“I’ll get a pen right away,” he muttered disconcertedly, but the postman — without uttering a word, as if he were only doing what he had been counting on from the outset — was already offering his own ready-to-hand pencil as if, merely for the sake of making his point, in the end he had delayed doing so up till now in order to make Köves feel ashamed.
In his room, Köves immediately opened the letter: it informed him that the editorial office of the newspaper on which he had been functioning up to that point as a journalist was hereby giving him notice of dismissal, and although, in compliance with the provisions of such and such a labour law, his salary would be paid to him for a further fortnight—“which may be collected at our cashier’s desk during business hours on any working day”—they would be making no claims on his services from today’s date onwards.
Köves read through the letter with a mixture of confusion, anger, and anxiety. How was this? Did life here begin with a person being dismissed from his job? Nothing of the kind, for of course Köves had not been working recently for the paper that had dismissed him; secondly, as far as that was concerned, he could, as it happens, have worked — now that he had been given the boot Köves felt truly drawn to this opportunity which had barely been dangled before him before it was being denied. And what if it was not his opportunity? How could he find out? The answer could only be given by experience; but then it was no longer an opportunity, but life — his own life. If he thought about it, Köves was not in the least attracted to journalism; it was possible, indeed highly probable, that he wasn’t suited to the profession. Journalism — he felt deep inside — was a lie, or at least preposterous folly; and although Köves was not at all so bumptious as to consider himself the sort of fellow who was incapable of telling a lie, nevertheless — or so he believed — he was not capable of being up to every lie at all times: some of them were beyond his strength, others beyond his ability, or, as Köves would have preferred to put it, his talent. On the other hand, undoubtedly, he was clever with words, and it seemed that this was appreciated by people here — naturally after their own fashion; besides which — even though, of course, he was not there in order to be a journalist, or to cultivate any other idiotic profession — he had to have something to live off of, and journalism, leaving the lying to one side, was a cushy job which gave one a fair amount of spare time. Whatever the case might be, Köves decided in the end, his imagination could not latch on to anything other than what was on offer; the letter had turned him into a journalist, and more specifically a journalist who had been dismissed, so he had to follow up on that clue — and Köves was by now racing into the bathroom (the hot water — an unpleasant surprise for him, even though he somehow expected it — did not work) and at once started dressing in order to get to the editorial office as quickly as possible.
Köves’s victories
As he hurriedly stepped out of the entrance, Köves literally tripped over a dog — one of those diminutive, long-bodied, short-legged, shiny-nosed creatures, a dachshund — which yelped loudly in pain, but instead of barking at Köves, sniffed around his shoes with a friendly wagging of the tail and even reared up to place its front paws on Köves’s trouser legs and look up at him with bright eyes and outstretched pink, curly-tipped tongue, such that Köves, by way of propitiating the animal, scratched the base of its ears without breaking his stride. He then turned in order to press on ahead, only to almost bump into a white-haired, ruddy-cheeked, slightly tubby gentleman, dressed with slightly shabby gentility, who was holding a dog collar and leash in his hands.
“A dog owner too?” he hailed Köves with a friendly smile, and although Köves was in a hurry, the oddity of this encounter, or perhaps the even odder idea that he might be a dog-owner, pulled him up short for a moment.
“No, not likely!” he quickly responded.
“Still, you must like animals: the dog can sense that straight away,” the elderly gentleman said with unruffled affability.
“Of course,” Köves said, “But if you would excuse me,” he added, “I have to dash.”
“Do you live here, in the house?” The stout fellow, without showing any change to the amiability of his features, now cast a quick, sharp glance at Köves.
“Not long,” Köves now replied, practically standing on one leg, and the old gentleman must have noticed the impatience:
“Then we shall no doubt have the pleasure another time.” He finally let Köves go, in his old, somewhat porously woody-sounding voice and with an old-fashioned wave of the hand.
Köves rushed for a tramcar; it was getting on for noon, so he might have missed the “business hours” mentioned in the dismissal letter; he found the stop easily, though it was not exactly in the place he had looked for it, the former traffic island now being just a pile of grey paving stones that had been thrown on top of one another, from which direction came the intermittent bursts of hammering of sluggishly moving road workers, but as to whether the road had been torn apart by bombs, or ripped up to form a barricade that was now being repaired, or was just being widened, Köves was in no position to know. The tram — a makeshift assembly all three cars of which carried the stamp of different eras, as if, for want of better, they had been hastily dragged out of the dusty gloom of various depots — was a long time coming, and quite a crowd formed on the pavement around Köves, on top of which Köves, who supposed he ought to let a heavily built woman loaded with all kinds of bags and baggage get on before him, then — obviously in his surprise — did not resist the determined pressure of an elbow and, after that, a blatant shove accompanied by a curse, all of a sudden found that he had been left behind: it was not so much the strength but, presumably, more the will that he lacked, or, to be more specific, the disposition needed to will things, the necessary sense of desperation from which deeds might have sprung, and that — for all the difficulties, despite legs and elbows and countervailing wills — helped him up onto the second tram car.
He had to face further difficulties at the entrance to the newspaper office: the doorkeeper, a customs man with holstered gun, was under no circumstances willing to let him in without an entry pass (Köves would hardly have said he was surprised, deep down he had expected there would be some sort of obstacle like this, except he had been thinking of later on, already imagining himself caught up in easygoing simple-mindedness at the cashier’s desk), which would be issued to him in the porter’s cubicle a few paces away. Here, though, light was thrown on Köves’s complete inexperience in not exactly immaterial questions regarding his own situation, being unable to give a straight answer to a single one of the porter’s questions, nor as to where he was from, or for whom he was looking, or actually even who he was, in point of fact.
“A journalist?” he was asked.
“Yes,” Köves declared. “I’d like to pick up what’s owed to me,” he explained.
“There’s a fee due?”
“Something like that,” Köves said. “In actual fact, my salary,” he added, before he could be caught out misrepresenting the truth.”