War & War

by Krasznahorkai, László

  7.

  Before the widening entrance to the arrivals hall, in the four corners of an area of roughly four by four meters, four black-uniformed and helmeted guards, clearly trained for special duties, equipped with handguns, tear gas, rubber truncheons and God knows what else, stood motionless, each capable of looking in thirty-six directions at once; four guards with stony expressions on their faces, their legs spread, in an area roped off with a piece of red tape that was just long enough to get round the four by four square meters and keep the crowd at bay, which was all the evidence of the clearly unique security system that first greeted the constant flow of people: no visible cameras, no sign of detachments behind the walls ready to leap out at a word of command, no peculiar collection of vehicles at the entrance to the airport, nor a squad of chief inspectors based somewhere in the building, keeping watch over all eighty-six thousand and four hundred seconds of the day, and this must have been unique, a truly unique security concept, to involve only four visible guards and four lengths of red tape for what these had to defend from which was constantly flowing their way, a whole horde of people comprising people from town, people passing through, aliens, assortments of professors, amateurs, collectors, addicts, thieves, women, men, children, the aged, all, all coming and going, for everyone wanted to see it, everyone tried to push to the front in order to get a really good view of it, of those four lengths of tape, and what the guards were guarding, which was a massive pillar covered in black velvet and lit from above by white spotlights, protected by bulletproof glass, for everyone wanted to see the diamonds, as they were referred to for the sake of simplicity, those diamonds that added up to the world’s most valuable diamond collection according to the advertisements, and there they really were, twenty-one miracles, twenty-one incarnations of pure carbon, twenty-one brilliant and matchless stones with the light imprisoned in them forever, their presence arranged by the Gemological Institute but drawing on the kind offices of various other corporations and well-disposed individuals, not forgetting, since it is diamonds on a global scale we are talking about, the publicly acknowledged guiding hand of De Beers Consolidated Mines in the background, twenty-one rarities, as the catalogues had it—which, in this case, was no exaggeration, for they were assembled according to the four classic categories of diamond quality, that is to say, Color, Clearness, Cut and Carat, qualities that, apart from the FL and IF classed groups, would not be applicable to any lower class of diamond—a list in which they attempted to give a comprehensive account of the terrifying world of facet, dispersion, brilliance and polish in twenty-one stars, as the text had it, of an entire universe, the very intention of so doing, or so they wrote, being unusual, since it wasn’t just one or two matchless beauties with which they intended to enchant the public but the idea of matchless beauty itself, beauty in twenty-one distinct forms that were not only extraordinary but utterly different from each other, and here they were, practically every sort you could imagine within the River, Top Wesselton, and Wesselton color range, the twenty-one perfect gems as measured by the Tolkowsky, Scandinavian and Eppler scale, including those cut in Mazarin, Peruzzi, Markiz and emerald fashion, in Oval form, Pear-shaped, Navette and Seminavette, from fifty-five carats through to one hundred and forty-two carats, and, of course, the two sensations, the sixty-one carat amber-colored TIGER’S-EYE in an ORLOV silver clasp, all offering a truly extraordinary, mind-blowing radiance under the bulletproof glass, and all this in the most unexpected place, at the most vulnerable point of the busiest airport in the United States of America, precisely where such a billion-dollar splendor was plainly least secure, though it was under the care of four hefty security guards standing with legs spread and four lengths of red official tape.

  8.

  Korin entered the last of the corridors, saw the arrivals hall in the distance, and as soon as he had seen it, or so he recalled in the course of a conversation later, he knew at once that he had taken the right route, the right route throughout, and that’s it, as he said to himself, thank God, he had left the warren behind and could walk a little faster now, feeling a degree more liberated and less anxious with each step, steadily regaining his good spirits, that intoxicating feeling, setting about the last few hundred meters in this state of mind, until, about a third of the way down, as he was approaching the hall with its light, noise and promise of security, he suddenly spotted a figure among the oncoming crowd, a short, rather scrawny young man of about twenty or twenty-two years of age, more a boy really, in checkered trousers, with a strangely dancing sort of walk, who seemed to have taken particular notice of him, who having got within ten paces of Korin suddenly looked at him full in the face and smiled, his face brightening at the sight, showing the kind of surprise and delight one feels when one unexpectedly comes across an acquaintance one hadn’t seen for a long time, his arms spread wide in greeting, accelerating toward him, in response to which Korin too, as he said, began to smile uncertainly, with an enquiring expression, while, in his case, slowing down, waiting for the point of meeting, but when the moment arrived and they came up level with each other, something quite unbelievable happened as far as Korin was concerned, something because of which, his view of the world immediately darkened, something that made him double up and squat down on the ground, because the blow affected him precisely in the solar plexus, yes, that was exactly what happened, said Korin, the boy, probably out of sheer devilment, on the spur of the moment, had chosen some arbitrary victim from among the new arrivals, had raised his eyebrows and approached him in an apparently friendly manner, then smacked him in the solar plexus, without saying anything, without a word, without conviviality, without any sign of recognition, without any of the warmth you might expect when meeting an old acquaintance, and simply fetched him a blow, but a big one, as the Trinidadian boy told the bartender in his local bar, just like that, biff, he demonstrated with a violent movement, properly fucking the guy over in the pit of his belly, with such power, said the Trinidadian boy to the bartender, that the guy clutched his stomach, doubled up, and without a sound, not a peep, but he was flat out on the floor, as if lightning had struck him, said the Trinidadian flashing his decaying teeth, like he was a piece of shit dropped from a cow’s ass, you understand, he asked the bartender, just one biff and the guy didn’t say so much as moo, but collapsed, just like that, and by the time the guy looked up, he himself had disappeared into the crowd, like the earth had instantly swallowed him, vanished, as though he had never been, while Korin just stared, dumbstruck, slowly being scraped off the ground, blinking this way and that, utterly astonished, seeking explanation in the eyes of the two or three people that had hoisted him up by the arms, but they gave no explanation, nor did anyone else as he went on his way, and it clearly did not seem to have meant anything to anyone, since they were wholly unaware of his presence, or where he had been, or that he had appeared one-third of the way down the corridor leading to the arrivals hall of JFK airport.

  9.

  It was still hurting when he reached the diamonds, and when he stepped into the hall with a painful expression etched into his face he entirely failed to notice either the diamonds or the seething crowds as he approached them, nor did the presence of the diamonds have anything to do with the hand with which he covered his stomach, for the pain was such that he was quite incapable of removing it from that spot, the pain affecting his stomach, his ribs, his kidneys and his liver, but still more his sense of injustice at the wickedness and sheer unexpectedness of the assault on his person, and that was a pain that infected every cell of his being, which was why the one idea in his mind was to get out of there as quickly as possible, looking neither left nor right, just moving in a straight line, onward and onward, not even noticing when the significance of the hand on his stomach changed from being a physical comfort and protection to an emblem of general, unconditional uncertainty in the face of dangers facing him, dangers that singled him out, but in any case, as he explained a few days later in a Chinese restaurant
, that’s how it happened, his hand just assumed this position, and when he eventually succeeded in fighting his way through the packed chaos of the hall, and arrived, if not in the fresh air, at least under some concrete arcade, he was still using his left hand to ward off anyone in his vicinity, trying to communicate to everyone near to him the fact that he was extremely frightened and that in this state of fear he was prepared for any eventuality, that no one should approach him, and in the meantime he walked up and down, seeking a bus stop before he realized that while the place abounded in bus stops there was in fact not a single bus in sight, and so, fearing that he might be condemned to stay there forever, he crossed over to the taxi stand and joined a long queue at the head of which was a commissionaire of some sort, a big man dressed like a doorman at some hotel, and this was a very wise thing to have done, as he said later, throwing his lot in with the queue opposite the concrete arcade, because this meant he was no longer lurching this way and that in an ever more advanced state of helplessness, for having got so far he had arrived at a point in the vast institution of the airport where he no longer had to explain who he was and what he wanted, since everything could be decided in his own good time, and so he waited his turn in the queue, slowly shuffling forward to the big commissionaire, the natural end point of his despairing, yet fortunate decision, because it was all likely to be smooth going from here once he showed him the slip of paper he had received from the stewardess in Budapest, with the name of a cheap, often tried and trusted hotel on it, after examining which the commissionaire nodded and told him the cost would be twenty-five dollars, and without any further ado sat him in a huge yellow cab, and there they were moving past street cleaners, having already rushed down the lanes of the highway that led to Manhattan, Korin still holding his stomach, his hand clenched into a fist, unwilling to move it from there, prepared to defend himself and beat off the next attack just in case the space between himself and the driver should suddenly be barred off and someone throw a bomb in through the cab window at the next red light, or in case the driver himself should lean back, the driver who at first glance he took to be Pakistani, Afghan, Iranian, Bengali or Bangladeshi, and grabbing a great blunderbuss cry, Your Money—Korin nervously consulted the phrase book—Or Your Life!

  10.

  The traffic made him dizzy, said Korin in the Chinese restaurant, and he was in constant fear of assault at every road and traffic sign that flashed before him and remained in his mind as if engraved there—Southern State Parkway, Grand Central Expressway, Jackie Robinson Parkway, Atlantic Avenue, and Long Island, Jamaica Bay, Queens, Bronx and Brooklyn—because as they journeyed further and further into the heart of town, he said, it was not the unimaginable, hysterically pounding, mortally dangerous totality of the whole as exemplified by the Brooklyn Bridge, say, or by the skyscrapers downtown that he had read about and the effect of which he had anticipated from the information given in his heavily thumbed travel guides, but odd small details, the apparently insignificant parts of the whole, that struck him, the first subway grille next to a sidewalk from which the steam was perpetually pouring, the first, swaying, wide-bodied old Cadillac they passed by the gas station and the first enormous shiny steel fire truck, and something beyond that, that silenced something in him, or, something that, if he might put it that way, burned its way into his mind without burning it quite through, for what happened, he continued, was that as the taxi swept on without a sound, as if they were slicing through butter, while he was still holding his left hand in the defensive position, looking out of the window, now left and now right, he suddenly felt, and felt most intensely, that he should be seeing something that he wasn’t seeing, that he should be comprehending something he was not comprehending, that there was, from time to time, right in front of his eyes, something he should be seeing, something blindingly obvious, but that he did not know what it was, knowing only that without seeing it he had no hope of understanding the place he had arrived at, and that as long as he failed to understand it he could only keep repeating a phrase he had been repeating to himself all afternoon and evening, something to the effect of Dear God, this really is the center of the world and that he, there could no longer be any doubt about it, had arrived there, at the center of the world; but he got no further with this thought and they turned from Canal Street onto the Bowery and soon enough braked to a halt outside the Suites Hotel, that being their destination, said Korin, and that’s how it had been ever since, he added, meaning that he still hadn’t a clue what it was he should be seeing in that vast city, though he knew full well that whatever it was, was right there before him, that he was actually passing through it, moving through it, as indeed he had been when he paid $25 to the silent driver and got out in front of the hotel, when the taxi started back again, and he was left gazing, simply gazing at its two receding red lights until it turned at the crossroads and set off in the direction of the Bowery, toward the heart of Chinatown.

  11.

  Twice he turned the key in the lock and twice he checked the security chain, then stepped to the window and watched the empty street for a while, trying to guess what was going on down there, and it was only after he had done that, he explained several days later, that he was capable of sitting down on the bed and thinking things through, his whole body still trembling, and he couldn’t even begin to think of not trembling, because as soon as he tried he started remembering, and there was no way but to sit there and tremble, unable to calm down and think things through, for it was achievement enough, after all, to simply sit down and tremble, which is what he did for minutes on end, and, he wasn’t ashamed to admit it, in the long minutes that followed the trembling he cried for a full half hour, for he was, he admitted, no stranger to crying, and now that the trembling had begun to diminish the crying took over, a kind of cramp-inducing, choking form of sobbing, the kind that makes the shoulders shake, that comes on with excruciating suddenness and stops excruciatingly slowly, though that was not the real problem, not the trembling and weeping, no: the problem was that he was obliged to face so many issues of such gravity, of such variety and of such impenetrable complexity that when it was over, that is to say after the concomitant hiccupping had also stopped, it was as if he had stepped into a vacuum, into outer space, feeling utterly numb, weightless, his head—how should he describe it?—clanging, and he needed to swallow but couldn’t, so he lay down on the bed, not moving a muscle, and started feeling those familiar shooting pains in the nape of his neck, pains so intense that at first he thought his head was about to be ripped off, and his eyes started to burn and a tremendous tiredness overcame him, although it was not impossible, he added, that all these symptoms had been there for a long time, the pain, the burning and the tiredness, and that it was only that some switch had been turned on in his head to turn the lot on, but, well, never mind, said Korin, after all that you may imagine what it felt like to be in such outer space, in this state of pain, burning and fatigue, and then begin, at last, to get his head together and deal with everything that had happened and attempt to cope with it systematically, he said, all this while sitting in a cramped-up position on the bed, going first through each and every symptom, saying, this is what hurts, this is what burns, and this, meaning everything, is what exhausts me, then attending to the events, one after another, from the very beginning if possible, he said, from the surprisingly easy way in which he managed to smuggle money through Hungarian customs without any official intervention, this being the act that made everything possible because, having sold his apartment, his car, and the rest of his so-called effects, in other words when he had converted everything to cash, he had had to think about converting that cash, little by little, into dollars on the black market, but knowing that the chances of getting official permission to take the accumulated sum across the border were negligible, he had sewed the money, along with the manuscript, into the lining of his coat, and simply walked through Hungarian customs, out of the country, without so much as a dog sniffing at hi
m, thus relieving himself of the most terrible anxiety, and it was this success, in every sense, that facilitated the untroubled flight across the Atlantic, and there hadn’t been a major hurdle since, not, at least, that he could remember, apart from the less than major issue of a pus-filled zit at the side of his nose and the problem of constantly having to look for his passport, for the slip of paper with the hotel’s name on it, for the phrase book and the notebook, to check constantly that he hadn’t lost them, to see if they were still where he thought he had put them, in other words, but there had been no problem with the flight, his very first experience of flying, no fear, no pleasure, only an enormous relief, that was until he landed and that was where such problems as he had began, starting with the Immigration Office, the boy, the bus stop, the taxi, but chiefly the problems in his own mind, he said, pointing to his head, where it was as if everything had clouded over, where he had an overwhelming feeling of being suspended in transit, a fact he understood once he had arrived on the first floor of the hotel, just as he understood that he had to change, to change immediately, and that that change must be a wholesale trans-for-ma-tion, a transformation that should begin with his left hand which he must finally relax and to relax generally, so that he might look ahead, because, in the end—and at this point he stood up and returned to the window—everything, essentially, was going well, it was only a case of finding what people referred to as peace of mind, and of getting used to the idea that here he was and here he would stay; and having once thought this he turned back to face the room, leant against the window, took in what lay before him—a simple table, a chair, a bed, a sink—and established the fact that this was where he would be living and that this was where the Great Plan would to be put into effect, and having made a firm decision in this respect he felt strong enough to pull himself together, not to collapse and not to start crying again, because he very easily could have collapsed and started crying again, he confessed, there on the first floor of the Suites Hotel, New York.