A conventional computer, the interpreter explained, normally consists of a monitor in a case, a keyboard, a mouse, a modem and various items of software one has to learn to use, and yours, he told Korin who was nodding without understanding anything, comprises all these items, and beside these has the extra facility, he pointed to the unwrapped laptop, not only of being plugged immediately into the Internet, which goes without saying, but of providing you with a template for a ready-made home page, which is all you need, for having put down a deposit of two hundred and thirty dollars, you have already paid for a provider several months ahead, so there is nothing else left for you to do except — but wait, let’s go from the top again, he sighed seeing Korin’s terrified expression — first you press this, he put his finger on a button at the back of the computer, to switch the set on, and when you do that these little colored icons appear, do you see? he asked pointing at each one of them, do you see all these? and began to go over it all again using only the simplest words and in the least technical detail, because the guy’s level of understanding, he told his partner, was negligible to the nth degree, and that’s not taking the speed of his reactions into account, so, never mind, he said, let’s start at the beginning, from the point at which you see what you do see on the monitor, at which point you should do this and that, and he would have gone on to explain why this or that action was necessary and what various things meant, but quickly realizing that this was utterly useless, he taught him only that which was mechanically required and made him practice it, since, when you came down to it, he told her, the only way was to make him go through the basic actions, everything but everything, time and time again, so as soon as he demonstrated something he asked him to repeat it and in this way, said the interpreter, after some three hours, the guy eventually learned the secrets of creating a home page, so though he hadn’t the faintest idea what he was doing he was capable of opening Word in Office 97 and typing in some piece of text, and, when he had finished for the day, of formatting what he had done as hypertext, saving it, then dialing up his server, typing his code-name, his password, his provider, his own name,
etcetera etcetera, just about everything he needed to know in order to send the information to his home page, using his personal password, so that he himself could check that his text had got onto the server and that the material could be searched on the basis of a few key words using the search engine, and this, all this, said the interpreter, still somewhat incredulously, had to be accomplished with the most primitive of methods seeing that the guy’s brains were like cheese, full of holes, in one ear and out of the other, and whenever he was told something new his brow completely creased up with the effort, like the whole guy was one enormous straining mass but you can see the stuff that had just entered his head leaking out again, right out so there was nothing left, so you may imagine, as Korin himself said in the kitchen the next day, you may imagine what he went through trying to learn it all, for not only did he admit that his mind was not what it had been, but confessed outright that, as a mind, it was useless, ruined, kaput, finished, no good for anything anymore, and it was only thanks to Mr. Sárváry’s remarkable, enchanting gift of pedagogy, not to mention, Korin added with a forced smile, his endless patience, that he finally got something right, and, why deny it, there was no one more surprised than he that he should have at his command this miraculous, incredible triumph of technology that weighed no more than a few ounces, and it worked, against all the odds it actually worked, he told her, highly animated, just imagine, young lady, there it was sitting in his room, the machine, on the table, right in the middle of it, adjusted precisely to its central position, and all he had to do was to sit down in front of it and everything was under way, everything functioning as it should, he suddenly laughed out loud, simply because, and for no other reason, than that he had pushed this or that button, and it was all as Mr. Sárváry said it would be, so with a couple more days of practice, he quietly told the woman, who was before the gas burner as usual, with her back to him, saying nothing, he could start work, just a couple more days, he repeated, then after a couple of days of concentrated practice he could get the job properly started, wholeheartedly commit himself to it, put his back into it, make a real go of it, in other words a day or so and he’d be sitting there, writing something for posterity, for eternity, he, György Korin, on the top floor of number 547 West 159th Street, New York, for the price of one thousand two hundred and eighty-nine dollars all told, of which two hundred and thirty was deposit.24.