Fiasco (23 page)

“I hate it most of all when she calls it a game!” “Why?” Köves was aroused by a spark of curiosity, “Isn’t that what it is?” “No way,” the boy snapped back curtly. “What then?” Köves poked further: “Work, perhaps?” “Got it in one!” It seemed as though the boy were glancing at Köves with a spot of respect. “I need a way of pulling myself out of this shit!” he added, but without expanding on that; teeth clenched, frowning, he was already pondering the next
move, and his voice was already snapping brusquely, dryly, like a rifle shot aimed at Köves: “Check!” In the end, all her rational arguments—that it was late, for instance, or the lodger might be tired, and especially that it was long past Peter’s bedtime, and tomorrow they both had school or the office to face—proved fruitless, and Mrs. Weigand had to literally drag her son out of Köves’s room, yet for a long time still that evening Köves was able to hear the boy’s hoarsely menacing and the woman’s soothingly engaged voices.

“An odd boy!” Köves remarked.

“Yes, but you have to understand him.” The woman was quick to get in her counter, and it was somehow well-drilled, as if it were not the first time she had used it and maybe—so Köves sensed—had to keep permanently on tap. “Things aren’t easy for him,” Mrs. Weigand went on, “and I have my difficulties with him. He’s at just the age when he is in most need of his father …”

She fell silent, and Köves, out of some obscure compulsion, as if he had been called upon for some purpose, though he didn’t know precisely what, followed that with:

“To be sure, he went quickly enough …”

What he said cannot have been clear, however, because Mrs. Weigand stared at him uncomprehendingly: “Who did?” she asked.

“I mean,” Köves chose his words carefully: he had strayed onto tricky ground, but now that he was there he could not retreat, of course: “I mean, he left you a widow at an early age …”

“Oh, I see,” said the woman. She remained silent for a short while before suddenly hurling at Köves’s face:

“They carted him off and he perished at their hands!” And, head held high, she stared at him almost provocatively, with a strange defiance, as if she were heaping all her sufferings at Köves’s feet and was now waiting for Köves to trample on them.

Nothing of the kind happened, however. Köves nodded a few
times, slowly, with the sympathetic, rather long face of someone who, while of course not regarding it as right, also does not find it particularly unusual that someone, as Mrs. Weigand put it, was “carted off” and “perished at their hands,” and who will make do with the dead without expecting further illumination as to the details; the woman’s tense face, on the other hand, gradually relaxed and slackened, as if she had grown weary of the silence which had descended on them, or perhaps suspected him of harbouring a secret complicity woven between them, as it were, by their silence.

“Yes,” she reiterated, this time languidly and even, it seemed, a touch listlessly, “they carted him off, and he perished at their hands! That’s at the bottom of all this. There’s no way he can accept it.”

“How do you mean?” Köves asked.

“He’s ashamed of his father,” Mrs. Weigand said.

“Ashamed?” Köves was astonished.

“He says: Why didn’t he stand his ground?” the woman feigned exasperation with upflung hands and head, as though she were now living, not with her husband, but with a question which was constantly coming up and to which she had now become just as accustomed as to her own helplessness.

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

“Child’s talk,” said Mrs. Weigand, “But then he’s still a child.”

“That’s true,” Köves conceded.

“He scarcely knew his father. And it’s no use my trying to explain …,” Mrs. Weigand fell silent, the sad little pools glittering moistly in the wintry landscape of her face. “Can one explain that at all?” she eventually asked, and Köves admitted:

“That’s hard.”

“So,” the woman said, “Is my son perhaps right? Is it really shameful?”

“I suppose,” Köves gave it some thought, “I suppose it is. Shameful. Notwithstanding the fact,” he added with a shrug of the
shoulders, “that one can’t help it: one is carted off and perishes.”

Once more they said nothing, then the woman exclaimed, again in her deep voice, though it still sounded brittle, like a wire which is about to snap:

“What perpetual pangs of guilt it causes: bringing a child into the world!… One never gets over it! And into a world like this, of all places …”

“The world,” Köves tried to console her, “is always difficult.”

Yet the woman may not even have heard him:

“I sometimes feel he hates me for it … blames me,” she said. “And I don’t know,” she went on, “I don’t know if, all things considered, he might not be right … what does he have to look forward to? What else will he have to go through?”

“And that … that’s his special pastime?” Köves put in quickly, fearing that he would find the woman breaking out in tears.

“The chess, you mean?” Mrs. Weigand asked. “He wants to be a contender in tournaments.”

“Ah! In tournaments! Nice,” Köves nodded appreciatively; it seemed they were over the hard bit, and he had managed to divert the woman’s mind away from her futile brooding and into an easier channel.

“He’s in training right now, preparing for some youth championship,” Mrs. Weigand continued. “He keeps saying that he has to win the championship. He has to be a great player, really great,” and one could tell from her voice that she was now citing her son’s words, with a hint of playful hands-off-ishness yet also of hidden seriousness.

“I see.” Köves was suddenly somehow reminded of Sziklai, and he could not help continuing with his words: “One has to make a success of something.”

“Yes.” Mrs. Weigand smiled the way mothers smile over their ambitious sons, sceptically yet with a degree of pride.

“Success is the only way out.” Köves still had a good recall of what Sziklai had said, all the more as he had since heard it repeatedly from him.

“That’s right,” the woman said, nodding. “He says that with his physique it’s no use trying in another branch of sport. There you are, see,” she added. “He has powers of judgement … that in itself is something, isn’t it?”

“Of course it is!” said Köves. “Let’s just hope,” and here he too broke into a broad, one could say jovial, smile. “Let’s just hope he has the makings of a grandmaster!”

On that note, they took leave of each other, Köves putting on his coat and saying he was going to the South Seas to dine. The next morning, after the by then routine sounds of muffled squabbling outside his door, followed by the loud slamming of the front door, he promptly got up, his first foray taking him straight to the authorities. Getting his temporary residence permit endorsed as permanent, it seemed to Köves, was a pure formality; they had just copied his particulars from the one paper to another, and there was just one section to ask him about which—so it seemed—had not been filled out:

“Your workplace?” The question though, it was clear, was by no means as subsidiary as the manner in which it was put to him, like a conditioned reflex—ready and waiting for a notification that was foreseen and at most unknown as to its specifics—because when the female clerk heard the answer: “None,” she raised her head with such a look of amazement at Köves as he stood before her desk that it seemed almost one of terror.

“You’re not working?” she asked, to which Köves replied:

“No.”

“How can that be?” In her astonishment, the female clerk may have forgotten for a moment about even her official position, her voice sounding just the way it would when one person asks
something of another, simply because she had become curious.

“I’ve been dismissed,” said Köves, and the clerk now stared at the half-completed ID, visibly racking her brains, as though some difficulty had cropped up in her work. Then, slapping down her pen, she suddenly got to her feet and hurried off to a distant desk, whispered something to the man who was sitting there, at which he too looked in amazement first at the female clerk and then at Köves, waiting farther off, before finally rising from his place and coming over to him along with the clerk:

“You have no workplace?” he asked, his censoriously knitted brow proclaiming that, for whatever reason, he was angry with Köves; Köves for his part repeated:

“None.”

“What are you living off, then?” came the next question, undoubtedly apposite, so that Köves could at most have found its reproachful edge peculiar, even if he could not have expected in all seriousness, of course, that they might actually be concerned for him there.

“At the moment I’m still within the period of notice,” he responded, and as if the fact that he had been fired now fell back upon him as his own shame, he added somewhat apologetically:

“I hope that I’ll soon be able to find a job.”

“So do we,” was the retort, and all you could pick out of that too was a highly qualified severity, as if his hoping not to be forced into begging or dying of starvation were not convincing enough, and he therefore had to be given orders to that effect.

Not long afterwards, Köves also put in an appearance at the janitor’s apartment in the house. Naturally, Mrs. Weigand had pushed for that as well: the fact that Köves had now become her permanent lodger, and therefore also the house’s, had to be entered by the janitor into a register, Mrs. Weigand pointed out. “Indeed, it wouldn’t hurt if the chairman got to know of you, although”—and
here it seemed Mrs. Weigand must have had second thoughts—“that might be better left to the janitor.” Köves, who took from this only that it meant one less thing he had to attend to, didn’t think to ask who the chairman might be, or indeed the nature of the chairmanship in question, when the woman mentioned that these matters had come to mind in passing.

The janitor lived at the foot of the stairwell, where there were two doors next to each other. As Köves approached, his eyes searching, one of the doors was suddenly flung open and a stocky man with a bushy moustache appeared in the doorway in a grey work coat but also huge boots, more suitable for ploughed fields, squelching in vivifying water, than for urban pavements, into which his trouser legs were tucked baggily, peasant style:

“Me you’re looking for, Mr. Köves?” he asked, to which, with a sudden onset of irritation brought on solely by the rake-shaped moustache, the fleshy nose, the thick, greying mop of hair growing, wedge-shaped, low on the brow, the high-buttoned coat, and the heavy boots—though it was absurd, of course, that a person should get into such a lather by a person’s largely random and temporary external appearance—Köves replied with almost cutting sharpness:

“Yes, if you’re the houseman.”

“That would be me, who else,” he chortled good-naturedly: whether he had noticed Köves’s irritation or not, the janitor had plainly not taken offence. “Be so kind, Mr. Köves, please come right in!”—the effect that the rasping yet somehow treacly voice had on Köves was like stepping into a mushy, sticky material which had suddenly welled up under his feet and had already gripped him up to his ears as he entered a gloomy hallway swamped with a smell of cabbage and warm vapours—behind a door, obviously that to the kitchen, a shuffling of feet and clattering of heavy cooking vessels could be heard.

“No doubt you came so I could enter you in the register.” From
somewhere the janitor got out a hard-covered notebook, a sort of large-format school exercise book, then switched on a tiny, yellow-shaded table lamp, the weak light from which illuminated only the notebook, the janitor’s gnarled fingers, and—oh yes—a bit of the filthy tablecloth while throwing the room itself into, if anything, an even more Stygian gloom.

“How come you knew straight away who I am, before I even introduced myself?!” Only now was Köves struck by the janitor’s sudden appearance—had he been waiting for him? maybe spying from behind the door?—and his irritation intensified to the point of nausea as he handed over the fresh bit of paper that he had been given by the authorities so that the janitor could enter the particulars in his register.

“My, my, Mr. Köves,” there was a hint of good-natured reproach in the janitor’s growling voice, and meanwhile a large pair of spectacles had appeared on his nose, which had a strange effect on his face, making it look frailer, and his ungainly fingers laboured over putting down the clumsy writing onto a notebook page ruled with both horizontal and vertical lines, “give me some credit, please! It’s my business to know my residents … so, you have no workplace.” The wrinkles ran together on his low forehead as he glanced up at Köves over his spectacles, but Köves did not reply, and the janitor, while entering that negative piece of data into his notebook, muttered it over again to himself, though now just by way of a statement: “None.” Then, putting the pencil down, closing the notebook and, so to speak, resuming his previous train of thought, he went on:

“That’s a houseman’s job … that’s what I’m paid for …,” and, taking his spectacles off, he stood up and held the document out for Köves, who took it back. “Not a lot, of course … one could not exactly call it a lot … but I mustn’t grumble … and one does for the residents what one can …,” and out of the murky words in the murky room, where only the janitor’s gaze smouldered like glowing
embers—Köves supposed, eagerly, almost peremptorily: it was most likely his disturbed senses that were making him see it in that way, for in reality it could only have been the little lamp flickering on the table that was being reflected in those eyes—Köves sensed a demand of some sort beginning to assert itself ever more explicitly, a demand that he soon understood and one to which he would, Köves decided, under no circumstances give in. But while he was coming to that decision, his hand, as if it were not even his own, was already breaking free and—Köves noticed to his great astonishment—reaching into his pocket, digging out a bank note, and pressing it into the janitor’s palm, whereas the janitor, just incidentally as it were, as if this too were tied up with the conversation, accepted it and thrust it into his baggy trousers:

“Why thank you, Mr. Köves,” he said, and at this point an indulgent cordiality crept into the rusty voice, “Honestly, that wasn’t my reason for saying it. Nice coat you have there.” He immediately perked up. “It seems to be made of a good material,” and, before Köves knew what was going on or could move, the gnarled, yellowed fingers were already pawing his overcoat. “Foreign by any chance?”