Liquidation

Let us call our man, the hero of this story, Kingbitter. We imagine a man, and a name to go with him. Or conversely, let us imagine the name, and the man to go with it. Though this may all be avoided anyway since our man, the hero of this story, really is called Kingbitter. Even his father was already called that. His grandfather too. Kingbitter was accordingly registered on his birth certificate under the name Kingbitter: that, therefore, is the reality, on whichreality, that is to sayKingbitter did not set too much store nowadays. Nowadaysa late year of the passing millennium, in the early spring of, let us say, 1999, on a sunny morning at thatreality had become a problematic concept for Kingbitter, but, more serious still, a problematic state. A state from which, on the report of Kingbitter's most private feelings, it was reality above all that was lacking. If he were in some way compelled to make use of the word, Kingbitter invariably added "so-called reality." That, however, was a very meager satisfaction; nor indeed did it satisfy Kingbitter. Kingbitter, as he did frequently nowadays, was standing at his window and looking out onto the street below. This street offered the most mundane and ordinary sights of Budapest's mundane and ordinary streets. The muck-, oil-, and dog-dirt-spattered sidewalk was lined with parked cars, and in the one-yard gaps between the cars and the leprotically peeling house walls the most mundane and ordinary passersby were attempting to go about their business, their hostile features an outward clue to their dark thoughts. Every now and then, perhaps in a hurry to overtake the single file inching along in front, one of them would step off the sidewalk, only for an entire chorus of rancorous car horns to give the lie to any groundless hope of breaking free from the line. On the benches in the square over the way, at least the benches not already stripped of their planks, were perched the homeless of the area, with their bundles, shopping bags, and plastic flasks. Above a bushy beard sprouted a knitted cap of carmine red, its dangling bobble merrily brushing the forbidding fuzz. A man wearing the battered cap of an officer of some nonexistent army was in a faded, buttonless heavy overcoat bound by a coy silk belt of gaudy floral design that had no doubt once belonged to a woman's housecoat. On bunioned female feet, peeking from beneath a pair of jeans, silvered evening shoes with worn-down heels; farther off, on a narrow strip of sparse turf, legs drawn up in catatonic inertness, sprawled a figure indistinguishable from a bundle of rags, laid out by alcohol or drugs, or maybe both. As he looked at the down-and-outs, Kingbitter all at once became conscious that he was again looking at the down-and-outs. Without doubt, Kingbitter was nowadays lavishing far too much attention on the down-and-outs. He was quite capable of frittering away whole half hours of his (as it happened, worthless) time by the window, with the captivation of a voyeur who is completely unable to tear himself away from the obscene spectacle unfolding before him. On top of which, this Peeping Tom behavior was for Kingbitter attended by a sense of guilt and, at one and the same time, a loathsome attraction which debouched ultimately into a form of nauseating anguish or existential angst. The moment this anguish took unmistakable shape within him, Kingbitter, having attained as it were his baffling activity's even more baffling goal, would turn away from the window with almost an air of satisfaction and step toward the table, on which were strewn various manuscripts, opened and spread out like the carcasses of birds. Kingbitter himself was well aware that there was something unsettling about this obsessive link that he had developedKertész, Imre is the author of 'Liquidation', published 2004 under ISBN 9781400041534 and ISBN 1400041538.