Fiasco

Change of direction

Not much later — it must have been midmorning, getting on for ten o’clock — Köves was standing in another stairwell and pushing once, twice and, finally, a third time on the bell of a battered door, which had no name-plate and had clearly seen better days, until an ill-tempered stirring could be heard from behind it and a bald, oval head, fleshy face, and morose pair of eyes appeared in the peephole, and then a high-pitched, brassy voice resembling a trumpet hooted at him:

“You?!..” Berg was amazed. A key then jangled, a lock clicked, and Köves found himself in a gloomy space — some sort of hallway it must have been, for one of his shoulders immediately bumped against one of a pair of cumbersome entrance-hall wardrobes of disparate sizes — from which he stepped through an open glazed door into a lighter, somewhat more spacious room. It was an odd room at first glance, and its oddity was not caused by the paler and darker blankets laid on the floor, which obviously served as a carpet, nor even by the two rush-bottomed armchairs and a stool which were fraying around the wooden frames, or the two bed-settees, already sagging like potholes, which were set alongside the middle of the wall, it was more something that was missing: it was only then that Köves saw that might have been meant to be among these things was the table he now spotted in front of a tile stove, which was standing in one of the far corners of the room and on which he could see a decrepit office desk lamp, which was shining even in the light of the morning, sheets of paper, a sharp and a blunt pencil, a red pencil sharpener, as well as a small metal tray, and on it, in single-file as if heading toward the stove, a green, a white, a pink, and a chocolate-coloured petit-four, along with a glass of water, then, in a recess between the table and stove, another rush-bottomed seat without a back — in all probability the one from which Berg had jumped to his feet, when Köves had started ringing at the door.

“To what do I have to thank for the … How did it come to mind that … How do you know the ring to give?” with great difficulty Berg got out his questions, evidently none too pleased at having to receive a guest.

“The same way that I knew the address.” Köves smiled tentatively, by way of an apology, as it were.

“So, you’ve come from the South Seas?” Berg asked.

“Yes,” Köves nodded, still a little uncertainly, as if he too were surprised by it. There was no denying that although he had started off from the typist’s dwelling with the initial intention of going to the Ministry of Production, if only to pick up his notice of dismissal, he had changed direction en route, it seems, because not long afterwards he found himself sitting in the South Seas and asking Alice to bring a substantial breakfast. One word led to another, and all at once there slipped from Köves’s mouth — due to sleeplessness, the experiences and unordered thoughts that were still whirling confusedly about in his head: in short, inattention — the question which had anyway long been on his mind: “How’s your … partner?” to which Alice had responded that if he was really curious, why didn’t he pay a visit? “Where?” Köves had asked, perhaps less surprised than the surprising suggestion would have justified. “At home,” Alice replied as unaffectedly as though Köves was a close friend who was constantly dropping in on them, and from the look she gave Köves seemed to discern a mute plea. He then recalled that Alice had complained for a long time, relating how Berg had not set foot outside his home for weeks, perhaps months now; and if she did not take home, and set down before him, his lunch and supper he would not eat but just die of hunger; and it was useless her telling him to get out sometimes, come down to the café, see something else than the four bare walls — all her talking was to no avail, for it was hard to get even a word out of him; he was more and more wrapped up in his thoughts. “About what?” Köves asked. “His work,” the waitress answered evasively and with a touch of uncomprehending nervousness over an activity somewhat alien to her, which on the spur of the moment put Köves in mind of Mrs. Weigand’s agitation in the way she was used to complaining about her son. To his dubious question as to what she was expecting him to achieve with a visit, all the waitress was able to say, with an unsure smile of unclear hope, was, “What a nice chat he had with you the other day …,” but still, he was there after all.

“People are worried about you,” he said, perhaps partly by way of explanation, with the hint of a smile, as if being simply the faithful bearer of that concern, but also with the required solemnity of one who was thereby fulfilling his mission.

It appeared, however, that Berg was not deceived:

“Some people may be worried,” he said in ringing tones, “but that’s not what brought you.”

“No,” Köves admitted; then, as though he were loath to admit it: “Cluelessness,” he added, with a slightly forced smile. “Am I disturbing you?” he asked next.

“As you can see,” Berg cast a sullen glance at the table, “I’m working,” placing a hand on his papers as on a restless animal. Making his way round the table, he dropped his heavy, but not disproportionate body down onto the stool and, like a gaoler over his prisoners, ran his eyes, fleetingly, but severely and appraisingly, over the petits-fours:

“You’re writing?…,” Köves asked after a short lull, quietly and, involuntarily, with a degree of sympathetic tact.

Berg, spreading his arms a little and grimacing, made the irritated admission:

“Yes, I’m writing,” like someone who had been caught in a shameful passion that he himself deprecated.

“And what?” Köves probed further, after allowing another considerate pause to go by, to which Berg, in wonder, raised a glance, as it were, looking past Köves:

“What?…,” the question came back, as if this were the first time he had thought about it. “The writing,” he then declared, and now it was Köves’s turn to be surprised:

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“What would I mean?” Berg shrugged several times in what amounted to serene helplessness, any pretence at making an effort suddenly peeling off him, as if Köves were no longer making him feel uneasy: “One is always writing one’s writing,” he carried on, “or at least always should be writing it, if one writes.”

“Fair enough.” Although Berg seemed to have forgotten to offer him a seat, Köves nevertheless set himself down in the armchair diagonally opposite Berg, cautiously smoothing down the rush ends sticking into his thigh from its frame. “Let me put it another way: What’s the writing about?”

“Mercy,” Berg responded promptly, without a moment’s hesitation.

“I see,” said Köves, although he couldn’t really have seen as he followed it straightaway by asking: “And what do you mean by ‘mercy’?”

“The necessary,” came the answer, as swiftly as before.

“And what is necessary?” Köves plugged away, as though sensing that the moment was favourable and wishing to make use of it.

“You’re again posing the question badly,” Berg motioned, his hand suddenly dropping, like an irrevocable decision, cutting a swath through the petits-fours, his glance darting over the table, most likely in search of a serviette (there was no way of knowing, but maybe he imagined he was in the South Seas), which of course he did not find, so he was only able to clean his presumably sticky fingertips by fastidiously rubbing them together. “You should ask what’s unnecessary.”

“Right,” Köves conceded to Berg, as though it were a riddle he had posed: “What’s unnecessary?”

“To live,” Berg supplied the answer, with a frosty little smile playing around his mouth, as though after a cruel act, carried out with ruthless purposefulness, although — at least as far as Köves could ascertain — all he had done was polish off a petit-four.

“I have never heard of a single living soul asking whether it is necessary to live,” Köves objected, perhaps more sharply than he intended.

“The fact that people don’t pose it doesn’t mean that it’s not a valid question,” Berg said and shrugged his shoulders.

Maybe,” Köves pondered, “I would understand what you are saying better if I could get to know what you are writing.”

“And how could you do that?!” was Berg’s response, with a smile that bore a hint of an almost cocky excitement.

“I know one way,” Köves ventured. “You could read it,” he blurted out, a suggestion that was followed by a prolonged silence.

“To tell you the truth,” Berg finally spoke, “I was preparing to do that very thing when you rang the doorbell. You see,” and he seemed to hesitate, “… you see,” he carried on nevertheless, “one section has been completed and I … ah! What do I care what you think!.. I like to try out how it sounds when read aloud. But I had not been expecting,” he added, “to have an audience as well …”

“Maybe it would be more natural that way …,” Köves offered.

“How do you mean?” It was Berg’s turn to be flummoxed.

“I mean, if you’re already writing,” Köves tried to explain, “then it’s natural that … in short,” he broke into a smile, radiating jaunty reassurance, “it’s natural for an artist to have an audience …”

But he had slipped up, it seemed, because Berg’s face clouded over, as if the effect of the reassurance had been rather to put him out of humour.

“The natural instinct for man to be an artist is not at all natural any longer,” he muttered. Köves did not respond, whereas Berg launched into a series of little moves, not every one of which was familiar to Köves but which he recognized, in totality, as preparations for giving a reading, so he continued to hold his tongue. Finally, Berg broke the silence, though not at all in order to read:

“Would you like a petit-four?” was all he asked, in a dour voice, which, unusually for him, was trembling a little from an attack of stage fright.

“No thank you,” Köves declined. “I had breakfast just before.”

Berg then seemed to be struggling but in the end only took a sip of water, then, without taking any notice of Köves, articulating clearly in his sonorous voice, began reading very clearly, starting with the title, which in itself was slightly disconcerting, even startling:

I, the executioner …

Writing, Ladies and Gentlemen, that strange and inexplicable desire to give form and expression to our lives, is a seductive but dangerous temptation. We cannot, in any case, decipher the dreamy secret of our lives, so we would do better to observe a modest silence and step aside quietly. Nevertheless, something impels us to put ourselves forward, out into the limelight of public attention, and as greedy buskers we strive to grab a scrap of approval and understanding. What can what has happened and what has yet to take place do to change that?

I may, perhaps, count on your kind indulgence when concerns like this are used to preface my book, which will, in due time, comprise the true story of my life — or at least the authentic story of an interesting and instructive life. Every life, of course, is interesting and instructive. But it is not given to every life to be laid out before the world in a carefully considered analysis, with its contents enhanced by generalization. That, at any rate, is how I intend to speak about my life: this is what I decided during those sterile days when the idea — I might say: the compulsion — to write first arose within me, though I was still struggling and kicking against the temptation. An entire week went by like that, a valuable, irrecoverable week: having definitively resigned myself, I am beginning to value time now that I have so little of it at my disposal. That week — most likely last week, since today is Monday — was the week of decision, then, and with its throes it insinuated eventful variety into my life. But maybe I needed this week of lively hesitations and internal excitements, which set it off from the indifference of recent months and years, for my work, and my internal resistance to writing may have been merely a natural protective instinct, the desire to preserve my sure and, in its own way, comfortable mental attitude, from the siege of expression, which, against my inclination so to say, compels me to view everything vividly and freshly, at a high emotional temperature, and to live through again — even more vividly than in reality — things which have already happened once. That is what I said previously was a seductive but dangerous temptation.

And yet all the same, as you see, I am buckling down to it. I feel a little bit as though I were commencing everything afresh, even though I cannot move forward with any of the excitement of a new beginning, just the resignation of unalterability, on a path already trodden once — otherwise my writing could not lay claim to the moral credence of this is what happened and this is how it happened, and so of reality, but would be just as irresponsible a flight of fancy as any novel. I have to say, however, that the self-assured defiance which precisely this unalterability awakens in me means too much for me seriously to consider, even for a second, any other eventuality my life might take. No, I am not of a mind to change matters that have been settled — and that seemingly lazy expression is, on this occasion, very accurate, because I really do have no mind for it. Not that looking back offers so much joy: my life has not been joyful, but it is a life that has been settled and solved, indeed exemplarily solved. A life that is worth speaking about, or at least so I feel, though the right to the final word necessarily lies with the Reader. Because, Ladies and Gentlemen, in order for us to be able to speak about our lives, we need to know how to appreciate our fate, to wonder with childish enthusiasm over the career that we have taken. My book is the fruit of that wonderment, of the childish amazement that was won back during the tranquil months of my arrest and detention over what has been my life and what now, during the nebulously melancholy time of my captivity, affects me with such a peculiar magic ………

Let us, then, take courage in both hands.

It is perhaps unnecessary for me to indicate the exact date; at all events, it is autumn, the sky is very likely covered by grey clouds, as shown by the tiny square of the horizon I can see from the pocket handkerchief of the window of my diminutive room, or, more properly and more accurately: my cell, my punishment chamber, and this leaden glimmer superbly matches my meditative frame of mind. I am in the favourable situation that I do not have to, indeed, it is expressly forbidden for me to step out onto the street, for that is precisely why I am locked in here, under a strict confinement which takes from my shoulders — albeit with punitive intent — responsibility for the further course of my fate. At least for my part, that is how I view my present form of life, and I would deeply deplore it if that were to be laid at the door of my depravity with the unbending prejudice and regrettable lack of comprehension which are so sadly typical of the world.

So, due to the fact that I have been isolated from the world with benevolent strictness (I could never stand rainy weather, and especially not the wind, the biting, dank wind, one of the curses, among others, of our draughty city, which always made me depressed and irascible) in my pleasantly temperate cell, without the disturbing irritation of outside influences, I can freely give myself up to my pastime of putting down on paper a thing or two, whatever I happen to see fit and necessary, as a refreshing counterbalance to interrogations, with their worn statements and proceedings in court, where I can only respond to what I am asked, and I can only show myself in the light that is forced upon me. Vanity, you will say, and of course you will be both right and wrong, as usual. Because in my opinion, and I speak as a man of some intellect and culture incidentally, or maybe not even incidentally since following the closing of my career in this world, you see, I am returning to intellectual pursuits — in my opinion, then, anyone is worthy of attention who wishes to show himself in a more complete light, thus supplementing the picture the world has built up — always one-sidedly — about him, and such an aspiration cannot simply be dismissed with a reproving word and blindly taken for nothing. At all events, it is fortunate that I still have the time and opportunity to devote to this belated and, no doubt, surprising need of mine, and this points to the advantages of civilized prisons, as opposed to our prisons, which have disadvantages practically to the exclusion of all else.

I must apologize in advance if, during what follows, I am a little whimsical in the approach I adopt to my own portrait, mixing it, from time to time, with thoughts that are seen as necessary and, after all, belong to the portrait, because, although a man of intellect and culture, I am not a literary man, at least not in the everyday sense. There is nothing to do but to throw myself on my natural talent, my strict sense of form, and my special sensitivity toward the phenomena of life; in a word, on my cultivation, innate and acquired. That is no small thing either, because even if, as I say, I am not a literary man, in the field of confessions and autobiographies the beginner is confronted with wonderful examples, more enlightened, indeed entrancing examples from the Enlightenment era, or even those of great penitents and confessors — examples that I feel called upon if not to outstrip, at any rate to take courage from their finely-nuanced accuracy, their heroic honesty, their gratifying endeavour to strive constantly to draw a lesson.

You have every right to shake your heads disapprovingly at the mention of these lofty models, to upbraid me for my rash tactlessness, and to regard as sadly typical the brazen unabashedness with which I dare to construct a link with the aforementioned blessed geniuses, I, a gaolbird, as it has become clear from what I have said; even if you know who I actually am, although I have already alluded to that in the book’s title. And even if on top of all that you were to recognize my name, the rightly infamous name that I shall disclose to the Reader in one of the ensuing paragraphs! No matter what I might have to say for myself against such reproaches, I would again only be able bitterly to attribute to the fact that the world places greater weight on the immutability of its notions of morality than on admitting the truth; that it manifests more feeling for condemnation than for judgement, and instead of looking to the bottom of things it thinks it better to dispose of them with a few time-honoured commonplaces. I, who will stand before the court accused of causing the deaths of 30,000 people, am able to transcend my fate, and to my pleasant surprise — obviously to the world’s surprise as well — I still feel that much responsible interest toward life as not to be ashamed of spending my last days and hours with moralising — rather appropriately and not unskilfully, you have to admit. Even if I cannot expect you, against your convictions, to respect the moralist in me first and foremost, at least pause before the phenomenon with the astonishment that it deserves. Because, see here, even in my peculiar career I have been able to preserve my original conviction, based on my upbringing, my spiritual and mental culture, as if nothing had happened, or rather as if everything which happened happened by accident, as if I were not giving it my full attention and commitment, or in point of fact, my consent, solely from the necessity of the recognition that I could not refuse the duty that had been assigned to me, the order and the mission marked out for me by a higher place, however regrettably it might have run counter to my own way of thinking and inclinations.

Would you believe that this fact, publication of which will probably serve merely to unleash a further outburst of general horror and indignation upon my head, instead of being able to sway you to a little more sympathy toward me (which is not my aim, by the way; I have no aim with you): would you believe that this fact is welcome least of all in my eyes and bestows on me far more bitterness, punishes me with burdensome reflection, instead of my being able to take a quiet satisfaction at this steadfastness of my nature? You can believe that I have done everything, grasped every opportunity in my peculiar career, to coarsen myself, to make myself bestially insensitive, primitively dull-witted, but, sadly, I didn’t succeed. My spiritual refinement was too high, my mind too civilized, and the havoc that was accomplished in others, and to which, out of the necessity to accommodate (and maybe also out of a certain curiosity, a desire to find out about myself), I also contributed with my own efforts; in the end, it was unable to destroy the fundamental determinacy of my character, and that character, in the event, coming to a sensible compromise with the circumstances, gave in merely to appearances, even though those appearances probably became hideously intermingled with reality. Now, here I stand (or rather sit) with the burdensome consequences of all this, and I am overcome by an ever more urgent need, by fleshing out the false reality — my acts, in other words — to furnish a more complete picture of myself; this, in my view, extraordinarily noteworthy need that you called vanity earlier on, but which, you will nevertheless have to acknowledge, is the most salutary form of vanity, socially speaking.

And here I come to your disapproving shaking of the head and small-minded reservations. I take the liberty of asking whether we should ascribe a lower value to the self-revelation of one man, who has gone through certain depths of life and is prepared, without any showing-off, to put its lessons at the disposal of the world, than another, who has moved within more innocuous extremes, assuming the former sees and interprets his life on the basis of the same morality and possesses as much human grit and happy creative power, even if in respect to form and artistry, he may leave more to be desired for want of the necessary practice and adequate time. All the same, it is precisely in the name of morality that you protest against my being allowed to speak out, as I have become someone who has forfeited the right to do that; someone who should not be allowed to speak out, only interrogated; someone who is unworthy of your sympathy and cannot supply any useful innovation or self-awakening lesson. Because I am, perhaps, not mistaken if I assert that your interest in grand confessions is attracted not so much by the excessively strange or wildly individual as by what is common, general, manifested in even the most extreme excesses, which pertains to yourselves, too, and which you happily discern, for instance, in the words of an aristocrat of sensitive soul who was blessed with a gift for expression and a vivid imagination, but was otherwise unexceptionable, who was made great by his talent and innocuousness and who in your mutual recognition of each other deliciously satisfies the dreams you weave about yourselves. Under no circumstances, by contrast, do you have any wish to have anything in common with me; you would most happily see me as some kind of savage, a strange wild animal; in any case as a person who is utterly foreign to your nature, with whom you can have nothing at all to do at the level of living contacts, and you derive satisfaction from the fact that the false reality created by my acts serves such assumptions perfectly, because you are not in the least curious about the fuller reality — I understand that endeavour, yet I still make so bold as to furnish the information that it is nothing more than self-delusion, which is not worthy of you. And now that I am modestly but categorically declaring my right to my human condition, my relevance to the general, you wish to have nothing to do with me; you avert your gazes from me in the name of morality lest I impel you to even the slightest bit of understanding or sympathy for me — that is to say, lest in me you should recognize yourselves to even the slightest degree.

I believe I see it clearly now: you fear my confessions. That is of no interest to me, though; far from putting me off, if excites and stimulates me. I am familiar with the fear aroused in people by our appearance alone: that jackbooted, pistol-on-belt, formidably overpowering appearance, in which there was also, against your will, a trace of reluctant, nauseated pleasure, precisely because it was against your will — oh yes, I am familiar with that feeling, which set me off on my career, and which I subsequently, out of revenge for myself as it were, pursued with ever-growing passion, trembling from the desire that others should also experience it; that it should enslave others, eat deep into their souls and stir up in them a licentious freedom, the abominable, soul-destroying pleasure that they live through in their fear — as I say, I am familiar with the fear, which this time I wish to transplant into you as a moral lesson, not by means of my aggressively real but my magical appearance; that is, by the representation of myself through words and language.

And this is the point where I feel, distinctly feel, that I have no reason to blush before the aforementioned blessed souls as far as my intentions go; that in respect of its blessedness my self-revelation is in no way inferior to theirs, assuming you have the courage, in the course of unfolding my excessively and wildly individual career, to recognize what it is in me that is blessed for yourselves. Which is, first and foremost, the fact that it was me who went through my career, not you.

I have the feeling that this way of formulating what I have to say is somewhat abstruse and might give rise to misunderstandings that will then invite your deliberate misunderstanding. I need to speak clearly, like all those who have the aim of struggling against the stubborn resistance that the world has displayed to implacable truths. But then, why should I beat about the bush? My blessedness lies precisely in my implacability, in which all of us should spot our selfish motives, as you shall see later on. So, what was it that I wanted to say? Nothing other than that you should recognize your salvation in my excessively wild fate, inasmuch as it might have been your fate, and inasmuch as I lived it, not despite, but instead of you.

Now that I am saying these words — I first said them to myself before writing them down and then saying them again, to my liking, out loud, which I would suggest the Reader do as well — I am seized by an unprecedented excitement, because I feel that I have finally managed to capture the essence of the thoughts and emotions which are churning confusedly inside me; indeed, the essence of my fate, the essence of the feeling that basically determined my career, which has made me so responsive to the will of my surroundings and is so typical of my covertly intimate relationship with the world. Now, that last sentence of the preceding paragraph is what this strange sensitivity of mine dictated to me. Yes, when I committed my definitive act — the first act of murder, which subsequently proved to be an irrevocable choice, just because it had happened, and because it could have happened—that is, the opportunity was presented to do it, and in point of fact an opportunity was not presented to do anything else — so when, under pressure of external compulsion, I committed my definitive act, that pressure of external force, as you will see in the course of the ensuing plot, was not present at all — it did no more than simply accumulate within me, became an inner compulsion, which is to say that it returned to its original form. Because the external compulsion was merely secondary, nothing more than a projection of a genuine will, which comes true if reality favours it. And the loose strands of an external compulsion which were not the bonds of a genuine will could easily be torn asunder by the world. But no, the world did nothing; it awaited events with bated breath; it wanted to see what would happen, only then to be horrified by it — horrified by itself. When I set off on my career, and steadily worked my way through it, all that happened was that, with my extraordinary responsiveness, I had understood the will of the world, your will — or if you prefer: the will you have conceived against your consciences — and, by the reality of my acts and career, I redeemed and returned to you your consciences. You, however, with an inconsistency typical of the world, will not hear of it, and the more you recognize the vitality of the relationship between us, the more you will deny it, and all the more I shall be seen by you as loathsome. I, on the other hand, stick to my guns, and like a conductor who, at the end of a concert, will point to the orchestra with a sweeping gesture as a way of indicating that the source of the success is to be sought in their common effort, so I point to yourselves — but then, of course, you will know that it is actually me you must applaud; that is, me you must string up.

In itself, though, that would be in order; that is the role which has been reserved for me in the game and which I have taken on, albeit not without some reluctance, and not exactly with good grace, since, as a result of the foregoing, I have a refined sense for ceremonial games; and no charge would distress me more than to be called a spoilsport of such fastidious games, though you will have no reason to do so, I feel, given my performance. There is just one thing I bridle against, which is that people will try to ascribe the moral composure, to which my every word bears witness, to my depravity, though it is nothing other than true inner peace.

I can already hear the question: How can that be? Surely this can’t be someone who wishes to sing the praises of a career which flouted the general consensus so blatantly and deviated from the world so profligately that he has ended up before the tribunal of the court? Yet that is precisely my intention. Because if I were not to do that, I would be misleading the Reader, who otherwise would never understand the strange grace in which I partake.

Yes, grace, I said. Because if someone can look back on his life with composure — burnt-out and weary, immensely weary, maybe, but still with composure — that is grace and, in itself, a victory. For I have to admit that I am as amused as much as I am saddened by the world’s propensity, stemming partly from simple-mindedness, partly from deliberate prejudice, to interpret my career as a failure, as a failure primarily in a practical moral sense, and to force that notion on me with self-important fuss. At the same time, I sense an eager longing in this pushy attempt, an urgent but basically clumsy entreaty, as if it depended on me, on my keenly and anxiously awaited words, for the world to be given back its childish faith in its ideals. Everything here turns on one question, and in this the world now displays what for it is an unusually fine discriminatory power, and that is on whether I feel guilty. Because the fact of my guilt has already been decided, otherwise I would not be locked up in here, subjected to the hassles of interrogations. But that is not what is important here, and, to my greatest amazement, those who have undertaken to be my judges are on the right track when they make a distinction between crime and consciousness of guilt. Because the moral significance of a sentence, the liberating effect to which every sentence lays a claim, if it considers that it is founded on morality, in my case depends solely on me, stands or falls on me, on my endorsing it, on my transfiguring it, on my raising it to an intellectual plane through my consciousness of guilt. How great the sympathy, how great the compassion, and then again how great the contempt with which I view this unfortunate demand, which simply underlines now shaky the ground is on which the world’s moral balance rests!

It is not me, then, who is the spoilsport: it is you. You, who disown me, who wish to hear no word about a tacit agreement existing between us, and fastidiously turn up your noses just on hearing about that possibility; when you now wish to see my fate, which we have transformed into what it has become, by common consent, merely an excessively wild individual, which has nothing to do with what is in common, and which it would be best to be rid as soon as possible, and then, after the obligatory shuddering, quickly forget all about.

You will have to realize that it’s my duty to protest against a bogus solution like that — my duty, for one thing, out of self-awakening, philanthropic unsparingness, for another, in the interests of preserving my dignity, which cannot tolerate being cheated so treacherously for the sake of cheap peace of mind.

If you are inclined to look more deeply into yourselves, you will understand me. Because, Ladies and Gentlemen, we have been hopelessly locked up together with one another in this world in miserable camaraderie; everything which happens carries such significance that we can no longer disperse it, nullify it, deny it from each other. We have to accept one another and our stories, and, even in the most extreme case, we have no other choice than to weigh up how, in the given situation, we can get away with even the mildest of our past deeds. And if everything that I shall relate to you further on is perceived by you in this way, then both parties, yourselves and I, will be able to get something out of it, although in the final analysis I truly do not know, in this respect, who will have the simpler task: you, who will be living on under the burden of my fate, or I, whom, through my likely removal from your midst, you will charitably excuse from further life. At all events, I draw my composure from the thought that my educationally-intended autobiography has in this way taken sweet vengeance for my fate on a world which allowed, tolerated, and thus wished for, this fate — sweet vengeance, I say, and ultimately I have striven to prepare your minds so carefully in order to make them sensitive to that vengeance.

Grounds, objections and a sad final conclusion

Having let the final sheet of paper drop onto the table, Berg looked up at Köves, who now shifted position on the creaking and uncomfortable seat (he had not dared bat an eyelid during the reading), and asked in a tense, eager tone:

“And then?…,” like someone who was not looking for a breather but rather expecting it to go straight on.

Berg, however, spread his hands slightly:

“That’s it,” he smiled.

“What do you mean?!” Köves spluttered. “You didn’t even get started!”

“To be precise, you heard the preface,” Berg informed him. “That’s as far as I have got. The rest has yet to come.”

“All of it, in other words!” Köves seemed disappointed, if not actually annoyed. “All I’ve heard so far is preaching, a pile of assertions that I can either believe in or not, because …,” Köves searched for the right word, and, it seems, he had not graduated from the hard school of Sziklai’s tuition for nothing, “… because there is no plot underpinning it!” was how he finally phrased his stricture, which was not exactly tactful, and Berg’s brow appeared to darken for a moment, but then he perhaps realized that Köves’s impatience, at root, must have been fed by approbation, or at least involvement.

“At least give me an idea what happens over the course of the plot,” Köves grumbled. “Who is that fellow, anyway? Who did he take as his model?”

“Who would I take it from if he were foreign to me?” Berg responded to the question with a question.

“You mean to say,” Köves was incredulous, “you are that fellow?”

“Let’s just say that’s one of the possibilities,” Berg replied. “One possible path to grace.”

“And what other paths might be possible?” Köves wanted to know.

“That of the victim,” came the answer.

“And then?…,” Köves pestered further.

To this, however, Berg responded:

“Only two paths are offered here.” A short pause ensued, with Berg groping like a blind man in the direction of the petits-fours, alighting upon the green one, grasping it, then putting it back and instead raising the chocolate-coloured one, but promptly dropping that too, hastily, resolutely, as if he were responding to a pledge that had been resuscitated from forgetfulness.

“And writing?” Köves piped up again. “Isn’t writing grace?”

“No,” Berg’s high voice snapped back as a curt yelp.

“Well what, then?”

“Deferment. Ducking. Dodging,” Berg itemized. “The postponement — impossible of course — of the election of grace.”

“In other words,” Köves asked, “you are either executioner or victim?”

“Both,” Berg answered in a slightly impatient tone, like someone who is required to provide information on matters that have long been known. His glance skimmed over the table until it stopped on a slip of paper, which he now lifted up from amongst his papers. ‘ “It might perhaps be pleasant,’ ” he read off it, “ ‘to be alternately victim and executioner.” ’ Berg put the slip down and again glanced at Köves. “That’s what the writing says, and I am its realizer,” he said.

“What writing is that?” Köves inquired. “Did you write it?”

“No,” Berg replied. “When it was written the time had not yet come. The time,” his clear voice chimed out as if he were not speaking but singing, “is here now.”

He fell silent, leaned back against the tile stove and, perhaps to stop them from being able to move, folded his arms on his chest and bowed his head. A little bit later he spoke the same way again, head bowed, as if he were not speaking to Köves, just as he had done in the South Seas when they had got to know each other:

“For a long time man was superfluous, but free. It was up to him to beg for what was necessary, or in other words, for grace — as I have already said, they are the same thing. Now, though,” he raised his voice, “man is just superfluous, and he can only redeem his superfluousness by service.”

“What sort of service?” Köves asked after the passage of what he judged to be a decent pause.

“The service of order.” Berg again raised his discomfitting gaze.

“What sort of order?” Köves was a rather timid about putting a further question, fearing that Berg might get sick of the conversation before it was time, but he could not miss out on a chance to possibly learn something.

An answer came back, however, even if it bore a noticeable touch of irritation:

“That’s a matter of indifference; it’s enough for it to be order.” Berg again hunted, and this time he took hold of a scribbled sheet. “Here we are,” he said in doing so, “a few words that were left out of the preface but will definitely have to be fitted into the work somewhere else,” and then started reading: “Because, Ladies and Gentlemen, if things go on like they are, life’s demands will soon exceed the bounds of man’s moral capacity, and believe me: man will only be redeemed by order, by setting those demands into an enthralling system …”

It seemed it was now Köves’s turn to lose his patience:

“You’re constantly using words that,” he didn’t even wait for Berg to stop speaking, “that I never hear anyone else using. ‘Moral capacity’!” he exclaimed. “What do you mean by ‘moral’?”

“Sensitivity to crime,” Berg replied.

“Crime!” Köves fumed on. “And what’s a crime?”

“Man,” said Berg with a short, cool smile.

“Man!” Köves reiterated. “And what is man’s crime?”

“That he is accused,” said Berg.

“Accused of what?” Köves dug in.

“Of being guilty.”

“But of what does his crime consist?” Köves wouldn’t give way.

“Of being accused,” and although this had brought them full circle, Köves cried out as if there must still be some way of breaking out of this:

“But what’s the good of that?”

“Of what?” Berg asked.

“Of accusing man!” and here a cold, bloodless smile again appeared around Berg’s fleshy lips:

“To make him understand his superfluousness, and, having understood his superfluousness, to yearn for grace in his misery.”

“I see.” Köves fell silent for a while, though it seemed he was far from reconciled to the answer.

He then suddenly asked:

“Does there exist another world, besides the one in which we live?”

“How could it exist?!” Berg appeared to be truly hurt. “It is not allowed to exist,” he added severely, as if he were forbidding it.

“Why not?” Köves enquired.

“Because it would complete our spoliation. Plus it would make even our superfluousness superfluous.”

“In that case,” Köves now posed the question, “who is your ‘executioner’ addressing all along?” In so doing he may well have touched on a sore point for Berg, because only after a protracted and visibly difficult struggle did he commit himself to answering:

“Even if it seems that another world comes into existence while one is writing, it is only on account of the blasted demands of the genre that it seems so, on account of the blasted demands of the game, the blasted demands of irony … anyway, it can only seem that way because the other world doesn’t exist,” he said in the end.

“But it must still exist in our hopes all the same,” came Köves’s quiet objection.

“It can’t exist, because there is nothing in which we can hope,” was Berg’s instant retort.

“Yet you write nevertheless.” Köves was doubtful.

“What do you mean by that?” Berg asked.

“That you hope all the same,” Köves asserted.

“In other words,” and a faint, affronted smile appeared on Berg’s lips, “you’re accusing me of deception?”

“You draw the boundaries too tight.” Köves strove to avoid giving a straight answer. “Something,” he faltered, “something is missing from the construction …”

“Yes,” there was a glint of mockery in Berg’s eyes, “I know what you’re going to say now: life.”

“Precisely,” Köves agreed. “You speak about order, and you confuse that with life.”

“Order,” Berg spoke, “is the terrain, the battlefield on which life takes place.”

“That may be, but it’s still not life,” Köves countered. “You’re banishing the accidental and all other chance …”

“The accidental?” Berg gaped. “What do you have in mind?” He smiled in the way one smiles at a child.

“I don’t know,” Köves squirmed uneasily, and in all likelihood he didn’t know, although their conversation reminded him of a conversation he had had with someone else in the dim and distant past, at the commencement of his arrival there, and thus of his life, as it were, during which he had argued in similar terms: he had not learned much since then, it appeared. “The way you talk,” he finally grasped for the words in his helplessness, though this time there may also have been a touch of asperity from knowing he was right, “it’s as if all of us get totally bogged down in the mess, whereas you, I notice, have somehow managed to find a way out, if you please.”

“Harsh words.” Berg was astonished. “Provide some evidence to back that up,” he demanded grimly.

It seemed, however, that Köves was not going to take the opportunity:

“What is that …,” he began a question with a pensive look on his face, “that definitive first act that, if I rightly recall, the hero commits under pressure of external compulsion, yet nevertheless without the external force being present at the time?”

“Yes,” Berg started as though bringing his mind back from dwelling on other things, “that’s a decisive, I might almost say crystal-clear passage in the construction. Still, what the act is I don’t exactly know as yet — it’s something I still have to work out,” he said, and brushed it aside.

“In that case,” Köves was curious, “how does he know that he’s going to commit it?”

“He has to commit it, because, as I say, the construction is ready to hand.” Berg was growing impatient. “The opening and the end for sure; it’s just the path stretching between that I don’t yet see quite clearly.”

“Yes,” Köves said, “and that path is life itself.” Then with a smile, as if he had just noticed them, he remarked: “You have some fresh petits-fours.”

“As you see,” Berg got out in a somehow strangled voice, his gaze veritably looking daggers at Köves, “I am trying to refrain from that pleasure.”

“Oh yes,” Köves hastened to acknowledge, “I see.”

Then next thing he knew he was asking:

“And love …,” here he wavered for a moment as if, now that he had got it out, he himself were looking back in astonishment at the word that had popped out of his own mouth, as at an obstacle he had thought was unjumpable. “Is love not grace?” he went on to pose the question nevertheless.

This time, though, he seemed to have violated some concealed boundary, because the storms of emotion that swept over Berg’s face were such as to truly scare Köves.

“What’s that got to do with me?!” erupted from him, and he almost jumped up from behind his table. “Even if it is grace, it’s not mine; I’m at best its victim … Yes,” he carried on, “they tolerate me, like this, as I am — you can see what I’m like, can’t you — and by way of, indeed on the pretext of taking care of me — well, I can confidently say they tyrannize me, even though it is, no doubt, experienced by them as suffering …”

“Why suffering?” Köves’s curiosity, it seemed, got the better of his initial horror at having rattled Berg so thoroughly.

“Because a tyrant always suffers.” Berg seemed to have been somewhat mollified by being able to expound his reasoning. “Suffering,” he went on, “partly from himself, partly from his unachievable ambition, since he can never rule absolutely over others, that being impossible as there is always an ultimate, unassailable retreat, into madness or death, if nowhere else — so he ends up turning against himself. You know, I sometimes think that martyrs are the most perfect tyrants. At least, theirs is the purest form of tyranny, before which everyone kowtows …”

For a short while, he seemed to be brooding before suddenly and alarmingly exclaiming “Oh!” and then so much plaintiveness sounded in his expressive voice that Köves felt obliged to lower his head in shame and out of respect, so to say, as Berg went on: “how terrible it is! We long for love, to be loved, but at the same time how it humiliates us! What a victory love is! What tyranny! What slavery!.. It forever eats away at the conscience like the disgrace of the bloodiest crime …” After the first, alarming cry, Berg’s voice slipped ever lower, so that Köves barely understood the final words; even after that, Berg whispered something he did not pick out at all. After sufficient time had elapsed for it no longer to look like impoliteness, Köves cautiously got to his feet, remarking that he was very tired, he had not slept much the night before, which after all was true, just as the claim to be feeling exhausted was not an outright excuse, so he would have to take his leave, at which Berg glanced up at him as if he had only just noticed he was still there. Then he too got up with unwonted affability — this rather disconcerted Köves, because it was a little as though something in Berg had broken and he had somehow flopped together more in a heap, and moreover without having noticed, or at most with an awkward shyness, one might even say with humility, moving onto his face — and accompanied Köves to the door, where, hardly giving clear expression to what was on his mind (if indeed his thoughts were dwelling on Köves and on the words intended for him) he declared:

“I’ll be glad to be at your disposal another time,” and with that Köves, to his undeniable relief, was once more outside, first in the stairwell, then down below in the street. He set off homewards on foot — the fresh air could do no harm, then back at home he could finally have a good sleep: if he had been sacked, he would at least enjoy the advantages of his regained freedom — and it seems his mind must have still been on the conversation with Berg, because on getting close to the house he noticed merely that he had landed in the middle of an excited crowd. He had to push his way though mostly old people, women, and sick people — idle or retired people with time to spare — in order to reach the front door, registering only as much of the words which were flying about around him as were absolutely inescapable: “from the chandelier,” “the end of a rope,” “had to smash the door in,” “monstrous,” “by his own hand,” and “they telephoned her at the office,” he heard while, coming to the house, he noticed that a dark, angular automobile with its doors closed was parked in front. Then two men in caps and some indeterminable uniform stepped out of the house, and on the stretcher that they slid into the load space through the rear door, and swathed from head to toe in some sort of sheet, lay a figure which seemed, from the size of the shape protruding from beneath the linen, to be the body of an adolescent boy. At that moment, an almost implausibly sharp, irregularly broken scream shattered the hush which had suddenly descended just beforehand, almost as if by magic, before Mrs. Weigand appeared in the entranceway, though to Köves — of course, it was just his tiredness, to say nothing of his astonishment which must have shown her in that absurd complexion — it seemed it was not Mrs. Weigand herself, but rather someone or something else who was screaming out of her throat and waving her head and arms about, a foreign being that had taken up residence in her and to which she was completely surrendering herself in her shocked and uncomprehending defencelessness: inconceivable pain.