Köves just how often, over the past hours, this surprised, or at least surprised-sounding, voice had already held him back from leaving.

“Home,” he said.

“What for?” With his eyes rounded and hands outspread, the pianist certainly looked like someone who was unable to make head or tail of Köves, again rousing the feeling in Köves that only at the expense of an unusual effort would he be able to convey his intentions, which even then would be left as some sort of ludicrous cavilling.

“I’m tired,” he said hesitantly, as if offering an excuse.

“So, relax!” The pianist patted the broken planks of the bench with a podgily soft hand. Perhaps still not truly awake, Köves felt his resistance weakening; the earlier pressing urgency had been replaced within him by a pleasant torpidity.

“You can’t put your head down now anyway,” the pianist explained, as though to a child. “By the time you snuggle into bed and fall asleep, the alarm clock will be ringing. Or is it just that your mind won’t rest unless you are rushing around after something?” Catching on slowly, as it were, Köves was now starting to be almost ashamed of himself, feeling he could be convinced of anything if he came up against the necessary patience or energy.

“Sit back down for a while,” the pianist continued. “Look!” he produced from his coat pocket a flat bottle that was already rather familiar to Köves. “There’s a drop still slopping about the bottom of this. That’ll bring you round.” So Köves complied again, as he had so many times during the hours which had passed. Those hours had now left in Köves’s mind an impression merely of some sort of obscure struggle of which he himself seemed to be not so much a participant as merely the object — an object that he was soon happier to abandon to the enemy than quarrel over, because, or so Köves felt — right then it was just a burden to him. This mind-numbing exhaustion, the night’s unclassifiable experiences, then to top it all those fine, fiery slugs he had swigged from the continually proffered bottle — that had to be the reason why even now, with his mind clearing, Köves was only able to summon up a few fragmentary details.

At all events, he had got into town from the airport by bus; Köves remembered how he had tried to stay alert, but his head had kept growing heavy with sleep and dropping onto his chest. His aim had been as clear as it was obscure: first of all, to reach a bed, in order at last to get a good sleep, with everything else taking its turn after that. He found the full address of his apartment in the envelope, at the top of a printed page, which had an official appearance: a registration form or a permit, in the dim lighting of the airport arrivals hall, and in his haste to reach the bus, Köves did not try to make head or tail of it, the one thing he managed to pick out being that he was obliged at all times to show it at the behest of any authority. Köves had a vague idea that he had already walked down the designated street — not here, of course, not one street of which he had seen as yet, let alone walked down, but in the place from which he had started on life’s journey, his native city, Budapest; but Köves managed quite easily to gloss over this difference, despite the fact that it might have become a source of misunderstanding, because he was cherishing a hope that he would find his street here, too, and if there was no other way, then he would get into a taxi, his purse would stand that.

The bus, a decrepit rattletrap of a crate, shook the very spirit from him. Köves saw factories, endless dismal suburbs, neglected, tumbledown dwellings, then nothing, after which a jolt again startled him awake: they were snaking along barely lit side streets, the windows were dark, a reek of insecticide was seeping out of the houses, the streets were deserted. Köves recalled there being later on a broad, dark thoroughfare with vacant lots between the houses, then a sharp bend, and all at once he found himself in a square (as best he recalled he was asked to get off, because they had reached the terminus), where Köves in the first flush of curiosity looked around with a measure of inward approval, as though he knew exactly where he had arrived.

Yet he soon realized that this feeling of his ran counter to sound common sense and, of course — as became clear on closer inspection — counter to reality. All it came down to was Köves’s hunch that he had seen the square somewhere before now, in the way that, arriving like this, in the middle of the night, at any central square of that kind, in any city, might have seemed familiar to him at first glance — from his dreams, from movies, from travel brochures, from illustrated guidebooks, from memories of unfathomable origin. The square to which it bore a likeness, or rather to which he likened it, Köves had last seen in Budapest before he had left on his travels: it was a quadrangular square, girded by proud buildings, in the middle of which was a diminutive park, in which stood an imposing group of statues. Now, this square too was unquestionably quadrangular, but of course differently: there were buildings here as well — even the dim street lighting revealed something of their original magnificence — yet what a lamentable sight they presented now! All maimed, senile war invalids. Köves was dumbfounded. Blackened walls, peeling plasterwork, pitting, and clefts everywhere. Were they bearing the traces of fighting? Had they been struck by some natural calamity? One of the houses, as if blinded, was lacking the entire row of windows on its uppermost floor, and in place of ornamental portals and elegant shops were mute gateways and boarded-up shop windows. In the middle of this square too Köves saw a sculptural group, the shoulders and chest of its main subject — a seated man — towering on a high plinth spattered with bird droppings, and he stepped closer in order to look him in the eyes (that sombre expression might, perhaps, put him on the right track), but the bowed head stared, sunk uncommunicatively, inscrutably, into darkness.

The square was deserted, with no sign of any taxi or night transport; Köves set off on foot with the peculiar assurance of a person led by memory, or by his travel experiences, although he could not boast of any travel experience, nor could memory have guided him in a place he had never been before. He left streets behind him, the houses bordered the line of his steps like decimated, lurching beggars, and Köves recalled that he had been startled when an infant had suddenly cried out from behind a window, as if he were surprised that children were also raised in this city. At street corners he was always gripped by the same shy hope: each time he hoped he had lost his way. Yet each and every time he came upon precisely the place he had known in advance, and at worst he did not recognize it immediately; for instance, in the place of a tall building he might now find a ruin or an empty lot; in place of a specific stretch of street that he would look for in vain, he would find one of a different character yet, in the end, exactly the same.

In Köves’s memory, these minutes remained the most testing: he was going around a foreign city with whose every nook and cranny he was nevertheless familiar — a strange sensation. Köves did not know how to wrestle with it. His legs were leaden, as if he were walking not on asphalt but in sticky tar. At one point, he noticed by the edge of the pavement an advertising pillar, which was adorned with just one poster, and even that was a scrap, for the greater part of it had been ripped off or become detached due to the vicissitudes of the weather. CITY OF LIGHT, Köves read in big capitals. Was it an advertisement? A slogan? A cinema bill? A command? At all events the street was dark; Köves was reminded of how full of hope he had been on arrival, the unhesitating confidence with which he had followed that beam of light; though it had happened only shortly before, Köves still felt as if he had travelled an endless road since then, up hill and down dale, from the warmth into the cold, and the road he had covered had used up all his strength. The sense of wonder had quit him, bit by bit; he was seized by a benevolent weakness, and in the way he ran his hand over a scabby house wall or a boarded-up shop window, in the way his steps found their way in the already familiar streets, Köves was possessed by that unfamiliar, and yet at the same time relaxed, almost intimate sense of homelessness that was on the verge of suggesting, to an intellect sinking back into dull exhaustion, that he was, indeed, back home.

At this point, his recollections started to become disjointed, even undirected, like his steps; he again emerged into a square somewhere; he rambled along a dusty promenade among broken see-saws, abandoned sandcastles, heavy, ungainly benches that had been left high and dry from bygone days, and might have been taken for a wandering drunk — at least that was how the question, full of good-humoured support, and addressed to him from one of the benches, sounded to his ears:

“Whither, whither into the night are you going, old pal?” And he can hardly have dispelled that impression with his answer:

“Home,” which had the ring of a gentle complaint. The man who had addressed him — Köves saw him in the murk of the spreading tree which overhung the bench more as an indistinct blob — was assuming a grave air as he nodded understandingly, like someone who fully appreciated that little good could be waiting for Köves back home.

“So is it far to go still?” he pressed his inquiries. In a rather doubtful tone, like someone who would not be surprised if he were to be informed that he was talking nonsense, Köves named the street, but the man merely said, with a renewed sympathetic nod:

“Well yes, that’s a fair way off from here.”

“But shorter if I go out by the bank of the Danube,” Köves gave it another go, again rather as if he were counting on being rebutted, on having it explained to him, for example, that he was blathering, there was no bank of the Danube here, while nobody had heard of the street, yet the stranger merely disputed whether Köves would really be able to cut his journey in the direction he had indicated:

“Take a breather first, chum!” he proposed, and Köves slowly, awkwardly lowered his body to sit beside him — for just a couple of minutes, of course, in order to pull himself together — on the bench.

Continuation

But as to how they whiled away those few hours, sitting here next to each other, that — apart from his ever more uncertain attempts to depart (as if he did not just tolerate but frankly expected the pianist, each and every time to prevail upon him to stay) — Köves would have found it hard to say. Naturally they had talked; they had probably entertained themselves with funny stories, because Köves recollected having laughed. It had not taken long for the flat bottle to materialize for the first time from the pianist’s pocket, and, turning it round and round in a hand raised on high, he had done his utmost to capture on it the dying rays of the moon descending onto a nearby house roof:

“Cognac,” he whispered playfully in a respectful, all but reverential tone.

At all events, he soon took Köves into his confidence, relating that he played in a nightclub called the Twinkling Star:

“I’m acting as if you didn’t know, being that you’re one of our regulars,” he said.

“Oh yes,” Köves hastened to confirm.

“Though I haven’t seen much of you recently.” The pianist peered at Köves with a frown, looking suspicious all of a sudden: “Who exactly are you, anyway?” he asked, as if he had unexpectedly regretted having asked Köves to sit beside him, and, having scratched his head in vain to come up with some sort of explanation or justification as to his identity, all that Köves could say in his sudden confusion was:

“Who indeed?” and shrugged his shoulders. “I’m called Köves,” he added; it was odd to hear his name sounding so insignificant that it rang almost disparagingly.

Yet it seemed this completely reassured the pianist: from the bottomless, satchel-like pockets of the overcoat that lay unbuttoned on his belly there now emerged sandwiches in paper serviettes.

“Life is short, the night is long,” he said merrily. “I always stock up before closing time. Go ahead!” he offered them to Köves, himself taking a big bite of one. “In the Twinkling Star,” he carried on with his mouth full, “you can come by exclusive nibbles, can’t you, even in this day and age.” The pianist at this point pulled a one-sided smile, as if he were speaking contemptuously about the place, about which, at one and the same time, in a manner Köves would have found hard to explain, he was nevertheless bragging. “When was the last time you ate any ham?” He winked at Köves.

“This evening,” Köves gave himself away.

“Oh!” The pianist was amazed. “Where?”

“On the flight,” said Köves. “That’s what the stewardess brought round,” he added by way of explanation, at which the pianist burst out laughing, as if he had finally made Köves out, and after some hesitation, and at first by no means as heartily but then all the more self-forgetfully, as if something had lifted inside him, Köves joined in.

“So, tell me now,” the pianist said, slapping his thigh, “what else did you have?”

“Cold sirloin of beef, a peach, wine, chocolate,” Köves recited, and both of them doubled up with laughter, so that even Köves had the feeling he was giving voice to distant fantasies, and childish ones at that, which were of no use at all other than for giving the grown-ups something to laugh about for a few minutes.

A bit later, however, the pianist again became long-faced; it seemed as if, behind the cheerfully glib words, he had continued to be preoccupied with disquieting thoughts, and he made ever more frequent references to his occupation and the nightclub, especially after Köves had remarked that it must be great to be an instrumentalist: he, Köves, supposed that a musician’s life was a truly splendid, independent life, all it required was the talent for it, but that was something that he, Köves, sadly did not have.

It seemed, though, that he had said the wrong thing, because to all intents and purposes the pianist took offence:

“I’m well aware what you people think of me,” he said, as if Köves belonged to a large circle of some kind who were all his adversaries: “He,” and here he obviously meant himself, “he has it easy! He’s got a good thing going for him! He plonks away a bit on the piano every evening, croons into a microphone, pockets the tips, and that’s your lot!.. Huh!” he gave an indignant laugh, so to say, to behold such ignorance.

“And it isn’t?’ Köves wished to know.

“How would it be?’ the pianist burst out. “In a place where whiskey is also being purveyed!”

“Why?” Köves asked. “Shouldn’t it be?”

“Most certainly!” the pianist said. “But I ask you … Or rather not I, because it’s of no interest to me, but …” The pianist now looked a bit flustered, as if he had become trapped in a sentence that could not be continued, and out of the shadow of the branches arching over his head he cast a swift glance at Köves, seated in the glimmering of the starry sky, before, having palpably calmed down on the one hand, but ever more agitatedly on the other, he carried on: “So anyway, as to who drinks the whiskey … what pays for it?! And why whiskey, of all things?!”

Köves responded that he was in no position to know.

“And you think I ought to?!” the pianist heatedly rejoined, so Köves deemed it advisable to hold his peace, because it seemed to him that whatever he might say, right now it would only nettle him.

As it was, the pianist quickly calmed down:

“Right, let’s have a slug!” He raised the bottle in Köves’s direction.

The cheerfulness was restored for only a brief period, however:

“Then there’s the numbers …” He fretted some more.

Köves had the feeling that this time he was only expecting to be prompted:

“What numbers?” he lent a helping hand.

“The ones I’m not supposed to play,” the pianist replied straightaway, in a slightly plaintive tone.

“Banned numbers?” Köves pumped him some more.

“What do you mean, ‘banned’?!” the pianist protested. If only they were, he explained, then he would not get the headaches either. What was banned was banned, a clear-cut matter: it was there on the list, and he wouldn’t play it for any money. Except that there were other numbers, he continued, which were, how should he put it, tricky numbers; numbers which did not appear on any lists, so nobody could claim they were banned numbers; but then it was still not advisable to play them — and of course, they were the ones requested by most of the guests.

“Now, what can I say to them? That they’re banned?” he posed the question, obviously not to Köves, but then it nevertheless seemed as though it were to him. “That would be slanderous, wouldn’t it, even worse than my just playing them!” he went on to answer that himself. “How can I say a musical number is banned when, on the contrary, it is permitted, just tricky, and thus undesirable — though one cannot say even that about it, because if it were undesirable, then it would be banned …”

The pianist relapsed into a troubled silence, clearly rejecting the solution that, on the basis of what he heard, Köves too had to regard as inexpedient, but otherwise he accompanied the pianist’s words with much nodding, feeling that he was hearing about interesting things, and even if he could not understand him in every respect, of course, he found that what the pianist was saying was nevertheless not entirely unfamiliar.

“Or,” he levelled a fresh question at Köves, “am I to tell them that I don’t know the number?”

Köves, tiring a bit by this point, felt it made a certain sense.

“But then what kind of pianist does that make me?” The pianist gazed reproachfully at Köves, and Köves conceded that, to be sure, he had not taken that objection into consideration. “I’m renowned,” the pianist complained, or at least it sounded as if he were complaining, “for knowing every number in the book. That’s what I make a living from, and I don’t just make a living from it: I really do know every number in the book, I …,” and at this point the pianist looked disconcerted, as if he did not know how he should express sentiments that he maybe did not wish to express in full. “So anyway,” he carried on, “I won’t budge on that. You could ask me why.…” He glanced at Köves, but Köves didn’t ask anything. “Even so, the only answer I have is that I won’t give an inch.” For a while he sat mutely beside Köves, presumably deliberating. “I won’t let my good name be besmirched!” he announced abruptly, almost angrily, as it were against his better judgement. “Ah!” he then let fling. “How would you people know what it is like when an evening comes to the end, the low lighting is turned off, I shut the lid of the piano, and I start to ruminate about what numbers I have played, and who requested them, who was sitting at the tables, and who could that unknown chap be who …” The pianist fell silent, and for a long time he said no more, so Köves could only guess that he might be occupied with what he had just referred to as “ruminating.”

As time passed, however, he seemed to forget that, too, and the good humour returned; yet the earlier weariness descended afresh on Köves’s senses. The last words that he believed he heard were the following: “Don’t ever feel embarrassed, old friend, just lay your head on my shoulder. If you want, I’ll even hum a lullaby into your ear”—and maybe it was not the pianist who said them but Köves who dreamed them, because by then he was asleep.

Daybreak. Motor trucks. Köves speaks his mind

So, Köves was still — or again — sitting there, and the fire of the last drop of the pianist’s drink was coursing beneficially through his veins.

“How long are we going to stay?” he asked, to which the pianist tersely said no more than:

“Not long now,” though he seemed in the meantime to be paying Köves hardly any attention. In the nascent light, Köves was now readily able to distinguish his slack and yet lively face: a new expression was displayed on that face — an expression which was abstracted yet at the same time uneasy. The ponderous body also shifted, with its limbs as it were rearranging themselves: the trunk which up till then had been turned toward Köves, was now leaning back; the feet, which had been slipped into shiny patent-leather shoes with old-fashioned pointed toes, were stretched out before him; the arms were outspread on the back of the seat — so long were his arms that one hand was dangling behind Köves from the end of the seat back — and he was visibly concentrating his whole attention on the street, as if he were awaiting someone who ought to be coming into view any time now. And Köves was assailed by a feeling — again an absurd feeling, just like he’d had the previous evening at the airport — that he too had been waiting all along, and was waiting now, for the same thing that the pianist was waiting for, even though he did not know, of course, precisely what it was they were waiting for, indeed, even whether they were waiting for anything at all in the first place.

So, he shifted his position, he too stretched out comfortably, lounging as if he were at home, so their arms were entwined, although they, like animals squeezed into a refuge, may not even have noticed this. Perhaps because his eyes had adjusted to it, but perhaps because his viewpoint had altered in the meantime, Köves did not judge the square as being so woeful now as he had done at night. The one thing that bothered him a little was a black firewall which was standing solitarily, looking as if a hurricane had blown the rest of the house away from it. Farther off extended a broad thoroughfare that Köves fancied he recognized, though in all probability this was a trick of the still uncertain light, because on closer inspection it proved not to be the street he had recognized, or at least that his eyes and his feet were used to. From that direction movement and scraps of sound drew Köves’s attention to them: people were gathering in front of a pulled-down iron roll-shutter, mainly women, still in make-do clothing, sloppy, their heads bound in curlers. So they’ve started queuing up this early: no doubt it’s for milk, thought Köves, seeing the cans and bottles that were dangling from the hands. From another direction there suddenly appeared hurrying, sullen-browed passers-by, so many silent reproaches as far as Köves was concerned; whether lugging bags or swinging empty hands, they were heading to wherever it was that for some reason — presumably obvious to them — they needed to be present. With heavy clattering, boxed-shaped trams began carrying their as yet sparse human cargoes hither and thither; cars whisked by, and Köves stared at them in bafflement at first, but before long he grew accustomed to their angular, cumbersome shapes. With a loud jolting on the even cobblestones, motor trucks also now appeared, two of them, one behind the other, and Köves may well have been daydreaming, because he was late in noticing their strange freight: people were seated on their platforms, men, women, and, so it seemed, even children. Their bundles and belongings, the odd piece of furniture, indicated that these were families who were moving house — all that was missing being at most any sign of joy or excitement or even anxiety, not to say vexation, at such a removal, at what was, therefore, some kind of change, a new circumstance in life. The lifeless faces, possibly still worn from an early wakening, passed before Köves’s eyes in the dawn as if they were turning their backs indifferently on what they were leaving behind. Maybe because they were united in their sullen bad humour with those who were transporting them, Köves was slightly tardy in distinguishing the men squatting in the back of the trucks who were gripping a rifle between their knees: from their uniforms — he could hardly believe his eyes — Köves recognized them as being customs men, albeit shabbier-looking, commoner, or, as Köves would have put it, more pitiful than the customs men who had welcomed him.

He glanced at the pianist, but the latter did not return the look: hidden under the tree, he was watching the trucks with a keen, inquisitive gaze that now as good as pinched his normally soft, doughy features. He was watching them approach; when they got nearer, he almost stood on tiptoe in order to get a look into them, then turned as they passed and did not let them out of his sight until they had vanished in the distant bend in the road.

Then slowly, unfolding virtually every one of his limbs individually in the daybreak, rather like a genie in the process of slipping out of a flask, the pianist struggled to his feet off the bench. He flexed so violently that his limbs almost cracked, like a tree bending its branches; it was only now that it could be seen what a giant he was, with Köves (not himself exactly short) being practically dwarfed beside him when he too — involuntarily — got to his feet.

“We can go and get some shut-eye,” the pianist said and gave a big yawn. “The day’s done.” Köves seemed to pick out from this something like a quiet satisfaction in the voice. However, it would have been futile searching for any sign of the affability he had grown used to: the pianist did not look at him any more, rather as though he had ended the service that, for some obscure reason, had bound him to Köves so far. His face was tired, worn, grey as the morning — grey as the truth, Köves caught himself thinking. A bit later (by then they were walking outside on the street, with Köves virtually not noticing that they had set off), the pianist threw in:

“Well, they won’t come today then; they always come at dawn.”

“Always?” Köves asked, most likely just for the sake of asking something; he was a bit confused, besides which he was forced to step on it, because it looked as though the pianist’s trek had all of a sudden become urgent, and that he did not concern himself greatly with the fact that his own long steps were leaving Köves trailing behind.

“Didn’t you know that?” The pianist looked down at him from the height of his shoulders.

“I knew about it as such,” said Köves, but then, as though giving an answer to something different from, or maybe more than, he had been asked, he exclaimed: “Of course, I knew, I had to, how could I possibly say that I didn’t!” whereupon the pianist gave him a surprised glance. “It’s just that maybe … how should I put it … yes, it wasn’t something I was ready for,” he added, much more softly, still quite flustered but already starting to compose himself, though even so passers-by remarked it, albeit not as though they had been brought up short by curiosity, more in the sense that they hurried along still faster, fearing that even so they might unavoidably be obliged to overhear something.

“But you have to be ready for it,” said the pianist, this time again looking more amiably at Köves, as if he were now striking up a friendship afresh.

“Now I don’t understand,” said Köves.

“What do you mean?”

“The bench.”

“One of the best benches known to me in the city,” said the pianist.

“It’s because of the tree that you find it so pleasing,” Köves nodded. “And also because I was there as well,” he tacked on after some reflection.

“You got it! Two together makes it more entertaining.” At this moment the pianist was quite as he had been, a broad smile wreathing his broad features, just as when he had taken Köves under his wing that night. “And more secure,” he added.

Köves again pondered this.

“I wouldn’t say that,” he said eventually.

“One still feels that way; you’d have to admit that much at least.” The pianist looked imploringly at Köves, in the way that one appeases the quarrelsome.

“Only for them to take the other one off along with you,” slipped out of Köves’s mouth before he had given any thought to the demands of good manners. “Do you know many benches?” he then asked in order to temper his words.

“Plenty,” said the pianist. “Pretty well all of them.”

By this point, the bustle through which they were proceeding was starting to pick up. At times they jostled among other people, at other times being held up by a red lamp.

“And do you imagine,” Köves, in full stride now, turned his whole body toward the pianist, looking up at him as at a lighthouse tower, “do you imagine they’re not going to find you on a park bench?”

“Who’s saying that?” the pianist replied. I just don’t want them to haul me out of bed.”

“What difference does it make?” Köves enquired, and for a while the pianist did not reply; he paced mutely beside Köves, seemingly plunged in thought, as if the question had hit a nail on the head, despite the fact that it was unlikely — or so Köves supposed — he had not already put it to himself.

“The difference between a rat and a rabbit may not be great,” the pianist eventually spoke, “but it’s crucial for me.”

“And why would they haul you out anyway?” Köves probed further. “Over the numbers?”

But the pianist merely smiled with sealed lips at that.

“Is there any way of knowing over what?” he then returned the question to Köves.

“No, there isn’t,” Köves admitted. They had reached a major crossroad, and as the morning light was reaching its fullness Köves looked around without any curiosity, feeling that he would now easily find his way: there was just a short stretch to go until he got home. “All the same …,” he said haltingly, as if he were searching for the words: “All the same … I think you’re exaggerating.” The pianist smiled mutely — the smile of a person who was in the know, more than he was willing to let on. As though triggered by that smile, Köves burst out: “Is that what our lives are about: avoiding winding up as freight on one of those trucks?”

“That, indeed,” the pianist nodded, and by way of reassurance, as it were, patted Köves gently on the nape of the neck. “And then you wind up on it anyway. If you’re really lucky,” he qualified with an expression that Köves this time felt was malicious, almost antagonistic, “you might even wind up at the back, at the rear end.”

“I don’t want the luck,” said Köves, “nor do I want sit at the rear end, but in the middle.” His agitation was in no way about to subside: “I think, he carried on, “all of you here are making a mistake. You pretend that all that exists are benches and those trucks … but there are other things …”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” and it seemed that Köves indeed did not know. Still, he did not let up:

“Something that’s outside all this. Or at least elsewhere. Something,” he suddenly came upon a word that visibly gratified him: “undefiled.”

“And what would that be?” the pianist wanted to know, his expression sceptical yet not entirely devoid of interest.

“I don’t know. That’s just it: I don’t know,” said Köves. “But I’m going to hunt for it,” he added swiftly, and no doubt equally involuntarily, because it seemed as if what he had just said had surprised himself most of all. “Yes,” he reiterated, as if all he were seeking to do was convince the pianist, or maybe himself: “That’s why I’m here, in order to find it.”

But this was where the pianist now came to a standstill and offered his hand:

“Well, much luck with that,” he said. “This is where I turn off, while you go straight on. Drop by to see me at the nightclub one evening. Don’t worry about the money, you’ll be my guest. As long as you find me there,” he added with a wry smile on his big, mellow face.

Köves promised to pay a visit. The pianist then turned off to the right, while Köves went on straight ahead.

Dwelling

Köves lived in a long but in other respects not particularly distinctive side street; to the best of his recollection — though his memory might well have been playing tricks, of course — there had at one time been some fairly comfortable dwellings in this district of the city. By now, of course, the houses were deteriorating, showing signs of damage and defacement, some of them literally crumbling, with, here and there, a balcony that had once boasted sweeping curves now disfigured and hanging into space over the heads of passers-by, with a notice warning of the threat to life, though evidently no one paid it any attention, and after the first few times of giving a cautionary glance up and dutifully walking round the warning sign Köves too passed beneath them with a nonchalant sense of defiance, and later on forgot even that. In the entrance hall he was greeted with a musty smell. Only a few of the imitation marble slabs that had faced the walls in the stairwell had remained in place, the elevator did not work, and there were gaps and cracks in the staircase as if iron-toothed beasts were taking bites out of the steps by night. Since he could hear sounds behind his front door: movement, a rapid patter of short steps, a shrill female voice as well as a second, croaking one of more uncertain origin, Köves did not even attempt to use his key — that too he found in the envelope he had been given by the chief customs man — but rather rang the bell so as not to embarrass anyone.

Shortly after, a woman who was on the short side and well into her forties appeared in the doorway wearing sloppy men’s trousers and a blouse of some kind, with what looked as if it might be alarm on her wan, peaky face, which disappeared the moment she had given Köves the once-over.

“So, here you are,” she said, stepping aside to permit Köves to step past her into the hallway. “We were expecting you yesterday.”

“Me?” Köves was astonished.

“Well, maybe not you specifically, but …”

“Who’s come?” the previous croaking voice, presumably an adolescent boy, could be heard now, amidst a rattling of crockery, from one side, from the kitchen.

“Nobody, just the lodger,” the woman called out and then again turned to Köves: “Or are you not the lodger?” and again cast a suspicious glance at him, even stepped back a bit as if she were suddenly regretting that she had let someone in who might be capable of anything.

But Köves hastened to reassure her:

“Of course,” and if he felt a sense of some kind of irrational disappointment, he could only blame himself: by the sober light of day, naturally, he could not have seriously supposed that he had been accorded the priceless gift of a home of his own; as it was, they had probably done more for him than they had thought — most likely nothing more than a provision that was driven by the pressure of necessity, so they would not have to immediately start shifting him from place to place as a homeless person. “I couldn’t come yesterday,” he continued, “because I arrived overnight …” Just in time Köves strangled his explanation, for he had rashly almost disclosed his obscure origin, so, as it was, his sentence sounded unfinished, though fortunately the landlady helped him out:

“From the country?”

“Yes, from the country,” Köves hastily acquiesced.

“I thought so right away.” The woman did not hide her dissatisfaction in the slightest. “I hope you don’t want to bring your family here, because in that case …”

But Köves interjected:

“I’m unmarried,” at which the woman fell silent and now for the first time peered more attentively at Köves’s face, as if with those two words — or the way he had said them — Köves had to some extent won her over.

“Can you play chess?” someone chimed in at that moment beside her: he caught sight of a chubby, bespectacled boy of thirteen or fourteen whose spiky hair, podgy physique, wobbly chin, and yet angular features reminded him of a hedgehog; he may have already been standing there in the kitchen door, watching them for a while, holding a half-nibbled slice of bread-and-butter in one hand, while two steaming teacups could be seen on the kitchen table behind him.

“Peter,” his mother chided him, “don’t bother …,” and here she hesitated, and Köves was just on the point of telling them his name — in the confusion introductions had somehow been forgotten — but the woman had already carried on: “You can see he’s only just arrived, he’s probably tired.”

“Well, can you or can’t you?!” The boy seemed not to have heard the admonition, and the peculiar strictness manifested on his face made Köves smile:

“In that case,” he said, “I can. Not very well, of course, just the way a person generally does.”

“We’ll see about that,” the boy clenched his lips as if he were engrossed in turning something over in his head. “I’ll get the chess board right away!” he announced and at that was already running out of the hallway toward a glass door — obviously the living-room.

Hi mother, however, nimbly jumped after him and managed to grab him by an arm:

“Didn’t you hear what I said? Finish your breakfast instead or you’ll be late for school and me for the office!” she reprimanded him. “My son,” she turned with an apologetic smile to Köves, still gripping Peter’s arm, “always sets his priority on pastimes before …”

“That’s a lie!” The boy’s seething anger, the palely clenched corners of his mouth and trembling of his lips genuinely alarmed Köves.

“Peter!” the woman rebuked him in a strangled voice, even shaking him a little as if to rouse him.

“That’s a lie!” the boy repeated, though more as if he was over the worst of it. “You know full well that it’s not a pastime!” at which he wrenched himself from his mother’s grasp, dashed straight into the kitchen, and slammed the door behind him with a great crash.

The landlady looked embarrassed:

“I don’t know what’s up with him …,” she muttered by way of an excuse. “He’s so on edge …”

To which Köves said:

“It’s hardly any wonder these days,” and it seemed he had settled on the right words, because although the woman evasively said no more than, “Come, I’ll show you the room,” her expression relaxed, showing something close to gratitude.

Köves’s room opened onto the other side of the hallway, diagonally opposite the kitchen: it was not particularly large, but it was enough for sleeping in and even gave a bit of room to swing a cat, the sort of place, Köves recalled, that back in his childhood had been called “the servant’s quarters.” It had obviously been designed to be darker, but since the firewall that would normally have overlooked the window — the whole of the next-door house was simply missing, its former site being marked by a dusty pile of rubble on the ground down below — the room was flooded with light; farther off was a disorderly yard beyond which was the back of another house, with its outside corridors, apertures onto its stairwells, its windows, indeed in many cases open kitchen doors with the figures that were bustling inside or before them, rather as if Köves had a view of its innards. The couch promised to be a good place to lie on — Köves was almost dying to try it out straight away — aside from which there was just enough room for a flimsy wardrobe, seat, and table, the latter being something the landlady seemed to be almost proud of:

“You can work on it, if you wish — not that I know what sort of a job you have, of course,” she gave Köves a sidelong glance, and it struck Köves what a surprisingly clear impression her pale blue eyes made in that rumpled face — unexpected pools in a ravaged countryside, so that in the meanwhile of course he forgot to answer the implicit question he had been posed (or rather not posed), so that the woman, having waited in vain for a moment, carried on:

“It would be too small as a drawing table, say, but papers would fit on it, for instance.”

Since Köves still said nothing — after all, he couldn’t know what he was going to use the table for (not for drawing, for sure, but then who could know what the future might hold for him?) — the woman, now somewhat put out, added in the same breath:

“Right, well I won’t intrude any further. I don’t have the time, anyway; I need to set out for the office, and you no doubt have business to attend to …”

“I want to sleep,” Köves said, halting the stream of words.

“Sleep?” the pools in the woman’s face widened.

“Sleep,” Köves confirmed, and with such yearning, evidently, that the woman broke into a smile:

“Of course, you said already that you were travelling all night. You’ll find bedclothes here,” and she pointed to the drawer under the couch, “and that’s a wardrobe for your own stuff.”

“I don’t have any stuff,” said Köves.

“None?” the woman may have been astounded, but not so much that Köves was obliged, and this is what he feared, to enter into explanations: it seemed that, being someone who ran a household in which there was a constant turnover of lodgers, she must have seen all sorts of things by now. “Not even any pyjamas?”

“No,” Köves admitted.

“Well, that won’t do at all!” she said so indignantly that Köves felt it was a matter of general principle, quite irrespective of himself personally — as it were, in defence of practically a whole world order — that she considered it wouldn’t do for a person to have no pyjamas. “I’ll give you a pair,” she said with the excitement of one who had been spurred into action forthwith by this intolerable state of affairs. “As best I can judge, my husband’s will be about your size …”

“But won’t your esteemed husband …,” Köves was about to start fretting.

Except that the woman curtly brushed that aside:

“I’m a widow,” and with that was already out of the door then promptly back again to toss a folded pair of pyjamas onto the couch. “And what’s your thinking,” she asked, “about here on in, when you don’t even have a change of underwear to your name?”

“I don’t know,” said Köves with his suitcase fleetingly coming to mind, though only as the flicker of a memory which barely impinged on him. “I’ll do some shopping later.”

“Is that right!” the woman said. “You’ll do some shopping,” and she gave a brief, nervous laugh as if she had been struck by an amusing thought. “It’s no business of mine, of course. I only asked … so, good night!” she got out quickly, seeing that Köves was already starting to take off his coat. “The bathroom is on the right,” she said, turning back at the door. “Naturally, you are entitled to use it.”

Köves heard them moving around for a while yet, the exchanges between the shrill and the more croaking voice — at times just whispering agitatedly behind the door, again bickering with each other, perhaps, like cats left to their own devices — and his head had just touched his pillow when the front door slammed, and with that silence fell. Köves now started to sink, and he was dreaming before he had even fallen asleep. What he dreamed was that he had strayed into the strange life of a foreigner who was unknown to him and had nothing to do with him, yet still being aware that this was only his dream playing with him, since he was the dreamer and could only dream about his own life. Before he finally got off to sleep, he sensed that a deep sigh had been torn from him — a relieved sigh, he felt — while his face was cracking a broad smile, and — for whatever reason — he breathed into his pillow, “At last!”