It must have been a strange state.
Parlous in the extreme.
Is that how you judge it now, or did you perceive it as dangerous at the time?
I don’t know. The drawback of conversations like this is precisely the fact that one speaks self-confidently about one’s life in the sure knowledge of where it has ended up, but are you able to conjure up the person you were, your aimlessness? Can you feel under your feet the tightrope that you danced on? Did you even know that you were dancing on a tightrope? Years later, I came across that immortal adage from Duchamp: “There is no solution, because there is no problem.” Probably one has to evoke trivial details, though often even that proves futile. Not long ago, for instance, I mulled at length over what I ate in those days. What did I eat during a period when practically all items of food were only sold in exchange for ration coupons? Who washed my underwear, and how? I recollect that there used to be one of those posh, old-fashioned public lavatories in front of the EMKE café, on the corner of the Grand Boulevard and Rákóczi Avenue. There were steps that led down to it. A decrepit crone who was a leftover from the “ancien regime” was in charge of it as the WC attendant. One even got a bar of soap from her, which had to be given back after one had washed. Other than that, I used to go to the Lukács Baths to wash down and have a swim — I remember that well. There were times when I was only able to get to the swimming baths in the evening, when the green waters of the pool would be lit up by searchlights a bit like spotlights. Those years dropped out of my life like loose change through a hole in a purse; it would be useless to try to gather them together now. On a sunny but gusty winter morning not long ago, I took a walk through the Városmajor Park in Buda and cut over the tramlines to reach Logodi Street15 in order to look for the house where I had been a subtenant what is now a good fifty years ago. I have long since forgotten the house number, so I tried to recognize it from memory: it just didn’t work. I traipsed back home. I began to realize that I shall never again make sense of my young days: I don’t know what I did, and why, how and why I became the person I became.
For my part, though, I hope we shall learn something about this in the end. You mentioned Logodi Street, which suggests that you were no longer living with your mother in Zivatar Street.
No, my mother married the glass engineer, who had in the meanwhile been promoted to managing director of the factory.
For political reasons or engineering know-how?
I suppose it was as a reward for all his inventions; he wasn’t interested in anything besides vacuum tubes. My mother, on the other hand, was finally able to live in the style she had dreamed about since her girlhood. There was a car that went with the position, and at weekends they would go off on shoots for game, have a pig slaughtered in autumn for the hams and sausages … and as a result of some property deal they swapped the Zivatar Street apartment over my head.
Effectively, put you out on the street?
Only in principle; in practice they arranged a subtenancy for me “on a friendly basis” as the main tenant was some sort of senior employee at the factory that my stepfather managed.
In other words, more through bribery than “on a friendly basis” …
That’s quite possible, as we settled on a ridiculously low rent; but the main thing was that it was a rather neat room at the foot of Buda Castle Hill, with my window overlooking the dense leafage of a tree. Since this meant we were finally free of each other, the endless wrangles with my mother also grew less common.
What were the wrangles about?
Look, I’ve already told you that in matters of no direct concern to her my mother suffered from outright colour-blindness. Both she and her husband pretended that we were living in a slightly wacky but otherwise completely normal world, in which a young person’s duty is to attend to their advancement and build a career. This was the summer of 1951. Every night, toward dawn, operatives of the State Security Office, the ÁVH, would go around the city loading onto trucks and transporting to their forced places of residence those people who had been sentenced to resettlement.
You mentioned earlier Iván Mándy’s book, Lecturers and Co-authors …
Yes, and that too was part of the total absurdity. At that time I was part of a small group of friends who would write humorous sketches and short radio plays, all kinds of nonsense, for the insatiable Hungarian Radio. We would take apart the elements of the plays of Ferenc Molnár in various dives and espresso cafés, quite convinced that we would soon become famous comedy writers.
In Fiasco there is a scene where Köves, getting on for daybreak, is making his way homeward along deserted streets and is hailed by a strange chap from a bench by the footpath …
The pianist, who didn’t dare go home, because he wanted to avoid being dragged away from his bed.
Is the pianist a figure you dreamed up, or is he someone you encountered in real life?
I could even tell you his name.
That scene, as it happened, you also wrote as a stand-alone short story under the title “The Bench,” which contains a very typical sentence about the nonexistent identity that you spoke of before. It runs: “In those days I could always be persuaded by anything if I came up against the necessary patience or robustness.”
That is probably how it was in fact.
I rather feared as much. What, then, did it take for you to come to your senses from this, as it were, semidetached state?
Maybe by first getting fully immersed in it, then, later on, simply recalling it and being duly astonished by it.
As if by means of a time machine, you were to arrive at an unfamiliar — or perhaps familiar — place and uneasily watch what is happening to you?
If you’re referring to the second part of Fiasco, then you’re on the wrong track. Köves knows exactly what is going to happen to him; indeed, he himself provokes the events.
He is tormented by a Kafkaesque guilty conscience and forebodings.
Not at all. I know that an interpretation along those lines was printed in a German newspaper …
Which claims that you are trying to amplify on Kafka, raising the question of whether that is in fact possible.
That’s not the point; the real issue is whether it is possible, in certain circumstances, not to amplify on Kafka. And here I don’t mean Kafka’s incomparable genius, but the fact that history has vindicated Kafka, and that has left its mark on the literature of succeeding generations. The language of the second part of Fiasco caused me quite a headache, i.e., how it is possible to cast the ephemeral ideological constructs of merely transitory closed regimes and dictatorships into the more durable form of a novel. I was looking for a usable metaphor, and it finally occurred to me that totalitarian dictatorships, including the Stalinist one, speak in the language of religion. Nor can it be otherwise, since their world was not a realm of logic but of the absurd. As a result, therefore, a degree of Kafkaesque stylization seemed glaringly obvious, for one thing because Fiasco ultimately deals with something entirely different from Kafka’s marvellous novels; for another thing, because what else is the intellectual domain that we call literature other than the handshaking of writers with one another ad infinitum? But that would take it too far. As far as Fiasco is concerned, it is a novel based on a fundamentally amusing notion. A writer bogged down in the intellectual swamp of the Seventies, the Brezhnev era, awakes to the realization that he is working counter to his own interest, because a creative life cannot be squared with the time in which he is living. That is when he embarks on a novel, which is nothing more than a process of the recapitulation of a fate: episode by episode, he recreates the existence of his young alter ego, Köves, looking more and more for where he lost his way, why he couldn’t disappear, submerge, into the anonymous mass of history. He is unlucky, however, and at the end of the book comes to the very same point — the L-shaped corridor — where he was once overtaken by his creative vision: the creative life proves to be an inescapable curse, its end product failure — the fiasco.