The pencil of light was then suddenly extinguished: evidently he had reached his goal. for Köves now found himself in front of a lighted-up entrance and a person. To be more accurate, the silhouette of a human form, standing several steps higher than him, because the lighting at the entrance was again angled in such a way that Köves was unable to see anything for the glare of light. At least it was at last a person, and the sole reason Köves did not hail him is because in the heat of the moment he could not think of the language in which to wish him a good evening.
Assistance was soon at hand, though:
“Just arrived, have we?” the person inquired of him. The question sounded more like a friendly greeting, and the hint of an overtone that was hard to decipher—malicious glee of some kind, perhaps—Köves may well have just imagined.
“Just now,” he replied.
“Well I never!” said the man, and again with an overtone that—no doubt because he was unable to see the face addressing him—set Köves puzzling afresh. He was unable to decide if what he was picking out was derision, or even some sort of concealed threat, or just a plain assertion. That uncertainty is what may have triggered him into elaborating, though no one had asked him:
“I have come to see my friend,” he said. “Only I didn’t let him know in advance, so I could surprise him …”
“What sort of friend?” the man asked.
“Sziklai he’s called … He later changed that to Stone … He’s now known as Sassone, the world-famous writer of comedies and screenplays,” Köves explained. Then, feeling the solid ground of facts beneath his feet: “You must have heard of him!” he added, much more firmly than before.
“You know very well that we cannot know of a writer by that name here,” came the reply.
“No?…” Köves queried, and since there was no response, he remarked: “I can’t say I did know, but I’ll bear that in mind.” He stood there in silence for a short while, the yellowish light pouring out of the entrance lengthening his shadow in an odd manner, displaying the suitcase dangling from his hand as an unshapely lump that was part of his body. Then, a good deal more quietly than before, so that after some introductory chat they might strike a more confidential tone, he asked, “Where am I?”
“At home,” came the answer. It was now the man’s turn to pause a little. Köves caught sight of the slight puff of condensation from his breath in the now-cooling spring night air—at last indisputable corroboration of the person’s physical reality—as the man again spoke. This time he asked Köves with unmistakable amiability, almost a measure of sympathy:
“Do you wish to turn back?”
“How would I do that?” Köves asked.
The man stretched out an arm in a gesture of solicitation, as if he were making Köves a wordless offer. Köves turned round: a row of tiny portholes twinkled almost indiscernibly in the distance. It might perhaps have been the plane in which he had arrived. He was suddenly beset by a rush of homesickness for the guaranteed safety of its passenger compartment, the warmth of its air-conditioned atmosphere, its comfortable seats, its cosmopolitan passenger list, its smiling air hostesses, the unfussy, pull-down-table rituals of the meals, indeed even his bored and close-mouthed English neighbour,
who always knew from where it was departing and at where it was arriving.
“No,” he said, turning back toward the man. “I think there’d be no point in doing that. Now that I’m here,” he added.
“As you please,” the man said. “We are not forcing you to do anything.”
“Yes,” Köves acknowledged. “It would be hard for me to prove the opposite.” He pondered a moment. “And yet you are forcing me,” he resumed. “Just like the beam of light that was sent to meet me.”
“You didn’t have to follow it,” the man instantly retorted.
“Of course,” Köves said, “of course. I could have stayed out under a raw sky until day breaks or I freeze”—though there was perhaps a touch of rhetorical exaggeration in that, seeing as was spring.
He caught a swiftly suppressed burst of laughter from above him.
“Come on, then,” the man eventually said. “Let’s get the formalities over with.” He stepped aside, and Köves was at last able to get under way and climb the few steps.
He stepped into an empty, lighted hall; only now did Köves see how deceptive the evening had been outside, for here inside he did not find the lighting anything like as bright; to the contrary, it struck him more as gloomy, even gap-toothed here and there, and all in all fairly dingy. The hall itself was large, but in comparison with the arrivals halls of international airports—as witness the deserted desks, empty cashiers’ windows, and all the other installations over which he cast but a cursory glance—it was provincially small-scale. Köves was now at last able to take a look at the man with whom he had been speaking up to now: in truth, he saw little more than
a uniform. The man himself struck him as matching it so well and being so inseparable from it that Köves almost had the impression—obviously a false impression, of course, no doubt prompted by his tiredness—that this uniform had existed from time immemorial and would exist for evermore, and that at all times it moulded its transient wearers to itself. The uniform moreover seemed familiar to him, though without his recognizing it. “It’s not military,” he mused, “nor the police. Nor is it …” he caught himself in a thought that suddenly broke free, to which he could not have put a definite name. At all events, he therefore decided that he was dealing with a customs officer: when it came down to it, nothing—nothing so far, at least—contradicted that.
Meanwhile the man asked Köves to follow him. He showed Köves into a room which opened straight off the hall: all it was furnished with was a long table, behind which stood three chairs. The customs man, as Köves now called him to himself, immediately went around the table and took a seat facing Köves. Though it might have been an observation of no significance, it struck Köves that he did not occupy the middle chair that was naturally enough on offer, but one of those on either side. Köves had to hand over his papers and to place his suitcase on the table.
“Please be so good as to go outside, and take a seat,” the customs man then said. “We shall call you when we need you.”
So, Köves sought a nearby seat for himself; it was an armchair, though its uncushioned, fold-up wooden seat did not hold out hope of too much comfort. From this position he was able to see the entire hall, but while he had been in the office, something had changed out there—most likely in the lightning, it occurred to Köves: it was now darker, in the meantime some of the light bulbs had been switched off; maybe they were getting ready to shut down. Indicative of that was that in the far corners of the hall cleaning staff, with leisurely, listless movements, had swung into operation; a man in a cap and blue
coat towed a vacuum cleaner along on the immensely long, worn-out, colourless strip of carpeting, but it was a machine of an antiquated kind that Köves had not seen around for a long time: its wheezy humming filling the whole hall with a monotonous drone. Now that nothing bothered him, or maybe because he was already getting used to it, the hall somehow seemed familiar to Köves. He was assailed by a sensation—absurd, of course—that he had passed that way once before, a sensation caused, perhaps, by all the fake natural stone—on the walls, the floors, every conceivable place—and the distinctive lines of the counters and other furnishings: the mark of a certain taste, one might almost say style, which in mid-century could still be considered modern, but which so easily became outmoded with the passage of fifteen or twenty years. Only this, and then the feeling of exhaustion which was again getting the better of him, could have produced the strange illusion that what he was seeing he had already seen once before, and what was happening had already happened to him once before.
For all that, he didn’t know what was going to happen; Köves was suddenly gripped by a lightheaded, submissive, almost liberated feeling of being ready, all at once, to accept any adventure—come what may, whatever might snatch him, carry him off, and engulf him, whereby his life would take a new turn: Wasn’t that why he had set off this journey, after all? Köves’s life over there—somewhere into the night, or even beyond that, in the remoteness of limitless tracts, maybe in another dimension, who knows?—had, there was no denying it, hit rock bottom. As to how and why, Köves no longer—or for a goodish while at least—wished to think about that. He had probably gone to ruin bit by bit, doggedly, as if he were moving ahead, by imperceptible steps then: he had lived a certain kind of life, stumbled into certain situations, ditched his choices; and finally the colours of failure had emerged out of it all, it had been impossible to deny it any more. It may have begun at birth—or no, rather with his
death, or to be more accurate, his rebirth. For Köves had survived his own death; at a certain moment in time when he ought to have died, he did not die, although everything had been made ready for that, it was an organized, socially approved, done deal, but Köves had simply been unwilling to satisfy the circumstances, was unable to withstand the natural instinct for life which was working inside him, not to speak of the good luck on offer, so therefore—defying all rationality—he had stayed alive. Because of that he had been subsequently dogged constantly by a painful sense of provisionality, like someone who is only waiting in a temporary hiding place to be called to account for his negligence; and although Köves himself, probably on account of the delicate structure of his mind—generally the mind—had not been fully aware of this, it nevertheless poisoned his further life and all his actions—even though he was not fully aware of it in point of fact and only saw the bewildering result. In short, he loafed around as a displaced person in his own anonymous life as in a baggy suit he had not been measured for and had been lent to him for some obscure purpose until, one fine day, enlightenment had dawned. This had happened in the shorter spur of a neon-lit, L-shaped corridor (where he had wound up through an utterly immaterial accident), in less than ten minutes (while he had been waiting for something utterly different), from which (having also seen to his accidental business in the meantime) he had stepped out onto the street with a fully formed task to accomplish. That task was essentially—much later, in the civilized, international ambience of the aircraft, for instance, in the company of the muchtravelled Englishman in the neighbouring seat, Köves would have been ashamed to admit it even to himself—to write a novel. It had become clear all too soon, however, that Köves was not in possession of the prerequisites needed for the task: he had no familiarity with the practice of novel-writing, for instance; he saw only in big outlines, but not at all in the more precise details, what kind of novel
he should actually write, and yet a novel is composed primarily of its own details; nor did he have a clue as to what a novel was at all, or as to why individuals would write novels, and why he would write one himself, or as to what sense that might have at all, most particularly for himself, and anyway who was he, in point of fact, and so forth—so many thorny questions, then, each on its own able to get a person snared for a lifetime. In the end, the novel had been completed in ten years, during which Köves lost touch with the world. The occasional income that he derived from the entertainment world—since writing the novel rendered Köves increasingly unfit to entertain people—had dwindled dangerously; his wife was forced into self-sacrificing breadwinning, and Köves was anguished to see her gradual acquiescence in a hard fate that she could do nothing to alter; meanwhile, he himself, staying shut up in his room—to be quite precise, the one and only room of their apartment—and lost in an abstract world of signs, practically forgot what life in the outside world was like. On top of all that, having used his last savings to get the novel copied by a typist with a reputation as the best in the business, then had it bound in a glossy folder, it was simply returned by the publisher. “On the basis of the unanimous opinion [of our readers], we are unable to undertake publication of your novel”; “We consider that your way of giving artistic expression to the material of your experiences does not come off, whereas the subject itself is horrific and shocking”; “The fact that it nevertheless fails to become a shattering experience for the reader hinges primarily on the main protagonist’s, to put it mildly, odd reactions”; “For the most part your sentences are clumsy, couched in a tortuous form”—those were samples of what was said in the appended letter to Köves.
It was not this letter that exasperated Köves; he had completed the task he set himself, and—write to him whatever they liked—he was left with no doubts on that score; as to whether the novel stirred or didn’t stir the reader, Köves regarded that as no more than
an exasperating and superfluous matter that they simply wanted to foist upon him, though it had nothing to do with him. For all that, a concept like “the reader,” along with the maniacal self-importance of the publisher’s letter on the subject of this by no means clarified, yet—for him at least—completely abstract concept gave Köves no rest, and in the end made him conscious of a strange circumstance that suddenly appeared before him in an aspect of forceful absurdity, namely that he was a writer. Up till then, that had never occurred to Köves, or if it had, then in a different form; certainly not in the way in which he now, in the light of the publisher’s letter, glimpsed himself, expelled from, and yet at the same time objectified in, this wretched line of occupation. There was no getting away from it, he had written a novel, but only in the sense that he would have flung himself out of even an aircraft into nothingness in the event of a terminal disaster, if he saw that as the sole possibility for survival; all at once it became obvious to Köves that, figuratively speaking, he could now only hit the ground as a writer or vanish into nothingness. This, though, awakened the most peculiar questions and thoughts in Köves. Before all else, whether this was what he had wanted, or to put it another way, whether it had actually been his goal, when he had set the task for himself as a result of the dawning of enlightenment, to become a writer? Köves no longer recalled; the years had washed away the memory of the moment, the experience of enlightenment had turned into wearisome effort, one might say a kind of slave labour, its purport continued to operate in Köves merely in the form of an implacable command spurring him on to accomplish his task. As a result, clarification of the question called for further reflection from Köves. He imagined, for instance, that the publisher had not written that letter, but exactly the opposite sort of letter. What was more—and Köves had heard that this sort of thing had happened in times past—the publisher’s readers, the editor in chief at their head, would turn up at his home around dawn to
assure him they had spent the entire night reading his novel in one sitting, passing pages from one to the other, and that the reader was indubitably going to be stirred to the core, so that they were going to bring it out right away. And then?—a sour note of scepticism resurfaced for Köves. What did one book signify, bearing in mind that at least one million book titles were published annually across the face of the globe, if not more? What could a reader’s fleeting emotion signify (in his mind’s eye, Köves saw the deeply stirred reader as, in search of a fresh stirred feeling, he was already stretching out a hand absent-mindedly to the shelf for a new book) as compared with the years that he, Köves, had dedicated to his task as he ruined his life, drained himself, and tortured his wife? And finally, how could he be reconciled to the practical outcome of his all-consuming task: a pitiful fee—to get to the bottom of all this, Köves had recently been making enquiries to this end—that could be earned within a few months in any branch of industry which was useful, unquestionable, and not subject to assessment by any publisher’s reader?