Fiasco

In a South Seas refraction

That evening, Köves turned up once more at the South Seas, spinning in through the revolving door and making a beeline for Sziklai’s table, where he was sitting in exactly the same pose as when he last took leave of him, and a broad smile now brightened and then cracked the hard face into tiny shards, as if all he had been waiting for ever since was Köves’s arrival.

“What’s ‘my literary talents’ supposed to mean?!” Köves waded in, throwing himself down on one of the chairs without even asking, and the smile froze slightly on Sziklai, who had no doubt been counting on a more cordial reunion.

“What it’s supposed to mean?… I don’t understand …,” he mumbled, his face still reflecting, on the one hand, the joy of seeing Köves again but now also, on the other, a touch of disappointment, whereupon Köves related what had happened that morning:

He had been handed his papers for the job at the steelworks and told to present them at the press department of the Ministry for Production, and without delay moreover, lest the greater part of the remainder of the working day be lost, and in order that Köves might be set immediately to work at the Ministry, should they see fit. Köves had rushed from one tram to another — the Ministry was near the city centre, a long way from the factory — as if he had been handed some extraordinarily fragile public property: his time, which he had to deliver perfectly intact to its destination, taking care, above all, not even to dream of pilfering any part of it for himself. This near-missionary feeling, as if it were not him who was arriving, or rather it was him, except representing himself, so to say — that easiness had helped him through the usual stumbling blocks with which he had to grapple at the porter’s lodge in order that, ID card in hand, he should then make his way between the two customs men at the main entrance. Köves had raced, panting, up stairs and along corridors until he had, at last, found the press department, where it had turned out that he would have to wait as the press chief just happened to be dealing with something else. “He’s in a meeting with the current chairman of the Supervisory Committee,” disclosed the typist — herself busy now clattering at her typewriter, now reaching for ringing telephones — in a voice that switched to a more confidential tone after she learned from Köves what had brought him there. “I see,” Köves commented, somewhat dazed, his face but then gradually recovering an intelligent expression, as though he were suddenly sobering up from a bout of intoxication and, with some primitive instinct, which seemed all at once to resuscitate the torpidity of his original nature, was already settling himself on what was, presumably, the most comfortable chair in the room. Now, of course, it would not occur to him, Köves smiled to himself, to rush the padded door; or if it did (as it had indeed just occurred to him), then not in the least with any disposition to act, at most the glint of a memory, an almost painfully exquisite memory that he had preserved of himself. What a child he had still been back then, Köves reflected, as though musing on times long gone. When had that been? Yesterday? Twenty years ago, perhaps? Ever since arriving in the country, Köves had always had a spot of trouble with time; while living it, it seemed interminable to him, but when he thought about it as the past, it seemed practically nothing, with a duration that might have fitted into a single hour, in all likelihood, the thought crossed Köves’s mind, an idle hour at a twilight hour in another, a more real, one might say a more intensive life, somewhere getting on suppertime, when a person has nothing better to do, nor does it does matter anyway, and ultimately, it fleetingly occurred to Köves, an entire lifetime was going to pass like that, his life, on which he would eventually be able to look back with the thought that he could have seen to it within the space of a single hour, the rest being a sheer frittering away of time, difficult living conditions, struggle — and all for what? At that moment Köves would have found it hard to say what; it was more just the sense of struggle that lived in him, of effort, without being able to see more exactly, or at least suspect, the object, let alone the purpose, of that struggle, though of course it could have been he was just tired, as usual, his intermittently failing reason maybe only indicating his exhaustion, the toe-curling boredom of the struggle. Maybe his mind was wandering, although it did not escape his attention that a woman and, immediately after her, a man hurried out from behind the padded door and crossed the room heading straight for the door — so Köves noticed that she was a good-looking woman who, through her hair and probably also her dress, left him with a fleeting impression of the yellowish-reddish-brown coloration of ripe chestnuts, whereas the man, diminutive, dapper, and with a moustache, whose jerky movements seemed as to be explaining something, striving to detain the woman, who was hurrying off wordlessly, without looking back and, improbable as it was, he appeared to have a flower adorning the buttonhole of his jacket — Köves continued to keep his eyes on the half-open inner door, waiting for the press chief and the current chairman of the Supervisory Committee, who, for whatever reason, he imagined as being an elderly, sturdy, bald or silver-haired man. It seemed, though, that he was wrong: after accompanying the woman to the door, it was the fastidious manikin himself who returned and, for the first time, cast a distracted and, outwardly, in some way drawn gaze first at Köves, then at the typist, who now announced in a soft, impatient voice that this was Köves, “the new colleague,” at which the man, a spasm of pain flashing across his face, asked Köves to “be patient for just a little longer,” and then vanished behind the padded door, which meant Köves had seen the press chief after all, and therefore the woman who had departed just beforehand could only be the current chairman of the Supervisory Committee. Shortly after, the handset on the typist’s desk buzzed. Köves looked at the typist, she at Köves, and Köves got up from the seat and headed for the padded door with the happy yet unsettling feeling that “their eyes met and they were in accord.” The press chief, his lineaments by now fully composed, with conspicuous affability invited Köves to take a seat and, while Köves established that he really was wearing a flower in his buttonhole, in point of fact a white carnation, told him that he was delighted to be able to welcome him among his colleagues, which Köves heard with well-founded scepticism. He instructed Köves to see to take whatever steps were necessary to ensure that his personal details were placed on file at the office — the typist would be of assistance there — and there was time enough to assume his new sphere of duties the next day: “We arrange for articles to be reprinted in the press,” he said, and a doleful smile appeared on his face, making Köves think at first that maybe it was the “reprinting” that distressed him, possibly he felt it was unworthy, but he could have been wrong about that, because the press chief’s long, brown, moustachioed face, seemed to carry some secret sorrow which nevertheless, at least in this mute form, sometimes sought to emerge, whereas at other times that smile lurked on it, even as he went on: “But what am I doing explaining all that to you, of all people, when I’ve heard all about your outstanding literary talents?” at which Köves jerked his head up like someone who had been roused suddenly from a long and tranquil dream with some frightening piece of news. “My literary talents?” He grew alarmed. “From who?” he asked. All the press chief said, this time substituting a mysterious smile for the doleful one, was “From our mutual friend; I can’t say more than that …,” yet Köves instantly guessed all the same whom he should suspect.

“Don’t tell me you’re not pleased about it?” Sziklai laughed out loud, but whether because he wanted to avoid giving a straight answer, or because he was curious about something else, Köves asked instead:

“So, you know him?”

“Certainly I know him,” Sziklai replied, his eyebrows raised in amazement, as if surprised at Köves’s ignorance. “All the same …,” he carried on but then broke off what he had to say so as to order two beers, no: “two shots” in celebration of their reunion, from Alice who had hurried up to their table and, for her part, likewise shared their delight, commenting that “We’ve been missing our Mr. Editor badly”—“All the same …,” Sziklai then picked up the thread of their conversation again, “How do you think you got out of the meatgrinder into such a classy job?”

“How?” Köves inquired curiously, but like someone already harbouring forebodings.

“By my organising it for you,” Sziklai wised him up.

“You?!” Köves was astonished. “You mean it wasn’t an arrangement from higher up?” He gave himself away, like a child who, driven by his own curiosity, starts taking a doll apart in order to see what is speaking in its belly; and having got going, he also related to Sziklai how he had been dismissed from the steelworks, and Sziklai laughed so hard that a tiny tear welled up in one eye and lodged, twinkling, in the thicket of wrinkles which had formed at the corner of the eye.

“An arrangement from higher up!” he choked. “Well of course it was an arrangement from higher up: I arranged it.” He finally calmed down, adding that the press chief was an “old client.” He had already known him during his journalist days, but he had “renewed contact” with him at the fire brigade, he said, at which point Köves asked parenthetically how, now it had come up, Sziklai felt being with the fire brigade, at which Sziklai gave a haughty dismissive wave:

“Superbly! I have them eating from the palm of my hand.” Now, he went on, the fire brigade was one of the Ministry for Production’s biggest clients, with all its orders for motor vehicles, pipes, fire ladders, helmets, and whatnot, in large quantities, and of course — as tends to be the case — goods at knock-down prices for the most part don’t come up to scratch, and then it was his — Sziklai’s — job, on behalf of the fire brigade, to raise the threat of public exposure, whereas it was the press chief’s job, on behalf of the ministry, to dissuade him from doing that, to reassure him with all sorts of promises, and the two of them generally managed to find ways of coming to terms with each other.

“If you know what I mean,” Sziklai said, winking meaningfully at Köves.

“Sure,” Köves retorted hurriedly, so as not to hold Sziklai from telling his story, because his own case was of more interest than any disputes between the fire brigade and the ministry. So anyway, Sziklai continued, during one of their talks it had come to light that a vacancy had arisen in the press chief’s department, and even though filling the position was not exactly of great urgency, still, if Sziklai happened to have a possible candidate in mind, the press chief would of course give serious consideration to offering the job to the person in question, and needless to say, said Sziklai, he had “jumped at the opportunity.”

“I told you I wouldn’t forget about you, didn’t I? That I’d find something for you without fail!” The one thing he hadn’t known, he anticipated Köves’s next question, was where Köves was to be found, given that he didn’t have his home address:

“Which is absurd, old friend. Give it to me right away!” at which Köves nodded vigorously as though that was precisely his intention, he was only deferring doing so until later in order not to interrupt Sziklai; and Köves had also forgotten to inform him, Sziklai upbraided him further, where he had gone to work. Now, discovering his place of work was by no means as difficult as Köves no doubt supposed, he went on; he had simply donned his fire officer’s uniform, gone off to the employment office, and enquired whether they had, by any chance, recently placed in employment anywhere an individual by the name of Köves, whom the fire brigade had reason to be interested in, and of course they had immediately been of service. Köves himself, however, Sziklai had not wished to notify for the time being.

“You were behaving so oddly when I last saw you that I was afraid you were quite capable of standing in the way of your own luck!” Consequently, he had merely given Köves’s name and workplace to the press chief, and the press chief “set the matter on an official footing,” which subsequently, having done the rounds from one department to the next, had eventually arrived at the steelworks in the form of a categorical order from higher up.

“Do you get it now?” Sziklai asked.

“Sure,” Köves replied with a thin smile, like someone who admittedly might have been slightly taken in but was nevertheless not entirely oblivious to the funny side of the situation. After which Sziklai once again got Köves to repeat what the head of the shipping department had said, the things about higher conceptualisation, unbroken perfectionism, and putting people to the test, the whole situation as they had sat opposite each other and debated things in all seriousness, when he, Sziklai, and the press chief had already talked about and arranged everything ages ago, and having again laughed at the whole thing as if he were hearing it for the first time:

“You see, old chap, now that’s a true comic situation for you!” his raised index finger drawing, as it were, the abiding lesson for the two of them.

Literature. Trials and tribulations

One evening, Köves bumped into Mrs. Weigand, the lady of the house; to be more accurate, as he was about to leave he was standing in the hallway when the woman called out to him from the opened kitchen door to please excuse that morning’s events, though Köves — his hand already on the door handle — could think of nothing offhand which had happened that morning (it had been a hard day at the ministry), but then it came back to him. It had concerned the boy, Peter, of course, or in truth more the fact that nowadays, since he had been working for the ministry, Köves had adopted a number of customs which pointed to being pampered; so, for example, he had taken a fancy — perhaps implanted by the girl — to having a breakfast before leaving the house, and the previous evening he had been in a shop to purchase some tea for this purpose, if not tea consisting of genuine tea, of course, at least not of the type whose fragrance or residual aroma Köves, at the moment of purchase, could almost sense shooting up from the depths of some distant and maybe nonexistent past. In the morning, then, Köves had appeared with the tea in the kitchen: he seemed to have forgotten that he no longer had to get up at daybreak, as when he had been at the steelworks, so he had caught the members of the household in the kitchen just as they were in the middle of their own breakfast, so, mumbling some sort of apology, he was about to withdraw immediately, had indeed already mentally abandoned his plan, as the idea of not breakfasting alone but in company had not figured at all among the fantasies he had woven about breakfast, yet Mrs. Weigand protested so strenuously, invited him so warmly, making space for Köves’s tea on the gas stove, that he could hardly back out without causing offence. In the end, breakfast was consumed in a tense atmosphere. Peter, who had in front of him on the table, a pocket-sized chess table with small holes in the middle of the squares into which fitted the pins of the pieces and, holding a nibbled slice of bread in one hand, moved the chess pieces with the other, only raised his eyes to the others to signal how much of a nuisance they were to him (though even so Köves noticed that behind the thick lenses of the spectacle the boy’s beady eyes were red from strain, or sleeplessness, or possibly both), so that Mrs. Weigand gradually gave up talking, only whispering to offer Köves the sugar and the mud-pie-like bread, and was finally reduced to simply gesticulating behind her son’s back to apologize and indicate her helplessness, to the point that Köves at times felt on the verge of laughing out because it looked almost as if the two of them were the children, with the forbidding and feared head of the family ruling over them with fickle despotism.

“I can’t do a thing with him,” Mrs. Weigand complained, spreading her hands then letting them drop again in a gesture of helplessness, uncomprehendingly shaking her pallid, peaked face, tipped slightly to one side, its pools now quite without lustre. “Since the chess competition got under way I simply can’t do a thing with him,” she reiterated to Köves, who recently had sometimes found himself trying to stitch his ministerial press briefings together at home (as a result of which the time had duly come, after all, when he made use of the table to which the lady of the house had drawn his attention with such pride on the day he arrived there, which, long ago though it had been, had nevertheless remained fresh in Köves’s memory) and was forced to slam his pencil down angrily, he was so disturbed by the constant squabbling between mother and son which filtered into his room, especially the shriek of the boy’s breaking voice, like steam whistling through a valve under high pressure, though who could tell whether Köves might not secretly have been glad to be disturbed and whether he was not seeking, by that whole business with the indignation, the gesture of throwing down his pencil and leaping up angrily from the table, not only to conceal from, and justify to, himself his relief, for there was no denying that the moment a person began to write, at least in Köves’s experience, he would instantly find himself becoming mixed up in a whole tangle of unclarified and unclarifiable contradictions.

“Is it, perhaps, that the game’s not going well for him?” Köves inquired, with a hint of gloating, it could not be denied.

“Not as well as he would like.” The woman was still shaking her head as though to indicate that she herself disapproved of what she was saying: “Apparently, nothing has been decided yet, but one game has been adjourned and it’s now a life-and-death matter that he wins the next match …,” the woman fell silent, her pools hesitantly seeking Köves’s gaze.

“Life-and-death?” Köves cocked an eyebrow in amused astonishment.

“That’s what he says,” the woman complained, seemingly already a little bit calmer for being able to talk.

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

“Child’s talk,” said the woman. “But then he’s still a child.” Köves was assailed by a sensation of a conversation held long, long ago being reprised.

“Well then,” he therefore brought the conversation to an end, “if it’s that important to him, then no doubt he’ll win it,” and if Köves, once he was on the stairs, felt it was exceedingly doubtful whether this really had been the appropriate solace to bestow on the woman, it was time for him to set off for the South Seas, partly in order to dine, but partly also out of duty, so that he and Sziklai might continue to turn over the matter of the light comedy, though as far as that was concerned, their brain-racking so far did not have much to show for it, comedy writing proving, at least for Köves, an onerous, depressing, and not in the slightest bit joyful labour. As in the past, when their friendship was as yet free and easy, unclouded by any common interest, Köves and Sziklai would sit every evening at their regular table in the South Seas, trade jests with Alice — although the waitress was never at a loss for a snappy retort, it seemed as if recently this had come at the cost of some effort on her part, with the tragic furrows around her mouth also apparently more deeply set than before, so it was sometimes on the tip of Köves’s tongue to ask her why he never saw her “partner,” Berg, around in the restaurant these days, but for some reason he did not put the question to her, with Sziklai’s presence making him feel ill at ease on one occasion, while on another he would feel it was not opportune, and then again, who knows, maybe he feared what the answer might be — and amuse each other with their fire-brigade and ministry yarns, or single out a guest or party for comment, yet from the very first moment the comedy which was awaiting their attentions cast a shadow on their spirits.

“So,” Sziklai’s brow would darken on his arrival, for instance, an event that although expected nevertheless seemed to come as a surprise to him. “Given it any thought?!..”

“Too right I have.” Köves would pull himself together, as though he had been waiting all along solely to be able to impart at last all the innumerable thoughts that he was aching to get out.

“And?” Sziklai’s hard face gazed questioningly at Köves: “Have you come up with anything?”

“It has to have love as the starting point,” Köves declared adamantly.

“Fine,” Sziklai concurred, “let’s take love as the starting point. Then what?”

“There’s a boy and a girl,” Köves offered apprehensively, as though that was about as far as he was willing to push it at that moment and was worried — most likely with good reason — that it would be far from enough to satisfy Sziklai.

“What happens to them?” he could already hear the impatient voice. “What stops them from being happy?”

And since Köves subsided into silence with an expression which was intended to be pensive but in truth was more just dark, as of someone in whom murderous passions were already being stoked against the imaginary loving couple whom they were supposed to steer into a safe haven of happiness over the course of the comedy.

“Right, so you’ve no idea,” Sziklai established, as Köves admitted with his continued guilty silence.

“There, there! No need for hanging the head,” Sziklai relented. “We need to think up a good story,” he opined.

“Indeed,” Köves agreed.

“Let’s try to think,” Sziklai would propose, at which a longer-lasting, facilitative silence would settle in between them, and all Köves had to take care of was to preserve, like some sort of theatrical mask, a haughty expression of brightly musing yet simultaneously expectant communicativeness appropriate to light comedy, as though he would speak the moment the brainwave came to him, which could be in only a matter of minutes now. His gaze and his attention, however, would be freed to go their own ways, flitting about the room, coming to rest, every now and then, on a table or face — the Transcendental Concubine over there, behind her drained glasses of spirits, resting her elbows on the table and her chin in turn on her folded hands, her empty gaze seeming to be trained on Köves but without seeing him. Did she really not see him? Köves was somewhat troubled in dragging his gaze away from her: in truth, he had a tie to her through a rather embarrassing affair, though he had only himself to blame for that, if not the girl at the factory. There was no denying that memories of the girl kept flaring up in Köves; it was far from merely a taste for breakfast that the girl had quenched in him, for she had also awakened in him a wild animal in search of game. Yes, there were times when Köves longed for a woman’s warmth, and not in the abstract but very much the practical, palpable sense of the word: longed for a woman’s body-warmth, a woman’s silkiness, a woman’s sleekness, and not necessarily the girl’s (whom he could have located and placated, of course, had he not considered that too big a price), for Köves’s longing had no object; or to be more accurate, it was impersonal; or to be even more accurate, Köves longed for a woman, but no woman in particular, and that longing, or rather torment, might yet drag him into danger, Köves reflected. Perhaps it was precisely this that he was musing on that evening, Sziklai having gone away early, because he would have to get up the next day at dawn, because the fire brigade were holding an exercise, leaving Köves to linger solitarily over his beer, and while doing so he noticed that the Transcendental Concubine seemed to be sending him some message, first with her eyes, then by a slight quiver of a shoulder and hand; but when, with the deceitful smile that he laid out like a lawn, so to say, to cover his twinges of crude voracity, Köves got up and went over to the woman’s table, she appeared to be outraged all of a sudden:

“What’s the idea?!” she asked in her strangled, hoarse voice. “That you can simply come over here and take a seat at my table just like that?!” thus forcing on Köves a cheekiness he was reluctant to affect:

“Why, anything against it?” he asked provocatively. At bottom, there wasn’t, so Köves took a seat; he even ordered several rounds of slivovitz and got slightly tipsy as he listened to the woman’s somewhat halting disquisition about how the world, themselves included, did not exist, and existence was taking place somewhere else, the world was just an obstacle to existence, so it had to be done away with, because it was not reality, only appearance, to which Köves — his wit sharpened by the drink, apparently — commented, after a time, that it would no doubt be necessary to pay for the slivovitz in reality, whereupon the woman gave a sharp laugh and familiarly placed a warm, dry hand on Köves’s thigh. And although the woman’s proximity did much to ease Köves’s burning torment (as though by now he no longer saw in her a stimulus, more an obstacle to the realisation of his longing for women), maybe the disconcerting incongruity manifested between her blonde hair, her softly contoured chin, and her determined, impudent nose nevertheless induced him to follow the woman on the night-time tram, then a series of streets right up to her dwelling. This was another side room, like all the other rooms on which Köves had paid private visits so far, and although it was true that this time he was not enjoined to be quiet, all the same the stuffy gloom of the hallway intimated the presence of sleeping people somewhere, but rather, on entering the room, veritably to freeze in horror, for in the glimmering semi-gloom (the room gained its mysterious illumination, as he later discovered, simply from the light of a street lamp on the other side of the road) there were phosphorescent eyes staring at him from every side, and Köves even fancied he could hear the heavy breathing of the beings to which they belonged, until the imagined sound was broken by a squeal of laughter from the Transcendental Concubine: “Bet that scared you!” she choked with laughter, toppling over onto her half-made bed. “Dolls’ eyes,” she eventually got out, but then her high spirits seemed to be replaced in a trice by a despair which seemed to be just as bottomless. “Yes, indeed,” she complained in an odd, frail, baby-talk tone: “My landlady constructs dolls’ eyes …,” and it was only now that Köves noticed the innumerable as yet sightless dolls and teddy bears lying on the floor, shelves, and table. “For that ugly, fat man …,” she carried on, her mouth set to whimper: “The Uncrowned … You know him?” she looked up at Köves from the bed, the setting with all those fixed glass eyes revealing her to be particularly talkative.

“Of course,” Köves replied.

“Then come closer,” the woman burbled, and when Köves complied, once again, as in the restaurant, he felt her fervent hand on his thigh, only now a little farther up.

“Where’s the bathroom?” he inquired, perhaps to win time, even if he could not know for what.

“What do you want from the bathroom right now?” The Transcendental was evidently none too willing to let him go, but since Köves, almost incomprehensibly even to himself, like a drunk clinging irrationally to an obsession which has occurred to him out of sheer whimsy, dug his heels in, it was again the accustomed, slightly hoarse voice which irritably snapped out: “So, go if you must! You’ll get to it in the end!” In the bathroom, a trap stuffed full with towels, tooth-glasses, and a blotchy mirror, Köves — who, it seemed, really had drunk more than was good for him — deliberated on whether he should spend the night there by locking the door on himself, or preferably slip unnoticed out of the dwelling, but in the end, like an escapee who remorsefully returns to the site of his sins, he stole back to the room, where the woman — and it was more just her outlines stretched out on the bed that Köves saw in backlighting which was filtering in through the window — betrayed by the even, slightly whistling sound of her breathing that she had in the meantime — more than likely just as she had been: fully clothed — had fallen asleep. Köves waited around longer, in case she woke up (although, admittedly, beyond waiting, he did nothing to facilitate that), then on sobering up, somewhat offended and slightly relieved, yet at the same time ashamed at seemingly not having the strength to give way to his own weakness and in the end, having so stingily and fruitlessly preserved what had been there to be squandered, he left the dwelling nice and quietly, and the next day the Transcendent seemed not to recollect a thing: the usual spirits glasses in front of her, she herself with her usual distant gaze, was listening to what Pumpadour, flowingly silver-maned and passionately rugged of face, was obviously saying with some force, leaning close to her face, and she returned Köves’s cautious greeting with no more than a fleeting, preoccupied, and totally disinterested nod. Köves likewise soon tore his gaze away from the musicians’ table if it accidentally strayed that way, almost out of habit, in the hope of coming across his old friend, the pianist, whom he had not seen since the day he bumped into him here, in the revolving door of the South Seas. One evening — an evening when Sziklai happened to be running late — Köves was unable to put up with it any longer, so he got up and went over to the musicians’ table and, having first begged pardon for the disturbance, inquired of a bald, slightly puffy-faced man with drooping bags under his eyes (Köves seemed to recall once hearing that he played a wind instrument, maybe the saxophone) whether he knew anything about the pianist. To Köves’s great astonishment, however, the saxophonist seemed to have not even the slightest inkling who he was enquiring about, even though the pianist’s appearance was hardly what one would call unobtrusive, on top of which Köves seemed to recall having seen him and the saxophonist many a time in earnest conversation, from which he had deduced that they must be good friends, or at least close acquaintances.

“He plays piano at the Twinkling Star,” Köves tried to jog his memory.

“At the Twinkling Star?!…” the saxophonist registered surprise. “But there is no pianist there. The Tango String Band plays at the Twinkling Star!” As though to forestall any incredulity on Köves’s part, he turned to his neighbour, a gaunt, dark-haired man whose shaven face carried a hint of blue and who exuded a whiff of hair oil: “Does the Twinkling Star have a pianist?” but the man was just as amazed as the saxophonist had been.

“How could it?! The Tango String Band plays at the Twinkling Star!” he said, looking at Köves with something that verged on indignation.

“There, you see!…” said the saxophonist, as though that had served to refute Köves definitively, so Köves quickly thanked him for so obligingly setting him straight and went back to his seat; he still saw the blue-shaven man passing some irritable comment to the saxophonist, who in turn spread his arms, pulling a face and shaking his head as if by way of an apology, and Köves sensed it was most likely on account of his importunity. A minute later, Uncle André, the Chloroformist, in his elegant dark suit, a long cigarette in his hand, passed by Köves’s table, gracefully bowing his grey-templed head at Köves’s greeting. Then, as if something had suddenly sprung to mind, stopped short and, with an urbane smile somehow at odds with the confidentially hushed tone of his voice, said:

“I heard you were asking about Tiny, the pianist, just before.”

“Yes,” Köves said, startled: he did not recall having seen Uncle André around when he was speaking with the musicians, though of course it could well be that he had not taken a hard enough look around. “Does that mean you know something, perhaps?”

“I do indeed. He was a very good friend of mine.” Uncle André nodded, and although he had not given a precise answer to what Köves had asked, on contemplating the receding slim back, Köves was nevertheless left with the feeling that he had indeed received the answer to his specific question and could now only trust that everything was going as the pianist would wish and that he had not been hauled out of bed.

In short, as for stories — he only had to look around — there were plenty of those: he even related one or two of them to Sziklai, and at these moments they would chat in complete agreement, almost forgetting why it was that they were sitting together, until it would again occur to Sziklai:

“Anyway, let’s get back to the comedy!”

“Let’s,” Köves would concur, resuming his sedulous expression.

“Let’s at least figure out a decent girl,” Sziklai encouraged him, and he explained that if he had a decent female lead character the comic writer would find that the “battle has essentially been won.” In Sziklai’s words, the girl needed to be a little ditzy but exciting, at once “unbearably capricious and adorably attractive,” but by then it was usually getting to be late in the evening, so the girl would, as Sziklai put it, be “put away for tomorrow,” when they would assure each other, now beyond the revolving door in the darkness and stillness of the night, that they would meet up anew in the same place, the South Seas.

Continuation

Köves had better success with literature in the ministry, albeit not in what was strictly his field of work: Köves had no need of any literary talents for his work, though as to what talents were actually needed he never managed to find out. Köves spent his first days at the ministry almost exclusively reading, and more specifically reading the writings of his colleague, the other staffer, or to be more correct (this being his official title): the senior staffer, the press chief, with a somewhat pained smile and now with two flowers in his buttonhole, being of the opinion that these writings would serve Köves as a better introduction into the scope of duties that were awaiting him, and at one and the same time an example to be followed, indeed, he might say — and here the press chief’s glance searched out the typist’s, as if the two of them knew something to which Köves was not yet privy — he might say, an ideal example. Köves therefore began reading these written creations, which seemed at times to be some sort of report, at other times an article or perhaps an essay of some kind, all of which opened as if frenziedly seeking to inform the outside world about some piece of news, an event, or maybe an item of information which, in the course of the article, the author must either have forgotten all about or that Köves quite simply did not understand, and all the less so because right after the opening sentences his eyes would begin darting here and there, ever lower and lower, until they slipped right off the paper and Köves — to his great horror — all of a sudden caught himself having nodded off. Besides which, or so it seemed to Köves, the senior staffer — an aging, balding figure as it happened — had very likely started writing in early childhood and had been writing incessantly ever since, because carbon copies of his works, held together with paper clips, filled entire shelves and desk drawers, and if Köves’s tormented gaze accidentally strayed onto the typist, perhaps to be cheered up by the sight for a fleeting second, she would instantly spring to her feet and, unbidden, pile up more and still more towers of the senior staffer’s oeuvre onto Köves’s desk, only to scurry back to her typewriter, on which she would be typing the senior staffer’s dictation or copying one of the senior staffer’s compositions that she had been handed to make a fair copy of. Even so, of course, the reading did leave some impression on Köves, a vague but at least uniform impression that, taken as a whole, reminded him of something Sziklai had said on the evening he had “joined the fire brigade.” Essentially, or so it seemed to Köves, what they were concerned about here was much the same, with the appropriate modifications, of course: more particularly, it was as if people in the Ministry for Production had woken up to the fact that production was, it seemed, far from the natural activity that for a long time they had thought it was, but was actually an extraordinary, heroic undertaking, indeed vocation, that the public at large, and even the workers themselves, were not fully alive to; they just did the work, but effectively without being aware of what they were doing, and it was the senior staffer’s duty — that is to say, now his as well, it dawned on Köves with a shudder — to awaken a sense of self-esteem in them, and of public esteem toward them.

There is no denying one day Köves realized that he was now not just reading but writing the senior staffer’s reports, articles, and essay species (if indeed that was what he succeeded in doing, about which Köves was far from sure, as he usually did not understand, and therefore could not judge, the compositions that he wrote with his own hand, indeed brain). An unbroken stream of announcements came in to Köves or the senior staffer, to the press chief himself or the typist, about which, if they impinged on his sphere of duties (and everyone except Köves appeared to know precisely what Köves’s sphere of duties was) Köves would be informed without delay. Köves would then have to go out to the locality (usually one of the steelworks) in order to check for himself the veracity of the announcements, which would concern some invention or performance, possibly the latest exploits of some paragon of production, and then to put in writing the outcome of that inspection — or to be more accurate, to put in writing what he ought to put in writing, though Köves was far from invariably clear what that was. It would not be so bad if he had to write about an invention, Köves considered: after all, an invention was a precisely circumscribed, readily describable fact of indisputable content, provided one was convinced of the genuineness of that fact and understood its objective essence. Except that it was far from sufficient, Köves had to realize before long, for him to be convinced of the genuineness of a fact, when that fact otherwise did not accord with what was considered there as being a desideratum, indeed requirement, of the fact (and facts in general); no, a fact, Köves recognized, was not something one could simply be satisfied with, and although he had heard much in the press office about the importance of the facts, he quickly realized that a fact was the least important aspect, much more important was how he viewed the facts, or rather how they had to be (or ought to be) seen, and what was more, what fact was viewed as a fact at all — generally it was here that Köves went off the rails, losing his control over a piece of his writing. For Köves these pieces of writing were a little like filing had been for him at the steelworks: the task appeared simple, nor was he lacking in endeavour, but all the same he was unable to do what presumably simpler-minded beings than he — a girl or a senior staffer, for instance — were able to accomplish without difficulty. What made Köves’s position all the worse was that whereas in the steelworks there had been the foreman, who at least showed with his instrument where, how, and by how much he had gone wrong, there in the ministry he was totally reliant on himself: the press chief displayed such blind faith in him that Köves thought it would be hazardous, not to say the greatest folly, to shake it with his perplexities and questions, whereas the senior staffer took very little notice of Köves, and even on the rare occasion when he had to exchange any words with Köves, his gaze would wander off somewhere past Köves’s head, as if he regarded Köves as some kind of transitory phenomenon that he did not consider worth closer inspection.

Consequently, Köves lived in a constant torment of uncertainty: almost every day he would produce a piece of writing, longer or shorter, which, as best he could, would be fashioned along the lines set by the senior staffer in respect of its syntax and an outwardly meaningful obscurity, or rather he would keep on amending it until in the end he himself did not understand it, for as long as he was able to understand it even he could see it was meaningless and therefore could not be good, or to be more accurate, could not serve its purpose — a purpose about which Köves was the least clearly aware of all, of course, though by the time it had been completed Köves would be unable to decide whether or not it was suitable, because he would not understand his piece of writing, and even less what purpose it served. So that when, one afternoon, the press chief, who had just returned to the office, whence he had left post-haste roughly an hour before — averring to the typist in passing that if anything urgent or of especially high priority were to come up, he could be contacted at the office of the current chairman of the Supervisory Committee, where he would be holding important talks — stopped behind Köves’s back, casting his eyes over him just as he was toiling on that day’s composition, Köves was startled like someone for whom the moment of truth had just struck. And when the press chief placed a hand on his shoulder and said to him, albeit in an undeniably amiable tone:

“Would you be so good as to step into my room for a minute?”

Köves got up from his desk like someone who, after much anguish, was almost relieved that he was finally going to hear sentence passed.

The press chief gestured obligingly that he should take a seat on the chair in front of his desk, but before complying with the tacit request, Köves, like a dying man who, with his last ounce of strength, is still thinking of his obligations on this earth, placed that day’s piece of writing on the press chief’s desk.

The press chief literally started back.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“A totally new manufacturing process,” Köves kicked off in a slightly lugubrious tone, “that …”

But the press chief immediately cut him short:

“Come off it!…” sweeping Köves’s creation into one of his desk drawers. Then on seeing the look of amazement on Köves’s face, an effortless little smile appeared in the general area of the moustache and, leaning forward slightly over his table, and in a voice that was lowered in friendly fashion as it were, he asked Köves with a conspiratorial wink:

“A new manufacturing process? Who’s interested in such nonsense?!” leaving Köves, who on the spur of the moment didn’t know what he should do with his face, the naked, uncontrollable thing which was constantly seeking to bring about his ruin (he would have best preferred to hide it in one of his pockets, or under his clothes, and then surreptitiously throw it away on the street, as one does when getting rid of a shameful, inconvenient belonging), broke into a faltering smile, but at any rate drew his eyebrows gloomily into a frown ready to be scandalized, as it were.

Yet the press chief now leaned back in his chair, adjusted his necktie, then with just a trace of a long-suffering smile and, his head tilted slightly to the side, came out with:

“I’d like to read out a poem to you.”

“A poem?” Köves was astonished.

Then, as if to intensify Köves’s surprise still further:

“My own,” the press chief smiled as he produced a folded sheet of paper from the inside pocket of his jacket, which once again was freshly adorned with a small white-petalled bloom, and slowly — to no little horror on Köves’s part — began to unfold it.

Turning-point. Passion. Back to earth

One morning, perhaps more midmorning, Köves stepped out of the front door and set off with a whistle, though there was no reason for that, the weather being overcast, with a cool wind blowing, and over the streets rose a cloud of dust (constant, yet at first glance it came merely from construction sites, with their proliferation of ruins, scaffolding, and obstacles of every kind) mingled with pungent smells, as though possibly (it was not out of the question) heralding the approach of autumn, conjuring up in Köves romantic images of bygone (perhaps never-were) real autumns of reds and yellows and crackling hearths, and awakening a whimsical longing for a light, soft, yet warm overcoat into the upturned collar of which, in one of those familiar acts, he might bury his chin — but anyway he set off with a whistle to his workplace, the Ministry for Production. To tell the truth, that morning Köves was not going to be exactly on time (the previous evening, he and Sziklai had spent a little too long weaving the still-nascent plot of their prospective light comedy, so in order to clear his head Köves had gone by foot across the city, which by then was sunk into a muffled night-time hush broken only, now and again, by an unexpected noise of scuttling, creaking, murmuring, or groaning, as if of audible scraps of a restless collective dream of those asleep behind the darkened windows, as a result of which he had got to bed late and simply overslept, though in view of the intimate relationship that had been built up with the press chief Köves could consider himself — unquestionably with good reason — as being in the rather privileged position of someone who would not get his head chopped off right away if he took certain liberties, provided he did not overdo it, of course. For notwithstanding the fact that Köves had barely an inkling about poetry (apart from an obviously critical year in his distant childhood, he had never written, or even read, any poems), the press chief seemed to trust in his judgement, because, after the first occasion, he read out his poems to him on a more or less regular basis; indeed, the previous afternoon there had also been a short story, or as the press chief himself styled it: “more of a prose ballad.” No question, Köves’s judgement was usually favourable: insofar as he was able to discern, the press chief’s poems were mostly lyrical verse, and Köves generally did not understand much of their content, since they were either too short, so that they had ended by the time he had started to pay any attention, or else too long, so that by the time he was able to form an opinion about them the press chief’s singsong voice and the sonorous rhymes would have lulled him into a pleasant, half-sleeping trance, as a result of which it was with a clear conscience that he was able to praise their allusiveness, their melancholic mood, their enigmatic atmosphere, and so forth. Even so, it struck Köves that there was a regular, one might say maniacal, recurrence of certain images in the course of these poems, for instance, the “fleshy calyx” of, as a rule, a “carmine” blossom which “thirstily imbibes” a dewdrop or raindrop “quivering” on it, or the fountain the jets of which “shoot” on high, sometimes irresistibly, sometimes like a rainbow, and goodness knows how else though always, at the end of a poem replete with rain, dew, drizzle, and every other conceivable kind of moisture. Undeniably, the task of listening to and, above all, discussing (or to be more accurate, praising) the poems represented extra work for Köves (the press chief would normally call him into his room “for a little chat” at the end of the regular working day, when they could not be disturbed by either the senior staffer, or the typist, and there was little likelihood of things that unexpectedly had to be attended to intervening), while on the other hand the press chief’s confidence, which, whether justified or not, was in any event seemingly unqualified, inspired Köves too with courage, so that he would now set his diligent compositions down on the press chief’s desk with a surer gesture, even if the consequent fate of those written works continued to remain a mystery to him, perhaps (he reflected once, with a touch of superior cheerfulness) the day would come when new recruits following in his footsteps would be edified by them, in just the same way that he had learned from the senior staffer.

He was therefore all the more surprised when, on getting to work that morning, he found the press chief, the senior staffer, and the typist all in the office (they were standing in a group as though they had nothing else to do that day other than, for instance, wait for him), and then his own expansive good morning was met, instead of by the expected reciprocation, by a frigid silence lasting several seconds, finally broken by the question with which the press chief greeted Köves:

“What time is this?”

Köves told him approximately, and not without some misgiving, whereupon the press chief — that morning again with a white flower in his buttonhole — asked:

“When does the working day start?” to which Köves (what else was he supposed to do?) specified a time-point roughly an hour and a half before.

“Where have you been up till now?” was the press chief’s next question, to which Köves, who had of course not for the first time officially set off for some steelworks (in reality he simply expropriated the time for himself, employing it for sleep or pottering about, possibly even for private purposes, with no-one having reproved him so far for doing so, the press chief least of all), replied that he had gone off to one of the steelworks the first thing that morning on the matter of some extraordinarily important performance results, or to be more accurate: he ought to have visited it, but he had been prevented from doing so by certain reasons, very serious reasons at that, in point of fact the matter of his health, as he had awoken that morning to find that he felt dizzy and queasy, and he may have had a fever as well.

“And are you feeling better now?” the press chief asked, and after some hesitation Köves considered that even if he was not yet feeling absolutely fine, at any rate it was better than earlier on.

“In that case,” the press chief now brought out the hand that up till then he had been hiding behind his back and which was clutching a sheaf of paper, and Köves, if he was not mistaken, was horrified to recognize his own writings, all the many, many assignments he had written and handed over to the press chief since arriving there—“in that case, try to devise some useable communiqués out of this dog’s dinner,” with which he tossed the entire bundle onto Köves’s desk (for he had a desk of his own in the ministry), but he misjudged the swing, or maybe he deliberately released the bundle from his hand prematurely, so that the unclipped sheets drifted and wheeled and flittered in all directions about the room, obliging Köves virtually to give chase and gather them one by one.

While he was doing that, the press chief set off to see the current chairman of the Supervisory Committee for the purpose of holding important talks, as he averred to the typist, whereas the senior staffer likewise informed the typist that he was awaited in a locomotive works on a matter that would brook no delay, and Köves, who had by then been seated at his desk for a while, staring at the untidy stack of papers that had piled up on it, all of a sudden became alive to a distinctly stimulating sensation coming from behind the nape of his neck — not a touch, more just a gentle puff, warm, exhilarating and fragrant, like an insinuation of the proximity of a female body. Köves hesitated for no more than a moment — it was not really a hesitation, just a cautious, as yet incredulous recognition — before raising his arm and, without even turning round, with unerring accuracy seized a soft, little hand which, in the midst of strange, and even to his ears alien, hiccuping and lonely sounds — it seemed the press chief’s incomprehensible manner of treatment must have been telling on her a little, after all — she started not so much kissing as more like tearing and mauling him, like a hungry animal would a prey which has unexpectedly come its way. And while a light arm snaked round his neck from behind, and a pliant, warm, living weight fused to the nape of his neck, Köves practically sensed with his hair how sounds are formed within a female chest and rise ever higher as tickling vibrations:

“Poor darling!…” the typist said, or rather whispered in a deep, emotion-laden voice.

It still took a long time before Köves, that afternoon, was able to hold this creature who had been hiding all the while, up till then, behind a wall of taciturn industry, whom he had mentally compared every now and then to a smart, graceful, nimble little squirrel, but who, with a single act, so outgrew that humble simile that for the rest of the day Köves could only be amazed at his own blindness; nor did he remember anything else of that day — at most its length as they strove to avoid, rather than seek out, each other’s looks, like people who have already reached agreement on the one essential matter, and now all that was important for them during these dreary hours until the time was their own was to spare each other, to quell their painfully mounting impatience, for they barely existed, and even if they did, they were never able to feel they were alone. So that by the time he was able to take her arm — this was in a side street into which they each turned separately on the way from the ministry, hurrying along the pavement, keeping their distance from each other like strangers, until the woman finally looked round, slowed her steps and allowed Köves to come up alongside — the reined-back feelings had well-nigh cooled and died in them, rather like a limb going to sleep.

“My room’s not far from here,” Köves spoke almost morosely.

“Then let’s go to my place, I have a whole apartment,” the typist responded in roughly the same tone that Köves had so often heard her using on the telephone on office business.

Once the door had closed behind them, however, they had only just enough time to swiftly get out of their clothes, but not to make the bed as well: they sank onto the gaudy, threadbare carpet, snatching, tumbling about, panting, moaning, as though all they had been doing for centuries, no, millennia, was wait, wait and endure, oppressed and, even under the blows which battered body and soul, concealing within themselves, secretly and as it were slyly, a hope, however preposterous, that their torments would one day, just once, be obliterated by rapture, or if it came to that, that all their torments would one day melt into rapture, from which they would groan just as they had from their torments, for throughout their lives all they had ever learned, ever at all, was to groan.

As a result, in respect of the whole day and the night that later greeted them, Köves precisely recalled certain words, moods, touches, and various situations, but much less their sequence and connections.

“What actually happened between the two of you?” the girl asked, but whether that was in the office, in the street, or in bed, Köves couldn’t say, because later on they did, after all, let the sofa down and got into bed in the slowly gathering twilight, as into a castle moat or a ship’s cushioned casemate, perfectly safe from the outside world, and flinging their intertwining bodies about over and over again were nevertheless able to get even for the ill treatment they had suffered. “Did he take you into his confidence? Let you in on his secrets?”

“What secrets?” Köves asked.

“That’s his way,” the girl said. “First he pours his soul out to you, then he murders you …”

“All he did with me is read out a short story,” Köves protested.

“What was it about?”

“It was nonsense. I couldn’t even tell you if I tried,” Köves shrugged his shoulders.

“Try,” the girl implored, so Köves did try, though it wasn’t easy, of course, because at the time he had not paid sufficient attention, and so now he was unable to remember much; what he was able to sketch most vividly, to the girl’s great amusement, in which Köves fancied that he could detect some hints of impatience, almost of deterrence, if he was not mistaken, was his own alarm when, on the afternoon of the previous day, he was summoned by the press chief into his room on a matter that Köves had no doubts about for even a second and yet, instead of the usual folded sheet of paper, had this time pulled a whole bundle from his desk drawer.

“I’ve written a short story,” he announced to Köves with a modest yet somewhat defiant smile.

“Oh good! A short story!” Köves enthused (in reality, of course, he was aghast).

“Perhaps,” the press chief amended his previous words with a somewhat meditative expression, “I might better call it a ballad, a prose ballad.”

Köves then related to the girl how the press chief had put on the eyeglasses that he rarely used, set them straight on his nose, pulled down with a few vigorous wriggles of his outstretched arms the cuffs of his shirtsleeves, which, it seems, had ridden up, smoothed the sheets of paper, cast another scrutinising glance at Köves, cleared his throat, then finally launched into reading out in an oily, sentimental voice, while he, Köves, who had by then acquired sufficient practice as to how to adopt the role of attentive listener, settled down with his elbows placed on the chair’s armrests, the palm of one hand cupping his chin and over his mouth (thus allowing him to discreetly cover any yawns that welled up), and was mainly preoccupied with weighing up the quantity of sheets of paper lying in front of the press chief and meanwhile thinking uneasily about the promise made to Sziklai to meet up that evening at the South Seas at an earlier time than usual. He had consequently abjectly failed to catch the title of the short story, and likewise its opening lines: all he remembered was a fogginess about when the story took place, the total absurdity of its location, and the antiquated, tortuous, indeed (or so Köves considered) defective language of the tale. In short, it was about the press chief, or rather not the press chief, not a bit of it: the protagonist of the story, a “Wanderer” of some sort (Köves tried to call him to mind) who was roaming around a desert of some kind and all at once arrives at a tower of some kind (as to why precisely a tower, or what sort of tower, the typist should not ask, because that never became clear, Köves explained), and in the tower he spies a marvellous woman (come to think of it, it was more than likely the woman’s singing which had drawn him to the tower in the first place, it occurred to Köves), who now came down to him and led him into her garden, though of course no indication had been given that a garden was to be found there at all. That was then followed by a lavish, one might even say lush, description of the garden, Köves retailed, the lawn with its bushes, the mirror-smooth little lake, the fragrant, carmine, fleshy-petalled blossoms which thirstily imbibed the dew-drops quivering on them, not to speak of a fountain which boldly shot up its jets on high. Anyway, he carried on, while the woman is leading him along these paths, the press chief, or Wanderer (though Köves could only ever imagine the latter amidst the garden scenery in the form of the diminutive, immaculately dressed press chief in some outrageous costume), notices that the woman has heavy shackles on her hands and feet. He remarks on it, promising the woman that he will secure her release from them, but all the woman responds, oddly and brusquely, is: “I like the shackles.” Then they sit down somewhere, at the foot of some tropical plant (sadly, on the spur of the moment, Köves was unable to recall its splendid, resounding name: maybe a magnolia, though possibly a eucalyptus), the moon rises, and in its light the press chief notices weals, scars, and signs of whiplashing on the woman’s shoulders and breasts (quite why was unclear but, somehow or other, the woman had disrobed, it seems). “Do you like being whipped?” the press chief asks the woman, but this time she remains silent and merely looks at him enigmatically with deep, dark eyes “like the water of nocturnal wells,” Köves recited. The press chief is then overcome by a disagreeable presentiment, except that by now a sense of compassion, to use a mild and by no means accurate word for it, has been awakened in him, and this has stifled more sober considerations, so that he starts to kiss the woman’s wounds, and she, in an enigmatic manner, stands up, takes the press chief by the hand, leads him back to the foot of the tower and there, on the moonlit lawn, submits to his passion. At this point there ensued certain details (Köves inferred that, rather than the expected fulfilment, the press chief, or rather Wanderer, had experienced some sense of let down, as if he had found the woman’s ardour too little: grim light was soon to be thrown on this, as well as his presentiments. Because a horrifying cry resounds, and a strapping, sinister man in black appears in the doorway to the tower, a cat-o’-nine-tails in his hand — the man of the house and the woman’s husband, who in all probability has seen everything from one of the tower’s windows. There now followed painful scenes of betrayal, cruelty, and fornication, Köves warned the girl, with misgivings that he jokingly exaggerated somewhat. The man of the house “sets his servants and hounds loose” on the press chief. The woman pleads for mercy, first for the two of them but, as the man raises the lash on her, forgetting the press chief, for herself alone, at which the man pulls the woman up and clasps her to his chest. The press chief, who in the meantime has been struggling with “the servants and hounds,” now catches the woman’s glance, reading compassion from it and something else: “stolen rapture”. His strength then fails him, and he yields to “the servants and hounds”. He possibly even dies, or at least the woman and the man suppose so. Nevertheless, he can still see and hear. He sees the woman’s smile, the gesture her hand makes as she strokes the muscles of the man’s arm and chest, even his lash, and he hears her voice as she extols the man’s strength, and he sees the man eyeing with grim delight the press chief’s corpse and his living wife. The woman, for her part, elatedly returns the man’s gaze. The sinister couple now sink to the ground and try to make love on the lawn, glimmering in the silver of the moonlight, right next to the press chief’s corpse. The man might have triumphed, but to no avail; the woman tries out in vain all the tricks and secrets of love that she has just learned from the press chief, so in the end they clamber to their feet on the turf and stand there, broken and overwhelmed with shame, tears glistening in their eyes. “Not even now?…,” the woman asks gently. “Not even now,” the man replies, his head lowered. In despair and anger, he is about to grasp the lash again, but the woman knocks it from his hand with a single blow. She takes the shackles off herself and uses them to fetter the man. The woman, indeed, goes further by attaching smaller chains to the man’s nose, lips, and ears, with the man submissively, mutely enduring all this as though he had been vanquished. Taking the chains in her hands, the woman then leads the man into the house and up the tower, and the mortally prostrate press chief hears the rattle of irons from up above, from the man’s window — presumably he has been chained to the wall.

At this point, having spoken ever more haltingly for a while, Köves fell silent for good, it seemed, indeed for a moment he might even have dozed off, because he started up at the sound of the girl’s insistent:

“And then …?” to which Köves replied that that was essentially the end of the story. The man was clapped in irons, the woman goes up the tower again, and the press chief hears her striking into song again: Ah! So this woman never sleeps, he thinks in horror, quickening his steps, for in the meantime he has somehow pulled himself together and, evading the vigilance of servants and hounds, made good his escape, and with his “lacerated wounds” he is now moving around outside anew, in the desert maybe, but free at last.

“Free!” the typist’s unexpected, unduly shrill exclamation brought Köves round, almost making him jump. “The wretch!.. He’ll never be free,” she added bitterly, leaving Köves, who felt his reason was beginning to slip away again (his exhausted, contentedly tingling senses demanded a break, sleep, a deep, unconscious dreaming, as if he were inebriated) and, offhand, maybe could not even have said whether it was still the dying evening or already the first glimmer of daybreak which was shimmering in the window, asked with a thick tongue:

“Of what? And who won’t?”

“Do you really know nothing?” the typist asked, and it really did seem that Köves knew nothing, nothing at all. “The current chairman of the Supervisory Committee!.. The bitch!…” the typist’s voice shrilled like an alarm at night, and Köves felt a warm, moist touch from the girl’s face on his fingers — in the dark she seemed to have buried her brow and tear-filled eyes for a second in Köves’s hand, but then she immediately snatched it up with an impetuous movement, as if she were seeking to throw far away the pain burrowing within it, shaking her head several times, making her swirling hair swish silkily, fragrantly, on Köves’s shoulder too.

“How long have you been working at our place?” she said, her voice still choking, like someone swallowing her tears, “and you still go around as if you had nothing to do with us, as if you were a foreigner: that’s what the boss was saying this morning, and I’m saying it too.”

“I can’t help it,” Köves muttered. And like someone whose tongue is loosened by approaching sleep or some other stupor, he added with uninhibited, cheerful determination: “None of you were of any interest.”

“I can believe that. There isn’t anything interesting about us,” he heard the girl’s quiet, bitter voice, and although she was now — it seemed like a long, long time already — lying wordlessly, stiffly beside him, Köves, even if he did not come completely to, also did not fall asleep; instead, on some unconscious compulsion, he moved and stretched out his hand questingly until the palm was caressing the at first bristling, but then ever-less-resisting, ever-more-melting female skin, and as if the warmth of the caressing fingers were also loosening her throat, the girl started talking quietly:

“The current chairman of the Supervisory Committee … you’d think, wouldn’t you, that was just one of those temporary titles, lasting only until it’s somebody else’s turn: that’s what you’d suppose from the name, isn’t it?”

“Indeed,” Köves agreed, even nodded, though probably pointlessly as it was dark and the girl wouldn’t have been able to see it.

“Well, it isn’t!” the girl cried out, as it were rebutting Köves’s assertion in a sharp tone of triumph. “Not a bit of it! She is permanently the current chairman of the Supervisory Committee; by pure chance she is always the current one, her, her, and no-one else, it’s been going on like that for years, and it will go on like that for still more years!.. Who is going to dare stand up to her husband?”

“Why? Who’s that?” Köves asked, more due to the pause that had ensued, which seemed to be demanding his voice, confirmation of his presence, rather than out of any genuine curiosity.

“The minister’s secretary,” the girl retorted with the same bitterness as before, though this time it carried a near-exultant ring of delight at being well informed.

“You mean there’s a minister?” Köves marvelled, but here it seemed the girl was almost angry at him:

“You can’t seriously be asking that,” she said, “when there’s a photograph of him hanging in every room, including ours, and right above your head at that.” Köves did, of course, remember the photographs perfectly well, though on the other hand, perhaps precisely because he had seen so many of them, he remembered the face itself only vaguely, like the sort of faces one recalls because they fleetingly pass before one’s eyes in specific places, at specific times, time and time again, but never recalling them for themselves, merely for those specific places and specific times, so he sensed that the girl had misunderstood his question, though as to what sort of doubts he wished to express thereby, maybe he himself had already forgotten, and therefore in order to preserve his authority all the same, he merely remarked:

“That’s not in itself proof he exists.”

“Oh,” the girl mocked, “so you’re an unbeliever! You need proofs, because if you aren’t suspicious, you feel stupid, and perhaps you even brag about your lack of faith, but meanwhile you have no idea about the real world, no idea about anything!”

With that dressing-down, Köves clammed up, and he listened without saying a word to the girl’s easy-flowing voice and fluent words as to the simultaneously refreshing and soporific patter of warm rain.

The minister — he existed all right, he was all too real! And even more real was his power, power in general. A ramifying thread which interwove everything and twitched everyone to do its bidding. There might be some individuals whom he did not reach, or who even did not see him — Köves for one, who therefore did not have the foggiest idea about him. And not through any stupidity: the girl had been watching Köves for a while and was convinced that he was not at all stupid. But then what could Köves be after? she had fretted, and she confessed that, to this day, she did not know. It was valid to ask, of course, whether it was possible to live like that, at least over a protracted period — outside the circle, that is. One thing for sure was that he was not going to get very far in life, though perhaps he would manage to preserve his intellectual independence, and at this point, after some groping in the dark, the typist squeezed her fingers over Köves’s lips as though she had concluded from his breathing that he was about to fly into a rage on account of her scathing words. Because, she continued, undeniably there was also something appealing about that independence: Was any further proof needed than the fact that Köves was in her bed right now? Of course not. Köves probably had not the slightest idea how weak, how vulnerable, how exposed, how defenceless he was. That morning, when “the humiliation occurred”—that, by the way, was bound to happen sooner or later, everyone knew that, everyone was waiting for it except Köves, of course — well anyway, that morning when all that happened in the end was what was bound to happen, she had nevertheless felt real pain, yes, literally physical pain, a sickly feeling, and, strange as it may sound, that sickness had told her what in fact she thought about him.

“And what would that be?” Köves asked, in a sharp, sarcastic tone, as though he were protesting not so much at what the girl was thinking about him but the very fact that the girl should be thinking about him; and the girl answered only after a pause, as if she had needed to wait until the hostility in Köves’s voice had died away everywhere, even in the room’s farthest recesses.

“That you are innocent,” she said.

“What do you mean?!” Köves rejoined promptly. “You think that someone who has committed no crime is automatically innocent?”

“Not at all,” the girl replied. “The way you live is already a big enough crime: your innocence is the same as a child’s — it’s ignorance,” and this time Köves maintained a silence, as if he were searching for counter-arguments, but so long was it taking that in itself it threw doubt on any refutation. Köves was not even aware, the girl continued, that his situation … and here she hesitated as if she were trying to find the appropriate words with which to alert Köves to his situation: his situation was the most precarious, the most fragile, in the department, he being the only person who was completely dispensable. The press chief, she enumerated, was indispensable, not just because he was the boss but because he was the minister’s speechwriter; it would not surprise her if Köves was unaware of even that. You see, she chortled, of course he was unaware. He might not even have heard the minister speaking as yet, might even be unaware that the minister occasionally gave speeches. Well then, it was actually the minister’s secretary who was supposed to write the minister’s speeches; however, he got the press chief to write them for him. Even if no one actually said it in so many words, that was basically the reason for maintaining the press office, even if there was also a certain amount of work with the press — but then the senior staffer took care of that. That was why he, too, was indispensable, because, to be honest, Köves did not do much to make the senior staffer dispensable. As far as she was concerned, every department always had need of a typist, though it was just the post that was indispensable, not herself personally, and she had no doubt that “some people would be glad to get rid of me,” she wouldn’t go into the reasons for that now, if … well, if it didn’t happen that it was actually she who wrote the minister’s speeches. She realized that Köves would now be pulling an incredulous face in the dark, but he should believe her that it didn’t call for any wizardry; the minister’s speeches were always constructed after the same pattern, one only had to recognize the pattern, though anyone was capable of that: it was pretty much like filling in empty boxes in a printed form. A speech was still a long way from being ready with just that, of course; the typist merely produced the “initial draft,” or in other words “collected, arranged, and outlined the material,” which she would then submit to the press chief, who would make his comments, then on the basis of those comments, she would reword the draft and again hand it over to the press chief, who would make any corrections that were seen as still necessary in his own hand and pass this on to the minister’s secretary. He, in turn, would read the whole thing through, likewise make comments and give it back to the press chief, the press chief back to the secretary, and the secretary now to the minister, who would make his own comments, give it back to his secretary, the secretary to the press chief, and he possibly again to her, after which it would again go on its way up the chain, possibly getting stuck for a longer or shorter interval, oscillating back and forth between secretary and press chief like a trembling compass needle, before finally reaching the minister, and it was possible that it would then be set off once more down, then again up … at this juncture the girl laughed out, in a deep, hoarse tone, as if she had never before dared to see the operation in the light in which she was now seeing it, in the dark: the purposeless and ridiculous shuttling up and down the official hierarchy, which the next day she would again be seeing in the colours of unrelenting seriousness, because that was how she had to see it; indeed, wished to see it: in just the same way as she would arise from a bed disordered by lovemaking to put on her clothes, another face, the inviolable armour of the secretary — and at this her naked body touched Köves’s, as if this fundamental insight had awakened in her a sensual desire that she had to quench rapidly, with rapid breathing. In short, she picked up later on, the department’s work was completely attended to by the three of them. Köves had only been taken on because there had been a need to do a quick favour for someone — the fire brigade, perhaps, as best she could recall.

“Yes, the fire brigade,” Köves confirmed.

“And you still did nothing to consolidate your position,” the girl chided him.

“What was I supposed to do?” Köves asked, like someone who was finally starting to take some interest in his own affairs, albeit belatedly of course, and therefore not so much with an eagerness to do something about it as out of the idle curiosity of a resigned regret.

“Open your eyes and find your way around the chain of command!” she girl told him.

“Is that so?” Köves muttered, as though the idea of doing that dispirited him even in retrospect, even undone. “And what would I have gained by going that?” he inquired nevertheless. For instance, he would have understood the press chief’s novella, the girl answered. He would have known what everyone knew: that a power struggle was going on between the press chief and the minister’s secretary, and also who was the instrument of that rivalry. She would be curious as to whether Köves was aware of that, at least, but of course he wasn’t. Well, it was the highly esteemed current chairman of the Supervisory Committee, and at one and the same time the minister’s secretary’s bitch of a wife, yes, her! — through her each kept a tight grip on the other, they literally clashed with one another over her body. On the surface, of course, the secretary’s position was incomparably the more favourable, both as the woman’s husband and as the minister’s secretary, who could simply stamp the press chief underfoot, pulverize him; but then, on the other hand, and the three of them were well aware of this, he didn’t do that precisely because he could. She could guess what sort of face Köves was pulling in the dark: an ignorant face, because he wouldn’t understand this, his mind worked on different lines — she wasn’t saying that disparagingly, but, quite the contrary, appreciatively, in some respects with outright admiration for Köves’s turn of mind, but it was still true, that’s what power was like, that’s how it operated: if it could not be exercised, then it wasn’t power. Ah! What did Köves know about that sort of thing: nothing, less than nothing! One fine day, for example, the press chief would receive a cold, unmerciful break-up letter from the woman which cruelly trampled in the dust all the feelings they had hitherto professed for each other. He had no clue what had happened; for days he had roved around the office pale as death, incapable of hiding his pain, wincing from the suffering and humiliation, trying to call the woman up, or to get calls put through to her, but not reaching her, finding she was not available, by pleading sickness, maybe not setting foot in the ministry for days on end, until, let’s say a week later, there would be a telephone call, or a letter would arrive, in which, for instance, the woman would inform him that every word of the previous letter had been dictated to her by her husband, the secretary, because he had come across something — a telltale piece of paper had popped up, or some fresh rumour had reached his ear — so, out of dreadful necessity, she had put down what had been dictated purely in order to avert the momentary threat, but with every word she had written she had suffered agonies of pain. Which was all very well, but in the meantime the press chief had been put on the rack: although this was not the first time it had happened — oh, by no means the first, nor even the second — he had nevertheless believed every word of what was in the letter, imagining he had been betrayed, deserted, indeed conspired against, and any moment might find himself struck down by the secretary’s avenging fury; pictured them in the marital bed as, for the sake of their spent love, they wring new stimuli for themselves out of his existence, so to say, and maybe at the climax of their pleasure they vilified his name; indeed — though he could not seriously have believed it, yet there were precedents — he even imagined they would murder him; yes, he had even played with that thought, had voluptuously pictured for himself a scene in which the secretary returned home with bloody hands, confessed to his wife, and the woman merely said: “Thank you.” That was the sort of thing he dreamed up, so it was genuinely painful to see him in such distress, torturing himself. How downcast he looked sometimes, destitute, that one was left not knowing what to do, how to console him, how to pull him round, when … when it was just power, a power game, nothing else. That was how it went, these were its laws; that was what it looked like when it was exercised, and she, the typist, would be mighty curious to know whether the press chief really did love the minister’s secretary’s wife in the way he himself imagined he did, or rather, as she herself, the typist, now thought, as a result of much head-scratching and her ruminations during many a sleepless night, the prey that the woman’s person represented for him. Otherwise what would the woman be worth to him if he did not have to claw her away from the minister’s secretary; and similarly, what would the wife be worth to the minister’s secretary if there was not the constant suspicion, if there were no cases of her being caught red-handed; if he could not order her to heel like a whimpering dog time and time again; and if he could not always use those occasions to give the press chief a kick. As to the woman, what would all this mean to her if she could not feel that she had two men in her power; in other words, all three of them had become so intertwined that they no longer knew who was controlling whom, who was on top and who the underdog, and why they were doing it at all — they were just doing it because they started doing it at one time, and now they were unable to do it any other way …

That, then, was how things stood, and anyone who did not know that, and was unsuspectingly fooled by appearances, or by the press chief’s words, like … well, like Köves by that novella:

“No doubt you made some pronouncement about it,” the girl queried, or rather asserted.

Certainly he had, Köves replied, since the press chief expected that of him; that’s why he had read the story out to him.

“And what did you say?” the girl wanted to know, and Köves, who no longer recalled much, it seemed, replied that it had been nothing in particular, little more than empty phrases, stock words of praise, like how interesting it was, how original, things like that.

“Nothing else?” the girl was unconvinced.

“Oh, yes!” it seemed that Köves now recalled more. “I told him that I considered it to be a symbolic story, but it still showed the mark of a lived personal experience.”

“There you are,” the girl’s voice was all gentle, comforting triumph. “He must have believed that you knew his secret, and now he has surrendered for good, put himself in your hands for good,” the girl spoke in an almost caressing tone, her hand finding Köves’s face in the dark and stroking it as if he were a little boy. “Oh dear, that’s ignorance for you,” she reproved him.

“Yes,” said Köves, “it seems that I don’t nurture the same interest in him that you do,” and the hand now stopped on the face, then pulled away, as if by making the remark Köves had withdrawn himself from their joint concerns and joint subjection to step onto a separate path and had thereby possibly offended her.

“How much you know about him,” he went on, all the same, his voice revealing not surprise so much as almost wonder. “You know him in the way that a person can only know her tormentor,” he added.

“My tormentor …? Why would something like that occur to you? How dare you say anything like that?” the girl asked indignantly, in that almost injured tone of voice people use who are offended only by the truth.

“And what if it were the case?” she said later with the liberated, almost scornful confidentiality that, it seemed, their ineffaceable hours of intimacy had precipitated within her. “Should I put up with it? Accept being walked all over, trampled upon?”

But it was most likely daybreak by the time this took place, when the light seems to bring with it a restoration of the order which will sunder them and soon direct them to their distinct, widely separated places, and they eye each other strangely, almost with hostility, like people who by the sober light of day are counting the cost of a venture predestined to come to nothing — it was something like this that Köves felt, still dazed from the sudden awakening and hurried dressing, while the girl stood before him in an immaculate dress, a cloud of fresh scents around her, radiant and cool as (it crossed Köves’s throbbing head) a drawn sword, and urged him to get going, so they did not arrive at the ministry together.

“You’re horribly ambitious,” he said, or rather complained, as he searched for some final item of discarded clothing, maybe his necktie, maybe his coat. “You’re eaten up by ambition. What do you actually want?” he asked, probably not driven by any curiosity, more simply to occupy the awkward moments until he had finished dressing.

But the girl must have misunderstood him, because she gave him an answer, overstrung, irascibly, in confidence and scornfully, like before:

“Him,” she said. “I want him back,” suddenly turning her back on Köves, and he saw her shoulders heaving, followed a moment later by a choking sound that was instantly stifled. Yet when he tried to approach her: “Don’t touch me!” the girl exclaimed, then “Get going, go!” she added in a sudden fit of anger that Köves felt he did not deserve as he had done nothing to upset the girl, or if he had, then it was not deliberate: “Just so you don’t get the idea that I’m going to walk arm in arm with you to the ministry where your notice of dismissal is waiting!”

“Notice of dismissal?” Köves was astonished, not so much at the news in itself, more at its unexpectedness, startled solely by the setting, the timing, and the occasion. “How do you know?” he asked a little later, and of course he had not the slightest intention of setting off.

“I typed it yesterday morning.” The girl now turned round to face Köves, her voice milder, a look of almost embarrassed sympathy on her face.

Köves then soon found himself in a strange stairwell, then on the street, where he pondered for a few seconds which direction he should now take.