“In that case,” he said, “I can. Not very well, of course, just the way a person generally does.”
“We’ll see about that,” the boy clenched his lips as if he were engrossed in turning something over in his head. “I’ll get the chess board right away!” he announced and at that was already running out of the hallway toward a glass door — obviously the living-room.
Hi mother, however, nimbly jumped after him and managed to grab him by an arm:
“Didn’t you hear what I said? Finish your breakfast instead or you’ll be late for school and me for the office!” she reprimanded him. “My son,” she turned with an apologetic smile to Köves, still gripping Peter’s arm, “always sets his priority on pastimes before …”
“That’s a lie!” The boy’s seething anger, the palely clenched corners of his mouth and trembling of his lips genuinely alarmed Köves.
“Peter!” the woman rebuked him in a strangled voice, even shaking him a little as if to rouse him.
“That’s a lie!” the boy repeated, though more as if he was over the worst of it. “You know full well that it’s not a pastime!” at which he wrenched himself from his mother’s grasp, dashed straight into the kitchen, and slammed the door behind him with a great crash.
The landlady looked embarrassed:
“I don’t know what’s up with him …,” she muttered by way of an excuse. “He’s so on edge …”
To which Köves said:
“It’s hardly any wonder these days,” and it seemed he had settled on the right words, because although the woman evasively said no more than, “Come, I’ll show you the room,” her expression relaxed, showing something close to gratitude.
Köves’s room opened onto the other side of the hallway, diagonally opposite the kitchen: it was not particularly large, but it was enough for sleeping in and even gave a bit of room to swing a cat, the sort of place, Köves recalled, that back in his childhood had been called “the servant’s quarters.” It had obviously been designed to be darker, but since the firewall that would normally have overlooked the window — the whole of the next-door house was simply missing, its former site being marked by a dusty pile of rubble on the ground down below — the room was flooded with light; farther off was a disorderly yard beyond which was the back of another house, with its outside corridors, apertures onto its stairwells, its windows, indeed in many cases open kitchen doors with the figures that were bustling inside or before them, rather as if Köves had a view of its innards. The couch promised to be a good place to lie on — Köves was almost dying to try it out straight away — aside from which there was just enough room for a flimsy wardrobe, seat, and table, the latter being something the landlady seemed to be almost proud of:
“You can work on it, if you wish — not that I know what sort of a job you have, of course,” she gave Köves a sidelong glance, and it struck Köves what a surprisingly clear impression her pale blue eyes made in that rumpled face — unexpected pools in a ravaged countryside, so that in the meanwhile of course he forgot to answer the implicit question he had been posed (or rather not posed), so that the woman, having waited in vain for a moment, carried on:
“It would be too small as a drawing table, say, but papers would fit on it, for instance.”
Since Köves still said nothing — after all, he couldn’t know what he was going to use the table for (not for drawing, for sure, but then who could know what the future might hold for him?) — the woman, now somewhat put out, added in the same breath:
“Right, well I won’t intrude any further. I don’t have the time, anyway; I need to set out for the office, and you no doubt have business to attend to …”
“I want to sleep,” Köves said, halting the stream of words.
“Sleep?” the pools in the woman’s face widened.
“Sleep,” Köves confirmed, and with such yearning, evidently, that the woman broke into a smile:
“Of course, you said already that you were travelling all night. You’ll find bedclothes here,” and she pointed to the drawer under the couch, “and that’s a wardrobe for your own stuff.”
“I don’t have any stuff,” said Köves.
“None?” the woman may have been astounded, but not so much that Köves was obliged, and this is what he feared, to enter into explanations: it seemed that, being someone who ran a household in which there was a constant turnover of lodgers, she must have seen all sorts of things by now. “Not even any pyjamas?”
“No,” Köves admitted.
“Well, that won’t do at all!” she said so indignantly that Köves felt it was a matter of general principle, quite irrespective of himself personally — as it were, in defence of practically a whole world order — that she considered it wouldn’t do for a person to have no pyjamas. “I’ll give you a pair,” she said with the excitement of one who had been spurred into action forthwith by this intolerable state of affairs. “As best I can judge, my husband’s will be about your size …”
“But won’t your esteemed husband …,” Köves was about to start fretting.
Except that the woman curtly brushed that aside:
“I’m a widow,” and with that was already out of the door then promptly back again to toss a folded pair of pyjamas onto the couch. “And what’s your thinking,” she asked, “about here on in, when you don’t even have a change of underwear to your name?”
“I don’t know,” said Köves with his suitcase fleetingly coming to mind, though only as the flicker of a memory which barely impinged on him. “I’ll do some shopping later.”
“Is that right!” the woman said. “You’ll do some shopping,” and she gave a brief, nervous laugh as if she had been struck by an amusing thought. “It’s no business of mine, of course. I only asked … so, good night!” she got out quickly, seeing that Köves was already starting to take off his coat. “The bathroom is on the right,” she said, turning back at the door. “Naturally, you are entitled to use it.”
Köves heard them moving around for a while yet, the exchanges between the shrill and the more croaking voice — at times just whispering agitatedly behind the door, again bickering with each other, perhaps, like cats left to their own devices — and his head had just touched his pillow when the front door slammed, and with that silence fell. Köves now started to sink, and he was dreaming before he had even fallen asleep. What he dreamed was that he had strayed into the strange life of a foreigner who was unknown to him and had nothing to do with him, yet still being aware that this was only his dream playing with him, since he was the dreamer and could only dream about his own life. Before he finally got off to sleep, he sensed that a deep sigh had been torn from him — a relieved sigh, he felt — while his face was cracking a broad smile, and — for whatever reason — he breathed into his pillow, “At last!”
CHAPTER THREE
Dismissal
Köves awoke to a sound of ringing, or to be more specific, to having to open the door: it seemed that the impatient ringing, which kept on repeating, at times for protracted periods, at times in fitful bursts, must have pulled him out of bed before he had truly woken up, otherwise he would hardly have gone to open the door, given that there was no reason for anyone to be looking for him there.
He was mistaken, though: at the door stood a postman who happened to be looking for ‘a certain Köves.”
“That’s me,” Köves said, astonished.
“There’s a registered letter for you,” said the postman, and in his voice Köves picked out a slight hint of reproof, as if receiving registered mail in this place was not exactly one of the most commendable affairs, though it could have been that it was just the postman’s way of taking him to task for the repeated futile ringing on the bell. “Sign for it here.” He held out a ledger in front of Köves, obviously a delivery receipt book, and Köves was about to reach into his inside pocket when he became conscious of how he was standing there, in front of the postman: probably tousled, his face rumpled from sleep, in someone else’s pyjamas — anyone might think he had idled away the morning, though that was his intention, of course.