“I can’t do a thing with him,” Mrs. Weigand complained, spreading her hands then letting them drop again in a gesture of helplessness, uncomprehendingly shaking her pallid, peaked face, tipped slightly to one side, its pools now quite without lustre. “Since the chess competition got under way I simply can’t do a thing with him,” she reiterated to Köves, who recently had sometimes found himself trying to stitch his ministerial press briefings together at home (as a result of which the time had duly come, after all, when he made use of the table to which the lady of the house had drawn his attention with such pride on the day he arrived there, which, long ago though it had been, had nevertheless remained fresh in Köves’s memory) and was forced to slam his pencil down angrily, he was so disturbed by the constant squabbling between mother and son which filtered into his room, especially the shriek of the boy’s breaking voice, like steam whistling through a valve under high pressure, though who could tell whether Köves might not secretly have been glad to be disturbed and whether he was not seeking, by that whole business with the indignation, the gesture of throwing down his pencil and leaping up angrily from the table, not only to conceal from, and justify to, himself his relief, for there was no denying that the moment a person began to write, at least in Köves’s experience, he would instantly find himself becoming mixed up in a whole tangle of unclarified and unclarifiable contradictions.
“Is it, perhaps, that the game’s not going well for him?” Köves inquired, with a hint of gloating, it could not be denied.
“Not as well as he would like.” The woman was still shaking her head as though to indicate that she herself disapproved of what she was saying: “Apparently, nothing has been decided yet, but one game has been adjourned and it’s now a life-and-death matter that he wins the next match …,” the woman fell silent, her pools hesitantly seeking Köves’s gaze.
“Life-and-death?” Köves cocked an eyebrow in amused astonishment.
“That’s what he says,” the woman complained, seemingly already a little bit calmer for being able to talk.
“Child’s talk.” Köves broke into a smile.
“Child’s talk,” said the woman. “But then he’s still a child.” Köves was assailed by a sensation of a conversation held long, long ago being reprised.
“Well then,” he therefore brought the conversation to an end, “if it’s that important to him, then no doubt he’ll win it,” and if Köves, once he was on the stairs, felt it was exceedingly doubtful whether this really had been the appropriate solace to bestow on the woman, it was time for him to set off for the South Seas, partly in order to dine, but partly also out of duty, so that he and Sziklai might continue to turn over the matter of the light comedy, though as far as that was concerned, their brain-racking so far did not have much to show for it, comedy writing proving, at least for Köves, an onerous, depressing, and not in the slightest bit joyful labour. As in the past, when their friendship was as yet free and easy, unclouded by any common interest, Köves and Sziklai would sit every evening at their regular table in the South Seas, trade jests with Alice—although the waitress was never at a loss for a snappy retort, it seemed as if recently this had come at the cost of some effort on her part, with the tragic furrows around her mouth also apparently more deeply set than before, so it was sometimes on the tip of Köves’s tongue to ask her why he never saw her “partner,” Berg, around in the restaurant these days, but for some reason he did not put the question to her, with Sziklai’s presence making him feel ill at ease on one occasion, while on another he would feel it was not opportune, and then again, who knows, maybe he feared what the answer might be—and amuse each other with their fire-brigade and ministry yarns, or single out a guest or party for comment, yet from the very first moment the comedy which was awaiting their attentions cast a shadow on their spirits.
“So,” Sziklai’s brow would darken on his arrival, for instance, an event that although expected nevertheless seemed to come as a surprise to him. “Given it any thought?!…”
“Too right I have.” Köves would pull himself together, as though he had been waiting all along solely to be able to impart at last all the innumerable thoughts that he was aching to get out.
“And?” Sziklai’s hard face gazed questioningly at Köves: “Have you come up with anything?”
“It has to have love as the starting point,” Köves declared adamantly.
“Fine,” Sziklai concurred, “let’s take love as the starting point. Then what?”
“There’s a boy and a girl,” Köves offered apprehensively, as though that was about as far as he was willing to push it at that moment and was worried—most likely with good reason—that it would be far from enough to satisfy Sziklai.
“What happens to them?” he could already hear the impatient voice. “What stops them from being happy?”
And since Köves subsided into silence with an expression which was intended to be pensive but in truth was more just dark, as of someone in whom murderous passions were already being stoked against the imaginary loving couple whom they were supposed to steer into a safe haven of happiness over the course of the comedy.
“Right, so you’ve no idea,” Sziklai established, as Köves admitted with his continued guilty silence.
“There, there! No need for hanging the head,” Sziklai relented. “We need to think up a good story,” he opined.
“Indeed,” Köves agreed.
“Let’s try to think,” Sziklai would propose, at which a longer-lasting, facilitative silence would settle in between them, and all Köves had to take care of was to preserve, like some sort of theatrical mask, a haughty expression of brightly musing yet simultaneously expectant communicativeness appropriate to light comedy, as though he would speak the moment the brainwave came to him, which could be in only a matter of minutes now. His gaze and his attention, however, would be freed to go their own ways, flitting about the room, coming to rest, every now and then, on a table or face—the Transcendental Concubine over there, behind her drained glasses of spirits, resting her elbows on the table and her chin in turn on her folded hands, her empty gaze seeming to be trained on Köves but without seeing him. Did she really not see him? Köves was somewhat troubled in dragging his gaze away from her: in truth, he had a tie to her through a rather embarrassing affair, though he had only himself to blame for that, if not the girl at the factory. There was no denying that memories of the girl kept flaring up in Köves; it was far from merely a taste for breakfast that the girl had quenched in him, for she had also awakened in him a wild animal in search of game. Yes, there were times when Köves longed for a woman’s warmth, and not in the abstract but very much the practical, palpable sense of the word: longed for a woman’s body-warmth, a woman’s silkiness, a woman’s sleekness, and not necessarily the girl’s (whom he could have located and placated, of course, had he not considered that too big a price), for Köves’s longing had no object; or to be more accurate, it was impersonal; or to be even more accurate, Köves longed for a woman, but no woman in particular, and that longing, or rather torment, might yet drag him into danger, Köves reflected. Perhaps it was precisely this that he was musing on that evening, Sziklai having gone away early, because he would have to get up the next day at dawn, because the fire brigade were holding an exercise, leaving Köves to linger solitarily over his beer, and while doing so he noticed that the Transcendental Concubine seemed to be sending him some message, first with her eyes, then by a slight quiver of a shoulder and hand; but when, with the deceitful smile that he laid out like a lawn, so to say, to cover his twinges of crude voracity, Köves got up and went over to the woman’s table, she appeared to be outraged all of a sudden:
“What’s the idea?!” she asked in her strangled, hoarse voice. “That you can simply come over here and take a seat at my table just like that?!” thus forcing on Köves a cheekiness he was reluctant to affect:
“Why, anything against it?” he asked provocatively. At bottom, there wasn’t, so K
öves took a seat; he even ordered several rounds of slivovitz and got slightly tipsy as he listened to the woman’s somewhat halting disquisition about how the world, themselves included, did not exist, and existence was taking place somewhere else, the world was just an obstacle to existence, so it had to be done away with, because it was not reality, only appearance, to which Köves—his wit sharpened by the drink, apparently—commented, after a time, that it would no doubt be necessary to pay for the slivovitz in reality, whereupon the woman gave a sharp laugh and familiarly placed a warm, dry hand on Köves’s thigh. And although the woman’s proximity did much to ease Köves’s burning torment (as though by now he no longer saw in her a stimulus, more an obstacle to the realisation of his longing for women), maybe the disconcerting incongruity manifested between her blonde hair, her softly contoured chin, and her determined, impudent nose nevertheless induced him to follow the woman on the night-time tram, then a series of streets right up to her dwelling. This was another side room, like all the other rooms on which Köves had paid private visits so far, and although it was true that this time he was not enjoined to be quiet, all the same the stuffy gloom of the hallway intimated the presence of sleeping people somewhere, but rather, on entering the room, veritably to freeze in horror, for in the glimmering semi-gloom (the room gained its mysterious illumination, as he later discovered, simply from the light of a street lamp on the other side of the road) there were phosphorescent eyes staring at him from every side, and Köves even fancied he could hear the heavy breathing of the beings to which they belonged, until the imagined sound was broken by a squeal of laughter from the Transcendental Concubine: “Bet that scared you!” she choked with laughter, toppling over onto her half-made bed. “Dolls’ eyes,” she eventually got out, but then her high spirits seemed to be replaced in a trice by a despair which seemed to be just as bottomless. “Yes, indeed,” she complained in an odd, frail, baby-talk tone: “My landlady constructs dolls’ eyes …,” and it was only now that Köves noticed the innumerable as yet sightless dolls and teddy bears lying on the floor, shelves, and table. “For that ugly, fat man …,” she carried on, her mouth set to whimper: “The Uncrowned … You know him?” she looked up at Köves from the bed, the setting with all those fixed glass eyes revealing her to be particularly talkative.
“Of course,” Köves replied.
“Then come closer,” the woman burbled, and when Köves complied, once again, as in the restaurant, he felt her fervent hand on his thigh, only now a little farther up.
“Where’s the bathroom?” he inquired, perhaps to win time, even if he could not know for what.
“What do you want from the bathroom right now?” The Transcendental was evidently none too willing to let him go, but since Köves, almost incomprehensibly even to himself, like a drunk clinging irrationally to an obsession which has occurred to him out of sheer whimsy, dug his heels in, it was again the accustomed, slightly hoarse voice which irritably snapped out: “So, go if you must! You’ll get to it in the end!” In the bathroom, a trap stuffed full with towels, tooth-glasses, and a blotchy mirror, Köves—who, it seemed, really had drunk more than was good for him—deliberated on whether he should spend the night there by locking the door on himself, or preferably slip unnoticed out of the dwelling, but in the end, like an escapee who remorsefully returns to the site of his sins, he stole back to the room, where the woman—and it was more just her outlines stretched out on the bed that Köves saw in backlighting which was filtering in through the window—betrayed by the even, slightly whistling sound of her breathing that she had in the meantime—more than likely just as she had been: fully clothed—had fallen asleep. Köves waited around longer, in case she woke up (although, admittedly, beyond waiting, he did nothing to facilitate that), then on sobering up, somewhat offended and slightly relieved, yet at the same time ashamed at seemingly not having the strength to give way to his own weakness and in the end, having so stingily and fruitlessly preserved what had been there to be squandered, he left the dwelling nice and quietly, and the next day the Transcendent seemed not to recollect a thing: the usual spirits glasses in front of her, she herself with her usual distant gaze, was listening to what Pumpadour, flowingly silver-maned and passionately rugged of face, was obviously saying with some force, leaning close to her face, and she returned Köves’s cautious greeting with no more than a fleeting, preoccupied, and totally disinterested nod. Köves likewise soon tore his gaze away from the musicians’ table if it accidentally strayed that way, almost out of habit, in the hope of coming across his old friend, the pianist, whom he had not seen since the day he bumped into him here, in the revolving door of the South Seas. One evening—an evening when Sziklai happened to be running late—Köves was unable to put up with it any longer, so he got up and went over to the musicians’ table and, having first begged pardon for the disturbance, inquired of a bald, slightly puffy-faced man with drooping bags under his eyes (Köves seemed to recall once hearing that he played a wind instrument, maybe the saxophone) whether he knew anything about the pianist. To Köves’s great astonishment, however, the saxophonist seemed to have not even the slightest inkling who he was enquiring about, even though the pianist’s appearance was hardly what one would call unobtrusive, on top of which Köves seemed to recall having seen him and the saxophonist many a time in earnest conversation, from which he had deduced that they must be good friends, or at least close acquaintances.
“He plays piano at the Twinkling Star,” Köves tried to jog his memory.
“At the Twinkling Star?!…,” the saxophonist registered surprise. “But there is no pianist there. The Tango String Band plays at the Twinkling Star!” As though to forestall any incredulity on Köves’s part, he turned to his neighbour, a gaunt, dark-haired man whose shaven face carried a hint of blue and who exuded a whiff of hair oil: “Does the Twinkling Star have a pianist?” but the man was just as amazed as the saxophonist had been.
“How could it?! The Tango String Band plays at the Twinkling Star!” he said, looking at Köves with something that verged on indignation.
“There, you see!…,” said the saxophonist, as though that had served to refute Köves definitively, so Köves quickly thanked him for so obligingly setting him straight and went back to his seat; he still saw the blue-shaven man passing some irritable comment to the saxophonist, who in turn spread his arms, pulling a face and shaking his head as if by way of an apology, and Köves sensed it was most likely on account of his importunity. A minute later, Uncle André, the Chloroformist, in his elegant dark suit, a long cigarette in his hand, passed by Köves’s table, gracefully bowing his grey-templed head at Köves’s greeting. Then, as if something had suddenly sprung to mind, stopped short and, with an urbane smile somehow at odds with the confidentially hushed tone of his voice, said:
“I heard you were asking about Tiny, the pianist, just before.”
“Yes,” Köves said, startled: he did not recall having seen Uncle André around when he was speaking with the musicians, though of course it could well be that he had not taken a hard enough look around. “Does that mean you know something, perhaps?”
“I do indeed. He was a very good friend of mine.” Uncle André nodded, and although he had not given a precise answer to what Köves had asked, on contemplating the receding slim back, Köves was nevertheless left with the feeling that he had indeed received the answer to his specific question and could now only trust that everything was going as the pianist would wish and that he had not been hauled out of bed.
In short, as for stories—he only had to look around—there were plenty of those: he even related one or two of them to Sziklai, and at these moments they would chat in complete agreement, almost forgetting why it was that they were sitting together, until it would again occur to Sziklai:
“Anyway, let’s get back to the comedy!”
“Let’s,” Köves would concur, resuming his sedulous expression.
“Let’s at least figure out a decent girl,?
?? Sziklai encouraged him, and he explained that if he had a decent female lead character the comic writer would find that the “battle has essentially been won.” In Sziklai’s words, the girl needed to be a little ditzy but exciting, at once “unbearably capricious and adorably attractive,” but by then it was usually getting to be late in the evening, so the girl would, as Sziklai put it, be “put away for tomorrow,” when they would assure each other, now beyond the revolving door in the darkness and stillness of the night, that they would meet up anew in the same place, the South Seas.
Continuation
Köves had better success with literature in the ministry, albeit not in what was strictly his field of work: Köves had no need of any literary talents for his work, though as to what talents were actually needed he never managed to find out. Köves spent his first days at the ministry almost exclusively reading, and more specifically reading the writings of his colleague, the other staffer, or to be more correct (this being his official title): the senior staffer, the press chief, with a somewhat pained smile and now with two flowers in his buttonhole, being of the opinion that these writings would serve Köves as a better introduction into the scope of duties that were awaiting him, and at one and the same time an example to be followed, indeed, he might say—and here the press chief’s glance searched out the typist’s, as if the two of them knew something to which Köves was not yet privy—he might say, an ideal example. Köves therefore began reading these written creations, which seemed at times to be some sort of report, at other times an article or perhaps an essay of some kind, all of which opened as if frenziedly seeking to inform the outside world about some piece of news, an event, or maybe an item of information which, in the course of the article, the author must either have forgotten all about or that Köves quite simply did not understand, and all the less so because right after the opening sentences his eyes would begin darting here and there, ever lower and lower, until they slipped right off the paper and Köves—to his great horror—all of a sudden caught himself having nodded off. Besides which, or so it seemed to Köves, the senior staffer—an aging, balding figure as it happened—had very likely started writing in early childhood and had been writing incessantly ever since, because carbon copies of his works, held together with paper clips, filled entire shelves and desk drawers, and if Köves’s tormented gaze accidentally strayed onto the typist, perhaps to be cheered up by the sight for a fleeting second, she would instantly spring to her feet and, unbidden, pile up more and still more towers of the senior staffer’s oeuvre onto Köves’s desk, only to scurry back to her typewriter, on which she would be typing the senior staffer’s dictation or copying one of the senior staffer’s compositions that she had been handed to make a fair copy of. Even so, of course, the reading did leave some impression on Köves, a vague but at least uniform impression that, taken as a whole, reminded him of something Sziklai had said on the evening he had “joined the fire brigade.” Essentially, or so it seemed to Köves, what they were concerned about here was much the same, with the appropriate modifications, of course: more particularly, it was as if people in the Ministry for Production had woken up to the fact that production was, it seemed, far from the natural activity that for a long time they had thought it was, but was actually an extraordinary, heroic undertaking, indeed vocation, that the public at large, and even the workers themselves, were not fully alive to; they just did the work, but effectively without being aware of what they were doing, and it was the senior staffer’s duty—that is to say, now his as well, it dawned on Köves with a shudder—to awaken a sense of self-esteem in them, and of public esteem toward them.