All That Man Is

by David Szalay

  ‘I understand,’ he was saying yet again. ‘The young lady told us that only one of us could, uh … you know,’ he said. ‘I understand. That’s okay. That’s okay. My, uh, my young friend will be … will be doing that.’

  Moving only his eyes, Balázs looked at the younger man. He was about twenty perhaps, or even younger, and, slumped in his seat, staring at his loafers, seemed not even to be following what was happening.

  Gábor said to Emma, again in Hungarian, ‘Do you have the money?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Who paid you?’

  She pointed to the older Indian, who said, ‘I just want to watch.’

  Gábor turned to him. ‘You want to watch?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Baszd meg.’

  ‘Is it a problem?’

  ‘Yes, it’s a problem,’ Gábor said in a louder voice.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why? Why?’ With what seemed to be a sudden loss of temper, Gábor seized the man by the scruff of his jacket and first swung and then started shoving him towards the door, until Balázs, packed into his lurid turquoise shirt, intervened and separated them.

  There was a moment of tense quiet while Gábor, evidently struggling to maintain a professional demeanour, focused on his shoes.

  Then he looked up and said, tautly, ‘It’s a problem, okay. A problem. Please?’ With stiff politeness, an extended hand, he showed the man the door.

  The Indian was starting to sweat somewhat. Nevertheless he seemed determined to negotiate it out. Panting slightly, he said, ‘No, just a minute. Please. I also say please. Just a minute.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ Gábor said.

  ‘Please,’ the man went on. ‘Let’s just talk for a minute. Let’s just talk. Your friend said the money was for a whole night with the, the young lady. Your friend said that.’

  ‘Yes,’ Gábor said, with strained patience.

  ‘Now, listen,’ the Indian said, his pate starting to shine, ‘what I want to suggest is, uh, that we only take an hour or two of her time – but that I’m allowed to watch. Just watch! Is that fair? Doesn’t that seem fair?’

  ‘Look,’ Gábor said. ‘She doesn’t do stuff like that, okay? She’s a nice girl.’

  ‘Oh, she’s a nice girl – of course she’s a nice girl …’

  ‘Yeah, she’s a nice girl. Let’s go.’

  ‘Okay, you want more money,’ the Indian said, as if surrendering, as Gábor took hold of his arm. ‘How much? How much? A thousand pounds,’ he offered.

  Gábor, transparently surprised by the size of the offer, did not say anything. He swallowed cautiously and looked at Emma.

  ‘Okay? A thousand pounds?’

  ‘Uh,’ Gábor said, frowning as if trying to work something out. He seemed unable to do so, however, and finally said, ‘It’s up to her.’

  ‘Of course!’ The man turned smartly to Emma. She was sitting, with some dignity, in a tub chair. The man said, ‘A thousand pounds, madam, simply to sit in the corner. I’ll be as quiet as a mouse. What say you?’

  Even the young Indian lifted his overlarge head, with its cockatooish plume of blow-dried hair, and looked at her now as they all waited to hear what she would answer.

  ‘Just say no,’ Gábor said to her, in their own language. ‘Just say no, and we’ll get rid of him.’

  ‘Why?’ she said finally. ‘What difference does it make?’

  Gábor’s face underwent a very slight distortion.

  ‘What difference does it make?’ she said again.

  ‘You’ll do it then?’

  She shrugged, and Gábor turned to the waiting Indian, who had not understood the exchange, and said, ‘Okay. Where’s the money?’

  ‘I, uh, I have it here.’ He took from the inside pocket of his jacket a tan leather wallet.

  As he counted out the money, Gábor said, ‘You just watch.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ the man said distractedly.

  ‘You don’t touch.’

  A shake of the shining head. ‘No.’

  ‘Any trouble, we’ll be here.’

  The man held out the money. ‘I promise you, there won’t be any trouble.’

  ‘Give the money to her,’ Gábor said.

  ‘Oh, excuse me. Madame?’

  Emma stood up – even without her shoes she was taller than the dapper man – and took the money and put it in the small handbag which was on one of the tables next to the brocaded expanse of the bed.

  ‘Okay,’ Gábor said to Balázs, while she was doing that. ‘Let’s go.’

  Gábor hardly spoke for the rest of the night, his face swallowed by shadow in the parked Merc. He had speculated bitterly, as they walked back, on the nature of the Indian’s perversion, but once they had taken their seats on the anthracite leather, he seemed to have nothing more to say.

  The previous night had also challenged his composure, though not nearly to the same extent. Zoli had told them, when he came as usual to collect his money, that the client for that night did not want to go to the hotel, so they should go instead to his house. It turned out to be in a grand square of stucco terraces. The two men had watched through the windscreen as Emma, in the familiar little flesh-coloured sheath of a dress, went up the steps to the porticoed entrance, with its big hanging lantern, and pushed the doorbell. A minute later the house swallowed her.

  ‘Whatever,’ Gábor said.

  The house spat her out at four in the morning, just as the birds were starting to sing in the railinged gardens.

  She was drunk. As they drove through the empty streets, she apologised for hiccupping, and then, when she couldn’t stop, seemed to get the giggles.

  ‘You’re in a good mood,’ Gábor said, fixing her momentarily in the rear-view mirror. ‘D’you have fun then?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said softly.

  ‘You’re drunk.’

  ‘Yes, I’m drunk. I’ve had about two bottles of champagne.’

  ‘Champagne?’ Gábor said. ‘Nice.’

  She ignored the sarcasm. ‘Not really.’

  ‘No? Did he make you drink it?’

  She turned to the window, to the blue streets, dawn seeping into them. Monday morning. ‘It helps,’ she said.

  *

  Tuesday night, the one after the incident with the Indians, is her night off. When she appears as usual at four p.m., Gábor says that Zoli has invited them out. He seems surprised and hurt when she tells him she is tired and wants to stay in. Later he tries again to persuade her – Balázs hears this through the wall – and when he meets with no success, emerges himself in a sharply pressed indigo shirt and extends the invitation half-heartedly to Balázs, who says that he, too, is tired and wants to stay in. Without making any effort to persuade him, Gábor phones Zoli and apologetically passes on the news that Emma won’t be joining them.

  ‘Nah,’ he says, standing in the middle of the living room with his phone to his ear, ‘nah, she wants to stay in. She says she wants to stay in.’ Zoli says something. ‘I did tell her that,’ Gábor says. Zoli makes some other point, and Gábor says, with feeling, ‘I know, I know.’ Finally Zoli desists and Gábor mixes a JD and Coke in the pine kitchenette, and having hurriedly swallowed it, heads out into the evening.

  When the slam of the door has dissipated, a very pure silence settles on the small flat.

  Balázs, pretending to read Harry Potter és a Titkok Kamrája, listens hard for any sound, any sign of life from the other room.

  After about twenty minutes he hears what sounds like the squeak of a bedspring.

  Some time after that – quite a long time, during which his hopeful theory that she turned down the night out specifically so that she would find herself alone in the flat with him is severely tested by the uninterrupted silence – he puts down the novel, with which he is making little progress and, passing quietly through the hall, goes out to get himself some supper.

  Her light was on when he left – he saw it under the door.
/>
  When he gets back he sees, with a squeeze of disappointment, that it is off. He should have tapped on her door before he went out and asked if she wanted anything. That would have been the obvious thing to do. Now it is too late. Without enthusiasm, he eats his food and, when he has finished, lights the first of a long sequence of Park Lanes.

  When he finally falls asleep, it is after two o’clock and the ashtray on the floor next to the sofa is full.

  3

  ‘Is there any coffee?’ she asks, hearing him stir.

  She is in the kitchenette, in her dressing gown, opening pine cupboards.

  ‘No,’ he says, squinting. The room is full of clean sunlight. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I only drink coffee in the morning,’ she explains. It is ten o’clock in the morning, a time when they are normally asleep.

  Naked in his sleeping bag but for a pair of black nylon briefs, Balázs does not move from where he is. ‘Did … Did Gábor get back?’ he asks.

  ‘He’s sleeping,’ she says.

  She has stopped searching the cupboards and is just staring at the kitchenette.

  ‘Where can I get some coffee?’ she wonders.

  And as if it were the simplest thing in the world, he makes his suggestion.

  ‘If you like,’ he says, ‘I know a place.’

  She looks at him, sitting there, up to his waist in the sleeping bag, his tattooed biceps and toaster-like pecs, his small pale eyes obscurely imploring.

  They are in the habit of speaking to each other now, up to a point. Still, it feels extremely intimate to pass through the downstairs hall together, to leave the house, and walk down the street.

  Balázs knows the way to the high street well by now and has seen some coffee places there, some with a few metal tables outside on the narrow, stained pavement. They sit on aluminium chairs, under a restless awning. He is wearing his sunglasses, the soldierly plastic wraparounds with their iridescent wing-shaped lenses, and his orange T-shirt is tucked into his jeans. He sucks at the lid of his coffee cup and looks at the sunny, trading street. ‘Nice day,’ he says.

  Also wearing sunglasses, she just smiles, not unsympathetically.

  ‘Did you sleep okay?’ he asks.

  She says she did.

  As if aware of some possible impropriety in the situation, she is, it seems, pointedly unforthcoming.

  There is a silence.

  Wondering what to say next, Balázs has another go at his coffee cup.

  Unable to think of anything, he offers her a Park Lane, which she takes. He lights it for her. There is a simple glass ashtray on the aluminium tabletop.

  Then he says, ‘I thought I might have a look round today. See some sights or whatever.’ He had hoped she would show some immediate enthusiasm for this idea but she doesn’t. Sitting on the other side of the little round table in a sleeveless top that shows the tattooed sprig of barbed wire encircling her slender upper arm, she just takes a pull of the Park Lane and says nothing. ‘There must be loads to see here,’ he says. When she still doesn’t play along, he opts for a more direct approach, and asks, ‘There anything you want to see? While we’re here.’

  She sort of laughs. ‘I don’t know.’

  The laugh is very discouraging, and he is about to drop the whole subject, when she says, without seeming interested, ‘What is there?’

  ‘Well, uh.’ He tries to sound spontaneous. ‘There’s some waxworks place, isn’t there?’

  ‘Oh, that.’ She seems a lot less into it than Gábor had suggested.

  ‘What about that?’ he suggests.

  She says she doesn’t know where it is.

  He says it wouldn’t be a problem to find out.

  She seems amused now. She is smiling at him as if he amuses her. ‘Are you really interested?’

  He shrugs. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘You don’t seem like that sort of person.’

  ‘What sort of person?’

  Still evasively smiling, she says, ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘The sort who’s interested in waxworks?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m interested in waxworks,’ he says, implausibly. And then, seeing an opening, ‘What sort of person do I seem like?’

  She ignores the question. ‘What time is it?’

  He looks at his watch, its muddle of intersecting dials, most of which seem to have no function, and tells her.

  ‘You’re really interested?’ she asks.

  And with a totally straight face, he says, ‘Yeah.’

  They have to take the underground, and he enjoys, standing in the noisy train, the envy of the other men, the way they watch her in her tall shoes and torn denim. She seems not to notice that she is being looked at, or to notice anything, as she sways with the movements of the train, her sunglasses fixed on some advertisement for a dating service or hair-loss product, or the diagram of the line.

  She had said to Balázs, while they were waiting on the platform at Finsbury Park, that she was impressed by his English. Where had he learned it? ‘Iraq,’ he said, surprisingly, and he told her, while they waited, about his time there. He didn’t try to pretend that it had been exciting, or even very interesting. He had spent more or less the entire time in various town-sized bases, playing computer games in plain, air-conditioned rooms and eating American food. He had spoken to not a single Iraqi – except one interpreter who had tried to sell him drugs – and had never fired his weapon. He had done some patrols, though even that only involved travelling around in an armoured vehicle, peering through a tiny window at the flat, beige land. Nothing had ever happened. His most abiding memory, he tells her, was of the heat, the way it took you the moment you stepped out of the air conditioning, the instant watery profuseness of the sweat.

  Standing on the up escalator at Baker Street Station, he asks her which famous person she is most looking forward to seeing in the museum. Her answer does not please him. He fucking hates Johnny Depp and those pirate films he is in. More than that, it seems possible that in selecting Depp, she was sending a deliberate message that he, Balázs, was ‘not her type’, that he shouldn’t get any ideas. (Why hadn’t she said Bruce Willis?) He wishes he hadn’t asked her the question, and doesn’t speak again as they leave the station.

  Out in the sunlight at street level, they look for the museum. When they find it, the queue of people waiting ‘to meet the stars’ is shocking. Where it starts, far up a side street, there is a sort of diffuse, subsidiary queue of people wondering whether to join the main queue, which is marked, every twenty metres or so, with signs indicating how long the wait will be from that point – Approx. 2½ hrs is the first, though that itself is quite far from where the queue is now being supplied with new material. Further ahead – in the vicinity of Approx. 1 hr – mime artists and a man on stilts attempt to entertain distraught and exhausted children.

  Balázs, absorbing the situation with weary stoicism, takes his place in the queue. He is docile and long-suffering when it comes to queuing – he takes a sort of joyless pride in waiting his turn, and in not being deterred by having to do so.

  ‘We’re not really going to wait, are we?’ she says, standing beside him.

  ‘Well …’

  She laughs. ‘I mean, we’ll be here for hours.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Balázs agrees.

  ‘Do we really want to do that?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  She folds her arms and they stand there for a minute or two in the fresh shade of the early-summer morning, a minute or two during which the queue does not move at all, and Balázs senses a souring of her mood – she has started to frown at her own feet. ‘Shou’ we do something else then?’ he ventures, lighting a Park Lane.

  ‘Like what?’ she asks.

  He shrugs, looks uninspired.

  ‘We could just walk a bit,’ she suggests.

  There is a glimmer of green at the end of the side street and they sta
rt to walk towards it, initially in silence.

  Just as the silence is threatening to turn awkward, she says, ‘When did you get back from Iraq?’

  ‘Uh.’ He has to think for a moment. ‘Eight years ago.’

  It seems amazing – awful – that eight years have passed since then.

  In fact it is more – it was December 2004, that winter day, the windy airfield. Home. ‘Eight and a half,’ he says, making the amendment. He was twenty then, had been in the army since he was eighteen. He tells her that he stayed in the army for a year or two after that.

  ‘And what have you been doing since then?’ she asks. ‘Working at the gym?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘working at the gym, and some other things.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘I was a security guard for a bit.’ He asks her if she knows a particular Tesco in Budapest. She says she does. ‘There,’ he says.

  The subject seems likely to peter out at this point, and then she says, ‘What was that like?’

  What was that like? Well, there was the humid nylon pseudo-law-enforcement uniform, the hours of loitering near the entrance, the dull CCTV screens of the security station. ‘It was okay,’ he says.

  They have arrived at a perpendicular street. On the other side is a stunning cliff face of pristine cream houses, through a wide opening in which the green trees of a park are visible. The street they are walking down goes through the opening, where it acquires a red tarmac cycle lane, and on into the park. They wait at the lights while the traffic streams past. This place, he thinks, staring at the high houses while they wait, is made of money. He says, ‘I got sacked in the end. From Tesco.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘Suspected collusion with shoplifters,’ he says.

  ‘Suspected?’

  ‘Yeah, suspected. I didn’t collude with anybody.’

  ‘Why did they suspect you then?’

  ‘Well, they were losing a lot of stuff. So I wasn’t much good at the job anyway.’ It was true that he had had a tendency to fall for what turned out to be diversionary tactics. The staged scuffle, the fake heart attack, the swarthy old woman selling violets, the old man with the never-ending story. He was probably a soft touch that way. That might have been what the manager thought too. Still, it’s easier to sack someone for being dishonest.