Fiasco
FIASCO
Originally published in Hungarian as
A kudarc
© 1988 Imre Kertész
Published by permission of Rowohlt. Berlin Verlag GmbH,
Reinbek bei Hamburg
Translation © 2011, Tim Wilkinson from
A kudarc
,
(2
nd
edition) Századvég Kiadó, Budapest, 1994
Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
eISBN: 978-1-61219-329-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011922454
v3.1
The old boy was standing in front of the filing cabinet. He was thinking. It was midmorning. (Relatively—getting on for ten). Around this time the old boy was always in the habit of having a think.
He had plenty of troubles and woes, so there were things to think about.
But the old boy was not thinking about what he ought to have been thinking about.
We cannot know precisely what he was thinking about: all one could see was that he was thinking, not what he was thinking. It could be that he was not thinking at all. But then it was midmorning (relatively—getting on for ten), and he had got used to being in the habit of having a think around this time. By now the old boy had acquired such a routine of having a think that at these times he was capable of giving the impression of having a think even when he was not thinking, and perhaps even when he imagined he was thinking. That’s the honest truth, not to put too fine a point on it.
So the old boy stood thinking (absorbed in his thoughts) in front of the filing cabinet.
At this juncture we can hardly avoid saying something about the filing cabinet.
The filing cabinet was a direct descendent of one of those corner bookcases the two wings of which occupied the southwest corner of a west-facing room, precisely from the southern edge of the longitudinally north-south window surface to the corner, and from a chest of drawers placed along the line of the longitudinally east-west wall to the same corner, against a roughly 50-inch-wide protrusion of the wall the purpose of which no one had ever been able to establish and which was covered over (out of bashfulness, so to speak) by a glued-on (and very messily glued-on at that) wooden board (an appurtenance of the bookcase, as it were), if not quite up to the ceiling, then at least to the full height—a good six feet, in other words—of the bookcase.
If we are going to go into this level of detail, we cannot pass over the fact that the above-mentioned bookcase itself had been put together from the linen drawers of two former
divan-beds
through the ingenuity of a neighbourhood carpenter, whereas a more distant upholsterer had fashioned from the upholstery of the divan-beds two modern
sofas
, which were still standing, re-covered to be sure, in the western and eastern corners of the room’s north-lying wall.
It may be recollected that it was in the midmorning (relatively—getting on for ten). We are now in a position to supplement that with further details: it was a splendid, warm, slightly humid but sunny late-summer (early autumnal) morning.
While the old boy at this relatively midmorning hour—getting on for ten—was standing in front of the filing cabinet and thinking, he was fleetingly subject to a temptation to close the window.
He didn’t have the heart to do it, however, because the warm, slightly humid but sunny late-summer (early autumnal) morning outside was so splendid.
It was as if a pale azure-tinted bell jar had been overturned onto the old boy, standing and thinking in front of the filing cabinet, and his wider environs.
That simile, like apt similes in general, is aimed at heightening sensitivities through the associations it evokes. For what we must also imagine are the countless sources of noise and smells in a very busy street under a tightly sealed bell jar, because that was the sort of street overlooked by the window, slightly to the south of which—or to the left, if we stand facing him—the old boy was standing and thinking in front of the filing cabinet.
It was an odious street.
The Slough of Deceit, as the old boy called it.
In reality it was just a side street. (Officially speaking).
Nonetheless, jammed as it was between two main thoroughfares, the side street was very busy coping—how could it not have been?—with the traffic from the two main thoroughfares.
On the kerbs of the sidewalk, which ran in a longitudinally north-south direction, were mounted various signposts (so many flagrant symbols of futility), whereas the southern debouchment of the street, at the junction of one forking main thoroughfare and three converging side streets, was closed off by a traffic lamp, which behaved as if the street were indeed a side street, so that out of the herd of cars of every conceivable size, from midget minicars to the giant towing units of heavy-goods vehicles (along with the corresponding exhausts and harmonics) (the latter sometimes in surprising discrepancy, yet more often than not proving to be proportionate, to the size), which honked, vroomed, and tremulously fumed before it, its permitting a mere two or three at a time to proceed before changing back to red.
Officially no trams ran along the street.
Unofficially, however, all trams travelling to or from one particular depot along one of the two main thoroughfares in point of fact effected their route, as if it were nothing to make a fuss about, by progressing via this side street jammed between the two thoroughfares.
A bellowing, rattling, grinding, rattling, screeching, and unbridled tumult boiled up from the Slough of Deceit as from the depths of a bubbling cauldron, among exhaust gases that were sometimes blackly louring, sometimes merely grizzling, whereas after the onset of evening (before the onset of winter) (for thus far we have not seen fit to so much as mention the chimney stacks) turning more a torpid bluish—until toward the dawn hour of 3:30 the first harbinger of the swarms of buses that would be emerging from their garages made its appearance (and with it a fresh day’s fresh black gases), hurtling at breakneck speed and twitching its empty rear-end like a mare in heat, at the northern debouchment of the street.
This street, running in a longitudinally north-south (or south-north) direction, was lined by not more than ten or fifteen buildings, yet an entire historical epoch had stamped its mark on even that relatively small number of buildings—a mark which, curiously enough, found chronological expression, going spatially in a south-north longitudinal direction.
The first half of the Forties had fallen on the middle of the street’s eastern side.
Those years had been characterized by the war, its buildings by an urgent investment of capital and the attendant corner-cutting and wartime material shortages.
The old boy lived in one of these buildings, in a second-floor flatlet (a bed-sitting room with hallway, bathroom, and kitchenette, 28 m
2
in all, rented council property, at a monthly rental which had grown, in line with the general inflation of rents, from 120 forints to currently still just 300 forints), registered temporarily for decades by right of marriage (since his permanent residence permit was valid, by right of his being an immediate family member, for his mother’s apartment, though he never lived there, not even temporarily, but seeing that it was ultimately inevitable that the old lady, for all the hopes that she would carry on to the extreme limit of
human life …) (in short, on being left vacant as a consequence of this ultimately inevitable event, the apartment would, by virtue of this subterfuge, pass on to the old boy) (provided this subterfuge, as could be anticipated on grounds of customary law, was respected by the competent authority within the council) (and despite the fact that it too was just a single room, albeit a large room with all amenities and in the green belt, on account of which this apartment where the old boy was registered as a permanent resident, though he never lived there, not even temporarily, was undoubtedly more serviceable, if only as the basis for a swap).
Since the furnishings of the flat—the one in which the old boy lived permanently, albeit registered only as a temporary resident—had been kept to the bare necessities from the first, one may confidently hope that those items that we shall pick out below as the most necessary of the bare necessities are at least not unnecessary in the context of our story.
The hallway running in the east-west longitudinal direction (from the entrance), which led, on opening a hammered-glass door bisected at its middle by a painted wooden strip (or, to be more precise, on sidestepping the door, since it was always open in view of the hallway’s airlessness), to the living room, was bounded on its south side by doors to the kitchenette and, to the west of that, the bathroom, with the remaining approx. 30 inches of wall still farther to west providing space for a hall stand (with hat rack).
The northern wall of the hallway was covered along its entire length, from doorframe to doorframe, by a curtain made from an attractive print of manmade fibre, behind which a clever system of racks and shelves strove to efface the memory of two ungainly, disparately-sized wardrobes that had once stood there, long defying the steadfast antipathy of the old boy’s wife, and which, as is allegedly the wont of materials, did not disappear but were merely transformed into said clever system of racks and shelves; indeed a
3 × 3 inch chunk originally from one of the wardrobes (noteworthy for the wax seal that was visible on it) (though the inscription on the wax seal had been rendered almost illegible by a yellowish-white layer of paint from repeated decoration) could still be found, at the time of our story, in one of the old boy’s boxes of papers (though which one, even he didn’t know).
This brings us to the hammered-glass door bisected at its middle by a painted wooden strip on opening which (or, to be more precise, on sidestepping which, since the door was always open in view of the hallway’s airlessness) we can enter the living room.
In the southeast corner of this room (which faced westward on the street side) was a tile stove, and both north and west of the stove, allowing for adequate gaps, were single armchairs (of the Maya II model, constructed from beechwood, nitrocellulose lacquer, HDP straps, foam rubber, furnishing fabric, quality in compliance with the specifications of Hungarian Standards 8976/4/72 and 8977–68, PROTECT FROM DAMP!), between the armchairs (slightly north-west of the stove) a sweepingly curved standard lamp (its shade changing roughly every five years) and, a little farther to the northwest, a tiny, rickety thingamajig, resting on stick legs, which according to its Quality Certificate was a child’s mini-table, 1st-class special ply of 1st-class sawn hardwood, but which in regard to its actual function was more a kind of tiny smoker’s table.
After the armchair to the north of the stove (allowing for an adequate gap) was another gap, and then the hammered-glass door—or to be more accurate, since the door was always open due to hallway’s airlessness—a door-sized aperture, then the hammered-glass leaf of the hammered-glass door, behind which was a gap and, after the gap, in the northeastern corner of the room, the narrower side of one of the sofas, then the corner itself, after which came—now along the northern wall—the longer side of the sofa, space, a low chest of drawers, space, and finally the second sofa, the longer side
of which snuggled up to the west wall, stretching north-to-south right under the window where, still more to the south, there was a space, then a table (to be more precise,
the
table, the only real table in the flat) stretching farther southward, almost to the southwestern corner of the room, the sole obstacle to reaching which was an item of furniture standing in this corner, and which by now should certainly no longer be entirely unfamiliar to the observant reader.
Our job is a good deal easier if we start from the armchair standing to the west of the stove (allowing for an adequate gap) and proceed along the room’s southern wall, because here there is just another gap then, more to the west, a low chest of drawers (an exact copy and pair of the chest of drawers opposite it), with a gap beyond which was the wall protrusion (the purpose of which no one had ever been able to establish), and lastly, in the southwest corner of the room, that hybrid, the bookcase–filing-cabinet centaur (if such a catachresis may be entertained), before which, one splendid, warm, slightly humid but sunny late-summer (early autumnal) morning—which spilled over him and his wider environs like an impenetrable bell jar—the old boy was standing and thinking.
To guard against any definitive fixing of notions which no doubt have already begun to form, our hitherto neutral use of words probably calls for some clarification at this juncture.
Just as the filing cabinet, for example, was not really a filing cabinet, or, to take another example, the old boy’s side street (the Slough of Deceit, as the old boy called it) was not really a side street, the old boy was not really old.
He was old, of course (for why else would we call him the old boy). Still, the old boy was not an old boy for being old; that is to say, he was not an old man (though he was not young either), (for why else would we call him the old boy).
In all probability it would be simplest just to say how old he was (if we were not averse to such exceedingly dubious specifics,
changing as they do from year to year, day to day, even minute to minute) (and who knows how many years, days and minutes our story will arch) (or what twists and turns that span may span) (as a result of which we might suddenly find ourselves in a situation where we may no longer be able to vouch for our rash assertions).
So, for want of better, let us fall back on an observation, though in itself it is by no means a particularly original one:
If a person is weighed down by a good half-century, then he either sinks under the burden or somehow withstands it, comes to a standstill (on the hook of time, as it were) (a hook which may, of course, drag and pull him ever further into the wasteland of the other shore, into a shadowy, desiccated abstraction amidst succulent colours and palpable forms), and an enduring moment supervenes which is as if it were not even here, or in other words, tempts us with the deceptive appearance of something still not having been definitively decided (whether or not the rope is strong enough, so to speak) (why wouldn’t it be? nevertheless we are all aware of the circumstance that, for sake of a more secure grip, it gives a little may, in itself, give rise to misconceptions) (above all in the sort of person who has already succeeded in severing the rope once) (but let us not anticipate our tale).
If in what follows we continue to maintain—and we shall—that the old boy was old, obviously we shall have to find another way of justifying this usage (which neither the old boy’s appearance nor even the superior knowledge of a registry office official peeking beneath the surface of things puts in our mouth).