At this point, having spoken ever more haltingly for a while, Köves fell silent for good, it seemed, indeed for a moment he might even have dozed off, because he started up at the sound of the girl’s insistent:
“And then …?” to which Köves replied that that was essentially the end of the story. The man was clapped in irons, the woman goes up the tower again, and the press chief hears her striking into song again: Ah! So this woman never sleeps, he thinks in horror, quickening his steps, for in the meantime he has somehow pulled himself together and, evading the vigilance of servants and hounds, made good his escape, and with his “lacerated wounds” he is now moving around outside anew, in the desert maybe, but free at last.
“Free!” the typist’s unexpected, unduly shrill exclamation brought Köves round, almost making him jump. “The wretch!.. He’ll never be free,” she added bitterly, leaving Köves, who felt his reason was beginning to slip away again (his exhausted, contentedly tingling senses demanded a break, sleep, a deep, unconscious dreaming, as if he were inebriated) and, offhand, maybe could not even have said whether it was still the dying evening or already the first glimmer of daybreak which was shimmering in the window, asked with a thick tongue:
“Of what? And who won’t?”
“Do you really know nothing?” the typist asked, and it really did seem that Köves knew nothing, nothing at all. “The current chairman of the Supervisory Committee!.. The bitch!…” the typist’s voice shrilled like an alarm at night, and Köves felt a warm, moist touch from the girl’s face on his fingers — in the dark she seemed to have buried her brow and tear-filled eyes for a second in Köves’s hand, but then she immediately snatched it up with an impetuous movement, as if she were seeking to throw far away the pain burrowing within it, shaking her head several times, making her swirling hair swish silkily, fragrantly, on Köves’s shoulder too.
“How long have you been working at our place?” she said, her voice still choking, like someone swallowing her tears, “and you still go around as if you had nothing to do with us, as if you were a foreigner: that’s what the boss was saying this morning, and I’m saying it too.”
“I can’t help it,” Köves muttered. And like someone whose tongue is loosened by approaching sleep or some other stupor, he added with uninhibited, cheerful determination: “None of you were of any interest.”
“I can believe that. There isn’t anything interesting about us,” he heard the girl’s quiet, bitter voice, and although she was now — it seemed like a long, long time already — lying wordlessly, stiffly beside him, Köves, even if he did not come completely to, also did not fall asleep; instead, on some unconscious compulsion, he moved and stretched out his hand questingly until the palm was caressing the at first bristling, but then ever-less-resisting, ever-more-melting female skin, and as if the warmth of the caressing fingers were also loosening her throat, the girl started talking quietly:
“The current chairman of the Supervisory Committee … you’d think, wouldn’t you, that was just one of those temporary titles, lasting only until it’s somebody else’s turn: that’s what you’d suppose from the name, isn’t it?”
“Indeed,” Köves agreed, even nodded, though probably pointlessly as it was dark and the girl wouldn’t have been able to see it.
“Well, it isn’t!” the girl cried out, as it were rebutting Köves’s assertion in a sharp tone of triumph. “Not a bit of it! She is permanently the current chairman of the Supervisory Committee; by pure chance she is always the current one, her, her, and no-one else, it’s been going on like that for years, and it will go on like that for still more years!.. Who is going to dare stand up to her husband?”
“Why? Who’s that?” Köves asked, more due to the pause that had ensued, which seemed to be demanding his voice, confirmation of his presence, rather than out of any genuine curiosity.
“The minister’s secretary,” the girl retorted with the same bitterness as before, though this time it carried a near-exultant ring of delight at being well informed.
“You mean there’s a minister?” Köves marvelled, but here it seemed the girl was almost angry at him:
“You can’t seriously be asking that,” she said, “when there’s a photograph of him hanging in every room, including ours, and right above your head at that.” Köves did, of course, remember the photographs perfectly well, though on the other hand, perhaps precisely because he had seen so many of them, he remembered the face itself only vaguely, like the sort of faces one recalls because they fleetingly pass before one’s eyes in specific places, at specific times, time and time again, but never recalling them for themselves, merely for those specific places and specific times, so he sensed that the girl had misunderstood his question, though as to what sort of doubts he wished to express thereby, maybe he himself had already forgotten, and therefore in order to preserve his authority all the same, he merely remarked:
“That’s not in itself proof he exists.”
“Oh,” the girl mocked, “so you’re an unbeliever! You need proofs, because if you aren’t suspicious, you feel stupid, and perhaps you even brag about your lack of faith, but meanwhile you have no idea about the real world, no idea about anything!”
With that dressing-down, Köves clammed up, and he listened without saying a word to the girl’s easy-flowing voice and fluent words as to the simultaneously refreshing and soporific patter of warm rain.
The minister — he existed all right, he was all too real! And even more real was his power, power in general. A ramifying thread which interwove everything and twitched everyone to do its bidding. There might be some individuals whom he did not reach, or who even did not see him — Köves for one, who therefore did not have the foggiest idea about him. And not through any stupidity: the girl had been watching Köves for a while and was convinced that he was not at all stupid. But then what could Köves be after? she had fretted, and she confessed that, to this day, she did not know. It was valid to ask, of course, whether it was possible to live like that, at least over a protracted period — outside the circle, that is. One thing for sure was that he was not going to get very far in life, though perhaps he would manage to preserve his intellectual independence, and at this point, after some groping in the dark, the typist squeezed her fingers over Köves’s lips as though she had concluded from his breathing that he was about to fly into a rage on account of her scathing words. Because, she continued, undeniably there was also something appealing about that independence: Was any further proof needed than the fact that Köves was in her bed right now? Of course not. Köves probably had not the slightest idea how weak, how vulnerable, how exposed, how defenceless he was. That morning, when “the humiliation occurred”—that, by the way, was bound to happen sooner or later, everyone knew that, everyone was waiting for it except Köves, of course — well anyway, that morning when all that happened in the end was what was bound to happen, she had nevertheless felt real pain, yes, literally physical pain, a sickly feeling, and, strange as it may sound, that sickness had told her what in fact she thought about him.