The department head, however, evidently appreciated his openness, his expression now all goodwill, his voice ringing warmly:
“A good worker,” he said, “is the last thing you’ll be. Either you leave here or you won’t come to anything. After all, you haven’t even learned how to file yet.” He fell silent, looked at Köves with his head slightly tipped to one side, then, with a friendly smile to balance, as it were, the harshness of what he had to say, he carried on: “In point of fact, we could dismiss you. You simply don’t come up to the requirements, after all. However,” he swiftly tagged on, “naturally we would prefer it if you were to accept our offer of your own free will,” and here Köves was all at once overwhelmed by a bottomless weariness which had actually never left him since he had arrived there.
They exchanged a few more words, with Köves most likely also signing something, after which the next thing he noticed was that, as on so many occasions already during his stay there, he was leaving an office with unsteady steps, without knowing anything more than he had when he entered, and he thought, with a certain amount of shame, of the girl’s beseeching, then uncomprehending, and finally, no doubt, astonished expression when he later packed his things together and left the factory without saying a word.
CHAPTER SIX
In a South Seas refraction
That evening, Köves turned up once more at the South Seas, spinning in through the revolving door and making a beeline for Sziklai’s table, where he was sitting in exactly the same pose as when he last took leave of him, and a broad smile now brightened and then cracked the hard face into tiny shards, as if all he had been waiting for ever since was Köves’s arrival.
“What’s ‘my literary talents’ supposed to mean?!” Köves waded in, throwing himself down on one of the chairs without even asking, and the smile froze slightly on Sziklai, who had no doubt been counting on a more cordial reunion.
“What it’s supposed to mean?… I don’t understand …,” he mumbled, his face still reflecting, on the one hand, the joy of seeing Köves again but now also, on the other, a touch of disappointment, whereupon Köves related what had happened that morning:
He had been handed his papers for the job at the steelworks and told to present them at the press department of the Ministry for Production, and without delay moreover, lest the greater part of the remainder of the working day be lost, and in order that Köves might be set immediately to work at the Ministry, should they see fit. Köves had rushed from one tram to another — the Ministry was near the city centre, a long way from the factory — as if he had been handed some extraordinarily fragile public property: his time, which he had to deliver perfectly intact to its destination, taking care, above all, not even to dream of pilfering any part of it for himself. This near-missionary feeling, as if it were not him who was arriving, or rather it was him, except representing himself, so to say — that easiness had helped him through the usual stumbling blocks with which he had to grapple at the porter’s lodge in order that, ID card in hand, he should then make his way between the two customs men at the main entrance. Köves had raced, panting, up stairs and along corridors until he had, at last, found the press department, where it had turned out that he would have to wait as the press chief just happened to be dealing with something else. “He’s in a meeting with the current chairman of the Supervisory Committee,” disclosed the typist — herself busy now clattering at her typewriter, now reaching for ringing telephones — in a voice that switched to a more confidential tone after she learned from Köves what had brought him there. “I see,” Köves commented, somewhat dazed, his face but then gradually recovering an intelligent expression, as though he were suddenly sobering up from a bout of intoxication and, with some primitive instinct, which seemed all at once to resuscitate the torpidity of his original nature, was already settling himself on what was, presumably, the most comfortable chair in the room. Now, of course, it would not occur to him, Köves smiled to himself, to rush the padded door; or if it did (as it had indeed just occurred to him), then not in the least with any disposition to act, at most the glint of a memory, an almost painfully exquisite memory that he had preserved of himself. What a child he had still been back then, Köves reflected, as though musing on times long gone. When had that been? Yesterday? Twenty years ago, perhaps? Ever since arriving in the country, Köves had always had a spot of trouble with time; while living it, it seemed interminable to him, but when he thought about it as the past, it seemed practically nothing, with a duration that might have fitted into a single hour, in all likelihood, the thought crossed Köves’s mind, an idle hour at a twilight hour in another, a more real, one might say a more intensive life, somewhere getting on suppertime, when a person has nothing better to do, nor does it does matter anyway, and ultimately, it fleetingly occurred to Köves, an entire lifetime was going to pass like that, his life, on which he would eventually be able to look back with the thought that he could have seen to it within the space of a single hour, the rest being a sheer frittering away of time, difficult living conditions, struggle — and all for what? At that moment Köves would have found it hard to say what; it was more just the sense of struggle that lived in him, of effort, without being able to see more exactly, or at least suspect, the object, let alone the purpose, of that struggle, though of course it could have been he was just tired, as usual, his intermittently failing reason maybe only indicating his exhaustion, the toe-curling boredom of the struggle. Maybe his mind was wandering, although it did not escape his attention that a woman and, immediately after her, a man hurried out from behind the padded door and crossed the room heading straight for the door — so Köves noticed that she was a good-looking woman who, through her hair and probably also her dress, left him with a fleeting impression of the yellowish-reddish-brown coloration of ripe chestnuts, whereas the man, diminutive, dapper, and with a moustache, whose jerky movements seemed as to be explaining something, striving to detain the woman, who was hurrying off wordlessly, without looking back and, improbable as it was, he appeared to have a flower adorning the buttonhole of his jacket — Köves continued to keep his eyes on the half-open inner door, waiting for the press chief and the current chairman of the Supervisory Committee, who, for whatever reason, he imagined as being an elderly, sturdy, bald or silver-haired man. It seemed, though, that he was wrong: after accompanying the woman to the door, it was the fastidious manikin himself who returned and, for the first time, cast a distracted and, outwardly, in some way drawn gaze first at Köves, then at the typist, who now announced in a soft, impatient voice that this was Köves, “the new colleague,” at which the man, a spasm of pain flashing across his face, asked Köves to “be patient for just a little longer,” and then vanished behind the padded door, which meant Köves had seen the press chief after all, and therefore the woman who had departed just beforehand could only be the current chairman of the Supervisory Committee. Shortly after, the handset on the typist’s desk buzzed. Köves looked at the typist, she at Köves, and Köves got up from the seat and headed for the padded door with the happy yet unsettling feeling that “their eyes met and they were in accord.” The press chief, his lineaments by now fully composed, with conspicuous affability invited Köves to take a seat and, while Köves established that he really was wearing a flower in his buttonhole, in point of fact a white carnation, told him that he was delighted to be able to welcome him among his colleagues, which Köves heard with well-founded scepticism. He instructed Köves to see to take whatever steps were necessary to ensure that his personal details were placed on file at the office — the typist would be of assistance there — and there was time enough to assume his new sphere of duties the next day: “We arrange for articles to be reprinted in the press,” he said, and a doleful smile appeared on his face, making Köves think at first that maybe it was the “reprinting” that distressed him, possibly he felt it was unworthy, but he could have been wrong about that, because the press chief’s long, brown, moustachioed face, seemed to carry some secret sorrow which nevertheless, at least in this mute form, sometimes sought to emerge, whereas at other times that smile lurked on it, even as he went on: “But what am I doing explaining all that to you, of all people, when I’ve heard all about your outstanding literary talents?” at which Köves jerked his head up like someone who had been roused suddenly from a long and tranquil dream with some frightening piece of news. “My literary talents?” He grew alarmed. “From who?” he asked. All the press chief said, this time substituting a mysterious smile for the doleful one, was “From our mutual friend; I can’t say more than that …,” yet Köves instantly guessed all the same whom he should suspect.