“And now I’m supposed to start all over again?” the pianist smiled hesitantly, dubiously. “There was a time,” he mused, “when if I could not play for two days running, I would be itching, raring to go so badly I would almost go nuts. And now?… I’d be happy not to see a piano. I’ve burned out, old chum. Here,” and with the tip of a crooked middle finger, looking almost as though he were intently listening inwardly, he cautiously tapped on his chest as though on a closed gate that he had already been asking to be let in through for quite some time in vain, “There’s no more music inside here …,” and it was useless for Köves to reassure him that, once he had rested himself and got back to a normal life, he would see, the inclination would return, the musician mournfully shook his head in doubt.
In recent days, the South Seas regulars had also been preoccupied by another case, likewise the subject of widespread debate
among themselves, though this time engendering merriment rather than dissension. Köves learned from Sziklai why it was he had not seen Pumpadour around at all recently, and the Transcendental Concubine only rarely, and even then not with the customary schnapps glasses, but totally sober, her vaguely dreamy gaze now replaced by a slightly crabbed look, like someone who has been rudely wakened from a prolonged sleep by cold reality, and who was always in a hurry, always laden with parcels and shopping bags, which had never been the case before.
“She bakes and cooks,” Sziklai chuckled.
“How’s that?” Köves marvelled, and Sziklai, who—at least “until events took a tragic turn”—now knew everything “first-hand,” from Pumpadour himself, for whom Sziklai had of late been securing regular appearances with the Firefighters’ Platform, told Köves that “things have started to look up for her,” with Pumpadour suddenly deciding to ask the Transcendental to marry him, and she, bridling at the idea, in a nonexistent world, of becoming the nonexistent wife of a nonexistent person, who was not even an actor but a repairer of clocks, though more a repairer of lighters than of clocks, became so infuriated that she declared she never wanted to see Pumpadour again. Time passed, but the Transcendental showed herself to be unbending, declaring roundly to Sziklai, who “tried to mediate,” that she “simply didn’t understand how our relationship could have degenerated to this,” whereas Pumpadour complained to Sziklai that the woman was his “last fling,” and that if he did not win her hand, “life would have no meaning.” In the end, he had written her a letter asking her for “just one final meeting.” The woman had consented, promising to pay a visit at the specified time, while for the occasion Pumpadour cobbled together a device out of all sorts of wires, an acid of some kind and an ordinary battery and taped this tightly to his body under his jacket—the device being intended to blow up and “kill both of them” the moment they
embraced. Either he miscalculated, or the device was not foolproof, or maybe a combination of the two: perhaps the Transcendental disentangled herself from the hug before Pumpadour was able to activate the device, or maybe the batch was too weak, or the tightness of grip, “the two bodies clinging together,” that Pumpadour had reckoned on for a detonation was missing—but in fact Pumpadour alone experienced the explosion, the outcome of which, apart from the scare, was nothing more serious than some bruising and burns to the chest. The Transcendental had immediately run to call a doctor and ambulance, while Pumpadour, overacting as ever, Sziklai said, had fainted, was carried off to hospital, and although his injuries had healed quickly, had meanwhile been discovered to have stomach ulcers, so now the Transcendental visited him regularly, taking in his meals for him, since he had been put on a special diet.
“How’s it all going to end?” Köves cheered up, and Sziklai, likewise laughing, suggested:
“I fear the same way as our comedy: a happy end!” because, after many vicissitudes, interruptions, and fresh beginnings, the comedy had, indeed, now begun to take shape, with Köves usually working on the dialogue in the South Seas, so that at least when he was trying to write a comedy he was not haunted by the depressing spectacle of mourning perpetually accorded him by Mrs. Weigand since her son’s suicide, her eyes long not the limpid pools that Köves had once seen them as, but now covered by frozen sheets of permanent ice, his ears catching through the walls, night after night, the stifled sound of her sobbing. Besides which, Köves anyway found it easier to write a light comedy in the racket of the coffeehouse than in the loneliness of his own room, where he was constantly in danger that his attention would wander and escape his control, with foreign figures intruding onto the stage out of nowhere, such as an old man with a little dog tucked under one arm and a suitcase in the other hand; or else he was supposed to be hammering out the comedy’s ditzy, exciting,
flighty, and adorable female character, but suddenly into her place other girls would push forward on whom he did not recognize those characteristics, at most their dearth—the factory girl, for example, who had been waiting for the death of her aunt from cancer and, for all he knew, might still be waiting now. Images would come vaguely to mind, memories lurk in waiting, all images and memories which had no place in a comedy and, as Köves thought, would probably not have come to mind if those empty white sheets of paper were not staring up at him, and if he did not have to sit there facing them. In his excruciating dreams (Köves had recently been sleeping poorly, indeed having bad dreams), like an alluvium which was continually sinking only to keep stubbornly resurfacing, he would sometimes make out a word, a word that, although not written down anywhere, he could nevertheless almost see, somehow starting with the letters of his name, but longer—
követelés
: “demand”? or maybe it was
kötelesség
: “duty”?—and then, if he looked closer, was not even a word but a drowning man, tumbling around amidst the waves, and Köves felt he ought to fling himself in after him to rescue him from the current before he drowned. Then, all at once, he was seized by a fit of rage: “Why me?” he thought in his dream, but it was no use looking around, he was on his own, facing the drowning man. He almost jumped, though he feared it would be a fateful jump, and the drowning man would pull him down into the maelstrom—then, fortunately, he would wake up in time, but the unpleasant atmosphere of the silly dream would trouble him for the whole day.
One afternoon, Köves was sitting at the table in his lonely room—not long before, a late-summer light shower swept over the city, so, as he had no wish to get drenched, Köves had set to work at
home—and probably even he thought he was debating whether he should make a start on the sketch that needed to be delivered for the Firefighters’ Platform, or should he write the newspaper article that was due, or should he get on with the light comedy, when, all of a sudden, he caught himself writing something that seemed most likely intended as the opening lines of a letter:
Lately, I have been thinking of you constantly. To be more specific, not so much of you as of what you read out; or to be even more specific, not so much of what you read out as of … You see, it’s precisely about this that I want to write. How can that be? That’s simple. Because I have picked up certain experiences which will certainly come in very handy for you, whereas I don’t know what to do with them. In short, I want to be of assistance to you, because you can’t deny that you are stuck. I believe you when you say that “the construction is ready to hand,” but there is something looming up between the “man of intellect and culture” and 30,000 corpses—maybe it too is just a corpse, but in any event the first, and thus the most important, because the question is whether it can be stepped over or ultimately presents an insurmountable barrier. Yes, that definitive first act which subsequently “proves to be an irrevocable choice,” if I rightly recall, just because it happened, and because it could have happened, indeed nothing else could have happened, and although it happens under the pressure of external compulsion, it does so in such a way that the external compulsion happens not to be present at the time, or is present merely as a circumstantial factor (with your permission, I would tag on the latter). It is governed by a purely helpful intention, then, though possibly also a little by one of protest; no, I can’t think of a better word for it at present
than “protest,” though I don’t know what it is I am protesting against. I bow to your superior learning, but as I have already said many times, your learning lacks the colour of life, which usually shades into grey. You see, how precisely you visualize the extremes, but you get stuck on the simple, grey, absurd motive which leads to the extreme, because you are unable to imagine the simple, grey, absurd act, and the simple, grey, absurd path leading to that act. Just between the two of us, it’s not easy to do so; indeed, I’d go so far as to say it’s almost impossible.
So listen!
Let’s start with me being called up by the army. I was reluctant to comply with the call-up order, in the way one is always reluctant to fulfil one’s personal destiny, all the more so as one usually does not perceive it as such. Every possible and impossible get-out crossed my mind, even including the idea of jumping off a high point in such a way that I would break a leg, but a friend (a fire officer) informed me that there was no sense in that, because they would simply wait until the fracture had mended, then whisk me off to be a soldier.
So, I went off, dazed and apathetic like a lamb to the slaughter, and, before I knew what was what, I was being fitted up in a uniform. You can’t expect me to fill you in on the horrors of barracks life, which may be rather well known, but still strike one as new if one experiences them personally. What I might say about them, perhaps, is that it is a complete absence, indeed denial, of one’s uniqueness, coupled with the incessant and intensified delights of physical being. It’s not true that one’s personality ceases to exist; it’s more that it is multiplied, which is a big difference, of course. And incidentally, to my no small surprise,
when it came to physical performance I held my ground splendidly, often in the most literal sense, which as time went by filled me with almost a sense of self-satisfaction, as though the space vacated by my uniqueness had been occupied by the soul of a racehorse, which, in the intervals between being disciplined and made to run around, spots a good breather in the collective dormitory, in the steaming body-warmth, the loosening, eerily familiar atmosphere of frivolity and banishment. The barracks town was situated in some unknown part of the country, on a desolate plain, where the wind whistled incessantly and bells from the distant settlements tolled incessantly, and I well remember one dawn, when I was standing in line in the open air, in front of the kitchen, holding a mug for coffee: the sun had just risen, the sky was hanging dirtily and shabbily above us; my underpants (in which, just beforehand, I had been performing physical jerks to orders that had been barked out through megaphones) were clinging, clammy from rain and sweat, to my skin when, all of a sudden—through an indefinable decaying stench, compounded of ersatz coffee, soaked clothes, sweaty bodies, fields at daybreak, and latrines—broke a memory, though it was as if the memory was not mine, but somebody else’s whom I seemed to remember having seen once in a similar situation, some time long ago, somewhere else, a long way away, in a sunken world lying far beyond the chasms of all prohibitions, dimly and by now barely discernibly, a child, a boy who was once taken away to be murdered.
If you don’t mind, I won’t supply any further details.
Yet what a filthy dream I woke up to once! I am standing in a room by a desk, behind which is seated an obese, hormonally challenged bonehead, with matted hair, rotting
teeth, bags under his eyes, and a sneer on his face: a major, and what he wants is for me to put my signature at the bottom of a piece of paper and accept a post as a prison guard in the central military prison.
So …
I tell him—because what else can I say?—“I’m not suitable.” And what do you think the jackass with the overactive glands and the rotten-toothed grin replies? “No one is born to be a prison guard”—that’s what he says, by way of encouragement. Look at it this way, others had signed up, meaning the rest of them, my fellow squaddies, because the whole platoon had been singled out for the job. “But I’m a man of intellect and culture,” I try once more. (You don’t by any chance know why precisely that phrase should have come to my mind?) To that he says: “Do you like the people?” I ask you, what answer are you supposed to give to that, if life is sweet to you, even if you happen not to like the people, since who on earth could have room for enough love to go round an entire people, and anyway the sonofabitch isn’t asking you to sign up as a god, just as a prison guard. So I say, “Yes.” “Do you hate the enemy?” is the next question, and again, what answer are you supposed to give to that, even if you have not seen hide nor hair of the enemy, and as to hating, it’s at most just this major you hate, and even him (human nature being what it is, its attention soon distracted and quick to forget) only in passing. “Right then, sign here!” he says, and he stabs a disgusting, stubby, flat-nailed, nicotine-stained index finger at the piece of paper. So, I take the pen from him and sign where he is indicating.
I’m trying to think why. Whichever way I look at it, I can see only one real reason: time. Yes, and this is something you may find a little curious, but only because, as I say, you
are not familiar with the colours of life and don’t know that what we later on view as an event of major significance always appears initially in the guise of little curiosities, but it was mainly due to time that I signed. In the end, no pressing reason came to mind, and I couldn’t just stand there for an eternity, pen in hand. You might say there was no need for me to take it in my hand. Well, yes, but then the whole thing seemed so unreal that I did not feel my signature was any more real. I personally was completely shut out of the moment, if I may put it that way: I took no part in it, my existence went to sleep, or was paralyzed inside me, or at any rate it gave no twinge of unease to warn me of the importance of the decision. And anyway, was it a decision at all, or at least my decision? After all, it wasn’t me who chose the situation in which I had to make a choice, moreover a choice between two things, neither of which I wished to choose: I didn’t wish to become a prison guard, of course, but nor did I wish to be punished, for although it’s true that no one threatened punishment, that is something one takes for granted from the outset and is usually not far wrong about. Then again, there were a few incidental factors which played a part: I have the sort of nature which prefers to try to please people rather than pick a fight, so I would have to say that I was also driven to some extent by courtesy, but maybe also, in some way, by curiosity to see what a prison here is like, though in such a way that I was safe. So you see, any number of reasons relating to the spirit of frivolity and eerie familiarity that I have already mentioned were being impressed on me by my surroundings.
This is sounding as though I were making excuses, when I am merely bearing you out, for I stepped onto the path of grace—or at least what you call grace.
Not long after that, I found myself in the prison. I shall never forget my first impression: solid wooden doors lining a cool stone corridor; alongside the walls, widely separated, men standing with hands held behind their backs, foreheads pressed to the wall. They were clothed in worn-out military fatigues, without insignia, belt, or indication of rank. Armed guards were standing about at both ends of the corridor. Every now and then, a soldier hurries the length of the corridor; his glinting boots, coloured collar-patches, pistol jiggling on his butt, his supreme indifference, a true provocation. Otherwise, endless time and perpetual, suffocating stillness. And a particular odour; there is no better term for it than a prison stench.
I landed there, then, and it was not long before I was looking around with an eerie sense of familiarity. What else could I have done? I am being careful not to portray as simple what was apparently simple: for instance, you won’t hear a word from me about force of habit, or anything else which presents the reality as reality just because it is the reality; not for a second did I consider it as being natural to be there, and on the other hand not a second could pass that I did not consider as being natural, since I was there, after all. So, nothing struck me straight away: I saw no torture chambers, nobody starving to death. Admittedly, there were some nights when executions took place in the courtyard but, for one thing, I didn’t see them, for another, they were wrapped in a shroud of legality: death sentences passed by a court of law. There was generally an explanation for everything. Nothing went beyond the bounds and scale that, so it seems, I was able to accept. The military prison wasn’t the worst of prisons either; its inmates had either been sentenced for ordinary transgressions or breaches of service
regulations, or they were waiting to be sentenced, unlike “over there,” as people, somewhat enigmatic expressions on their faces, referred to the customs service’s prison, which was separated from ours by an impenetrable wall.
Enough of this, though! It’s starting to sound as if I wanted to describe the circumstances—or in other words, again offer excuses—and as if the circumstances could be described anyway. They can’t. I long, long ago resigned myself to the fact that I shall never know where I am living and what laws I am governed by; that I am reliant on my sensory organs and my most immediate experiences, though even they can be deceptive, indeed maybe them most of all.
It’s funny, but before anything else I had to attend a school, a sort of course, where, along with my fellow squaddies, I was given instruction in what a prison guard had to do. I recollect the smile I had when I took my place on this course: it was the smile of the damned, of one who was, by then, ready for anything in the spirit of the contract, with the scrutiny of that bitter smile being the only reservation.
But I had not expected what happened next. What did I expect? I don’t know exactly; how could I? Essentially something along the lines that they, in their own crafty way (about which again I can have had no precise notion), would put my brains, my soul, even my body to work; would instruct and bully me, din into me, some crude, savage, and blind consciousness; in short, prepare me for my sinister job. Instead of which, what do I hear? You’ll never believe it: they are perpetually going on about the law, about rights and duties, regulations, records, procedures, official channels, health regulations, and so on and so forth. And don’t think this was done disingenuously, with a hideous,
hand-wringing grin on their faces: not a bit of it! With the straightest imaginable expression, not one word out of place, not one collusive wink. I couldn’t get over it: Could this be their method? They pitch me in among prisoners, then leave me to myself? Are they relying on my duties to transform me, to break me in? Well, I thought to myself, if they have picked me out for their ends (and of course it was useless to rack my brains as to what sort of mystery could have guided that choice: some sort of educational intention, perhaps, or—and after a while this seemed the likeliest to me—merely blind, impersonal chance), they must also know what they’re expecting from me; but then, it suddenly occurred to me, did I myself know?
In a word, I was scared. As a prison guard, I was terrified of the prisoners. Or rather, I was terrified of coming into contact with prisoners in the capacity of a prison guard. It seemed unavoidable, though, since that was why I had been stuck in the post. The hormonally challenged, dog-breathed major’s question as to whether I hated the enemy kept resurfacing like a nightmarish dream, and I was seized by fear a thousand times over that they would delegate some miserable authority to me and force me to live up in practice to the word I had given. (How many times I regretted it now!) Because I naturally, or perhaps I should say: instinctively, took as my starting point the idea that a prisoner was just a prisoner, and wrong can only be lying in wait for those who exercise authority over them. On the course, naturally, I heard umpteen times over that the basis of the administration of justice was the law, so the prisoners were transgressors of the law, whom the law had sentenced to imprisonment for their wrongs. I also saw that one or another of the pretend prison guards among my
companions jumped at this sort of reasoning, as if the fact that they were facing criminals directly threw light on their business; extreme necessity might have compelled even me to try my hand at the method, but it has always been my experience that it is pointless for me to pursue my luck down this path. For whatever reason, I completely lack the propensity to act as a judge over others, and I have had the feeling there is no crime on earth which could adequately justify, at least in my eyes, the job of prison guard.
That, then, was the belief with which I entered service as a prison guard in a prison.