Fiasco (41 page)
For whatever reason, I took a step forward. A tiny
little step only, and I immediately stopped again. Clearly, though, the prisoner may well have misunderstood—or, as I preferred to think at the time: misinterpreted—the movement, because he instantly flinched. But there wasn’t much room, and his leg was immediately caught against the bunk, so he could only lean his upper body farther back, and that was how he faced me. That was when I raised my hand and struck a defenceless prisoner in the face, causing him to drop onto the bunk, from where he looked up at me, not without a trace of fear, yet still with a smack of satisfaction, if I wasn’t mistaken, indeed, so it seemed, even a touch of surreptitious defiance.
I no longer paid him any heed. I backed out of the cell, with my trembling hands locked the door with great difficulty, then slowly, as if I were trooping to the dead march at an execution, I set off down the corridor to my room.…
That, then, is the letter as you may wish it. The “crystal-clear act” (I remembered that right, haven’t I?), the wound that never heals.
If you wish, by the way, it may even open up the route to the 30,000 corpses.
Purely for the sake of order and continuity, I would add that as far as I am concerned, the following morning, at that breathtaking sublime moment when general orders are being read out, I simply fell down flat on the floor, then for weeks and months on end, even in my dreams, I stubbornly hung on to a new being, summoned up out of some illness which was no doubt not properly pinpointed, whom I became, or wished to become. It was a madman, no question about it, the sole refuge available to me at the time—the other, so that I might, so to say, provoke my arrest, and I don’t know if that was not what I really wanted, even if only in secret, so even I
would be unaware of it, as I can’t have wanted that, after all. I will spare you the details of how many jails I did time in, how many punishments (I almost wrote humiliations, as if I could have been humiliated still further) I was subjected to, until in the end, I landed in hospital where my games, arbitrary as they may have been, but still following a definite logic, were now carried on under the crossfire of expert eyes. After all, everything depends on the firmness of our will, and in my experience a person can cross over into madness with terrifying ease, if he wants that at all costs. I had to see, however, that I could not consider this a solution. Not that I thought it was cheap, more because my normal life was no more foreign to me than madness. Then the investigations suddenly came to an end, and for a while they left me in peace, and then, on some spurious pretext, I was released from hospital and discharged from the army—thanks to the changes, as I hear from all sides nowadays.
So, now here I stand (or more specifically, sit) with my story, which I shall hand over to you, not knowing what to do with it myself. When all is said and done, nothing irremediable happened: no one was killed, and I personally did not become a killer; at most, all links broke down, and something—maybe I do not even know precisely what—has been left lying in ruins. I am striving ever harder to crawl under those ruins so they cover me completely. What else can I do? I was unable to set off down the path to grace that you denoted; all I was capable of is what I have told you, and in the end my strength cracked doing even that. I know there is the other possible path, but I can’t truly pull even that off, I have missed the opportunity, so to say, at least for the moment. At this protracted, difficult moment, I am obliged to notice, destiny is taking a rain check. As a result,
I live concealed in the crowd, in protected—I almost said: happy—insignificance. I write newspaper articles and light comedies; if I try hard, I can undoubtedly make some sort of success with that. I can tell no one else what has happened to me: either they will considerately excuse me or sternly condemn me for it, though I need neither, because they will do nothing to move what is immovable. Something else is needed, and again all that comes to my mind is a word of yours, though not in the least in the sense you use it: grace. But I feel that is farther from me than anything else. From time to time, the dull, rummaging rustling of my perplexity is drowned out within me by the savage voice of fear. It is not fear of fear or cowardice, but rather something else, and occasionally I feel that my fear is all I can rely on, as if that was the best thing about me and might, in time, lead somewhere—no, I’m not putting that well: which might lead me out of somewhere, even if it leads nowhere …
But that is of no interest to you. You have simply got the upper hand over all this with a judgement and have locked yourself, with an eerie sense of familiarity, into the world of constructions, from which you deny every living thing every living way out in the name of the sole possible grace, which in reality, of course, is some form of damnation, and which, I admit, you are absolutely right about, even if, from another angle,, you are not right, because it is not as easy and simple as that, even if from yet another angle it really is that easy and simple …”
At this point Köves suddenly stopped writing, as he may well have felt he was becoming bogged down in a confused line of thought from which he would have a hard job extricating himself at present (he was probably a little tired, on top of which his
patience suddenly failed him), and he remained sitting for a while longer, bent over the filled sheets of paper, as if he were pondering whether to run through it again, but then he swiftly gathered the sheets, folded them in two and hesitantly looked around as though searching for an envelope (fruitlessly, of course) before finally stuffing them into his pocket and setting off from home in a hurry.
Köves was getting close to his target, having decided that he would slip the letter in person under the addressee’s door, when something in a narrow, busy street brought him up sharp. Neck craned, he was looking for a gap in the crowd: as he had thought, making her way along the other side, was a woman who was neither young nor old, her clear, agreeable face, long unseen, creased by two deep, tragic furrows. Beside her, or in fact more behind her, constantly falling back, a robust man: his bald, oval head, his fleshy face—of course Köves recognized him instantly, and yet somehow he did not recognize him but just stood, rooted to the spot, motionless. For something was missing from the face, precisely the thing that had made him so recognisable and unmistakable, but as to what that deficiency was it took several seconds for Köves to mutter to himself, his lips chilled in alarm: intelligence.
At that very moment, the man suddenly came to a standstill before a shop window (it was some sort of bakery, with a display of sweet pastries, cakes, and petits-fours adorning the window). The woman took another pace, and only when she must have sensed that she would be unable to drag the man along any farther did she stop and turn round. Köves saw her saying something and also nodding—maybe encouraging him to come on, but the man perceptibly dug his heels in, squatted and, arm extended like a child, pulled the woman back toward the shop window, until she finally relented and, with a mild shake of the head, entered the shop with him.
Flabbergasted, Köves stood at the kerb for a brief moment longer in the bustle and then quickly turned on his heels and,
devastated, bewildered, shot off toward the city as if he were hoping that perhaps somewhere in the streets he would be able to rid himself of the spectacle, as of some burdensome and unpleasant object, but meanwhile the feeling pressed in him that, on the contrary, he ought to preserve it and bring it out from time to time in order to come to understand its import.
The letter stayed in his pocket.
Köves was given an assignment to make enquiries and write an article about why the trains were running late: the trains always ran late, but it seems they only found it unusual now, when everyone had, at long last, got used to it, though Köves, who knew very little about railways (he was not even in the habit of travelling, so the fact that the trains ran late was to him, no denying it, a matter of some indifference), was by now on the second day of trotting from one office to the other in order to collect the basic information needed for the article lest, when the time came for him to come forth clad in the expected superiority and irrefutability, he should find himself accused of not being fully informed. He had even put in an appearance in the inner offices of one of the railway stations to inspect with interest exceedingly complex point- and signal-switching apparatus, listen somewhat dozily, but with encouraging nods, to various high-ranking railway officials, who expounded on the state of rolling stock, the difficulties of freight transport, and the like, apologetically as it were, then finally found himself in the office from whose rooms, they explained to Köves, they directed all the trains that sped along (or, if it came to that, were held up) on the distant rails, and since the high-ranking official with whom Köves was due to talk happened, at that moment, to be right in the middle
of directing, among various complicated charts and audio-visual devices, numerous trains, Köves was asked to be so kind as to wait a little until they called him.
It seems, though, that they must have forgotten all about him, or possibly unforeseen problems had cropped up inside while they were directing the trains, but in any case Köves had spent long enough time strolling up and down a deserted, windowless corridor, illuminated by no more than the nightmarish light of neon tubes (at one end the corridor ran into a blank wall, while at the other end made a right-angle turn into a passage which promised to be quite a lot longer than the one he was in, so it was likely that Köves was located on the shorter limb of an L-shaped corridor) himself to have forgotten (or at least not to have thought about for a long time) what he was actually doing there, for whom and what he was waiting, even whether he was actually waiting or simply happened to be there, in the same way that he might be anywhere else. Besides which, Köves was in a somewhat strange mood: at once lively and pensive, inattentive and keyed up—like everyone nowadays, so it seemed to Köves. He had hit the road that morning from the South Seas (he had a big breakfast beforehand), and there he had been welcomed straight away with excitement and a babble of voices: at the Uncrowned’s table (even that early he had taken his seat at the head of the table in person) they were in the middle of unrolling some fabric or other, a long sheet of the kind which is secured at both ends to poles and held up high (that was what they were trying out at that moment: it was embellished with the words
WE WANT TO LIVE!
in fancy, coloured embroidery), so that one of the waiters was obliged to hasten to the table and on behalf of the manager (who had no time to go himself and passed on well-disposed greetings) asked the gentlemen “for the sake of everyone’s comfort to please be so kind as to avoid making any stir.” While he was subsequently making the rounds of the offices, Köves’s ear had been caught, every
now and then, even on streets which seemed to be a bit busier than normal, by the slogan that he had first come across in the South Seas, but signs of excitement were also being manifested by the high-ranking officials, who, despite the rather disquieting nature of their thoughts as far as the subject matter went, would crack an occasional smile while making their expositions, would lose the thread of their thinking or fall silent for a moment, all ears to the street sounds that would drift in through the window from time to time, and even if it could not have been put into precise words, all that had an effect of Köves, of course.
This elation, this state of readiness which couldn’t make its mind up what to be ready for, and therefore probably magnified every tiny thing inordinately, may well have caused Köves, all at once, to hear the tramp of marching feet in the corridor. Tens or hundreds of thousands, or millions?—Köves could not have said. In reality, of course, it was just one person, and not near at hand but in the longer limb of the L-shaped corridor, which Köves could not see into from where he was—clearly an official who had clearly stepped out of his room and was now clearly hurrying to another room, his footsteps echoing in the narrow corridor, and Köves was no doubt perfectly aware that this was the case, it was just that his present mood simply would not tolerate him taking into account such trivial and dreary facts. He merely sensed something: the vortex of those echoing steps, the pull of the marching—this truly made him dizzy, enticed him, induced him to join, dragging him off into the flood, the ranks of the unstoppable procession. Yes, out into the multitude, because Köves now did not just hear the tread of a single official as the tread of many, he could almost picture the multitude as well: warmth, security, the irresistible, blind tide of incessant footsteps and the twilight happiness of eternal forgetting were waiting for Köves—not for a second was he in doubt about that. At that very second, though, he also saw something else in
the corridor: a vague apparition which resembled the drowning man haunting his dreams. Of course, he only saw the drowning man in the way that he did the multitude; in other words, not at all, yet meanwhile feeling that he saw it better than if he actually saw it: it was his uniqueness which was writhing there, his abandoned, ownerless life. At that moment, Köves sensed, with almost piercing clarity, that his time there had come to an end and had simultaneously been accomplished: whether to make the jump or not, he had to choose—indeed, with an obscure sense of relief, he felt he no longer even had to choose. He was going to make the jump simply because he could do nothing else; make the jump even though he knew it would be a fateful jump, that the drowning man was going to carry him along, and who could know how long they would have to struggle in the depths, and who could know whether he would ever be able to find his way up into the light again?
How long he stood there in the corridor, and how long he experienced the strange and evidently destined to be far from transient mood which overcame him like a sudden shock from the outside, as it were—Köves would have been hard put to keep an eye on, to be sure. The fact is, the footsteps which had induced this almost feverish state of stunned elation had not even died away when the door opened and he was called for, and Köves went in and behaved as though he were Köves, the newspaper correspondent, who was interested in nothing else but why the trains were running late, looked at charts, listened to explanations and, who knows, maybe even posed a few questions of his own, nodded, smiled, shook hands, took his leave—none of this disturbed him in the least, did not even impinge on him, as if it were not happening to him, or rather exactly as if it were happening to him alone since—he realized all at once, as he raced down the stairs and stepped out onto the street—it was precisely in this respect that some irrevocable volte-face had happened to him: everything which had happened and was happening
had happened and was happening to him and could no longer happen to him without the incisive consciousness of this presence. He may still have been living, but he had virtually lived his life already, and all at once Köves glimpsed that life in the form of such a closed, complete, rounded story that he himself was lost in wonder at its foreignness. And if it was hope that this spectacle elicited from him, that could have pertained only to this story; Köves could only hope that if he personally was beyond saving, his story could still be saved. How could he have imagined he could hide away, detach himself from the gravity of his life like a stray animal from its chain? No, this was how he would have to live from now on, with his gaze riveted on this existence, and to watch for a long time, fixedly, wonderingly, and incredulously, watching on and on, until he finally spotted something in it which very nearly no longer belonged to this life; something which was palpable, confined to the essential, incontestable, and accomplished, like a catastrophe; something which would gradually become detached from this life, like a frost crystal that anyone can pick up and gaze at its final configurations, then pass on to other hands for inspection as one of Nature’s marvellous formations …