It looked as though, instead of the cashier’s desk, he had dropped in on the editorial office (if it was so hard to gain admission to the building, one would think they could take care that a person actually went about his business and could not wander around wherever he felt like, Köves supposed, with a measure of the scornful satisfaction of someone who has found a chink in a logic which went so far as to glory in its perfection. He found himself in an immensely long corridor illuminated by flickering strip lighting; from behind doors, which were in many cases wide open, could be heard the clacking of typewriters, snatches of voices, whether or excited or dictating articles, and a piercing ringing of telephones. His nostrils caught a whiff of the smell of fresh printer’s proofs, and Köves, clearly through tiredness, was overcome by an indefinable feeling, a dizziness, like someone visiting the scene of a recurrent nightmare. People passed him or came hurrying the other way; Köves looked at them curiously: some were wearing boots which still practically reeked of a caking of soil and dung; others, wearing shoddy suits and bearing expressions which were sombre, troubled, or determined, looked lost as they clutched sheets of paper between fingers below the nails of which an indelible oily grubbiness had infiltrated; he encountered no more than a few lanky, balding, bespectacled, stubble-chinned, hurried men with nervously twitching eyes, most of them in shirtsleeves, a cigarette stub in the corner of the mouth, whom Köves took to be actual journalists. Toward the end of the corridor, he saw a door marked Editor in Chief Secretary’s Office; on pressing down the door handle, he found himself in a light, airy room at the back of which someone was typing; near Köves a plump, blonde woman was seated behind a writing desk. Her haughty little double chin, well-groomed appearance, and trim clothing were the exact opposite of everything Köves had seen there up to this point, and, catching the whiff of an up-market perfume, he inhaled deeply, for the last time he had smelled anything similar was during his stay abroad. In response to the secretary’s question as to what had brought him there, Köves without more ado announced that he wanted to speak with the editor in chief.
“Who shall I say is asking?” the secretary asked.
“Köves,” said Köves, and the secretary leafed through a notebook.
“You’re not down here,” she said eventually.
“No, I’m not,” Köves acknowledged, “But I still want to speak with him.”
“What does it concern?” the secretary asked, to which Köves reacted, perhaps not entirely without acerbity:
“I’ve been given notice to quit.”
“I see,” said the secretary, exactly the same, though not in exactly same way, as the porter, looking at Köves not reprovingly but more with a degree of interest. “You’re the one who has come home from abroad. We know about you,” and at that, while the expression of curiosity on her face was extinguished just as incomprehensibly as it had lit up, she let Köves know that she would first have to come to an agreement with the editor in chief by phone, then the editor in chief would set a time point for an appointment, which he would inform her of, and about which she in turn would notify Köves — by telephone, if he had a telephone, and if he didn’t, by mail.
“That way it’s going to take a long time for my turn to come round,” Köves considered.
“It could be,” the secretary admitted, “but that’s the way it works,” adding that the editor in chief, unfortunately, was busy at the present moment.
“Doing what?” Köves asked, and the look that the secretary gave him was as if he had not arrived from abroad so much as straight from the madhouse.
“He’s working,” she said, “and he instructed me that he was not to be disturbed by anyone.”
“I’m sure he’ll make an exception for me,” Köves reckoned, heading straight for a padded door — and if this careful insulation and the shining brass studs around it had left him in any doubt, the imposing plate which adorned the door’s padding also enlightened him: Editor in Chief — at which the secretary shot out from behind her desk as if she had been stung by a bee:
“You can’t be thinking of going in, surely?!” she yelled.
“Too right I am,” said Köves, and kept on going, if not quite uninterruptedly, because he first had to get round the secretary, who now bobbed up between him and the door so as to block his path.
“Leave this instant,” she shouted. “Clear off from here!” Evidently she had completely lost her cool. “Do you hear me?!” and it seemed as though Köves had indeed not heard her, because although he took care not to tread on the secretary’s toes, he marched straight ahead with the secretary continually retreating from him (surely she’s not going to grapple with me or pull out a weapon, Köves niggled to himself). “Even columnists are not allowed to go in unannounced … not even the managing editor!” the secretary carried on, now with her arms outstretched as if to embrace Köves, although she was only defending the door with this desperate and, of course, useless gesture, as in the meantime the derrière she had thrust out behind her was almost touching the padding on the door. Köves was then again a witness to a turnaround that was the reward, so it seemed — always, or just at those rare, unpredictable moments of indecision, an operational glitch as it were — for extreme, indeed downright threatening stubbornness. Because on the drawn, quivering face of the secretary, who was by now practically crucifying herself on the door, there now appeared a hesitant look, then a smile of pained cordiality, and as if it had not been she who had shouted, indeed yelled at him just beforehand, in a sweet tone, albeit one still husky with agitation, she advised Köves:
“Take a seat for a minute, I’ll announce you right away,” at which she had already slipped behind the padded door, behind which — Köves noticed — stood a second door.
So he sat down. Something suddenly made him feel uneasy, and Köves puzzled out that it was the stillness: a typewriter which had been ceaselessly clattering in the background had fallen silent, and having only registered it in the way that one would, say, the rustling of tree boughs or the pitter-patter of rainfall in natural surroundings, which is to say he had not noticed it at all until now it had fallen silent. A tiny, high-pitched voice struck his ears from the same place; it seemed to be the sound of stifled female giggling, and he was just about to turn round when the secretary returned, and this time with the bland, official smile in place, as if nothing had happened between the two of them, she advised him:
“Be so kind as to go through,” and at that moment, though perhaps somewhat less busily than before, the typewriter struck up its clattering again.