Fiasco by Imre Kertész

Author:Imre Kertész
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: World War II, Jewish, Totalitarian, Holocaust, Fiction, Nobel Prize
ISBN: 9781612193298
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2013-07-09T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

Permanent residence permit. Landlady, houseman.

Köves went off to the authorities in order to get his temporary residence endorsed as permanent and to obtain ID papers to that effect: Mrs. Weigand, the landlady, had reminded him for the second time that, insofar as he wished to carry on lodging with her, he needed to attend to his official registration as soon as possible.

“Of course, I don’t know what plans you have,” she said casting her clear little pools up at Köves, and Köves smiled uncertainly, as if he had less idea about those plans than even Mrs. Weigand.

“To be sure,” he said, therefore, “I’m finding it very satisfactory here,” as if that were the reason he was there, not anything else, to which the woman responded:

“I’m glad to hear it!” as she picked some invisible thread or crumb off the tablecloth. They were standing in Köves’s small room—Köves had vainly offered Mrs. Weigand the sole chair as a seat, so he too remained standing—with the afternoon already getting on for evening, though not yet time to switch on the lights, and the landlady had just before knocked on Köves’s door. Köves had initially flinched slightly, thinking the boy was going to burst in on him again, but before he called out “Come in!” it occurred to him that it could hardly be him as Peter was not in the habit of knocking.

“You didn’t even mention that you’re a journalist,” the woman carried on, with a hint of mock reproach lurking in her voice and a timid smile appearing on her pallid, pinched face, as if she were in the presence of a renowned man with whom she ought to speak with restraint, and Köves, who had indeed mentioned nothing of the kind, was astounded at how well she was informed. How could that be? Did the grapevine work that fast there? Yet instead of asking for clarification, he considered it of greater urgency for himself to supply some clarification, as if he wished to dispel a disagreeable misunderstanding which almost amounted to mudslinging:

“Yes,” he said, “only I’m not with a newspaper.” Then, not caring what a letdown it might cause the woman (for all he knew she might have already been boasting that she had a journalist as her lodger), he swiftly tacked on: “They fired me.”

But if she did feel any letdown, that did not show on the woman: it seemed as if she had, in some manner, become more relaxed; her face. cagey beforehand, now assuming a surprised, yet for all that, a warmer expression, and in a tone that Köves felt was more natural than before she quietly acknowledged:

“So, they fired you,” and, head slightly askance, she looked up at Köves with interest, and, being a blonde, albeit possibly from a bottle, she now reminded Köves of a canary. “You poor thing,” she added, at which Köves raised an eyebrow as though he were about to protest but didn’t know yet what he should say. It was

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