Customs inspection
Although still slightly drowsy, Köves nevertheless noticed a number of changes inside the room. First and foremost, and it may have been an incidental circumstance, but it struck Köves with the very first breath of air he took, was that the room was now full of harsh tobacco smoke. He blinked in disgruntlement, the acrid air irritating him to cough: he was not used to tobacco like that — at all events, to something a cut better. Apart from that, there were now three people sitting facing him, with on each of the two outer chairs a customs man, one of whom was Köves’s acquaintance, the other and also another — Köves could hardly characterize them better than that, because although obviously differed from his colleague in respect of personal features, through his uniform and the indifference reflected on his face, he looked exactly the same, and he knew that his customs man was who he was from the fact that he had just seen him take his seat on the chair to the right. The person seated in the middle Köves would have taken, at first glance, to be a soldier had he not quickly established that nothing supported that assumption, apart from the fawn-coloured tunic and the shirt and necktie of military hue: he carried no insignia of rank, nor belt nor shoulder strap by way of trimming, and so, Köves concluded, could not be a soldier, after all. In the end he decided that he too was a customs man, though clearly a different type of customs man — some sort of chief customs officer. Before them, in the middle of the table, he saw his suitcase again.
As he stepped into the room — on the principle that one should always be polite with customs men — Köves gave a friendly greeting of good evening, then waited attentively for their questions. Yet whether because they had not yet decided what to ask, or for some other reason of which Köves could not be aware, they asked nothing. One was smoking a cigarette, the second was leafing through documents of some kind, the third was scrutinizing him; they merged together in his blurred gaze in such a way that Köves finally saw them as a single triple-headed, six-armed machine, and it was obviously attributable to a brain confused by exhaustion that he suddenly caught himself on the point of racking his brains for an excuse, like somebody whom they had seen through and whose secret they had discovered — secret or offence, it came to same thing — which they were about to spring on him as a surprise, as Köves personally was not yet clear what it was.
“I wasn’t given a customs declaration form,” he remarked in the end, rather brusquely, in order to restore a due sense of proportion and order as it were.
“Do you have anything to declare, then?” the man in the middle said, immediately raising his head from his documents.
“I don’t know what is dutiable here,” Köves replied with icy politeness. A number of articles were reeled off; Köves mulled them over conscientiously, even reciting certain items to himself, in the manner of a respectful foreigner, who is showing he does not overestimate the local authorities precisely by showing his esteem, indeed even permitting himself a degree of persnicketiness in order to emphasize his goodwill, but at the same time also his rights, before replying that to the best of his recollection his baggage did not contain any of the articles that had been enumerated. But, he added immediately, if they wished, they should convince themselves of the fact. Whereupon he was given the answer that it was up to him to know what was in his luggage, to which Köves inquired whether they wished to inspect his suitcase.
“Should I open it?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer, with a strange zeal that even he sensed was excessive but was no longer able to keep in check, as if someone else were acting on his behalf, he leapt toward his case in order to snap open the locks. His efforts were superfluous, however: the case was already open. And when he hastily raised the top, although he found his belongings more or less in order, they were nevertheless not in the lovingly careful, painstaking order in which his wife had packed them for him.
He stared in astonishment into his suitcase, as if something indecent had been concealed in it.
“But you’ve already inspected it!” he exclaimed.
“Naturally,” the chief customs man nodded. Without saying a word, he scrutinized Köves for a while, and Köves could have sworn he saw the shadow of a smile of sorts flit across the narrow, pallid face. “You are always acting as if you were surprised,” he added, and Köves noticed that he exchanged a quick glance with his own customs man: he had to suppose that the latter had already briefed his boss on how he, Köves, had conducted himself in the course of their earlier conversation.
A silence descended. Köves irresolutely stood his ground; he was ransacking his brains for a question that he just could not put his finger on, so instead of that he finally asked:
“What do you intend to do with me?”
“That depends on you,” the person in the middle replied forthwith. “We didn’t invite you; you arrived here,” and here it crossed Köves’s mind that he had heard something of the kind already from his own customs man.
“Of course I did. But then why’s that so important?” he asked.
“We didn’t say that it was,” came the answer. “But if it is important, then it’s not important for us. You should quiz yourself, not us.”
“About what?” Köves, grumpy from drowsiness, asked like a child.
“About what brought you here.” That wasn’t a question, nor was it an assertion, yet Köves still found himself cudgeling his brains for an answer, and like someone plucking an incoherent image at random from his fragmentary dreams, he finally muttered:
“I saw a beam of light, I followed that.”
His rambling reason, however, must have stumbled on the right words, because his answer was evidently judged favourably:
“Carry on following it,” the chief customs man said, nodding more mildly, indeed with a quiet, enigmatic seriousness that was suddenly transmitted to the faces of the two customs men on either side of him, the way these things do with underlings: somewhat exaggerating the original model, as a result of which an expression of some kind of rigid, implacable solemnity now appeared on the two outer faces, and Köves would not have been astonished — or at least that’s how he felt at this juncture — if they had risen to their feet and saluted or started to sing. Without turning their heads that way, their gazes slipped over toward the chief customs man; he, however, did not move, and he now carried on, once more in his earlier manner:
“Your papers are in order. We shall treat you as if you had been domiciled abroad. Obviously you will wish to continue your original activity. In this envelope,” and here he placed a brown envelope on the table before Köves, “you will find the key and the address of your apartment. Consider it an object that has been on deposit — as if you had left it with us and were now getting it back. Your suitcase will remain here. We’ll let you know when and where you can pick it up.”
He fell silent. Then in a tone which, apart from a certain conditioned mechanicalness, expressed nothing: no promise, but also no rejection:
“Welcome back!” and stretching out his arm he pointed toward the door.
CHAPTER TWO
On waking the next day. Preliminaries. Köves sits down
Although he had been allocated his home, Köves did not spend the remaining hours of that night in his bed; as to exactly where he did spend them, in the first moments of starting up from an, in all likelihood, brief and light, yet nonetheless all-obliterating dream, maybe he did not know either. The sky had assumed a glassy brightness; his limbs felt stiff and numb, his shoulder blades were pressed up against the back of a bench in the park area of a public square, his neck felt as if it had been dislocated: it could be that as he was sleeping he had simply laid it on the shoulder of the stranger seated next to him, a basically well-built, tubby man wearing a polka-dot bow-tie.