“And what would that be?” Köves asked, in a sharp, sarcastic tone, as though he were protesting not so much at what the girl was thinking about him but the very fact that the girl should be thinking about him; and the girl answered only after a pause, as if she had needed to wait until the hostility in Köves’s voice had died away everywhere, even in the room’s farthest recesses.
“That you are innocent,” she said.
“What do you mean?!” Köves rejoined promptly. “You think that someone who has committed no crime is automatically innocent?”
“Not at all,” the girl replied. “The way you live is already a big enough crime: your innocence is the same as a child’s — it’s ignorance,” and this time Köves maintained a silence, as if he were searching for counter-arguments, but so long was it taking that in itself it threw doubt on any refutation. Köves was not even aware, the girl continued, that his situation … and here she hesitated as if she were trying to find the appropriate words with which to alert Köves to his situation: his situation was the most precarious, the most fragile, in the department, he being the only person who was completely dispensable. The press chief, she enumerated, was indispensable, not just because he was the boss but because he was the minister’s speechwriter; it would not surprise her if Köves was unaware of even that. You see, she chortled, of course he was unaware. He might not even have heard the minister speaking as yet, might even be unaware that the minister occasionally gave speeches. Well then, it was actually the minister’s secretary who was supposed to write the minister’s speeches; however, he got the press chief to write them for him. Even if no one actually said it in so many words, that was basically the reason for maintaining the press office, even if there was also a certain amount of work with the press — but then the senior staffer took care of that. That was why he, too, was indispensable, because, to be honest, Köves did not do much to make the senior staffer dispensable. As far as she was concerned, every department always had need of a typist, though it was just the post that was indispensable, not herself personally, and she had no doubt that “some people would be glad to get rid of me,” she wouldn’t go into the reasons for that now, if … well, if it didn’t happen that it was actually she who wrote the minister’s speeches. She realized that Köves would now be pulling an incredulous face in the dark, but he should believe her that it didn’t call for any wizardry; the minister’s speeches were always constructed after the same pattern, one only had to recognize the pattern, though anyone was capable of that: it was pretty much like filling in empty boxes in a printed form. A speech was still a long way from being ready with just that, of course; the typist merely produced the “initial draft,” or in other words “collected, arranged, and outlined the material,” which she would then submit to the press chief, who would make his comments, then on the basis of those comments, she would reword the draft and again hand it over to the press chief, who would make any corrections that were seen as still necessary in his own hand and pass this on to the minister’s secretary. He, in turn, would read the whole thing through, likewise make comments and give it back to the press chief, the press chief back to the secretary, and the secretary now to the minister, who would make his own comments, give it back to his secretary, the secretary to the press chief, and he possibly again to her, after which it would again go on its way up the chain, possibly getting stuck for a longer or shorter interval, oscillating back and forth between secretary and press chief like a trembling compass needle, before finally reaching the minister, and it was possible that it would then be set off once more down, then again up … at this juncture the girl laughed out, in a deep, hoarse tone, as if she had never before dared to see the operation in the light in which she was now seeing it, in the dark: the purposeless and ridiculous shuttling up and down the official hierarchy, which the next day she would again be seeing in the colours of unrelenting seriousness, because that was how she had to see it; indeed, wished to see it: in just the same way as she would arise from a bed disordered by lovemaking to put on her clothes, another face, the inviolable armour of the secretary — and at this her naked body touched Köves’s, as if this fundamental insight had awakened in her a sensual desire that she had to quench rapidly, with rapid breathing. In short, she picked up later on, the department’s work was completely attended to by the three of them. Köves had only been taken on because there had been a need to do a quick favour for someone — the fire brigade, perhaps, as best she could recall.
“Yes, the fire brigade,” Köves confirmed.
“And you still did nothing to consolidate your position,” the girl chided him.
“What was I supposed to do?” Köves asked, like someone who was finally starting to take some interest in his own affairs, albeit belatedly of course, and therefore not so much with an eagerness to do something about it as out of the idle curiosity of a resigned regret.
“Open your eyes and find your way around the chain of command!” she girl told him.
“Is that so?” Köves muttered, as though the idea of doing that dispirited him even in retrospect, even undone. “And what would I have gained by going that?” he inquired nevertheless. For instance, he would have understood the press chief’s novella, the girl answered. He would have known what everyone knew: that a power struggle was going on between the press chief and the minister’s secretary, and also who was the instrument of that rivalry. She would be curious as to whether Köves was aware of that, at least, but of course he wasn’t. Well, it was the highly esteemed current chairman of the Supervisory Committee, and at one and the same time the minister’s secretary’s bitch of a wife, yes, her! — through her each kept a tight grip on the other, they literally clashed with one another over her body. On the surface, of course, the secretary’s position was incomparably the more favourable, both as the woman’s husband and as the minister’s secretary, who could simply stamp the press chief underfoot, pulverize him; but then, on the other hand, and the three of them were well aware of this, he didn’t do that precisely because he could. She could guess what sort of face Köves was pulling in the dark: an ignorant face, because he wouldn’t understand this, his mind worked on different lines — she wasn’t saying that disparagingly, but, quite the contrary, appreciatively, in some respects with outright admiration for Köves’s turn of mind, but it was still true, that’s what power was like, that’s how it operated: if it could not be exercised, then it wasn’t power. Ah! What did Köves know about that sort of thing: nothing, less than nothing! One fine day, for example, the press chief would receive a cold, unmerciful break-up letter from the woman which cruelly trampled in the dust all the feelings they had hitherto professed for each other. He had no clue what had happened; for days he had roved around the office pale as death, incapable of hiding his pain, wincing from the suffering and humiliation, trying to call the woman up, or to get calls put through to her, but not reaching her, finding she was not available, by pleading sickness, maybe not setting foot in the ministry for days on end, until, let’s say a week later, there would be a telephone call, or a letter would arrive, in which, for instance, the woman would inform him that every word of the previous letter had been dictated to her by her husband, the secretary, because he had come across something — a telltale piece of paper had popped up, or some fresh rumour had reached his ear — so, out of dreadful necessity, she had put down what had been dictated purely in order to avert the momentary threat, but with every word she had written she had suffered agonies of pain. Which was all very well, but in the meantime the press chief had been put on the rack: although this was not the first time it had happened — oh, by no means the first, nor even the second — he had nevertheless believed every word of what was in the letter, imagining he had been betrayed, deserted, indeed conspired against, and any moment might find himself struck down by the secretary’s avenging fury; pictured them in the marital bed as, for the sake of their spent love, they wring new stimuli for themselves out of his existence, so to say, and maybe at the climax of their pleasure they vilified his name; indeed — though he could not seriously have believed it, yet there were precedents — he even imagined they would murder him; yes, he had even played with that thought, had voluptuously pictured for himself a scene in which the secretary returned home with bloody hands, confessed to his wife, and the woman merely said: “Thank you.” That was the sort of thing he dreamed up, so it was genuinely painful to see him in such distress, torturing himself. How downcast he looked sometimes, destitute, that one was left not knowing what to do, how to console him, how to pull him round, when … when it was just power, a power game, nothing else. That was how it went, these were its laws; that was what it looked like when it was exercised, and she, the typist, would be mighty curious to know whether the press chief really did love the minister’s secretary’s wife in the way he himself imagined he did, or rather, as she herself, the typist, now thought, as a result of much head-scratching and her ruminations during many a sleepless night, the prey that the woman’s person represented for him. Otherwise what would the woman be worth to him if he did not have to claw her away from the minister’s secretary; and similarly, what would the wife be worth to the minister’s secretary if there was not the constant suspicion, if there were no cases of her being caught red-handed; if he could not order her to heel like a whimpering dog time and time again; and if he could not always use those occasions to give the press chief a kick. As to the woman, what would all this mean to her if she could not feel that she had two men in her power; in other words, all three of them had become so intertwined that they no longer knew who was controlling whom, who was on top and who the underdog, and why they were doing it at all — they were just doing it because they started doing it at one time, and now they were unable to do it any other way …