Nothing became clearer to Köves than the fact that he had reached a dead end; he had irretrievably frittered away his time, what was more. He grew sick of novel-writing for good; indeed, sobering up as it were from an unbroken drunken binge which had lasted ten years, Köves was now unable to grasp with a clear head how he could have gone in for such a crazy undertaking. If he could at least be acquainted with the reason, then—or at least so Köves felt—he might find some solace in necessity. Like everyone else, he had naturally heard that what supposedly swept a person onto the novel-writing path was talent. For Köves, though, that term had signified nothing tangible. It somehow struck him in much the same colouring as saying about someone that his face flaunted a charming wart. That wart could later, no question, develop into an ugly inflamed lesion, even a malignancy, or it could remain as an attractive blemish—that was obviously a matter of luck. Except
that Köves had never discovered on himself any irregularity of that kind; he had never considered himself to be the owner, whether privileged or unfortunate, of any kind of proud, innate distinguishing mark. The fault had to be lurking elsewhere, Köves reckoned, somewhere deeper down; in himself, in his circumstances, in his past, maybe even—who knows?—in his character: in everything that had happened to him, in the whole course of his life, to which he had not paid sufficient attention. If he could at least have his time over again, begin again from the beginning, Köves had daydreamed, everything would work out differently; he would know now where he ought to correct and change it. All of which, as he had been well aware, was impossible, and that was when he had decided on the trip. Not that he wished to leave his wife, home, and homeland in the lurch, but he had felt that he was in need of new inspiration, that he needed to dip his toes in foreign waters in order to be rejuvenated: he longed to be far away in order to get closer to himself, so that he might discard all that was old and lay hands on something new—in short, in order to discover himself and so begin a new life on new foundations.
Köves was also spurred on by a dream—the sort of constantly recurrent dream which visits everybody from time to time. It began with floating: Köves in nothingness. It was a twinkling nothingness, with minute points of light all around, like stars, yet it was a nothingness, and the many tiny lights led Köves astray more than they set him in the right direction. That was followed by anxiety, a bitter consciousness of a sense of his own confinement in big spaces; yet he was not afraid of becoming lost, that he would, as it were, be dissolved and vanish into thin air: on the contrary, even in his dream Köves
distinctly felt he was apprehensive of coming across something. He was looking for something, but did not wish to find it; or to be more accurate, he wanted to find something, but not what he was looking for. His uneasiness kept growing, then all of a sudden scraps of things were being cast in front of Köves, as if they had been thrown aloft by the invisible jets of a diabolical fountain: faces and objects that were familiar to him. A face he loved, an object he saw, or made use of daily, a belonging he wore every day. He tried, but failed, to touch them, take them in his hands; he felt the objects and faces were somehow reproachfully watching his forlorn clawing after them, which was why they had offered themselves to him, so as to force him to struggle and, as it were, demonstrate that he was unable to grab hold of them. Köves felt that their distressing helplessness, their slipping past him, their sinking back down and dispersion, was his own fault: yes, he felt it was a fault that he was struggling in vain for them, that he was unable to hold in his hands things, each and every one of which was longing for the warmth of his touch. Köves sensed that desire clearly, including the clumsy yearnings of inanimate objects, which was why he was fleeing from them. He finally left them behind, or they disappeared, whereas he entered some sort of cavity: a cave or tunnel of some kind. It was nice there, because the tunnel was safe, dark, and warm; it would have been nice to stay there, to hide in the gloom, yet Köves was driven by an involuntary momentum, over which he had no control, to carry on further, onward, toward the light glimmering in the distance. The tunnel widened out all at once, expanding into a circular area, and Köves could see flaming letters as a kind of
mene, mene, tekel, upharsin
on the wall opposite. At first glance, he was terrorstricken by them, but then he noticed it wasn’t so bad as all that; he was standing in a square that was well known to him—probably somewhere around the middle of the Grand Boulevard—and he was looking at the letters of a modern advertisement flashing in red,
yellow, and blue neon, only these letters were varying their colours, indeed even their shapes, so quickly that in the end Köves, though he sensed they contained an extraordinarily important message of which everyone in the world, except him alone, was aware, was unable to assemble a single word out of them. While he battled with growing irascibility to make sense of them, the letters seemed to have suddenly gone mad, first starting to spin at an ever-crazier speed, after which the coloured lights blurred hopelessly together and faded, so that in the end Köves could only see a barely glowing sphere somewhere far below his feet, with himself again floating in nothingness. Only then did he notice how greatly the sphere resembled the Earth, with some sort of outline showing on it, though not one of the continents or oceans—rather a tangled contour, a peculiar shade which kept changing shape like an indolent marine jellyfish, assuming ever more dreadful forms. Köves sensed with horror that this incessantly moving shadow, these continually transforming lines, must resemble something, or rather: someone, moreover an inexpressibly important being, to whom Köves could not say offhand whether he was bound by fear or attraction, but who—and he was quite sure about this, by contrast—was projecting the dark, amorphous blot onto this milky-white globe. He had to puzzle out who it could be; straining every nerve, he racked his brains, then all at once, but in a voice which was almost earsplitting, he heard his own name called.
Only his dream could have intensified the voice so hugely, for it was the customs man calling him from the door, and in all probability he had been obliged to repeat the name twice or three times over until Köves at last grasped, with embarrassment, that he had fallen asleep while waiting, and he now leapt hastily to his feet in order to follow the customs man into the office.
Although still slightly drowsy, Köves nevertheless noticed a number of changes inside the room. First and foremost, and it may have been an incidental circumstance, but it struck Köves with the very first breath of air he took, was that the room was now full of harsh tobacco smoke. He blinked in disgruntlement, the acrid air irritating him to cough: he was not used to tobacco like that—at all events, to something a cut better. Apart from that, there were now three people sitting facing him, with on each of the two outer chairs a customs man, one of whom was Köves’s acquaintance, the other and also another—Köves could hardly characterize them better than that, because although obviously differed from his colleague in respect of personal features, through his uniform and the indifference reflected on his face, he looked exactly the same, and he knew that his customs man was who he was from the fact that he had just seen him take his seat on the chair to the right. The person seated in the middle Köves would have taken, at first glance, to be a soldier had he not quickly established that nothing supported that assumption, apart from the fawn-coloured tunic and the shirt and necktie of military hue: he carried no insignia of rank, nor belt nor shoulder strap by way of trimming, and so, Köves concluded, could not be a soldier, after all. In the end he decided that he too was a customs man, though clearly a different type of customs man—some sort of chief customs officer. Before them, in the middle of the table, he saw his suitcase again.
As he stepped into the room—on the principle that one should always be polite with customs men—Köves gave a friendly greeting of good evening, then waited attentively for their questions. Yet whether because they had not yet decided what to ask, or for some other reason of which Köves could not be aware, they asked nothing. One was smoking a cigarette, the second was
leafing through documents of some kind, the third was scrutinizing him; they merged together in his blurred gaze in such a way that Köves finally saw them as a single triple-headed, six-armed machine, and it was obviously attributable to a brain confused by exhaustion that he suddenly caught himself on the point of racking his brains for an excuse, like somebody whom they had seen through and whose secret they had discovered—secret or offence, it came to same thing—which they were about to spring on him as a surprise, as Köves personally was not yet clear what it was.
“I wasn’t given a customs declaration form,” he remarked in the end, rather brusquely, in order to restore a due sense of proportion and order as it were.
“Do you have anything to declare, then?” the man in the middle said, immediately raising his head from his documents.
“I don’t know what is dutiable here,” Köves replied with icy politeness. A number of articles were reeled off; Köves mulled them over conscientiously, even reciting certain items to himself, in the manner of a respectful foreigner, who is showing he does not overestimate the local authorities precisely by showing his esteem, indeed even permitting himself a degree of persnicketiness in order to emphasize his goodwill, but at the same time also his rights, before replying that to the best of his recollection his baggage did not contain any of the articles that had been enumerated. But, he added immediately, if they wished, they should convince themselves of the fact. Whereupon he was given the answer that it was up to him to know what was in his luggage, to which Köves inquired whether they wished to inspect his suitcase.
“Should I open it?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer, with a strange zeal that even he sensed was excessive but was no longer able to keep in check, as if someone else were acting on his behalf, he leapt toward his case in order to snap open the locks. His efforts were superfluous, however: the case was already open. And when he hastily
raised the top, although he found his belongings more or less in order, they were nevertheless not in the lovingly careful, painstaking order in which his wife had packed them for him.
He stared in astonishment into his suitcase, as if something indecent had been concealed in it.
“But you’ve already inspected it!” he exclaimed.
“Naturally,” the chief customs man nodded. Without saying a word, he scrutinized Köves for a while, and Köves could have sworn he saw the shadow of a smile of sorts flit across the narrow, pallid face. “You are always acting as if you were surprised,” he added, and Köves noticed that he exchanged a quick glance with his own customs man: he had to suppose that the latter had already briefed his boss on how he, Köves, had conducted himself in the course of their earlier conversation.
A silence descended. Köves irresolutely stood his ground; he was ransacking his brains for a question that he just could not put his finger on, so instead of that he finally asked:
“What do you intend to do with me?”
“That depends on you,” the person in the middle replied forthwith. “We didn’t invite you; you arrived here,” and here it crossed Köves’s mind that he had heard something of the kind already from his own customs man.
“Of course I did. But then why’s that so important?” he asked.
“We didn’t say that it was,” came the answer. “But if it is important, then it’s not important for us. You should quiz yourself, not us.”
“About what?” Köves, grumpy from drowsiness, asked like a child.
“About what brought you here.” That wasn’t a question, nor was it an assertion, yet Köves still found himself cudgeling his brains for an answer, and like someone plucking an incoherent image at random from his fragmentary dreams, he finally muttered:
“I saw a beam of light, I followed that.”
His rambling reason, however, must have stumbled on the right words, because his answer was evidently judged favourably:
“Carry on following it,” the chief customs man said, nodding more mildly, indeed with a quiet, enigmatic seriousness that was suddenly transmitted to the faces of the two customs men on either side of him, the way these things do with underlings: somewhat exaggerating the original model, as a result of which an expression of some kind of rigid, implacable solemnity now appeared on the two outer faces, and Köves would not have been astonished—or at least that’s how he felt at this juncture—if they had risen to their feet and saluted or started to sing. Without turning their heads that way, their gazes slipped over toward the chief customs man; he, however, did not move, and he now carried on, once more in his earlier manner:
“Your papers are in order. We shall treat you as if you had been domiciled abroad. Obviously you will wish to continue your original activity. In this envelope,” and here he placed a brown envelope on the table before Köves, “you will find the key and the address of your apartment. Consider it an object that has been on deposit—as if you had left it with us and were now getting it back. Your suitcase will remain here. We’ll let you know when and where you can pick it up.”
He fell silent. Then in a tone which, apart from a certain conditioned mechanicalness, expressed nothing: no promise, but also no rejection:
“Welcome back!” and stretching out his arm he pointed toward the door.
Although he had been allocated his home, Köves did not spend the remaining hours of that night in his bed; as to exactly where he did spend them, in the first moments of starting up from an, in all likelihood, brief and light, yet nonetheless all-obliterating dream, maybe he did not know either. The sky had assumed a glassy brightness; his limbs felt stiff and numb, his shoulder blades were pressed up against the back of a bench in the park area of a public square, his neck felt as if it had been dislocated: it could be that as he was sleeping he had simply laid it on the shoulder of the stranger seated next to him, a basically well-built, tubby man wearing a polka-dot bow-tie.