“Of being accused,” and although this had brought them full circle, Köves cried out as if there must still be some way of breaking out of this:
“But what’s the good of that?”
“Of what?” Berg asked.
“Of accusing man!” and here a cold, bloodless smile again appeared around Berg’s fleshy lips:
“To make him understand his superfluousness, and, having understood his superfluousness, to yearn for grace in his misery.”
“I see.” Köves fell silent for a while, though it seemed he was far from reconciled to the answer.
He then suddenly asked:
“Does there exist another world, besides the one in which we live?”
“How could it exist?!” Berg appeared to be truly hurt. “It is not allowed to exist,” he added severely, as if he were forbidding it.
“Why not?” Köves enquired.
“Because it would complete our spoliation. Plus it would make even our superfluousness superfluous.”
“In that case,” Köves now posed the question, “who is your ‘executioner’ addressing all along?” In so doing he may well have touched on a sore point for Berg, because only after a protracted and visibly difficult struggle did he commit himself to answering:
“Even if it seems that another world comes into existence while one is writing, it is only on account of the blasted demands of the genre that it seems so, on account of the blasted demands of the
game, the blasted demands of irony … anyway, it can only seem that way because the other world doesn’t exist,” he said in the end.
“But it must still exist in our hopes all the same,” came Köves’s quiet objection.
“It can’t exist, because there is nothing in which we can hope,” was Berg’s instant retort.
“Yet you write nevertheless.” Köves was doubtful.
“What do you mean by that?” Berg asked.
“That you hope all the same,” Köves asserted.
“In other words,” and a faint, affronted smile appeared on Berg’s lips, “you’re accusing me of deception?”
“You draw the boundaries too tight.” Köves strove to avoid giving a straight answer. “Something,” he faltered, “something is missing from the construction …”
“Yes,” there was a glint of mockery in Berg’s eyes, “I know what you’re going to say now: life.”
“Precisely,” Köves agreed. “You speak about order, and you confuse that with life.”
“Order,” Berg spoke, “is the terrain, the battlefield on which life takes place.”
“That may be, but it’s still not life,” Köves countered. “You’re banishing the accidental and all other chance …”
“The accidental?” Berg gaped. “What do you have in mind?” He smiled in the way one smiles at a child.
“I don’t know,” Köves squirmed uneasily, and in all likelihood he didn’t know, although their conversation reminded him of a conversation he had had with someone else in the dim and distant past, at the commencement of his arrival there, and thus of his life, as it were, during which he had argued in similar terms: he had not learned much since then, it appeared. “The way you talk,” he finally grasped for the words in his helplessness, though this time there may also have been a touch of asperity from knowing he was right, “it’s as if
all of us get totally bogged down in the mess, whereas you, I notice, have somehow managed to find a way out, if you please.”
“Harsh words.” Berg was astonished. “Provide some evidence to back that up,” he demanded grimly.
It seemed, however, that Köves was not going to take the opportunity:
“What is that …,” he began a question with a pensive look on his face, “that definitive first act that, if I rightly recall, the hero commits under pressure of external compulsion, yet nevertheless without the external force being present at the time?”
“Yes,” Berg started as though bringing his mind back from dwelling on other things, “that’s a decisive, I might almost say crystal-clear passage in the construction. Still, what the act is I don’t exactly know as yet—it’s something I still have to work out,” he said, and brushed it aside.
“In that case,” Köves was curious, “how does he know that he’s going to commit it?”
“He has to commit it, because, as I say, the construction is ready to hand.” Berg was growing impatient. “The opening and the end for sure; it’s just the path stretching between that I don’t yet see quite clearly.”
“Yes,” Köves said, “and that path is life itself.” Then with a smile, as if he had just noticed them, he remarked: “You have some fresh petits-fours.”
“As you see,” Berg got out in a somehow strangled voice, his gaze veritably looking daggers at Köves, “I am trying to refrain from that pleasure.”
“Oh yes,” Köves hastened to acknowledge, “I see.”
Then next thing he knew he was asking:
“And love …,” here he wavered for a moment as if, now that he had got it out, he himself were looking back in astonishment at the word that had popped out of his own mouth, as at an obstacle
he had thought was unjumpable. “Is love not grace?” he went on to pose the question nevertheless.
This time, though, he seemed to have violated some concealed boundary, because the storms of emotion that swept over Berg’s face were such as to truly scare Köves.
“What’s that got to do with me?!” erupted from him, and he almost jumped up from behind his table. “Even if it is grace, it’s not mine; I’m at best its victim … Yes,” he carried on, “they tolerate me, like this, as I am—you can see what I’m like, can’t you—and by way of, indeed on the pretext of taking care of me—well, I can confidently say they tyrannize me, even though it is, no doubt, experienced by them as suffering …”
“Why suffering?” Köves’s curiosity, it seemed, got the better of his initial horror at having rattled Berg so thoroughly.
“Because a tyrant always suffers.” Berg seemed to have been somewhat mollified by being able to expound his reasoning. “Suffering,” he went on, “partly from himself, partly from his unachievable ambition, since he can never rule absolutely over others, that being impossible as there is always an ultimate, unassailable retreat, into madness or death, if nowhere else—so he ends up turning against himself. You know, I sometimes think that martyrs are the most perfect tyrants. At least, theirs is the purest form of tyranny, before which everyone kowtows …”
For a short while, he seemed to be brooding before suddenly and alarmingly exclaiming “Oh!” and then so much plaintiveness sounded in his expressive voice that Köves felt obliged to lower his head in shame and out of respect, so to say, as Berg went on: “how terrible it is! We long for love, to be loved, but at the same time how it humiliates us! What a victory love is! What tyranny! What slavery!… It forever eats away at the conscience like the disgrace of the bloodiest crime …” After the first, alarming cry, Berg’s voice slipped ever lower, so that Köves barely understood the final words;
even after that, Berg whispered something he did not pick out at all. After sufficient time had elapsed for it no longer to look like impoliteness, Köves cautiously got to his feet, remarking that he was very tired, he had not slept much the night before, which after all was true, just as the claim to be feeling exhausted was not an outright excuse, so he would have to take his leave, at which Berg glanced up at him as if he had only just noticed he was still there. Then he too got up with unwonted affability—this rather disconcerted Köves, because it was a little as though something in Berg had broken and he had somehow flopped together more in a heap, and moreover without having noticed, or at most with an awkward shyness, one might even say with humility, moving onto his face—and accompanied Köves to the door, where, hardly giving clear expression to what was on his mind (if indeed his thoughts were dwelling on Köves and on the words intended for him) he declared:
“I’ll be glad to be at your disposal another time,” and with that Köves, to his undeniable relief, was once more outside, first in the stairwell, then down below in the street. He set off homewards on foot—the fresh air could do no harm, then back at home he could finally have a good sleep: if he had been sacked, he would at least enjoy the advantages of his regained freedom—and it seems his mind must have still been on the conversation with Berg, because on getting close to the house he noticed merely that he had landed in the middle of an excited crowd. He had to push his way though mostly old people, women, and sick people—idle or retired people with time to spare—in order to reach the front door, registering only as much of the words which were flying about around him as were absolutely inescapable: “from the chandelier,” “the end of a rope,” “had to smash the door in,” “monstrous,” “by his own hand,” and “they telephoned her at the office,” he heard while, coming to the house, he noticed that a dark, angular automobile with its doors closed was parked in front. Then two men in caps and
some indeterminable uniform stepped out of the house, and on the stretcher that they slid into the load space through the rear door, and swathed from head to toe in some sort of sheet, lay a figure which seemed, from the size of the shape protruding from beneath the linen, to be the body of an adolescent boy. At that moment, an almost implausibly sharp, irregularly broken scream shattered the hush which had suddenly descended just beforehand, almost as if by magic, before Mrs. Weigand appeared in the entranceway, though to Köves—of course, it was just his tiredness, to say nothing of his astonishment which must have shown her in that absurd complexion—it seemed it was not Mrs. Weigand herself, but rather someone or something else who was screaming out of her throat and waving her head and arms about, a foreign being that had taken up residence in her and to which she was completely surrendering herself in her shocked and uncomprehending defencelessness: inconceivable pain.
One fine day, Köves turned up again at the South Seas; he had not been there for a long time, he had been in the army, because the same post as the dismissal letter from the ministry had also brought a demand that he immediately discharge his deferred military service, at which the army had sniffed him in and swallowed him up, until the day came when even it could stomach him no longer and one morning—it happened to be during the solemn moments when general orders are read out—he dropped full length on the floor, almost knocking over a chair and two fellow squaddies in the process, then showed no inclination to return to his senses, despite being disciplined, punished, taken to task, and pilloried, so he was finally carted off to hospital, where he was surrounded by suspicious doctors who cross-questioned him, took samples of his blood, tapped his limbs, thrust a needle into his spine, and—just at the point when he was fearing he would be unmasked, with the attendant, none too promising consequences—abruptly and most unceremoniously, so he barely had time even to be surprised, though there was plenty of reason for that, he was discharged, because one of the checks had shown that one of his thighs was an inch thinner than the other and, even though Köves was unaware of it, he was probably suffering from muscular dystrophy. Sziklai’s face split into a thousand pieces from laughter when Köves told him the whole story:
“They could hardly wait to get rid of you, old chap!” he slapped Köves on the thigh in question and put the fortunate outcome of the affair “solely down to the changes.”
“What changes?” Köves was amazed, being up to date on
nothing since he had been recently preoccupied with rather different matters.
Yet Sziklai did not appear to be much better informed than him:
“Can anyone know?!” he almost reproached Köves for his tactlessness, and it had been so long since Köves had heard the question that, for the first time since he had been discharged from hospital and the army, he was almost seized by a feeling of having found his way back home.
“In any event, one can sense winds of change,” Sziklai went on, half rising from his seat to scan round the coffeehouse, as though searching for someone. “Just look over there.” He nodded before long toward one of the distant tables. “Do you know the gentleman who is ensconced at the head of the table?” The aging, stout man with the prominent chin and vigorous nose whom Köves glimpsed in the direction indicated, and whom, under other circumstances, might have struck Köves as imperious, was very likely someone he had seen before somewhere; nevertheless he had to wait until Sziklai enlightened him:
“Don’t tell me you no longer recognize our all-powerful editor in chief?” At which, suddenly cottoning on, Köves was veritably flooded with grievances which had by now melted into distant, as good as forgivably sunny memories of a long, long bygone age, and now he fancied he also recognized the two thickset, balding men seated on either side of the editor in chief: they seemed to be identical people from the factory, though he was far from certain about that and, with the table standing so far away in a gloomy room, there was every chance he was mistaken.
“He was sacked,” Sziklai grinned.
“Sacked?…,” Köves was astonished.
“No kidding: times are like that now.” Sziklai again settled comfortably on his chair. They had even sought him out, he related,
offering him a job back on the newspaper, as a columnist at that, because it turned out that what they had done to him was not just against the law but flew in the face of common sense, as Sziklai had been one of the most outstanding people they had.
“They woke up to it a little too late,” Sziklai said, shrugging his shoulders. “I’d be crazy to go back to being a reporter when I’ve settled down so brilliantly with the fire brigade.” But no doubt they would take Köves back, he hastened to add; he had already put out feelers along those lines, and …
Köves, though, writhed on his seat as if he had been suddenly stabbed:
“I’m not going back to the paper!” he protested as though tormented by bad dreams.
“So you already have a job, then?” Sziklai enquired.
“I’m not going to get a job!” Köves declared so adamantly and, with such a cold repugnance, that it was as if he were not speaking for himself but maybe on behalf of someone else with far more important, far more pressing things to attend to than to fritter away his irreplaceable time in any mere job.