Fiasco

Matutinal intermezzo

One morning when Köves hastily pulled the front door to behind him (in reality it was closer to dawn, as nowadays Köves was working in a steelworks, and the factory was far away, so Köves always ought to have set off from home earlier than he did), he was brought to a standstill by an unusual clamour in the normally still stairwell. Sharp, explosive sounds prised at and reverberated against the walls: the innocuous barking of a dog, but magnified to an intolerable pandemonium by the resonant stairwell, and in the turn of the stairs above Köves there now appeared a ruddy-cheeked face in a frame of snow-white hair. Köves’s first sensation — no doubt the product of ceaseless dashing around, which was gradually making him blind to his surroundings and view every chance event, whatever its nature, as representing merely another obstacle — was one of frugal grouchiness: he would now have to waste some of his precious time on unavailing courtesies. Even so, the old fellow’s garb almost brought a smile to his face: although the promise of a sweltering day ahead had already crept into the closed space of the stairwell, the elderly gentleman was wearing heavy walking boots, thick woollen socks, shorts, and a windcheater, with a large rucksack pressing down on his shoulders, a heavy suitcase in one hand, and the other clutching his dog to his chest, and on spying Köves the dachshund instantly started barking again, while his tail, that animated spokesman of canine delight, drummed like a rain shower on the windcheater’s fabric. Köves was just about to move on, a perfunctory greeting on the tip of his tongue, when two other men attracted his attention. They were behind the old fellow and were young, each of them also carrying a suitcase, doubtless not their own but the old fellow’s — they were travelling cases of sorts, flaunting on their sides the faded remains of gaudy stickers; Köves was sent off into a daydream on spotting on one of them surf and the sun-shaded terrace of a bathing resort hotel — clearly assisting him, forming a single, cohesive group, so that Köves might well have taken them for the old fellow’s porters had he not noticed the uniforms they were wearing and their sidearms.

It was too late for Köves to hurry down the stairs in front of them as if he had not seen them, or perhaps to give voice to some degree to what he felt, along with a disapproving shaking of the head; nor could he jump back into the apartment (the idea of doing so fleetingly crossed his mind, but Köves would have considered that bad manners, for want of a better phrase on the spur of the moment); then again, of course, the paralyzing effect of surprise could have played a part in his just standing there, frozen, rooted to the spot.

The old fellow, who at first, it seemed, had wanted to pass him without a word — and that would have been the best as Köves, with hardly any loss of time, would have been able to hurry down straight after them and race out of the entrance hall and on to the tram stop, in blind haste, so to speak — all at once now came to a standstill after all, and partly by way of an explanation, partly just a little, perhaps (although quite likely it only came across like that to Köves), by way of an apology, yet also, at one and the same time, as if he were calling on Köves to act almost as a witness to his case, spoke in his wooden voice, which was even less sonorous than usual:

“So, it’s come to this, Mr. Köves.”

Köves was just about to ask something (though as to what, he didn’t know, of course, as this was hardly the place for questions: he might at most have wished the old fellow good luck, if that had not sounded absurd even before he could get it out), but instead one of the customs men broke the silence, and although Köves didn’t make a precise note of his words the gist of them was that the old fellow should stop “loafing around” and “get a move on.” He even raised a free hand, and Köves became seriously alarmed: for him to become a passive onlooker to an act of violence was something which — or so Köves felt, at least at that moment — would be too much for him.

Yet nothing happened, whereas the old fellow, as though suddenly awakening to the strengths residing in his defencelessness, went on unperturbed:

“Fortunately, I’ve been permitted to bring my dog along,” and he gave a wry smile, as though that were now the sole concession granted him in life, and he should be thankful for even that. The dog, as though sensing they were talking about it, started to wriggle in the old fellow’s arm, barking to be set down on the ground, wanting to get at Köves’s feet, while the customs men looked impatient (they may have feared that the yapping might draw people out of the apartments, on top of which it could not have been fully in line with regulations for them to be hauling the old fellow’s luggage after him like servants: no doubt they had been constrained to do it solely by their haste, for who knows what sort of night, and how much work, lay behind them, or who may have been hurrying them along in turn, as a result of which the second customs man, in irritation, which seemed to be intensified by his inability to do anything with Köves present, told the old fellow off for speaking when he was forbidden to do so, while the first one, by way of underlining the point as it were, swung round to address Köves:

“And who are you?” At which Köves started slightly: he was suddenly beset by a vague feeling that his negligence could land him in trouble, even though he had no idea what act of negligence he may have committed — besides being there, of course.

In the manner of someone in whom resentment at being intimidated finally prevails over the fear in itself, he flung his reply back at the Customs man in such a way that he himself was unsure whether he was on the attack or defence, or simply telling the truth:

“Who am I? Nobody!” He was just about to add that it was sheer chance that he had stepped out of the door at that moment, but, even though it fully accorded with the truth, he vaguely felt that would be a form of betrayal vis-à-vis the old fellow, as if he were meaning to say that he, Köves, had nothing to do with the whole business, though as far as that goes it was again no more than the truth, of course.

He therefore said:

“My name is Köves.” Tossing in, with an added disparaging edge: “A worker,” even though he himself did not know what the reproach covered, or to precisely whom it was addressed, so that in all likelihood it went unnoticed.

After that Köves was further held up on the steps for long minutes while he fumbled uncertainly in his pockets, as if he were searching for something that he just could not lay his hands on — his cigarettes, perhaps, although of late he had given up smoking — and in the meantime the whole stairwell around him was filled up with quiet rustling: it may have been his fraught imagination playing tricks on him, but Köves fancied he could pick out a quiet clicking of keys in locks, a cautious clumping of windows being shut, until he heard from the street the dull thuds of suitcases being tossed up onto the back of a truck, followed by the rumble of a truck engine, at which Köves was finally able to scurry down the stairs and sneak out of the entrance hall, and warily at that, lest the janitor notice him and happen to suppose he had seen something.

Accident. Girlfriend

That morning, Köves made his way alone along a by now deserted street from the tram toward the steelworks; at the gates, the head gatekeeper asked him sternly, as if he had never seen him before (which might have been the case, of course, given the number of workers in the factory), who he was looking for, while Köves, perhaps in the irrational hope that he might sneak past without attracting attention, tossed out while he was still in motion:

“A worker from the machine shop,” flashing toward the gatekeeper the entry permit with his photograph that he had been given not long before.

“You’re late, you mean,” the gatekeeper stated, blocking Köves’s path and taking his card away from him so as to note down the details for the report he would have to file on Köves’s late arrival, whereas Köves — well aware that lateness was treated severely, almost more severely, in his experience, than work itself, as if some general inclination (or its lack) could be deduced from it — tried pleading, albeit without much conviction:

“Not by a lot,” which only obliged the head gatekeeper to look at the clock.

“Three minutes,” he said, stepping into his glass box and sitting down at the desk, whereupon Köves, who remained standing in the doorway and rested against the frame as if he were already tired out, badly and massively tired, though the day had not even started, remarked, more due to his overwrought state than in any hope of pulling a fast one on the head gatekeeper:

“It wasn’t my fault,” though he immediately regretted it, because in response to the head gatekeeper’s question:

“Whose then?” he was not really in a position to give an answer that would have dispelled any doubt. There is no denying that at that moment Köves would have been hard put to say whose fault it was that he was late: perhaps himself most of all, since, from the head gatekeeper’s point of view, he, Köves, should undoubtedly have been honour-bound to push aside — whether politely or rudely, but in any event citing the punctuality expected of him — all those standing in his way, shake them off, cut his way through them, and set off for the factory, having given deeper weight to the thought that the head gatekeeper was hardly going to appreciate the emotions that had nonetheless been surging through Köves to detain him in the stairwell. What weighed still more heavily in the scales was the fact that Köves felt he was unable to set forth his reasons, would simply have been unable to relate to the head gatekeeper that morning’s events, at least the way they happened — there, by the head gatekeeper’s desk, where everything was impelling him to the crucial and the rational, Köves suddenly saw that this story was simply untellable. If he were to come out with it all the same, he would probably lose the thread, being forced into all sorts of evasions in the course of which his true feelings would come to light (those feelings now appeared to Köves as if it were not he who was feeling them and they were only importuning him like some evil-minded gang in order to make him their accomplice, although Köves was guilty of nothing, of course, unless of being late), so what he said in the end was:

“I got caught in a traffic jam,” but fortunately the head gatekeeper did not notice his discomfiture (he had very likely had a shrewd idea what the answer would be, having heard a more than a few excuses of that kind over the years), and now that he had finished writing, he got up from the desk:

“You need to be prepared for that. The next time set off half an hour earlier,” he advised Köves and handed back his pass.

Not much later, Köves was standing by a workbench and trying to file the upper surface of a lump of steel level, filing — so it seemed — being the key concomitant of the machine fitter’s craft, for Köves had signed on at the steelworks as a machine fitter, even though he was not a machine fitter, and if he were to be a worker, he had no wish to be a machine fitter; Köves had his own notions about that, until of course he came up against the reality of it. In his mind’s eye, Köves had seen a big, clean space and, in a well-lit place at one of the workbenches, himself, possibly in a white overall, surrounded by minute tools and tiny precision machines, where, possibly with a magnifying lens in one eye (the spectacle of Pumpadour, whom he had seen so many times in the South Seas, may have been somewhat instrumental in this), as he fabricated some tiny device that would then move, tick, whirr, or spin. It turned out, however, that it was useless his hankering after that sort of work, the factories in the city were mostly steelworks, and a steelworks devours manpower, so they were always taking people on, and at the employment office Köves was advised to sign on as a machine fitter. Köves was none too eager, on the grounds that if there were fitters, what was the point of a machine fitter, why not a locksmith, who — Köves imagined — produced locks, keys, fastenings, that kind of thing, and for whom a day would come when he could set off on a stroll round the city, or so Köves imagined, and from time to time peep into the entrance to an apartment block, maybe even walk round the outside corridor, and have the modest satisfaction of being able to tell himself that he had made this or that lock, or whatever, but there they were: those were objects that preserved, albeit anonymously, a trace of his handiwork. Köves had barely any idea about machine fitting, or at most no more than he had acquired once, a long time ago — long, long ago, it seemed to Köves, when he was still a small child — at a railway station, that having been a time when Köves took an extraordinary interest in locomotives, and at the station two black men (everything about them was black: their clothes, their tools, their faces, and their hands) had banged on the wheels of a locomotive with big hammers, prompting Köves to ask his companion (no doubt one of his parents) who they were and being told: machine fitters, and henceforth whenever machine fitters crossed his mind (and of course they rarely did cross his mind) he would visualize them as, so to say, fairytale monsters of that kind, a sort of cross between a giant and a devil. It soon became clear, though, that this was the only opening on offer at the employment office: what had been brought to Köves’s attention at his first word, as a piece of good advice, proved, as such, to be more of a command for him, he only had to sign a bit of paper that — to Köves’s amazement — was already waiting for him, completed, as if the office had already been counting on his coming by: of course it is possible that it was just some impersonal form onto which they would subsequently enter the precise particulars (Köves did not see clearly what they thrust in front of him then snatched away immediately after). Afterwards, he even haltingly brought up the objection that he knew nothing about the craft: never you mind, they had replied, they’ll teach you within six weeks. Köves had left the office with mixed feelings (he was supposed to report early the next day at the steelworks); he felt a degree of incredulity over the notion that within six weeks he would become proficient in all the ins and outs of a craft which could hardly be simple, on top of which he shuddered at the thought that he might have to serve an apprenticeship among trainee kids.

As luck would have it, there was no question of that; the people around Köves learning the machine-fitting craft were all adults, some learning for one reason, some for another (in most cases the exact reason never emerged, and making enquiries, for which Köves had neither the time nor the inclination, seemed to be frowned on there), but in any event next to Köves a slim man with a moustache and a pleasant outward appearance was filing, engrossed in his work and silently, in shirtsleeves and a peaked cap of a kind that at most Köves might have seen abroad, had he been interested in equestrian sports, as well as gloves that an expert eye would have been able to recognize, despite the wear and tear, the stains and holes, as being made of buckskin. Had he been fired from somewhere? Or was some guilt burdening his conscience (like Köves’s, too, in all probability), and had he become a machine fitter as a punishment or, for that matter, out of clemency? Or had he perhaps originally had an occupation which had now simply lost relevance, become unnecessary, like that of the sluggish, slightly burly figure who was filing away a bit farther off, whose closer friends would sometimes, within earshot, call “Mr. Counsellor?” Köves had no way of knowing.

People of all sorts were there, though, from the mysterious to the simple, from those who were upright to the more slovenly, indeed uncouth; there were even a few female machine fitters — on Köves’s other side, for instance, there was a girl filing away, and highly competently too: Köves would occasionally watch enviously, yet at the same time with a tinge of smiling acknowledgement, how in her eagerness her lithe body would quiver all over, her headscarf would slip away from the glossy black hair, tiny beads of sweat would appear on her upper lip, and the girl would sometimes catch him looking, smiling the first time secretively, later on more boldly, and by now sometimes throwing out the occasional remark to Köves, to which Köves, his attention wandering, yet still like someone withstanding the challenge, would toss back some repartee. At other times, he would fasten his gaze on a pair of identical men — at any event both were stocky and balding, both were wearing brand-new blue overalls, which in Köves’s eyes unaccountably looked like the external mark of some resolve, not unlike new penitents who don a monk’s cowl yet, out of old habit, still get it made by their own tailor, filed away with dour assiduity: they were there in the morning, they disappeared in the evening, and they spoke not a word either to others or to each other; Köves heard that they had been dismissed from somewhere, but they considered that this had been a blunder and were now waiting as machine fitters for light to be cast on that blunder, and the reason they were so guarded was that they were afraid a fresh blunder might befall them, or even that they themselves might commit one.

In short, Köves was making do there (to some extent, being present as if he was not present at all, or as if it was not he who was present: an illusory feeling, since it was he after all), and he had already been touched to cheery wonder by the obscure minor delights of a worker’s life: those of the lunch hour, the end of the shift, even of a job of work well done, though the latter was not entirely unalloyed, given that, to tell the truth, Köves had little success with the file; he would never have believed that to smooth a lump of steel immaculately level could be so beyond his powers. Köves regarded filing as almost a matter of honour, and it had got to the point that he now dreamed about it: he stood transfigured at the workbench, iron filings falling from under the file in a flurry of grating, scraping noises, but to no avail, as the foreman — a stout, flaxen-haired man who walked up and down good-naturedly, though somewhat lethargically, among the people bent over their vises and from time to time, with a gesture that was patient but showed little in the way of encouragement, would make an adjustment to the way Köves was holding his elbow or hand — with the aid of a tiny, gallows-like measuring tool was always able to point to some bump or hollow, disfigurement or crookedness on the lump of steel on which Köves had laboured with such furious care.

Köves derived some solace from drilling: that went well for him, one might even say splendidly, as unlike others he never snapped the bits, while he was also able to look forward to plate-shearing with definite confidence — they had tried it out that afternoon, with the gentleman-rider taking a turn at the metal shears before Köves and the girl after him, with the girl calling something across to him with a smile (Köves did not understand it: it sounded as though it were meant to encourage or spur, even urge him on, but in any case Köves had thrown back some facile comment while he set the metal plate in position, then gave a self-confident heave on the steel handles of the shears, heard a cry and was astonished to see the girl’s horrified expression, only after which did something warm pour down his forehead: it seemed he must have stood the wrong way at the machine, and as he had heaved it toward himself the handgrip had banged on his head.

As to what happened to him and around him after that, Köves was only able to follow it with a docile absent-mindedness, like someone who has laid down his arms and allows himself to be swept along by events (which are none too important anyway). Out of the hubbub which arose around him he could again clearly pick out the girl’s appalled yet almost boastful exclamations of “it’s my fault it happened, my fault for telling him to get a move on,” after which a white handkerchief was held to his forehead — more than likely that too was the girl’s. Köves stained the handkerchief quite profusely with his blood, then they lay him down on a bench to staunch the flow, and after that they got him to his feet after all, when they decided that he needed to be taken to the factory’s doctor. As well as he could remember, Köves did not see the girl among those who accompanied him, having sought her in order to return the handkerchief, so he stuffed it in his pocket, even though in doing so he had no doubt daubed blood all over his pocket. They crossed various courtyards before finally reaching the surgery, where the factory doctor pronounced that, the shock aside (though he was not in the least bit of shock), there was nothing seriously wrong with Köves, at which the escort (somewhat disappointed, he thought) left Köves to himself with the doctor and the nurse working alongside him. With rapid, skilled movements, they carried out several procedures on his head (Köves caught the pungent smell of disinfectant and felt some stinging), as a result of which a plaster, rakishly slanted and not too large, ended up on Köves’s brow, directly under the hairline. The doctor told him that he had “stitched” the wound and, enunciating clearly so that Köves, being a simple worker, should be able to understand him, made him promise not to touch the plaster and to come back for it to be treated in three days’ time. He could return to work the next day, he added; the wound did not justify his being put on the sick list. Köves was then allowed to lie for half an hour on the surgery’s couch, and by the time the half hour was up, the shift had also ended.

Köves nevertheless went back to the locker room, partly in order to change, but mainly so as to get a shower: he was able to wash down every day in the steelworks shower room, and there were times when he was in low spirits and felt that the only reason it had been worth getting a job there was for the sake of its shower room, though now of course he had to twist his head about so as not to get the wound wet. While he was dressing, several people patted him chummily on the back, after which he was soon joining the human flood pouring out of the factory.

At the gate, or maybe even before (he was unsure), Köves found that the girl had appeared beside him. Everything that happened to them after that Köves accepted, without any particular surprise, assent or dissent, as a well-organized and self-explanatory process, as a fact that had long been decided and only needed them to recognize it so they might submit to it, even though to some extent that still depended on them, and to that extent Köves might have been mistaken all the same. It began with some teasing (what lodged most in Köves’s memory was the girl’s opening remark: “What an elegant plaster!”), after which somehow neither of them boarded the tram but instead they wandered around in what, for Köves, was the unfamiliar realm of the outer suburbs, where they came to some sort of park, then all of a sudden Köves found he was strolling with a good-looking, dark-haired girl under the leafy boughs of an avenue of trees, and from far away, with a somewhat astonished yet indulgent smile he was beholding a strange and unfamiliar thing happening to him — precisely the fact that he, Köves, was strolling under the leafy boughs of an avenue of trees with a good-looking, dark-haired girl. He was nagged by a vague anxiety, perhaps a presentiment of imminent danger, but defiant urge kept welling up in boiling waves to give way to her and perish.

“Don’t you have a home to go to?” the girl asked, and Köves, coming round from his dreams as it were, could only echo the question:

“Home?” as if he were surprised by the savour of the word, as well as the thought that he ought to be going home to somewhere. “No,” he then said, and the girl, averting her eyes as though she were not even addressing the question to Köves but to the trees lining the street:

“Don’t you have a wife?” she asked; that, it seems, is what interests girls everywhere and at all ages equally.

“No,” he replied, and the girl now fell silent, as if she wished to be left on her own for a while with Köves’s answer.

A little later she said:

“It’s still early.”

“For what?” Köves asked.

“To go up to my place,” the girl responded, and the promise implicit in those words was distant enough for Köves to win time, but on the other hand sufficiently enticing to make him restive and spur him to some sort of action: Köves felt his arm moving and encircling the girl’s shoulder.

Later on, Köves recalled a restaurant, a kind of beergarden where a third-rate Gypsy band squeaked and squealed stridently as a clutch of shirtsleeved men at some table or other defiantly bellowed some song, their faces red as lobsters, while at other tables solemn, overweight families sat stiffly, wordlessly, stricken in their incommutable presence as it were; it was here that Köves — his head now starting to throb, which may well have made him somewhat preoccupied — learned that the girl had come to the city from somewhere farther afield, against the will of her parents, who had intended their straitened peasant fate for their daughter, but she had run away from her parents and the future that had been lined up for her by starting work at the factory:

“You have to start somewhere, don’t you?” she said, and Köves keenly approved, even though every nod he gave sent a pain shooting through his head. They later got on a tram which jolted along, taking them farther out of the city, where they alighted somewhere and the girl led Köves among squat, newlybuilt housing, which, in the uncertain glimmer of the sparsely sited street lamps already — perhaps on account of all the planking, sand heaps, and unfilled holes that had been left there — looked like ruins, until they turned in at a gate, climbed a dark set of stairs, and the girl groped with her key to open a door and in the hallway signaled Köves to remain quiet, which he, although not knowing the precise reason, accepted as self-explanatory, as if there was no way of reaching the place he and the girl were approaching other than stealthily. In the end, they slipped into a tiny side room, where the girl switched on a table lamp with a pink shade and Köves cast a fleeting glance across the objects which, so to speak, consummated the room’s perfection: a cracked mirror, a rickety wardrobe, crocheted doilies, a grinning rubber dog sticking out its tongue under the lampshade, a line, discreetly strung up in a dark corner, from which hung a few pairs of stockings and items of underwear, an artificial flower poking up from a chipped vase, a chair, a table, and, above all, a fairly broad but springy bed which would presumably be squeaking later on, while his nostrils were assailed by the smell of poverty, cleanliness, some cheap perfume, and adventure, though he had a hunch that the latter was the sole volatile scent among all the other durable odours.

After which, the next thing Köves caught himself doing was making love — despite everything and over and beyond everything that he had shared in there, how was it possible that he had been made to forget that he was a man? All at once, he now awakened to his insatiable primeval thirst: it was as if he were seeking to douse his throbbing, burning member, yet finding it had plunged into bubbling lava, which burned it even more, with the girl, to start with whispering but then aloud, as it were, egging him on, Köves, like someone in whom a protective concern had suddenly awakened with the passing of the initial half-hours of recurrently erupting self-oblivion, so to speak, asked the girl:

“Aren’t you worried about having a child?”

The look the girl gave might have been, if anything, more worrying for him:

“Why should I be worried?…,” she asked, but she was unable to follow on as she had heard a noise (Köves did not notice it), and she now bid Köves to be quiet, quickly slipped out of the bed, her body white before Köves’s eyes as she bobbed down here and there to search for an item of clothing, which she then draped round her shoulders before dashing out of the room, though her nimble feet soon brought her back, as if she did not wish to leave Köves on his own for too long in the bed, lest he be overcome with loneliness or a fit of absurdity and fear, and she uninhibitedly discarded her negligee, leaned over Köves, and switched off the lamp before nestling up to him with a total confidence which t slightly astonished Köves, like a discreet assault, yet at the same time also disarmed him.

“It was the old lady,” he heard the girl say in the dark.

“Which old lady?” he asked.

“The old lady,” the girl repeated.

“I see,” Köves murmured.

“She was thirsty,” the girl said, then after a brief pause added: “She has cancer; she’s dying,” the girl’s voice rang firmly, almost optimistically, and on hearing her Köves himself did not know why he winced a little. The girl, though, as if she now wanted quickly to interpose herself between Köves and the questions that were assailing him:

“Don’t worry, she’s already gone to sleep. She won’t disturb us any more,” she whispered, and after some wavering hesitation Köves meekly sensed that he was again gradually being suffused by a wave of ardour.

Köves is summoned. Forced to have second thoughts

Köves was called in; he was just in the middle of filing away when the foreman came over to him to say that he was urgently wanted upstairs, in the office. What sprang immediately to Köves’s mind was his recent lateness, and although the foreman insisted that he should drop everything and get his skates on, Köves — who after all was merely a worker there (he could hardly sink much lower than that), but then it was precisely through this that he had attained his freedom, even if that freedom did not consist of much more than not having anything to lose — reckoned he was in no hurry to be hauled over the coals. First of all, therefore, he put down the file he was holding, shook the iron filings from his trousers and shoes by stamping a few times, wiped his hands on an oily rag with a few big, easy movements (the way he had seen real machine fitters in the nearby workshops do it), and only then, having as it were disposed of the more important matters, did he set off out of the workshop at a leisurely, ambling pace, responding to the girl’s questioning look only with a wink of the eye: since the first time, Köves had several times spent the night at the girl’s place, reaching the point that they had breakfasted together in the pocket-handkerchief kitchen and set off together for the factory, with the girl delighting in covering the short stretch from the tram to the steelworks hand in hand, although Köves usually found some pretext (such as an urgent need to blow his nose) for withdrawing his hand from the girl’s. In the meantime, Köves learned that the old lady, whom fortunately they never encountered, was some distant relative of the girl’s; the old lady had taken her in, and the girl looked after her in return, and when she died the girl would get the authorities to hand over to her the big room in which the old lady was presently living, and in point of fact, it would be possible to obtain the whole apartment, or at least there would be a greater chance of that if the girl had a family, and especially a child; to all of which planning Köves listened with approving nods, but always in the manner of a well-disposed outsider who, although of course not indifferent to the girl’s life, was nevertheless not, by any means, a part of it, and yet it seems that this did not dampen the girl’s spirits: she just smiled at Köves, as if she knew something better than he did. The previous night, indeed, Köves had not spent with the girl, excusing himself on the grounds that he needed to pay a visit on an uncle, but tossing and turning in his bed, unable to get to sleep, he had been surprised to find himself missing the girl. Yes, if he was a worker, then (so it seemed) he needed a wife; but then, on the other hand (it crossed Köves’s mind), if he had a wife, that would turn him into a worker for good, not that it made such a big difference (he was already one as it was) — Köves no longer knew, in his restless half-slumbering state, where he stood even with his own affairs. In the end, the girl would be right: if she gave it time, that would tie him, without his noticing it, to the girl’s life, and that in turn to the works and promotion, as they waited for the cancer-stricken old lady’s death, and meanwhile along came children, one after the other.

Köves was supposed to look for the shipping department (the head of the department wanted a word with him), and for a while he wandered uncertainly along various corridors, until he finally spotted a group of men who, with laboured care, were lugging heavy crates out through a door, but the female clerk sitting inside (who, having first asked Köves if he was a truck driver, had found out he was not) informed him that he was in the wrong place: this was the haulage department; shipping, she said, was something different), at which Köves begged pardon, remarking that he hadn’t known that.

“No?” the clerk was amazed. “Oh well, you’ll learn,” and with that gave directions to Köves, who, in another corridor, indeed on another floor, finally spotted, hanging one of the doors, spotted a sign that read SHIPPING, with below it, in smaller lettering: CUSTOMS MATTERS — PERSONNEL MATTERS — MATERNITY BENEFIT. Slightly nonplussed, especially by the “Maternity Benefit,” Köves entered a relatively plain office, where, apart from the customary female clerk, there was a man with the outer appearance of a machine fitter, pacing up and down, hands in his pockets, with obvious impatience, though when Köves took a closer look, of course, he immediately noticed it was only his clothing that made him look like a machine fitter, more specifically the unbuttoned, faded-blue overall jacket, and especially the peaked cloth cap that, for whatever reason, he was wearing indoors in the great heat; under the jacket were a white shirt and a necktie, and though sagging slightly and wrinkle-creased, and despite the thick locks of greying hair peeping out from under the cap, he had a soft, youthful-looking face, his piercing blue eyes glinting at Köves as he stepped through the door:

“Köves?!” he shouted, and on receiving an affirmative answer almost set upon him: “Where have you been all this time?!” at which Köves, acting the dumb worker, shrugged his shoulders, having come when he was told to and being there now, but when it came down to it, of course, he could answer for himself in his own way.

“Right! Come along anyway, come!” The man seemed to relent, ushering Köves with a cordial gesture in through a side door marked, HEAD OF DEPARTMENT, which he carefully closed after them, then offered Köves a chair while he himself sat down behind a desk, directly in front of Köves. He stayed silent for a while, running his gaze keenly over the piles of paper and bundles of documents which were heaped on the desk, pulling out one or another to look at, only to toss it back testily:

“Well then,” he eventually spoke, abstractedly, as he was doing that, and to Köves’s astonishment in an undeniably friendly, if not downright intimate, tone of voice. “How are you finding it here, with us?” Köves, who on the spur of the moment did not know whether he should consider the cordiality inherent in the question an aberration, or suspect a trap in it, or even whether he should take the question seriously at all, hesitated a little before replying, as though he thought the formalities could be dispensed with and wanted to get straight to the point.

As nothing happened, however — the man was still hunting through his papers and seemed to be waiting for an answer — Köves said:

“Wonderfully,” so as to say nothing, yet still break the silence.

“Wonderfully!” the man repeated the word, even Köves’s intonation, while he pulled out one of the desk drawers and leaned over to take a look in it. “And here I am, unaware of how wonderful it is to be a machine fitter with us,” which shut Köves up for good. “You’re a shrewd one …,” the man went on, pushing the drawer back in irritation and straightening up again: “Very shrewd …,” and now his face suddenly brightened, but only so to speak incidentally, and just momentarily at that: most probably he had come across the document he had been looking for, and on the desktop after all, and he now immediately became engrossed in it:

“With your talents …,” he went on, he was all but griping. “With your knowledge …”

Like someone who had suddenly concluded his dual activity and wished to devote his attention solely to Köves from now on, he now slapped vigorously on the desk and flashed his piercingly blue eyes at Köves:

“How long do you intend to laze around here?!” he almost snarled. “Did you think you would be able hide from us?! Tell me frankly, are you really satisfied here?!” at which Köves, who had been fidgeting on the seat in growing astonishment, was genuinely stunned. What was this? Was this a joke? He gets kicked out of everywhere to find they are only willing to take him on at a steelworks, forcing him, a mature adult, to become apprenticed as a machine fitter, and then they have the nerve to throw it back in face, as if it had been his idea to become a machine fitter? Had he not been driven there by necessity, in the face of duress? Had he not come here because he couldn’t go anywhere else? And now here they were, all at once pretending that among all of life’s boundless, rich parade of options he, Köves, had happened to choose this, as it now turned out, the very worst of all, and on his own whim at that? In what way could he be satisfied?… Köves had hardly given any thought to that so far; indeed, it had not occurred to him (he had not come to the steelworks in order to be satisfied, after all); but now he was being asked, even if it was hardly in all seriousness of course, and possibly was even expected to answer — for which he would still remain in their debt, of course — Köves felt that the entire time he had spent there was a single day, with its mornings and evenings maybe, but still a single, long, monotonous day, running constantly in the grey colours of dawn, that he kept scraping away at with his file as at an unerodable piece of steel, with its alternations of boredom and the deceptive relief of the end of the shift, and with the fleeting distraction that the girl offered, for which he had to pay with a feeling of belonging together. Köves had supposed that he was now going to live his life like that — in truth, of course, maybe he didn’t think that, in truth he more likely thought that he would only have to live that way temporarily, for today, tomorrow, and then maybe the day after tomorrow, because it wasn’t possible to live that way, though it had occurred to Köves to ask himself: Does man not live in a way he is not supposed to live, and then does it not transpire that this was his life after all? — at all events Köves was, in a certain sense, undeniably calm, and now that the department head was poking around at his composure, as he had been with his documents just beforehand, a hunch vaguely took shape in Köves that in that composure he had, to some extent, lighted on himself, perhaps more than in anything else before.

Now, therefore, he enquired, sharply, coolly, like someone whom emotion had made to forget he was a machine fitter:

“Why? You know of something better for me, perhaps?”

The department head, however, did not seem to be put out in the least by Köves’s manners.

“Yes, I do,” he smiled. “That’s why I summoned you.”

Casting a swift glance under the now part-way raised palm of his hand, which had been resting on the document that had been located with such difficulty, he continued:

“You’re a journalist. From tomorrow you’ll be working for the press department of the Ministry of Production, the ministry which supervises us,” and he had maybe not even got the words out, or Köves heard them, when, slipping out of Köves, brusquely and harshly, as if his life were under threat, came a:

“No!”

“No?” the department head leaned over the desk toward Köves, his face unexpectedly softening and sagging, his mouth opening slightly, his eyes staring confusedly at Köves from under the cap: “What do you mean, ‘No’?” he asked, so Köves, who by then had visibly regained his poise, although this seemed to have reinforced rather than shaken his determination, repeated:

“No,” like someone shielding something tangible against some kind of fantasy. And so as not to appear like the sort of uncouth bumpkin who could not even speak, he added by way of an explanation:

“I’m unsuited for it.”

“Of course not.” The department head too had meanwhile calmed down and plainly resigned himself to the utmost patience he could muster in order to acquaint Köves with one thing and another. “Of course you’re not suited: we are quite clear of that ourselves.” There was a momentary pause as a slightly care-laden expression flitted across his face, then, overcoming his doubts as it were, he slowly raised his blue gaze and trained it straight on Köves: “That’s precisely why we’re posting you over there,” he went on, “so that you will become suited,” and now it was Köves’s turn to lean forward in his chair in surprise.

“How can I become suited for something I’m unsuited for?!” he exclaimed, making the department head crack a smile at his bewilderment.

“Come now, don’t be such a baby!” he soothed Köves. “How would you know what you’re suited for and what not?”

“Who but me?” he yelled, even more vociferously than before, “Surely not yourselves!” in his excitement he seemed involuntarily to take over the use of the plural from the department head, even though there was just one of them sitting facing him.

“Naturally.” The department head’s eyes rounded and one eyebrow shot up almost to the middle of his forehead at the sight of such ignorance. “Look here,” he said, an unexpected tinge of gentleness creeping into his voice. The free hand which was not covering the document moved, stretching forward, and Köves was now beset with a vague feeling that the department head might be seeking to grasp his hand, though of course it could only have been his confused imagination playing tricks on him, it was too far away anyway, so nothing of the sort happened. “Look here, I could tell you a great deal, a very great deal, about that. Who could know what he’s suited for and what not? How many tests do we have to go through until it becomes clear who we are?” The department head was warming to the task, gradually bringing the colour of more briskly circulating blood to his pallid features. “Upstairs,” and at this point the hand which, just before, had been reaching forward was now raised, fingers spread, as if he were raising a chalice above his head, “in higher circles, they’ve come to a decision about you. How do suppose you can defy that decision?”

“But it’s about me, after all,” Köves interposed, somewhat unsure of himself, though not at all as if he had been persuaded, more because he was interested in what the department head was saying, yet he again seemed to be astonished:

“About you? Who’s talking about you? What role are you marking out for yourself, apart from doing what you’re told?!” And with his face now flushed like someone incapable of containing his enthusiasm, he called out: “We are servants, servants, each and every one of us! I’m a servant, and you’re a servant too. Is there anything more uplifting than that, more marvellous than that?”

“Whose servants?” Köves got a word in.

“Of a higher conceptualization,” came the answer.

“And what is that conceptualization,” Köves got in quickly, as if he were hoping he might finally learn something.

The question must have been over-hasty, however, because the department head stared mutely at him, as if he could not believe what he was hearing, and then he again glanced at the document that he was warming under his palm:

“Of course,” he spoke finally. “You’ve returned home from abroad.”

All the same, he answered the question Köves had asked, though by now in a much drier tone:

“Unbroken perfectionism.”

“And of what does that consist?” Köves, seeming to have already accepted that he was a journalist once again, yet was not to be deflected.

“Our trying ceaselessly to put people to the test.” The department head at this point indicated, with a brusque flip of the hand, that they had exhausted the subject and should revert to practical matters. “Consider it a piece of good luck,” he said, “that you’ve been noticed,” and it seemed that his words had a sudden sobering effect on Köves as well.

“I don’t want good luck,” he said, now in the same dry, determined tone and with a feeling he had already said that before to someone, even if then he may have been even less well-armed against luck than he was now. “I want to be a worker,” he went on, “a good worker. If I understand something, then …,” he hesitated slightly, but then he must have decided there was little risk to laying his cards on the table: “then you can’t trifle with me so easily.”

The department head, however, evidently appreciated his openness, his expression now all goodwill, his voice ringing warmly:

“A good worker,” he said, “is the last thing you’ll be. Either you leave here or you won’t come to anything. After all, you haven’t even learned how to file yet.” He fell silent, looked at Köves with his head slightly tipped to one side, then, with a friendly smile to balance, as it were, the harshness of what he had to say, he carried on: “In point of fact, we could dismiss you. You simply don’t come up to the requirements, after all. However,” he swiftly tagged on, “naturally we would prefer it if you were to accept our offer of your own free will,” and here Köves was all at once overwhelmed by a bottomless weariness which had actually never left him since he had arrived there.

They exchanged a few more words, with Köves most likely also signing something, after which the next thing he noticed was that, as on so many occasions already during his stay there, he was leaving an office with unsteady steps, without knowing anything more than he had when he entered, and he thought, with a certain amount of shame, of the girl’s beseeching, then uncomprehending, and finally, no doubt, astonished expression when he later packed his things together and left the factory without saying a word.