“Your salary?” The porter looked up at him disbelievingly from behind his desk, upon which lay a telephone, entry passes, and a list of names of some kind. “You mean you haven’t picked up your pay packet yet?”
“No, you see …,” Köves began, but the porter interrupted him:
“Are you attached to the paper?”
“Oh yes!” Köves hastened to assure him.
“Then where’s your permanent entry card?” came the next, loaded question, which would have done service in a cross-examination; a minute may have elapsed while Köves deliberated on his answer:
“I have been abroad for a while.” This statement seemed to have an unexpected effect on the porter.
“Abroad? In other words, you handed it in for that time being,” he said, now for the first time in the helpful tone of voice that, in Köves’s view, a porter ought to speak. “May I see your ID, please?” he added with a practically apologetic look on his face for this intrusive yet manifestly inescapable request, pencil in hand to fill out the entry card without delay on the basis of the ID.
Resettling on it forthwith was not so much a look of suspicion as of crude and somehow hurt rejection when he glanced at Köves’s ID:
“I can’t accept a temporary entry permit.” He pushed it away from himself toward Köves, who, far from treating it as a fait accompli that he himself, along with his papers, had been pushed aside so to say, did not pick it up, so that it remained at the edge of the table.
“I have no other papers at present,” he tried to convince the porter, a scraggy little man, whose limbs on show above the desk were intact but whom, possibly due to something peculiar, whether in his features or his movements — he would have been unable to account for precisely why — Köves had from the very first moment taken to be disabled, and what was more: a war invalid — a totally arbitrary figment, as if one could only become disabled in a war. And in order to give authentic evidence of what he was saying, a brainwave so to say — fortunately he had stuffed it in his pocket before leaving home — Köves now produced and showed the porter the dismissal notice he had received that morning: “Here you are,” he said, “You can see that I’m not lying: I am attached to the paper, I am a journalist, and I want to pick up my pay.”
But all the porter said as his narrow, hard-mouthed expression ran over the letter was:
“I see!” in an unmistakable tone as he set the letter down on the table edge, alongside Köves’s other piece of paper, with an even more unmistakable gesture. With that he had already turned to the next enquirer, for in the meantime several people, men and women, who were seeking admission into the building, had gathered in the small room: Köves had so far not even noticed them, at most feeling the pressure of some sort of silent weight on his back, even though in truth no one actually touched him, and it was only from the relieved looks on their faces that he understood how long they had already been waiting for him to be silenced and an end be brought to the fruitless struggle.
Now, though, wheels could turn, business resume; the porter was positively demonstrative in assisting all those who, unlike Köves, could lay claim to an entry permit, greeting some of them as old acquaintances, for others dialling a number on his telephone, while with yet others there was no need for even that, because they already featured on a list of names of those who were already expected somewhere upstairs. A cheerful activity, a kind of tacit agreement, developed around Köves and, as it were, against him — an impression hardly based on the facts of the matter, but more likely just on the undoubtedly exquisite sensitivity that Köves was displaying at that moment. Although no one paid any attention to him any longer, he nevertheless felt that all eyes were fixed on him, and the filling-in of each new permit seemed as if it were not an entry into the building so much as serving solely for his — Köves’s — further humiliation. At all events, there could be no doubting that without the necessary will, and the appropriate expression of that will, just like he failed to get on to the tram, he was also not going to get into the newspaper office. The trouble being that in this respect Köves now found himself somewhat perplexed: he did not know what he was supposed to wish for. As regards what common sense would have made him wish, which was to enter the newspaper office in order to pick up his pay packet, Köves no longer wanted that; indeed, it had probably slipped his mind, and to the extent that he still wished to enter the newspaper office, it was purely in order to triumph over the porter and teach him a lesson. But even that he was only able to wish for if, so to speak, he puckered his brow, because what he really wished for was something quite different, and that would have been a breakthrough into another realm, a break with all sanity: Köves wished quite simply to strike the porter’s face, and to feel with his fists how the sometime face was pounded into a slushy, shapeless mush — and meanwhile he merely beat himself up, as it were, for he was well aware that he wasn’t going to do it, not out of compassion or discipline, nor even fear, but just because he was simply incapable of striking anyone in the face.
This anger which he felt, not so much for the porter as for himself, not to mention a confused urge, possibly vanity, not to abandon the arena without protest, without a trace, as if he had never been there — that, and not a purposeful rage, is what eventually exploded from Köves by the time the last of the applicants had gone, and before any newer ones had arrived:
“Right, so don’t let me in, but then don’t quote me the rules as being your authority, but your own rancour! This is my ID, there is no other, and you’d be amazed to know where I was given it and by whom! But now I’ll take it back to them and report that you won’t accept it — that you won’t accept the ID papers they have issued!” he yelled, and he was astonished to hear his own voice almost screeching as he carried on: “In any event I have to receive my pay, and if by no other way, then they will send it via the postal service! Which, of course, simply incurs unnecessary added work and costs for the firm, but then don’t worry! They’ll learn who lay behind it: you, and your overstepping of your official sphere of authority!” With that he snatched up his papers from the table, and he had already placed a hand on the doorknob when the porter’s voice caught up with him:
“Not so fast!” at which, slowly and reluctantly, Köves turned round: so was this how one achieved one’s aim here, by gambling away all one’s hopes?
“Just let me see that ID!” the porter urged, the features even surlier than before but now seeming as if they were covering up a certain hesitation. He looked in turn at Köves and the ID, as if he were comparing them, though of course no photograph of Köves was to be seen on the document; his hand also moved to reach for the telephone, but then he had second thoughts and instead suddenly snatched up his pencil to fill out Köves’s entry permit in big, clumsy lettering, then quickly ripped the form off the pad; not one word was exchanged, they no longer even looked at each other, as Köves took the paper from him and hastened out of the room.
Continuation (a further victory)
Going up in the elevator — a continually circulating, endless chain of open boxes: a rosary, no: a paternoster, the name by which lifts of this kinds were commonly known suddenly occurred to him — Köves felt dull and tired, his heart was hammering, his eyelids kept on listlessly closing as if the victory he had just had gained had drained all his strength, although of course he was still in want of sleep and had also forgotten to eat breakfast. Was it always going to be like this? Would he always have to squeeze from himself such violent, self-tormenting passions each and every time he wished to move ahead? How was he going to control his emotions, and especially his sense of direction; after all, where was he actually headed? Which way was ahead? Still, Köves could not deny that his wretched victory — the wretchedness being precisely the fact that he felt it was a victory — had warmed his heart like a satin caress, nor was he able to suppress the quiet song of a vague satisfaction as though, within himself, he had stumbled upon hitherto unsuspected blind forces. He even forget to step out at the appropriate floor — as Köves was apprised by a notice board hanging in the vestibule, the cashier’s desk was located on one of the lower floors of the building — he suddenly realized that he was being warned by a sign that he should alight or remain calm in the head of the elevator shaft, where the elevator would switch over and begin its descent; Köves preferred to alight.