Fiasco

Permanent residence permit. Landlady, houseman

Köves went off to the authorities in order to get his temporary residence endorsed as permanent and to obtain ID papers to that effect: Mrs. Weigand, the landlady, had reminded him for the second time that, insofar as he wished to carry on lodging with her, he needed to attend to his official registration as soon as possible.

“Of course, I don’t know what plans you have,” she said casting her clear little pools up at Köves, and Köves smiled uncertainly, as if he had less idea about those plans than even Mrs. Weigand.

“To be sure,” he said, therefore, “I’m finding it very satisfactory here,” as if that were the reason he was there, not anything else, to which the woman responded:

“I’m glad to hear it!” as she picked some invisible thread or crumb off the tablecloth. They were standing in Köves’s small room — Köves had vainly offered Mrs. Weigand the sole chair as a seat, so he too remained standing — with the afternoon already getting on for evening, though not yet time to switch on the lights, and the landlady had just before knocked on Köves’s door. Köves had initially flinched slightly, thinking the boy was going to burst in on him again, but before he called out “Come in!” it occurred to him that it could hardly be him as Peter was not in the habit of knocking.

“You didn’t even mention that you’re a journalist,” the woman carried on, with a hint of mock reproach lurking in her voice and a timid smile appearing on her pallid, pinched face, as if she were in the presence of a renowned man with whom she ought to speak with restraint, and Köves, who had indeed mentioned nothing of the kind, was astounded at how well she was informed. How could that be? Did the grapevine work that fast there? Yet instead of asking for clarification, he considered it of greater urgency for himself to supply some clarification, as if he wished to dispel a disagreeable misunderstanding which almost amounted to mudslinging:

“Yes,” he said, “only I’m not with a newspaper.” Then, not caring what a letdown it might cause the woman (for all he knew she might have already been boasting that she had a journalist as her lodger), he swiftly tacked on: “They fired me.”

But if she did feel any letdown, that did not show on the woman: it seemed as if she had, in some manner, become more relaxed; her face. cagey beforehand, now assuming a surprised, yet for all that, a warmer expression, and in a tone that Köves felt was more natural than before she quietly acknowledged:

“So, they fired you,” and, head slightly askance, she looked up at Köves with interest, and, being a blonde, albeit possibly from a bottle, she now reminded Köves of a canary. “You poor thing,” she added, at which Köves raised an eyebrow as though he were about to protest but didn’t know yet what he should say. It was thus again the landlady who spoke next, now asking in a confidential tone, as if there was no longer anything to hide between them, and at the same time softly, as if she did not want others to hear them (although there was no one except themselves in the room, of course):

“And why?…”

Köves for his part responded:

“Can anyone know?”—an answer which now again seemed not to miss its mark:

“No,” said the woman, slowly lowering herself onto the previously offered but at the time rejected seat, all expression being extinguished from her face, as if she had suddenly become aware of being inordinately tired, “one can’t.” They held their silence for a short while, and so as not to make the landlady feel awkward, Köves sat down too on his bed, while Mrs. Weigand, for want of more crumbs or threads, now started fiddling with the fringe of the tablecloth.

“I’ll tell you what,” she eventually spoke in the deep voice that Köves had heard from her only once before, on the morning of his arrival, “there are times when I feel that I understand nothing any more.” She slowly raised her head to look at Köves, the unexpected pools among the zigzagging wrinkles now seeming to have shadows cast on them by dark clouds. “As a matter of fact,” she continued, “I ought to be apologizing to you.” Then, maybe taking Köves’s silence to be incomprehension or perhaps expectancy: “On account of my son,” she tacked on: “He’s a nuisance, I don’t doubt.” There was no gainsaying it, Köves had been having trouble with the boy; already the very first evening, when Köves was getting ready to go to bed, having had practically no sleep for two days on end, the boy had simply opened the door on him, chessboard under his elbow: “I’m here!” as if, amid the myriad other urgent calls on his time, only now, at last, did he have the time to spare to meet a longstanding obligation toward the lodger. It was useless for Köves to look for a cop-out, in vain that he instanced his tiredness and bad humour, the boy had already spread out the board on Köves’s couch and made a start on setting up the chessmen. “Black or white?” He glanced severely at Köves from behind his glinting spectacles, and promptly answered for him: “White. Your start.” So, Köves started, then waited for his opponent to move, then again moved, hardly paying attention to the board, his hand pulling the pieces about mechanically, essentially independently of himself, in accordance with some dreamlike battle array that his fingers had somehow, no knowing how, retained a memory of, something that had entered them, perhaps, when he was still a boy himself — almost marvelling, Köves smiled to himself at the thought: there had been a time, of course, when he too was a child, and he only snatched up his head in response to a hissing sound. It was Peter, lips contorted, head trembling, his face seemingly drained of the last drop of blood. “Such a cheap sucker trap … a cheap sucker trap … and I fell for it!” he was hissing, glaring at Köves with a look of hatred from behind misted-up spectacles. Then: “I resign!” whereat board and chessmen went flying in all directions, at which Köves, in his initial discomposure, began bending down to pick them up until it came to mind that he was dealing with a child who therefore should not be spoiled but chastised. “Pick up now the bits you’ve chucked around!” he rebuked him in the sternest voice he could manage. But the injunction was unnecessary: the boy was already scrabbling around on all fours on the floor, and just a few minutes later the board was already in front of Köves, with the pieces set in their places. “I’ll hammer you now, thirty times in a row!” the boy informed him through clenched teeth, as if he were preparing to wrestle, rather than play chess, with Köves. He thereupon opened the next game. Köves most likely fell asleep several times while play was in progress, at which the boy would either nudge his knee or bawl out “Your move!” while Mrs. Weigand also popped her head round the door from time to time to enquire shyly: “Is the game not over?” and then disappear again, to which the boy paid no heed, except that once he remarked, evidently not so much for Köves’s benefit as just for its own sake, out of petulance:

“I hate it most of all when she calls it a game!” “Why?” Köves was aroused by a spark of curiosity, “Isn’t that what it is?” “No way,” the boy snapped back curtly. “What then?” Köves poked further: “Work, perhaps?” “Got it in one!” It seemed as though the boy were glancing at Köves with a spot of respect. “I need a way of pulling myself out of this shit!” he added, but without expanding on that; teeth clenched, frowning, he was already pondering the next move, and his voice was already snapping brusquely, dryly, like a rifle shot aimed at Köves: “Check!” In the end, all her rational arguments — that it was late, for instance, or the lodger might be tired, and especially that it was long past Peter’s bedtime, and tomorrow they both had school or the office to face — proved fruitless, and Mrs. Weigand had to literally drag her son out of Köves’s room, yet for a long time still that evening Köves was able to hear the boy’s hoarsely menacing and the woman’s soothingly engaged voices.

“An odd boy!” Köves remarked.

“Yes, but you have to understand him.” The woman was quick to get in her counter, and it was somehow well-drilled, as if it were not the first time she had used it and maybe — so Köves sensed — had to keep permanently on tap. “Things aren’t easy for him,” Mrs. Weigand went on, “and I have my difficulties with him. He’s at just the age when he is in most need of his father …”

She fell silent, and Köves, out of some obscure compulsion, as if he had been called upon for some purpose, though he didn’t know precisely what, followed that with:

“To be sure, he went quickly enough …”

What he said cannot have been clear, however, because Mrs. Weigand stared at him uncomprehendingly: “Who did?” she asked.

“I mean,” Köves chose his words carefully: he had strayed onto tricky ground, but now that he was there he could not retreat, of course: “I mean, he left you a widow at an early age …”

“Oh, I see,” said the woman. She remained silent for a short while before suddenly hurling at Köves’s face:

“They carted him off and he perished at their hands!” And, head held high, she stared at him almost provocatively, with a strange defiance, as if she were heaping all her sufferings at Köves’s feet and was now waiting for Köves to trample on them.

Nothing of the kind happened, however. Köves nodded a few times, slowly, with the sympathetic, rather long face of someone who, while of course not regarding it as right, also does not find it particularly unusual that someone, as Mrs. Weigand put it, was “carted off” and “perished at their hands,” and who will make do with the dead without expecting further illumination as to the details; the woman’s tense face, on the other hand, gradually relaxed and slackened, as if she had grown weary of the silence which had descended on them, or perhaps suspected him of harbouring a secret complicity woven between them, as it were, by their silence.

“Yes,” she reiterated, this time languidly and even, it seemed, a touch listlessly, “they carted him off, and he perished at their hands! That’s at the bottom of all this. There’s no way he can accept it.”

“How do you mean?” Köves asked.

“He’s ashamed of his father,” Mrs. Weigand said.

“Ashamed?” Köves was astonished.

“He says: Why didn’t he stand his ground?” the woman feigned exasperation with upflung hands and head, as though she were now living, not with her husband, but with a question which was constantly coming up and to which she had now become just as accustomed as to her own helplessness.

“Child’s talk,” Köves broke into a smile.

“Child’s talk,” said Mrs. Weigand, “But then he’s still a child.”

“That’s true,” Köves conceded.

“He scarcely knew his father. And it’s no use my trying to explain …,” Mrs. Weigand fell silent, the sad little pools glittering moistly in the wintry landscape of her face. “Can one explain that at all?” she eventually asked, and Köves admitted:

“That’s hard.”

“So,” the woman said, “Is my son perhaps right? Is it really shameful?”

“I suppose,” Köves gave it some thought, “I suppose it is. Shameful. Notwithstanding the fact,” he added with a shrug of the shoulders, “that one can’t help it: one is carted off and perishes.”

Once more they said nothing, then the woman exclaimed, again in her deep voice, though it still sounded brittle, like a wire which is about to snap:

“What perpetual pangs of guilt it causes: bringing a child into the world!.. One never gets over it! And into a world like this, of all places …”

“The world,” Köves tried to console her, “is always difficult.”

Yet the woman may not even have heard him:

“I sometimes feel he hates me for it … blames me,” she said. “And I don’t know,” she went on, “I don’t know if, all things considered, he might not be right … what does he have to look forward to? What else will he have to go through?”

“And that … that’s his special pastime?” Köves put in quickly, fearing that he would find the woman breaking out in tears.

“The chess, you mean?” Mrs. Weigand asked. “He wants to be a contender in tournaments.”

“Ah! In tournaments! Nice,” Köves nodded appreciatively; it seemed they were over the hard bit, and he had managed to divert the woman’s mind away from her futile brooding and into an easier channel.

“He’s in training right now, preparing for some youth championship,” Mrs. Weigand continued. “He keeps saying that he has to win the championship. He has to be a great player, really great,” and one could tell from her voice that she was now citing her son’s words, with a hint of playful hands-off-ishness yet also of hidden seriousness.

“I see.” Köves was suddenly somehow reminded of Sziklai, and he could not help continuing with his words: “One has to make a success of something.”

“Yes.” Mrs. Weigand smiled the way mothers smile over their ambitious sons, sceptically yet with a degree of pride.

“Success is the only way out.” Köves still had a good recall of what Sziklai had said, all the more as he had since heard it repeatedly from him.

“That’s right,” the woman said, nodding. “He says that with his physique it’s no use trying in another branch of sport. There you are, see,” she added. “He has powers of judgement … that in itself is something, isn’t it?”

“Of course it is!” said Köves. “Let’s just hope,” and here he too broke into a broad, one could say jovial, smile. “Let’s just hope he has the makings of a grandmaster!”

On that note, they took leave of each other, Köves putting on his coat and saying he was going to the South Seas to dine. The next morning, after the by then routine sounds of muffled squabbling outside his door, followed by the loud slamming of the front door, he promptly got up, his first foray taking him straight to the authorities. Getting his temporary residence permit endorsed as permanent, it seemed to Köves, was a pure formality; they had just copied his particulars from the one paper to another, and there was just one section to ask him about which — so it seemed — had not been filled out:

“Your workplace?” The question though, it was clear, was by no means as subsidiary as the manner in which it was put to him, like a conditioned reflex — ready and waiting for a notification that was foreseen and at most unknown as to its specifics — because when the female clerk heard the answer: “None,” she raised her head with such a look of amazement at Köves as he stood before her desk that it seemed almost one of terror.

“You’re not working?” she asked, to which Köves replied:

“No.”

“How can that be?” In her astonishment, the female clerk may have forgotten for a moment about even her official position, her voice sounding just the way it would when one person asks something of another, simply because she had become curious.

“I’ve been dismissed,” said Köves, and the clerk now stared at the half-completed ID, visibly racking her brains, as though some difficulty had cropped up in her work. Then, slapping down her pen, she suddenly got to her feet and hurried off to a distant desk, whispered something to the man who was sitting there, at which he too looked in amazement first at the female clerk and then at Köves, waiting farther off, before finally rising from his place and coming over to him along with the clerk:

“You have no workplace?” he asked, his censoriously knitted brow proclaiming that, for whatever reason, he was angry with Köves; Köves for his part repeated:

“None.”

“What are you living off, then?” came the next question, undoubtedly apposite, so that Köves could at most have found its reproachful edge peculiar, even if he could not have expected in all seriousness, of course, that they might actually be concerned for him there.

“At the moment I’m still within the period of notice,” he responded, and as if the fact that he had been fired now fell back upon him as his own shame, he added somewhat apologetically:

“I hope that I’ll soon be able to find a job.”

“So do we,” was the retort, and all you could pick out of that too was a highly qualified severity, as if his hoping not to be forced into begging or dying of starvation were not convincing enough, and he therefore had to be given orders to that effect.

Not long afterwards, Köves also put in an appearance at the janitor’s apartment in the house. Naturally, Mrs. Weigand had pushed for that as well: the fact that Köves had now become her permanent lodger, and therefore also the house’s, had to be entered by the janitor into a register, Mrs. Weigand pointed out. “Indeed, it wouldn’t hurt if the chairman got to know of you, although”—and here it seemed Mrs. Weigand must have had second thoughts—“that might be better left to the janitor.” Köves, who took from this only that it meant one less thing he had to attend to, didn’t think to ask who the chairman might be, or indeed the nature of the chairmanship in question, when the woman mentioned that these matters had come to mind in passing.

The janitor lived at the foot of the stairwell, where there were two doors next to each other. As Köves approached, his eyes searching, one of the doors was suddenly flung open and a stocky man with a bushy moustache appeared in the doorway in a grey work coat but also huge boots, more suitable for ploughed fields, squelching in vivifying water, than for urban pavements, into which his trouser legs were tucked baggily, peasant style:

“Me you’re looking for, Mr. Köves?” he asked, to which, with a sudden onset of irritation brought on solely by the rake-shaped moustache, the fleshy nose, the thick, greying mop of hair growing, wedge-shaped, low on the brow, the high-buttoned coat, and the heavy boots — though it was absurd, of course, that a person should get into such a lather by a person’s largely random and temporary external appearance — Köves replied with almost cutting sharpness:

“Yes, if you’re the houseman.”

“That would be me, who else,” he chortled good-naturedly: whether he had noticed Köves’s irritation or not, the janitor had plainly not taken offence. “Be so kind, Mr. Köves, please come right in!”—the effect that the rasping yet somehow treacly voice had on Köves was like stepping into a mushy, sticky material which had suddenly welled up under his feet and had already gripped him up to his ears as he entered a gloomy hallway swamped with a smell of cabbage and warm vapours — behind a door, obviously that to the kitchen, a shuffling of feet and clattering of heavy cooking vessels could be heard.

“No doubt you came so I could enter you in the register.” From somewhere the janitor got out a hard-covered notebook, a sort of large-format school exercise book, then switched on a tiny, yellow-shaded table lamp, the weak light from which illuminated only the notebook, the janitor’s gnarled fingers, and — oh yes — a bit of the filthy tablecloth while throwing the room itself into, if anything, an even more Stygian gloom.

“How come you knew straight away who I am, before I even introduced myself?!” Only now was Köves struck by the janitor’s sudden appearance — had he been waiting for him? maybe spying from behind the door? — and his irritation intensified to the point of nausea as he handed over the fresh bit of paper that he had been given by the authorities so that the janitor could enter the particulars in his register.

“My, my, Mr. Köves,” there was a hint of good-natured reproach in the janitor’s growling voice, and meanwhile a large pair of spectacles had appeared on his nose, which had a strange effect on his face, making it look frailer, and his ungainly fingers laboured over putting down the clumsy writing onto a notebook page ruled with both horizontal and vertical lines, “give me some credit, please! It’s my business to know my residents … so, you have no workplace.” The wrinkles ran together on his low forehead as he glanced up at Köves over his spectacles, but Köves did not reply, and the janitor, while entering that negative piece of data into his notebook, muttered it over again to himself, though now just by way of a statement: “None.” Then, putting the pencil down, closing the notebook and, so to speak, resuming his previous train of thought, he went on:

“That’s a houseman’s job … that’s what I’m paid for …,” and, taking his spectacles off, he stood up and held the document out for Köves, who took it back. “Not a lot, of course … one could not exactly call it a lot … but I mustn’t grumble … and one does for the residents what one can …,” and out of the murky words in the murky room, where only the janitor’s gaze smouldered like glowing embers — Köves supposed, eagerly, almost peremptorily: it was most likely his disturbed senses that were making him see it in that way, for in reality it could only have been the little lamp flickering on the table that was being reflected in those eyes — Köves sensed a demand of some sort beginning to assert itself ever more explicitly, a demand that he soon understood and one to which he would, Köves decided, under no circumstances give in. But while he was coming to that decision, his hand, as if it were not even his own, was already breaking free and — Köves noticed to his great astonishment — reaching into his pocket, digging out a bank note, and pressing it into the janitor’s palm, whereas the janitor, just incidentally as it were, as if this too were tied up with the conversation, accepted it and thrust it into his baggy trousers:

“Why thank you, Mr. Köves,” he said, and at this point an indulgent cordiality crept into the rusty voice, “Honestly, that wasn’t my reason for saying it. Nice coat you have there.” He immediately perked up. “It seems to be made of a good material,” and, before Köves knew what was going on or could move, the gnarled, yellowed fingers were already pawing his overcoat. “Foreign by any chance?”

“Right, foreign,” said Köves, as if he were only telling the truth out of disdain.

“Do you regularly get parcels from abroad perhaps?” the janitor inquired, and Köves, who had meanwhile come to his senses, now replied with unconcealed sarcasm:

“If I do, you’ll know soon enough from the postman!” And with that he was on his way to the door when the janitor’s response—

“My, my, Mr. Köves, so what if I do? It’s not a secret, or is it?”—caught up with him more or less on the staircase, and as he made his way up from the basement the chuckling also gradually faded away, so that all he carried with him, on the folds of the overcoat that had been praised shortly before, was the cabbage smell.

The man with the dog

One noon — or might it not rather have been getting on for evening? Since arriving there, time seemed to have become somewhat disjointed, with his having left the old tempo behind but not yet having found his way into the swing of things in the new place, so that it was as if it were all the same to him what the time was, the part of the day, and even what day, obviously as a result of the lazy way of life, which would change as soon as he found work and it imposed order on him, although, he mused, might it not be all the same to him precisely for that reason? — Köves set off at an easy pace to the South Seas. No doubt it was a Sunday, with an unwonted sluggishness reigning over the city; sounds of jollity could even be picked out here and there, the sleepy stillness broken by the racket of children, a strident burst of music and the odours of Sunday lunches streaming from open windows; only the ruins looked even more inconsolable than at other times — maybe the absence of the otherwise constant sound of hammering and the sight of workers scrambling around on buildings — as if they were unable either to be built up or destroyed and now wished to stay there forever the way they were, stubbornly holding out in the midst of perpetual decay as it were, though tomorrow, of course, the hammers would ring out anew, goods trucks do their rounds, people yell. Peter had turned up in the room already early that morning, when Köves was still in bed, and the boy had wanted to set out the chessboard on the bedspread, on his stomach, but Köves told him in no uncertain terms that he was unwilling to play. “See if I care,” the boy said in response. “I was fooled by you once, but you know diddley-squat about the game. And anyway, I hate you,” he added from the doorway, leaving Köves hoping that the hatred would spare him thereafter from playing chess. Later on, Köves went for a walk, looking around the city — having a bite to eat at a stand-up buffet en route, whatever they were selling as long as it was cheap — and looking at shop windows in particular, at least those that were not boarded up. He had already procured for himself one thing and another, but shopping did not proceed anything like as easy as Köves had, if not imagined, in any case would have liked; a crowded throng packed most of the shops, and in many cases he was greeted by a line of people stretching outside the doors, and by the time he had reached a counter it turned out that he had to buy something other than what he had wanted to buy, in the best case at least something similar: a nightshirt instead of pyjamas, for example, but even then only in a much larger size than his, more of a fit for some potbellied giant, although Köves couldn’t stand nightshirts, so in order that he would be able to return her husband’s pyjamas to Mrs. Weigand, he chose to sleep in the buff, though he bought a nightshirt nevertheless, and — with exchange in mind — not just one but two, for when he was about to leave he had spotted an unaccountable dash of joy in the saleswoman’s expression which suggested, Köves reasoned, that nightshirts must be a scarce commodity there, so it would not be smart to pass up this good fortune; in the end, it emerged that Mrs. Weigand did not insist on hanging on to the pyjamas at all, as she herself had no use for them and they were, as yet, too big for Peter.

He was already at the corner when the sounds of wheezing and a hurried scrabbling of the claws of tiny legs struck his ears, and as he turned the corner a little dog flew like a brown projectile, hurled with great force, at his lap, flinging its tiny head and its shiny nose this way and that in its ecstasy, sniffing, lapping with its lolling tongue at Köves’s hands, fixing its sparkling button-eyes expectantly on Köves, then from farther away a porously woody-sounding voice blared:

“Here this instant, you little rascal!” It was the elderly gentleman and his dachshund, whom Köves had run across not long before. “A shameless flatterer, you are, nothing else!” the elderly gentleman’s grouching sounded more like an expression of affection as he bent down and attached the leash in his hand to the dog’s collar. “There’s no escaping him once he’s formed a liking for someone,” he continued, apparently still grumbling but in truth with barely concealed pride. “But it’s rare for him to form a liking for a person at first sight, take it from me, Mr. Köves!”

“I see you already know who I am,” said Köves, somewhat surprised, “so there’s no need for me to introduce myself.”

“Certainly I know who you are.” The elderly gentleman was jerked vigorously by the end of the leash, as the dog suddenly pulled away in his excitement so as to bless a house wall with a cocked rear leg. “In a certain sense it’s my duty to know. Keep still now!” he scolded the little dog, which was again leaping around like crazy, getting entangled with their legs. “I’m the chairman, you see.” He again turned his head with its fine white hair, ruddy-cheeked face and amiable smile toward Köves.

“Ah! I see,” said Köves. “Chairman of what?” and, to make the question sound airier, even more casual, Köves bent down to stroke the animal, which in gratitude immediately jumped up at him.

“The one that you too, for example, elected.” The elderly gentleman’s smile now beamed broadly and at the same time took on a somewhat impish look. “Come now, Mr. Köves!” he said in a quieter, confidential tone, “let’s not play with words!” and Köves, perhaps less at a loss than before, reiterated:

“I see.”

“We already met the other day,” the elderly gentleman went on, “but you were in a hurry then.”

“I had something to take care of,” explained Köves.

“That goes without saying,” the old fellow hastened to assure him, “but you may have more time now. We’re taking a constitutional.” He glanced at the dog, which, after the initial paroxysms of delight, had now, it appeared, suddenly grown bored with them and was straining at the leash after some scent or other, its muzzle pressed to the pavement: “If you would care to join us, please do. How do you find it in our house?” he then asked. Köves replied with an easy little half-smile:

“Couldn’t be better,” saying it like someone who meant it, make of it what one might.

“Splendid!” said the elderly gentleman. “Mrs. Weigand is a fine, decent lady; you couldn’t have a better place to stay.” He glanced askance at Köves, who, because he could not tell offhand, and he could not discern from the face which was turning toward him whether was he was expected to agree or protest, held his peace. “I gather you’re a journalist,” the old fellow went on. “I know you’re not with a paper at the moment.” Quickly, almost in anticipation, as if seeking to cut Köves short, he raised his free hand (with the other he was trying to restrain the dog, which, on spying the small park in the middle of a square which had suddenly appeared before them, was all for scampering toward the strip of wan grass). “I imagine that has nothing to do with your talents. Nowadays …,” the elderly gentleman was getting nowhere with the dog, which was on its hind legs, straining at the leash with all its might, so he bent down and released it: “Scoot! Off you go and take your poop, you rascal!” only after which did he continue the sentence he had begun: “Nowadays,” and here his face, up to that point sunny and bursting with health, darkened slightly, “it’s not easy to live up to one’s profession. Could you explain to me, Mr. Köves,” he said suddenly, turning his whole body toward Köves, “why I’ve become the chairman, for example?”

Köves, surprised as he was by the question, and having even less clue what the explanation might be, and he chose to respond at random:

“Obviously they trust you.”

“Obviously.” The elderly gentleman nodded, strolling along the gravelled path of the square’s garden, hands clasped behind his back. “I myself can think of no other explanation. They trust me, but they serve someone else. After all,” the elderly gentleman spread his arms as they walked on, “that’s people for you. The battle’s not yet over, and already they’re lining up on the victor’s side. Yet,” and here the elderly gentleman came to a halt to raise a stubby, well-manicured index finger on high by way of warning: “victory is far from assured, and what will decide it is precisely the fact that they already think it’s all over. A strange logic, Mr. Köves, but I’m old now and nothing surprises me any longer,” and with a shake of the head he set off again, Köves at his side: what he had heard may have been enigmatic, but it interested him all the same, and he had just formulated a question in his head when, with a sharp about-turn which ended up as just a half-turn, such that Köves sensed his gaze on him, although he was not actually looking at him, the elderly gentleman got in first:

“Have you seen the houseman yet?” his voice may have been dry, yet it still sounded as if it were concealing a sneaking excitement.

“Yes, I have,” said Köves.

“And did he not say that you should come up and see me?” The customary affability was now lacking from the elderly gentleman’s smile; it was somehow more of a gash, the corners of the mouth trembling slightly as if he were rubbing salt in his own wounds.

“No. Or rather …,” and Köves was suddenly reminded of Mrs. Weigand’s strange hesitation when she had mentioned the chairman the other day, as well as his own visit to the janitor, about which he now thought back, he himself knew not why, with a degree of bewilderment. “If I omitted to do something,” he said, “then I would ask you to excuse me.”

“The omission,” the elderly gentleman now began visibly to regain his previous, amiable poise, “was not yours. Just look!” he pointed to the middle of the little park, “Wouldn’t you know it, but that rogue has again found something to amuse himself with,” and indeed the dog was leaping around a young boy’s ball, then scampering after pieces of gravel that the child threw for it to fetch. “And it’s not the first omission that has been perpetrated against me,” he then went on; they had already crossed the square’s garden and had now set off around its perimeter. “Being the chairman, I ought to protest, of course. Only I’m completely unsuited to the role, Mr. Köves.”

“Come, come,” said Köves, “people didn’t elect you because they saw you as unsuitable …,” he was slowly beginning to understand the old fellow, and as he understood him his distress provoked a smile: that was all it was about, a storm in a teacup, he thought.

“But it’s true,” the old fellow kept plugging away, casting the occasional solicitous glance at his dog farther off as they carried on walking. “I can’t keep a secret, for instance. Then, I’m incapable of the requisite objectivity: what counts with me is always what I feel sympathy or antipathy toward, that’s all that matters, there’s nothing I can do about it.” He spread his arms. “If two people call on me to ask about someone whom I have taken a liking to, then I can’t say anything about that, even though I’m well aware that I’m making a mistake, a mistake, and in a double sense: first of all, I’m contravening the need for official secrecy, then, secondly, I’m throwing myself on the mercy of the person they were warning me about.” He fell silent; with his puckered brow and long, trouble-laden face he now oddly resembled his dog. “What I have to do is no picnic, Mr. Köves,” he sighed. Köves, more as a mechanical courtesy than anything else, remarked:

“It’s no picnic for anyone conscientious.”

The old fellow, however, truly pounced on the remark:

“That’s what it’s about, precisely! Conscientiousness and sympathy! I didn’t warm at all to the two strangers who came round to see me — and I suppose they also dropped in on the janitor — though I’m well aware that duty binds me to them. All the same, my sympathies are with the person they were asking about. Yes, yes, we’re still here, you little scamp!” he called out to the dachshund, which was rushing toward them only to race off again. “I wouldn’t take it too much to my heart if he were to find himself in danger,” he eventually added.

“All the same, the person in question can only be grateful to you, in my view,” Köves said, by now undeniably fed up with the role that had been forced on him, but not judging the moment as propitious to part from the old fellow.

“Grateful!” The elderly gentleman raised both hands in the air. “Have you any idea how much I’ve done for other people?! And it was never so that they would feel grateful to me but so that I should be able to sleep soundly at night.”

“Maybe it’s to that you owe your prestige,” Köves said, cracking a smile, like someone bringing the conversation to a close. He came to a halt, thereby forcing the old fellow to stop short. He was just about to hold out his hand when, fortuitously it seemed, something else came to mind:

“And what did the two men enquire after?” he asked; his smile had not yet vanished, only become set as though it were only there still out of forgetfulness.

“The usual things.” The elderly gentleman shrugged his shoulders. “When the person in question comes home, whether he has any visitors, then does he have a job, is he working already,” the old fellow would have liked to resume his walk but, since Köves did not move, he nevertheless remained standing there.

“Were they customs men?” Köves asked, his voice unquestionably faltering a little bit.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Köves.” The old fellow, paying no heed to Köves, set off after all, so compelling Köves, if he wanted to hear him, to do the same. “Were they customs men, I wonder?… They didn’t wear any uniform, and I have no idea why customs men should get involved in such matters. You see how much I put myself out?” He looked reproachfully at Köves. “We’re already discussing things that one should not speak about, because how do customs men come in here, and why would we look with suspicion, or maybe — even worse — fear, on a body that upholds the law?…”

“I understand,” said Köves. “My thanks to you, Chairman.”

“For what?” the old fellow asked, patently astonished. “I didn’t say anything! But I can see how much you want to go, and I won’t hold you up. We’ll stay a little longer. Here, rascal!” he called out to his dog. He did not offer his hand either, as if he had forgotten to do so or had taken offence at Köves.

The South Seas: a strange acquaintance

He may have got there too early, though of course it was also a Sunday: Köves could not see a single free table in the South Seas. He had already spotted Sziklai beforehand — to Köves’s considerable surprise he was sitting at the table of a man with a grey moustache and some kind of uniform — not a military or police one, nor even anything like that of the customs men: rack his brains as he might, the only other bodies among Köves’s acquaintances whose members might wear a uniform were railway workers and firemen — but in any event he did not get beyond his own arbitrary guesswork as he was approaching the table. Sziklai was appearing not to recognize him, and it was only the vigorous shaking of a hand dangled under the table which gave Köves to understand that he should not take a seat there for the time being, nor even greet him. There was the usual hum in the place, the usual smells, and great merriment at the Uncrowned’s table: as he passed, the way regulars do with one another, Köves gave an easygoing nod, while the Uncrowned, his thighs wide apart, his waistcoat unbuttoned over his belly, and in mid-guffaw (evidently someone had just told a joke or funny story) good-humouredly called over to Köves: “Good evening, Mr. Editor!” Sitting at a table further away, in a tight, outmoded suit, with a strangely cascading necktie and a rakish stuck-on moustache (it could only have been stuck-on because a day ago not so much as a bristle had been sprouting on the spot), was Pumpadour: there must have been an interval between two acts at the theatre and he had popped across in his costume for a drink, or perhaps because he had an important message for the Transcendental Concubine, who, chin resting on her hands, was listening to him impassively, her gaze emptily fixed, maybe on transcendence, maybe on nowhere (three empty spirits glasses were already lined up before her). Toward the rear was a noisy crowd: the table reserved for the musicians (as Köves had learned from Sziklai some time before), who would later be dispersing to go to the nightclubs where they were engaged. Not long before, Köves had spotted among them a conspicuous figure, his physiognomy, over a polka-dot bow tie, broad as the moon: his acquaintance, the bar pianist, who in turn noticed Köves and joyfully got to his feet in order to greet him, so that Köves abandoned Sziklai for a moment.

“Well now!” exclaimed the bar pianist, sinking Köves’s proffered hand into his own huge, soft fist, “Have you found it yet?”

“What?” Köves asked, having no idea offhand what the pianist could be asking him to account for.

“You said you were looking for something.”

“Yes, of course, of course,” said Köves; the musician evidently had a better recollection of his words than he himself did: “Not yet,” at which the pianist, for whatever reason, seemed satisfied, as though he had been fearing the opposite and was now relieved.

“Where did you meet Tiny, the pianist?” Sziklai asked, when Köves sat back down at their table, and Köves, glad that he was at last able to say something new to Sziklai, told him about the bench and the pianist’s dread. “How do you mean, scared?… Him of all people?…,” Sziklai’s harsh features began to crack bit by bit from the smile which spread across them.

“Why?” Köves asked, finding Sziklai’s amazement somewhat unsettling, “Is that so incredible?”

“What do you think,” Sziklai countered. “Who do you suppose plays the piano in the Twinkling Star?”

“Aha!” Köves responded, whereupon Sziklai’s “You see!” carried the air of didactic superiority of someone who had managed to bring order to Köves’s confused frame of reference.

In the “Rumpus Room,” the name given to a low-ceilinged, windowless parlour, illuminated only by the nightmarish glow of neon tubes, in a wing right at the back of the restaurant, card games were going on amid a cacophony of sounds clattering back off the walls, with slim, grey-templed Uncle André, the Chloroformist, a bored, man-of-the-world smile on his lips, was walking from table to table, stopping every now and then, behind a seat, to take a peek at the cards, and Köves was just debating inwardly whether he should leave and come back later when Alice, as she rushed by, took his fate in her hands:

“Come,” she said, “I’ll give you a seat with my partner,” and with that was around him and making her way toward a table in the corner — in point of fact, a sort of service table, stacked with tableware, glasses, and cutlery, from which Alice laid the tables — at which a well-built man sat beside a pile of plates, his head bowed as if he were sleeping, only the balding crown of his head showing, in front of which Alice, with Köves a few paces behind, now halted and, leaning across the table, gently, yet loud enough for Köves to hear clearly, asked him:

“Are you thinking?…,” at which the man slowly lifted up his face and sleepy-looking, grave expression to Alice — a fleshy oval of a face, were it not for this expression, accusatory even in its plaintiveness, irritated even in its wordless sufferance, and, taken as a whole, somehow crippled — whom Köves had of course seen a number of times before in the South Seas, though up till now only from farther off, when he had given an impression that was more genial, friendly, and, one might even say, cheerful.

“I’m going to seat the editor here,” Alice went on. “He won’t disturb you.” The woman’s voice surprised Köves: breezy as she always was with strangers, himself included, the bravado seemed frankly to desert Alice in front of her “partner.” He was even more astonished by the murmured entreaty that she directed at him:

“Try and amuse him a little,” as if she were entrusting a seriously ill patient to his care, at which, on taking his seat at the table, nothing more amusing coming to mind at that moment, Köves for a start told him his name, and the man in turn informed him of his own, in a high, strident voice, like an operatic singer:

“Berg!”—snippily, sternly, and yet somehow still sonorously: it was already known to Köves, of course, along with the usual dismissive waves of the hand and expressions of commiseration accorded Alice by common consent, whenever the South Seas’ regulars mentioned the name — if it was mentioned at all — among themselves.

“What am I going to have for supper tonight?” he said and then turned to Alice, clearly complying with her entreaty beforehand by giving a smile that was more intimate and ready to joke, and it seemed the waitress too immediately played along with the game:

“Cold cuts,” she said.

“What’s that when it’s at home?” Köves enquired.

“Bread and dripping with spring onions,” Alice replied. Then, turning to Berg, who did not seem to be in the least amused, and maybe had not even heard their banter (his head was bowed as if he had dozed off to sleep again), she asked him in a softer voice which sounded almost anxious:

“Would you like a petit four?” at which Berg again lifted his lethargic, accusatory expression at her:

“Two!” he said. On that note, the woman went off, while Berg, turning to Köves, who now felt for the first time the gaze of that distracted, yet somehow still discomfiting look being directed at him, commented:

“I’m fond of sweet things!” in a sonorous, matter-of-fact tone from which Köves nevertheless reckoned he could pick out an apologetic note:

“I’m quite partial to them myself,” he found himself saying offhand, and idiotically of course (it seemed that some of Alice’s incomprehensible discomposure must have rubbed off on him).

Still, it seemed as though this had aroused in Berg some interest toward him:

“Journalist?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Köves. “But I’ve been fired,” he added promptly, to preempt any possible misunderstandings as it were.

“Well, well!” Berg remarked. “Why was that?”

To which Köves, breaking into a smile, responded:

“Can anyone know?”

“One can,” Berg said resolutely in his high voice. So that Köves, plainly surprised by an answer of the sort which was so uncommon there, said, shrugging his shoulders with a slightly forced lightheartedness:

“Then it appears you know more than I, because I don’t know, that’s for sure.”

“But of course you know,” said Berg, seemingly annoyed by the contradiction. “Everybody knows; at most they pretend to be surprised,” and here a distant memory was suddenly awakened in Köves, as if he had already heard something similar here before.

Their conversation, however, was interrupted for a while by Alice’s return. She set down the petits fours in front of Berg, whereas Köves was given rissoles, two sizeable discs, with potatoes and pickled cucumber, Alice clearly being of the opinion that Köves could stuff himself cheaply on that. Although not slow in responding with a grateful smile, in reality Köves could hardly wait for them to be left alone:

“Could it be that you too were kicked out?” he asked, because he seemed to recall having heard something of the kind about Berg, though he did not remember precisely, of course, for in the South Seas, as Köves had begun to notice bit by bit, people knew everything about everybody and nothing about anybody.

It seemed, though, that Berg, too, was sparing with accurate information:

“You could put it like that,” was all he replied, nibbling the pink icing off one of the petits fours and placing the pastry base back on the plate.

“And”—it went against his practice, but this time Köves, for some reason, did not wish to concede the point—“do you know why?”

“Of course I do,” Berg said coolly, resolutely, indeed even raising his eyebrows slightly as though exasperated by Köves’s obtuseness. “Because I was found to be unsuitable.”

“For what?” asked Köves, who in the meantime had likewise tucked into his supper.

“What I was selected for.” Berg bit into the second petit four, which was chocolate-coloured though of course it did not contain chocolate, just a paste that resembled it.

“And for what were you selected?” It seemed that Köves, in his bewilderment, was unhesitatingly adopting Berg’s curious ways with words.

“What I am suited for,” came the answer, with the same effortlessness as before.

“But what are you suited for?” Köves kept plugging away.

“You see,” Berg’s face now assumed a ruminative expression, not looking at Köves, almost as though he were not talking to him but to himself: “that’s the point. Probably for everything. Or to be more precise, anything. No matter. Presumably I was afraid to give it a try,” and, returning to the real world as it were, Berg now looked around the table with a searching gaze until his eyes alighted on the serviettes, on one of which he proceeded to wipe his fingers, which were clearly sticky from the petits fours. “And now we shall never know,” he continued, “because I have been excluded from the decision-making domain.”

“How was that?” Köves asked.

“By recognizing the facts,” said Berg, “and the facts recognizing me.”

There was a clattering: Alice carried away a number of plates and sets of cutlery from the stock piled on their table, with Berg closing his eyes, as though the woman’s scurrying around and the attendant skirmishing were a cause of physical agony, while Köves made use of the opportunity to ask for a glass of beer from Alice, who, leaning over the table and articulating as if she were speaking to a deaf-mute, asked Berg:

“Aren’t you thirsty?” to which Berg shook his head, his eyes still shut, his face anguished, now somehow childishly imploring, merely held up two fingers, at which Alice hesitated a bit:

“Won’t that be too much?” she asked, at which Berg folded one finger down, to leave just the index finger raised beseechingly upright.

“Fine,” the woman said after some further reflection; “You’ll upset your stomach,” as she hurried off. Köves, who by that point could hardly wait to make a remark, was at last able to trot it out:

“That all sounds very interesting, but I don’t quite understand.”

“What was that?” Berg opened his eyes, having visibly forgotten what they had been talking about before.

“What do you mean,” Köves was growing impatient, “by the facts recognizing you?”

“I said that?” Berg asked.

“You did,” Köves urged, rather like a child waiting for the next instalment once a story has been begun.

“No more,” said Berg, and now cracking a smile, as if he were seeking to tone down his words with the smile, “than that I am just like a certain gentleman who tasted vinegar.”

Impatience was gradually beginning to curdle into irritation for Köves. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“It’s not who I’m referring to that matters,” said Berg, “but what he said.”

“Well then,” Köves pushed, “what?”

“That all this be accomplished.” Berg smiled, whereas Köves, in whom the last vestiges of politeness were swept away by this smile, contrived in its raggedness, and this way of talking, with its riddling and quackery, and who was now aroused to unconcealed exasperation, remarked almost aggressively:

“It’s all very well that the person in question said that, but you — forgive me! — you are sitting here, on a comfortable café seat, and you’re not sipping vinegar but scoffing petits fours, and with great relish too, as I can see.”

Berg, though, was not perceptibly in the least put out by Köves’s irritation, if he even noticed it:

“Don’t blame me for that,” he said, almost appeasingly. “They seem to have forgotten about me.”

“Who has?” Köves regained his self-control, all that was left of his irritation being an unspoken aversion, though that aversion was somehow still thirsting to be satisfied. His question, however, was succeeded by silence, and Köves had given up on an answer — he had also nearly polished off his supper and was hankering only for the beer that he had ordered — when suddenly, in a sonorous tenor voice, his head bowed so that Köves could hardly see his face, Berg started to speak after all:

“In the room where they run through the list of names, from time to time, and they reach my name, which is quite soon, given that my initial is B, someone will cry out: ‘What! Is he still around?! Let’s get rid of him.’ His colleague will just wave that aside, saying, ‘Why bother?! He’ll snuff it of his own accord anyway!’ ” at which point he looked up suddenly, though not to look at Köves but at a small dish Alice had set down in front of him, this time with a white-coated petit four on it, while Köves got his beer and promptly emptied it in one draught. Whether it was because of the drink going to his head, or because the question, against his will, had been ripening in his head and now wanted to pop out, he asked smilingly, like someone who, purely for the fun of it, of course, was going along with the game:

“And what they will decide in that room about me, for example, do you suppose?”

“You see, that’s the big mistake people generally make.” Berg too now smiled, and all at once everything strange now peeled off him (or maybe it was precisely his strangeness which had now become familiar to Köves), though he was suddenly struck by the queer, albeit possibly deceptive hunch that Berg was also a foreigner — who knows, possibly an older compatriot who had fetched up there longer ago and therefore knew the ropes better than he did. “It’s you who has to decide,” Berg went on. “Here they merely give you the opportunity, and then what they do in the room is take cognizance of your decision.”

“And do you suppose,” the scene that Berg had, as it were, painted for him seemed rather incredible, yet — possibly through its very vividness — it still gripped his imagination, “do you suppose that such a room really exists?”

“It may be that in reality it doesn’t exist,” Berg shrugged his shoulders almost absent-mindedly, “But the possibility exists. And the worry is: What if it exists after all, and adding to that the uncertainty over whether it does, indeed, exist? — that’s enough.”

“For what?” Köves asked.

“To permeate every single life.”

But Köves was not satisfied with that answer:

“It’s not enough for me,” he said. Then after an interval, pensively and showing his puzzlement in confidence to Berg, he noted, “I don’t see any method here.”

“That is precisely what is methodical about it,” Berg countered immediately, his face twitching slightly as if he were offended by Köves’s doubts.

Köves, however, resolved that he was not going to be won round as easily as that:

“The fact that I don’t see it,” he asked, “or that it is unmethodical?” Berg’s response to which:

“The two together”—only dissatisfied him even more.

“That is just an assumption, he said, “empty words, no evidence. It lacks something …,” Köves searched for the word. “Yes,” he eventually said, “it lacks life.”

“Life?” It was now Berg’s turn to look surprised. “What’s that?” Köves was frank in quietly admitting:

“I don’t know.” But he added straightaway: “Perhaps no more than that we live.” Glimpsing in the corner of his eye that the man in the uniform was taking his leave of Sziklai, and Sziklai was already searching round for him, Köves suddenly got up from the table:

“I’ll see you!” he said, to which Berg nodded without a word, plainly not seeking to hold him up, whereupon he hurried over to Sziklai and beheld, with a warm, cosy feeling, the way his friend’s face was transformed by the laughter which was wrinkling his countenance:

“I’ve joined the fire brigade!” Sziklai relayed his news.

“How’s that?” Köves joined in the laughter as Sziklai related that the “guy” with whom he had been “negotiating” just beforehand was the city’s deputy fire chief, whom he, Sziklai, had got to know quite some time before:

“When I was with the paper, I did him a few favours,” he said. “At the fire brigade they have now woken up to the fact that fighting fires is actually a daring, hazardous and heroic calling that the public at large, and even the firemen themselves, are not fully alive to: they just put out fires, but in effect without being aware of what they are doing. In short, every trick of the letter, the word and conceptual impact has to be mobilized to awaken a sense of self-esteem in them, and public esteem toward them, to which end they would be willing, moreover, to allocate a substantial sum of money, if they were able to find an appropriate expert.”

“Which would be you?” Köves enquired.

“Who else?” Sziklai laughed. “Born for it, I was.” The guy, he related, offered him the rank of lieutenant, but he would only have to wear the uniform on official and festive occasions.

“I have a hunch,” he mused, “that for him I’ve come at just the right moment.”

“How’s that?” Köves asked.

“Because I’ve been fired and it’s the only chance I’ve got,” explained Sziklai. “Don’t you see?” he looked at Köves, at which Köves admitted:

“Not exactly.”

“Get away with you!” Sziklai fumed. “They need the publicity, they have the cash for it, money to burn, but he can’t get at it directly, so what do you think he wants?”

“Aha!” Köves said, just to be on the safe side, and:

“There you are!” Sziklai too finally regained his composure. “Now all we have to do is find something for you,” he continued.

“Me?” said Köves, “I’ll find a job tomorrow.”

“Where’s that?” Sziklai was surprised, with Köves replying:

“Anywhere,” and recounting that two men had been asking after him. “They were from customs,” he added. Sziklai scratched his head:

“Yikes!” he grimaced. “Let’s try to think it over,” he suggested, though Köves reckoned:

“There’s nothing to think over,” and Sziklai had to concede, albeit grudgingly, that he was right.

“All that worries me,” he fretted, “is that you’re going to vanish, that you’ll be lost to me in the depths of somewhere.”

And as if the smile with which Köves had greeted his words were bearing out his anxieties even more emphatically, he exclaimed:

“And what’s going to become of the comedy?!” Yet evidently, even now, he could not have read anything encouraging from Köves’s expression, because he went on: “I won’t forget about you; I’ll definitely find something for you sooner or later,” he hastened, agitatedly, to assure him. Köves expressed his thanks, and they agreed that “whatever might happen” they would continue to meet there, in the South Seas, after which Köves said good-bye, saying he wanted to get up early the next morning, paid Alice for his supper, then came to a halt for a moment by the exit, because at that very moment the revolving door spun and in came Tiny, the pianist, who greeted Köves with an expansive and overdone gesture.

“Which bench,” Köves asked after returning the salutation, “will you be gracing with your presence tonight?”

“None,” the pianist said: he looked more uncared-for than usual, his face shone greasily, his polka-dot bow tie was missing, and Köves caught a sour whiff of alcohol.

“Are you not worried any longer about being taken away?” asked Köves.

“Sure I am,” the musician replied, “but I’m even more worried that I’ll get rheumatism!” at which, mouth open wide, he laughed long and loud at his own joke — if that’s what it was and he was not speaking in all seriousness — as if he never wished to stop, during which Köves noticed that there were a number of gaps between his long teeth, which was a rather belated observation, or so he thought, considering that he had once spent a whole night in his company.