That, then, was how things stood, and anyone who did not know that, and was unsuspectingly fooled by appearances, or by the press chief’s words, like … well, like Köves by that novella:
“No doubt you made some pronouncement about it,” the girl queried, or rather asserted.
Certainly he had, Köves replied, since the press chief expected that of him; that’s why he had read the story out to him.
“And what did you say?” the girl wanted to know, and Köves, who no longer recalled much, it seemed, replied that it had been nothing in particular, little more than empty phrases, stock words of praise, like how interesting it was, how original, things like that.
“Nothing else?” the girl was unconvinced.
“Oh, yes!” it seemed that Köves now recalled more. “I told him that I considered it to be a symbolic story, but it still showed the mark of a lived personal experience.”
“There you are,” the girl’s voice was all gentle, comforting triumph. “He must have believed that you knew his secret, and now he has surrendered for good, put himself in your hands for good,” the girl spoke in an almost caressing tone, her hand finding Köves’s face in the dark and stroking it as if he were a little boy. “Oh dear, that’s ignorance for you,” she reproved him.
“Yes,” said Köves, “it seems that I don’t nurture the same interest in him that you do,” and the hand now stopped on the face, then pulled away, as if by making the remark Köves had withdrawn himself from their joint concerns and joint subjection to step onto a separate path and had thereby possibly offended her.
“How much you know about him,” he went on, all the same, his voice revealing not surprise so much as almost wonder. “You know him in the way that a person can only know her tormentor,” he added.
“My tormentor …? Why would something like that occur to you? How dare you say anything like that?” the girl asked indignantly, in that almost injured tone of voice people use who are offended only by the truth.
“And what if it were the case?” she said later with the liberated, almost scornful confidentiality that, it seemed, their ineffaceable hours of intimacy had precipitated within her. “Should I put up with it? Accept being walked all over, trampled upon?”
But it was most likely daybreak by the time this took place, when the light seems to bring with it a restoration of the order which will sunder them and soon direct them to their distinct, widely separated places, and they eye each other strangely, almost with hostility, like people who by the sober light of day are counting the cost of a venture predestined to come to nothing — it was something like this that Köves felt, still dazed from the sudden awakening and hurried dressing, while the girl stood before him in an immaculate dress, a cloud of fresh scents around her, radiant and cool as (it crossed Köves’s throbbing head) a drawn sword, and urged him to get going, so they did not arrive at the ministry together.
“You’re horribly ambitious,” he said, or rather complained, as he searched for some final item of discarded clothing, maybe his necktie, maybe his coat. “You’re eaten up by ambition. What do you actually want?” he asked, probably not driven by any curiosity, more simply to occupy the awkward moments until he had finished dressing.
But the girl must have misunderstood him, because she gave him an answer, overstrung, irascibly, in confidence and scornfully, like before:
“Him,” she said. “I want him back,” suddenly turning her back on Köves, and he saw her shoulders heaving, followed a moment later by a choking sound that was instantly stifled. Yet when he tried to approach her: “Don’t touch me!” the girl exclaimed, then “Get going, go!” she added in a sudden fit of anger that Köves felt he did not deserve as he had done nothing to upset the girl, or if he had, then it was not deliberate: “Just so you don’t get the idea that I’m going to walk arm in arm with you to the ministry where your notice of dismissal is waiting!”
“Notice of dismissal?” Köves was astonished, not so much at the news in itself, more at its unexpectedness, startled solely by the setting, the timing, and the occasion. “How do you know?” he asked a little later, and of course he had not the slightest intention of setting off.
“I typed it yesterday morning.” The girl now turned round to face Köves, her voice milder, a look of almost embarrassed sympathy on her face.
Köves then soon found himself in a strange stairwell, then on the street, where he pondered for a few seconds which direction he should now take.