All That Man Is

by David Szalay

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘There is a swimming pool?’

  The man’s expression turns sad, almost mournful. ‘At the moment, no, sir, there is not,’ he says. He starts to explain the situation – something about a legal dispute with the apartments next door – until Bérnard interrupts him, protesting mildly that the hotel had been sold to him as having a pool, so it seems wrong that there isn’t one.

  The smiling man says, ‘We have an arrangement with the Hotel Vangelis, sir.’

  There is a moment of silence in the oppressive damp heat of the lobby.

  ‘An arrangement?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘What sort of arrangement?’

  The arrangement turns out to be that for ten euros a day inmates of the Poseidon can use the pool facilities of the Hotel Vangelis, which are extensive – the aqua park pictured on the Poseidon’s website, and also in the leaflet which the smiling man is now pressing into Bérnard’s hand.

  The smiling man has a moustache, Bérnard notices at that point. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Thank you. What time is supper?’

  ‘Seven o’clock, sir.’

  ‘And where?’

  ‘In the dining room.’ The smiling man points to a glass door on the other side of the lobby. Dirty yellow curtains hang on either side of the door. Next to the door there is an empty lectern. The room on the other side of the door is dark.

  ‘You wanna party, yeah?’ Leif asks, smiling lazily, as Bérnard, with a perspiring Keo, the local industrial lager, takes a seat opposite him.

  Bérnard nods. ‘Of course,’ he says, fairly seriously.

  A tall, tanned Icelander, only a few years older than Bérnard, Leif turned out to be the company rep.

  Now he is telling Bérnard about the night life of Protaras. He is talking about some nightclub – Jesters – and the details of a happy-hour offer there. ‘And then three cocktails for the price of two from seven till eight,’ he says. ‘Take advantage of it. Like I told the others, it’s one of the best offers in the resort.’

  ‘Okay,’ Bérnard says.

  Leif is drinking a huge smoothie. He keeps talking about ‘the others’, and Bérnard wonders whether he missed some prearranged meeting that no one told him about.

  Who were these ‘others’?

  ‘Kebabs,’ Leif says, as if it were a section heading. ‘The best place is Porkies, okay? It’s just over there.’ He takes his large splayed hand from the back of his shaved head and points up the street. Bérnard looks and sees an orange sign: Porkies.

  ‘Okay,’ he says.

  They are sitting on the terrace of Waves, he and Leif. Inside, music thumps. Although it is only just six, there are already plenty of drunk people about. A drinking game is in progress somewhere, with lots of excitable shouting.

  ‘It’s open twenty-four hours,’ Leif says, still talking about Porkies.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And be careful – the hot sauce is hot.’

  He says this so seriously that Bérnard thinks he must be joking and laughs.

  Just as seriously, though, Leif says, ‘It is a really fucking hot sauce.’ He tips the last of his smoothie into his mouth. There is a sort of very faint disdain in the way he speaks to Bérnard. His attention always seems vaguely elsewhere; he keeps slowly turning his head to look up and down the street, which is just starting to acquire its evening hum, though the sun is still shining, long-shadowedly.

  ‘So that’s about it,’ he says. He has the air of a man who gets laid effortlessly and often. Indeed, there is something post-coital about his exaggeratedly laid-back manner. Bérnard is intimidated by him. He nods and has a sip of his beer.

  ‘You here with some mates?’ Leif asks him.

  ‘No, uh …’

  ‘On your own?’

  Bérnard tries to explain. ‘I was supposed to be with a friend …’ He stops. Leif, obviously, is not interested.

  ‘Okay,’ Leif says, looking in the direction of Porkies as if he is expecting someone.

  Then he turns to Bérnard again and says, ‘I’ll leave you to it. You have any questions just let me know, yeah.’

  He is already standing up.

  Bérnard says, ‘Okay. Thanks.’

  ‘See you round,’ Leif says.

  He doesn’t seem to hear Bérnard saying, ‘Yeah, see you.’

  As he walks away the golden hair on his arms and legs glows in the low sun.

  Bérnard finishes his drink quickly. Then he leaves Waves – where the music is now at full nightclub volume – and starts to walk, again, towards the Hotel Poseidon.

  He feels slightly worse, slightly more isolated, after the meeting with Leif. He had somehow assumed, when he first sat down, that Leif would show him an evening of hedonism, or at least provide some sort of entrée into the native depravity of the place. That he did not, that he just left him on the terrace of Waves to finish his drink alone, leaves Bérnard feeling that he has failed a test – perhaps a fundamental one.

  This feeling widening slowly into something like depression, he walks into the dead hinterland where the Hotel Poseidon is.

  It is just after seven when he arrives at the hotel. The lobby is sultry and unlit. The dining room, on the other hand, is lit like a hospital A&E department. It doesn’t seem to have any windows, the dining room. The walls are hung with dirty drapes. He sits down at a table. He seems to be the last to arrive – most of the other tables are occupied, people lowering their faces towards the grey soup, spooning it into their mouths. It is eerily quiet. Someone is speaking in Russian. Other than that the only sound, from all around, is the tinking of spoon on plate. And a strange humming, quite loud, that lasts for twenty or thirty seconds, then stops, then starts again. A waiter puts a plate of soup in front of him. Bérnard picks up his spoon, and notices the encrustations on its cloudy metal surface, the hard deposits of earlier meals. With a napkin – which itself shows evidence of previous use – he tries to scrub them off. The voice is still speaking in Russian, monotonously. Having cleaned his spoon, he turns his attention to the soup. It is a strange grey colour. And it is cold. He looks around, as if expecting someone to explain. No one explains. What he does notice, however, is the microwave on the other side of the room – the source of the strange intermittent humming – and the queue of people waiting to use it, each with a plate of soup. He picks up his own soup and joins them.

  He is preceded in the queue by a woman in her mid-forties, probably, who is quite short and very fat. She has blonde hair, and an orange face – red under her eyes and along the top of her nose. He noticed her sitting at a table near him when he sat down – she is the sort of fat person it is hard to miss. What makes her harder to miss is that she is with another woman, younger than her and even fatter. This younger woman – her daughter perhaps – is actually fascinatingly huge. Bérnard tried not to stare.

  After they have been standing in the microwave queue for a few minutes, listening to the whirr of the machine and taking a step forward every time it stops, the older woman says to him, in English, ‘It’s a disgrace, really, isn’t it?’

  ‘Mm,’ Bérnard agrees, surprised at being spoken to.

  The woman is sweating freely – the dining room is very warm. ‘Every night the same,’ she says.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really,’ she says, and then it is her turn and she shoves her plate into the microwave.

  4

  Iveta. Ah, Iveta.

  He first sees her the next morning, in Porkies.

  He has had almost no sleep, is tipsy with fatigue. It was a nuit blanche, nearly. He wasn’t out late, it wasn’t that – he had a few lonely drinks on the lurid stretch, tried unsuccessfully to talk to some people, was humiliatingly stung in a hostess bar, and then, feeling quite depressed, made his way back to the Poseidon. At that point he was just looking forward to getting some sleep. And that’s when the problems started. Though the hotel seemed totally isolated, there was at least one place in the
immediate vicinity which thudded with dance music till the grey of dawn. Within the hotel itself, doors slammed all night, and voices shouted and sang, and people fucked noisily on all sides.

  Finally, just as natural light started to filter through the ineffectual curtains, everything went quiet.

  Bérnard, sitting up, looked at his watch. It was nearly five, and he had not slept at all.

  And then, from the vacant lot next door, where people would illegally park, they started towing the cars.

  He must have fallen asleep somehow while they were still doing that, while the alarms were still being triggered, one after another – when he next sat up and looked at his watch it was ten past ten.

  Which meant he had missed the hotel breakfast.

  So he went out into the morning, which was already hot, to find something to eat, and ended up in Porkies.

  Porkies, even at ten thirty a.m., is doing a steady trade. Many of the people there, queuing for their kebabs, are obviously on the final stop of a night out. Hoarsely, they talk to each other or, still damp from the foam disco, stare in the fresh sunlight near the front of the shop, where a machine is loudly extracting the juice from orange halves.

  With his heavy kebab Bérnard finds a seat at the end of the counter, the last of the stools that are there.

  Next to him, facing the brown-tinted mirror tiles and still in their party kit with plenty of flesh on show, is a line of young women, laughing noisily as they eat their kebabs, and speaking a language he is unable to place.

  He gets talking to the one sitting next to him when he asks her to pass him the squeezable thing of sauce and then, taking it from her, says, ‘It was a nice night?’

  ‘Where are you from?’ he asks her next – the inevitable Protaras question.

  She is Latvian, she says, she and her friends. Bérnard isn’t sure where Latvia is. One of those obscure Eastern European places, he supposes.

  He informs her that he is French.

  She is on the small side, with a slightly too-prominent forehead, and spongy blonde hair – a cheap chemical blonde, displaced by something mousier near the roots. Still, he likes her. He likes her little arms and shoulders, her childish hands holding the kebab. The tired points of glitter on her nose.

  He introduces himself. ‘Bérnard,’ he says.

  Iveta, she tells him her name is.

  ‘I like that name,’ he says. He smiles, and she smiles too, and he notes her nice straight white teeth.

  ‘You have very nice teeth,’ he says.

  And then learns that her father is a dentist.

  He says, mildly bragging, ‘I know a guy, his father is a dentist.’

  She seems interested. ‘Yes?’

  There is something effortless about this, as they sit there eating their kebabs. Effortlessly, almost inadvertently, he has detached her from the others. She has turned away from them, towards him.

  ‘You like Cyprus?’ he asks.

  Eating, she nods.

  This is her second time in Protaras, he discovers. ‘Maybe you can show me around,’ he suggests easily. ‘I don’t know it. It’s my first time here.’

  And she just says, with a simplicity which makes him feel sure he is onto something here, ‘Okay.’

  ‘Where are you staying?’ he asks.

  She mentions some youth hostel, and he feels proud of the fact that he is staying in a proper hotel – proud enough to say, as if it were a totally natural question, ‘What are you doing today?’

  Her friends are starting to leave.

  ‘Sleeping!’

  She says that with a laugh that unsettles him, makes him feel that maybe their whole interaction has been, for her, a sort of joke, something with no significance, something that will lead nowhere. And he wants her now. He wants her. She is wearing denim hot pants, he sees for the first time, and sandals with a slight heel.

  ‘What about later?’ he says, trying not to sound desperate. The sense of effortlessness has evaporated. It evaporated the moment she seemed happy to leave without any prospect of seeing him again.

  Now, however, she lingers.

  Her friends are leaving, and yet she is still there, lingering.

  ‘You want to meet later?’ she says, with some seriousness.

  ‘I want to see you again.’

  She looks at him for a few moments. ‘We’ll be in Jesters tonight,’ she says. ‘You know Jesters?’

  ‘I heard of it,’ Bérnard says. ‘I never been there.’

  ‘Okay,’ she says, still with this serious look on her face. And she tells him, in unnecessary detail, and making sure he understands, how to find it.

  ‘Okay,’ he says, smiling easily again. ‘I’ll see you there. Okay?’

  She nods, and hurries to join her friends, who are waiting near the door.

  He watches them leave and then, squirting more sauce onto it, unhurriedly finishes his kebab.

  His mood, of course, is totally transformed. He fucking loves this place now, Protaras. Walking down the street in the sun, everything looks different, everything pleases his eye. He wonders whether he’s in love, and then stops at the pharmacy next to McDonald’s for a ten-pack of Durex.

  ‘Hello, my friend,’ he says to the smiling man, who is on duty in the humid lobby of the Hotel Poseidon.

  ‘Good morning, sir. You slept well, sir?’

  ‘Very well,’ Bérnard says, without thinking. ‘Yesterday you said something, about another hotel, the swimming pool …?’

  ‘The Hotel Vangelis, yes, sir.’

  ‘Where is that?’

  Bérnard, eventually finding the Hotel Vangelis, says he is staying at the Hotel Poseidon, pays ten euros, gets stamped on the hand with a smudged logo, and then follows a pointed finger down a passage smelling of pool chemicals to a locker room, and the sudden noise and dazzle of the aqua park.

  In knee-length trunks, he swims. His skin is milky from the Lille winter. He does a few sedate laps of the serious swimmers’ pool, then queues with kids for a spin on the water slide. Next he tries the wave-machine pool, lifting and sinking in the water, in the chlorine sparkle, one wet head among many, all the time thinking of Iveta.

  And still thinking of her afterwards, drying on a sunlounger. His eyes are shut. His hair looks orangeish when it is wet. There is a tuft of it in the middle of his flat, white chest. His arms and legs are long and smooth. The trunks hang wetly on his loins and thighs, sticking to them heavily.

  Slowly, the sun swings round.

  One of the pools features a bar – a circular, straw-roofed structure in the shallow end, the seats of the stools that surround it set just above the surface of the water. Where it touches the side of the pool, there is a gate that allows the barman to enter the dry interior, where the drinks are kept in a stainless-steel fridge.

  Some time in the afternoon, Bérnard is wallowing in this shallow pool, thinking of Iveta, when, on a whim, he paddles over and takes a seat on one of the stools. His legs, still in the water, look white as marble. He orders a Keo. He is impatient for evening, for Iveta. The day has started to be tiresome.

  He is sitting there, under the thatch, holding his plastic pot of lager and looking mostly at his blue-veined feet, when a voice quite near him says, ‘Hello again.’

  A woman’s voice.

  He looks up.

  It is the woman from the Hotel Poseidon, the fat one he spoke to in the microwave queue last night. She and her even fatter daughter are wading towards him through the shallow turquoise water of the pool – and weirdly, though they are in the pool, they are both wearing dresses, simple ones that hang from stringy shoulder straps, sticking wetly to their immense midriffs, and floating soggily on the waterline.

  ‘Hello again,’ the mother says, reaching the stool next to Bérnard’s, her face and shoulders and her colossal cleavage sunburnt, her great barrel of a body filling the thin wet dress.

  ‘Hello,’ Bérnard says.

  The daughter, moving slowly in the water
, has arrived at the next stool along. She, it seems, is more careful in the sun than her mother – her skin everywhere has a lardy pallor. Only her face has a very slight tan.

  ‘Hello,’ Bérnard says to her, politely.

  He wonders – with a mixture of amusement and pity – whether she will be able to sit on the stool. Surely not.

  Somehow, though, she manages it.

  Her mother is already in place. She says, ‘Not bad, this, is it?’

  Bérnard is still looking at the daughter. ‘Yeah, it’s good,’ he says.

  ‘Better than we expected, I have to say.’

  ‘It’s good,’ Bérnard says again.

  When the two of them have their sweating plastic tankards of Magners, the older woman says, ‘So what do you think of the Hotel Poseidon then?’ The tone in which she asks the question suggests that she doesn’t think much of it herself.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Bérnard answers.

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Yeah. Okay,’ he admits, ‘maybe there are some problems …’

  The woman laughs. ‘You can say that again.’

  ‘Yeah, okay,’ Bérnard says. ‘Like my shower, you can say.’

  ‘Your shower? What about your shower?’

  Bérnard explains the situation with his shower – which the smiling man this morning again warned him against using. It would, he promised Bérnard, be sorted out by tomorrow.

  The older woman turns to her daughter. ‘Well, that’s just typical,’ she says, ‘isn’t it? Isn’t it?’ she says again, and the younger woman, who is drinking her Magners through a straw, nods.

  ‘We’ve had no end of things like that,’ the mother says to Bérnard. ‘Like what happened with the towels.’

  ‘The towels?’

  ‘One morning the towels go missing,’ she tells him. ‘While we’re downstairs. They just disappear. Don’t they?’ she asks her daughter, who nods again.

  ‘And then,’ the mother says, ‘when we ask for some more, they tell us we must have stolen them. They say we’ve got to pay forty euros for new ones, or we won’t get our passports back.’

  Bérnard murmurs sympathetically.

  He has a swig of his drink. He is still fascinated by the daughter’s body – by the pillow-sized folds of fat on her sitting midriff, the way her elbows show only as dimples in the distended shapes of her arms. How small her head seems …