by David Szalay
An hour later he finds Gábor in the smoke-filled living room of the flat, on the phone. He is obviously talking to Zoli.
While he talks he does not acknowledge Balázs’s presence, standing there waiting for him to finish, until he says to Zoli, in a quiet voice, ‘Yeah, he’s here. He just got back.’
A minute later he puts down his phone and says, ‘Zoli is fucking livid.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Balázs says.
‘Do you know who that is whose nose you broke?’
Balázs shakes his head.
‘What the fuck were you doing?’ Gábor shouts at him.
‘I’m sorry,’ Balázs says again, lowering his eyes.
‘I mean, are you out of your fucking mind?’
‘I thought … I thought he hurt her,’ Balázs says.
‘No, he did not hurt her. I told you she was okay.’
‘She’s okay? So what happened, why did she …?’
‘Do you have any idea,’ Gábor says, ignoring him, ‘what I have had to deal with?’
Balázs, after a long silence, is about to say sorry again, when Gábor goes on. He speaks in a ferocious semi-whisper, perhaps because Emma is trying to sleep in the other room. ‘First I’ve got to deal with the guy with the broken nose,’ Gábor says, ‘this guy on the floor. Give him towels to soak up the blood, find his teeth and give them to him – I mean, it was disgusting, man! Then he starts saying he’s going to call the police. I mean, he gets really fucking angry suddenly. So I have to try and calm him down, tell him he probably doesn’t want to call the police, that he probably doesn’t want to involve them. And he tells me to go fuck myself, he doesn’t give a shit, he’s going to call them, and we’re all going to get arrested. And I’m worried he is going to call them – that he isn’t thinking straight, he’s full of cocaine, he’s probably concussed or something. I mean, he might do something stupid, something he regrets later as well. So I tell him I’m going to call Zoli and talk to him, and he shouldn’t do anything till I’ve done that. And anyway he’s still dizzy and can’t even stand up, and doesn’t know where his phone is – his clothes and stuff’s all over the place. I mean, he’s still fucking naked at this point, and when he tries to stand up he just falls over again. So I call Zoli, yeah, and of course he’s asleep, because it’s the middle of the fucking night, and at first he doesn’t answer, but I keep trying and eventually he picks up, and obviously he knows there’s a problem otherwise I wouldn’t be calling him in the middle of the night, but then I’ve got to tell him what happened, I’ve got to tell him that you broke the guy’s fucking nose. And he says, “What did the guy do?” And I’ve got to tell him that the guy did nothing, basically, you just broke his nose. I mean, Zoli can hardly fucking believe it when I tell him that,’ Gabor says, suddenly flaring up himself, and taking a moment to light a cigarette. ‘And he immediately starts having a go at me for bringing you into this whole thing – I mean, like it was my fault what happened. And then he starts saying he’s going to break your legs and stuff. I mean, he says it like he really means it, and maybe he knows people who can do that, I don’t know. Anyway, I tell him the guy’s threatening to call the police. And he says I can’t let him do that. And I say, “What the fuck do you want me to do – kill him?” And Zoli says, “Let me talk to him.” So I tell the guy Zoli wants to talk to him, and give him the phone. And the guy looks fucking terrible – I mean, his face is swollen like a fucking balloon and all purple, and his nose is just a fucking grotesque mess. Anyway, he takes the phone and talks to Zoli, and he’s still really fucking angry – he’s shouting about how he’s going to call the police and how it might be embarrassing for him but we’re the ones who are going to go to jail and stuff. Fuck, it takes Zoli about half an hour to calm him down, and then he gives the phone back to me and says Zoli wants to talk to me again, and Zoli tells me he’s agreed with the guy that he won’t call the police if we give him his money back, and at that point I’m just fucking relieved to have this sorted out so he’s not going to call the police, so I tell Emma to get the money and she does, and I give it back to the guy. That felt really shit.’ Gábor stubs out his cigarette.
Balázs is still standing there, near the door.
Gábor says, ‘I tell him to get dressed and clean himself up, and I’ll be back in ten minutes. Then I take Emma back to the car, and leave her there and go back up to the room, where the guy’s got his clothes on and has washed most of the blood off his face. Anyway, he leaves and then I’ve got to try and clean the fucking room up. I mean, there’s blood everywhere.’ Gábor sighs, weary with telling the story now. ‘So I call Juli and we find some kind of carpet-cleaning machine in a cupboard somewhere, some kind of steam cleaner, and she shows me how to use it, and I’ve got to try and clean the carpet with it.’ Almost tearfully he shouts at Balázs, ‘I mean, this fucking unwieldy machine! I didn’t even know how to work it properly!’ He lights yet another cigarette. Still standing there, Balázs lights one too. ‘I mean, I fucking hated you while I was doing that,’ Gábor says. ‘I wanted to fucking kill you.’
‘I’m really sorry,’ Balázs says.
‘Where the fuck did you go?’
‘I dunno. Nowhere.’
Gábor looks at him for a few moments, as if he doesn’t understand. Then he says, ‘I can’t pay you, man. I mean, what I was going to pay you for this week. I mean, we had to give the guy his money back – which is much more than I was going to pay you, okay. I mean, we lost that money because of what you did, so …’
Though it had not occurred to him that this might happen, Balázs just shrugs.
‘I mean, Zoli wants you to pay us the difference,’ Gábor says, with some vehemence. ‘He wants you to pay us the fucking difference, and that’s like a million forints. I told him you can’t do that, you just don’t have the money, and he said maybe you’d prefer to have your legs broken. I mean, he is fucking angry, man. And so is Emma,’ Gábor says more moodily, looking away.
‘Is she?’ Balázs says quietly, surprised.
‘Well, yeah! She had to fuck that guy,’ Gábor says, spelling it out, ‘and she didn’t even get paid.’
‘Yeah.’
‘So yeah, she’s angry.’
‘But she’s okay?’
Gábor ignores the question. ‘Listen,’ he says, ‘there’s two more nights. I think you should just stay here, whatever. I’ll take care of things.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I think you should just be out of this from now on. I mean, we’re not paying you now, so … Look, just forget it. Leave it to me. Your work is done. Okay?’
Zoli does not come round that day, of course, since there is no money to collect, and by the time he appears the next day, he seems to have calmed down and merely ignores Balázs. Balázs, lying on the sofa with Harry Potter és a Titkok Kamrája, ignores him back. There is no talk of leg-breaking – only the coldness normally accorded to someone who has seriously fucked up.
And this coldness extended, Balázs found, to Emma. She had seemed to avoid him the previous afternoon. She had stayed out of the living room, and it was only when they met accidentally at the bathroom door that they spoke.
Without looking him in the eye, she said, ‘Oh, sorry.’
And Balázs, emerging, said, ‘No, it’s okay, I’ve finished.’
Still filling the door, he was in her way.
‘Look, I’m sorry,’ he said.
Still without looking at him, she nodded. ‘Okay.’
And that was it – he stood aside and she went past into the damp reek of the bathroom.
A few hours later she and Gábor left for the hotel.
Gábor put his head round the living-room door. ‘Okay, we’re going,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ Balázs said, ‘okay.’
When they had left he sat there for a while. Meditatively, he smoked two Park Lanes, then he put on his jacket and went out into the street. The sky was a super-intense evening blue, and subd
ivided by jet trails in various states of dispersal, some plain white, some, perhaps those higher up, a fanciful pink. Down where he walked, dusk was deep in the small street, silvering the windscreens of the parked cars. Everything was quiet, and there was a pleasant emptiness inside him too – something like the unlit windows of the houses he walked past, a peaceful vacancy. Silent interiors. No one home.
It was less than a week since he had first done this walk, from the flat to the high street, and already it felt like something totally familiar – something that, no matter how hard he looked, would show him nothing new.
And then there was the girl at the chicken place. She was always there, serving the customers, but he hadn’t really noticed her until tonight. The little smile she gave him when she took his order, it occurred to him, as he sat down to wait for his food, was not the first. Part of the lace edge of her bra showed in the V-shaped neckline of her T-shirt, where a little gold cross lay on the skin. He watched her dealing with the next customer, her earnest manner, her hand tightly gripping the pen with which she wrote the orders down. He wondered what she thought about things. Though she was not smiling now, she had a nice face.
4
1
It is light when he leaves the hotel. Light. Primordial sunlight disclosing empty streets, disclosing form with shadow, the stucco facades. And silence. Here in the middle of London, silence. Not quite silence, of course. Never true silence here. The sublimated rumble of a plane. The burble of pigeons courting on a cornice. A taxi’s busy rattle along Sussex Gardens, past the terraced hotel fronts, from one of which he now emerges.
He feels that he is leaving London unseen, slipping out while everyone else is still asleep, as he walks, with his single small holdall, to the square where he left the car. The square is hotel-fringed, shabby. A few benches and plants in the middle. Sticky pavements. The car is still there, surrounded by empty parking spaces. It is not his. It is someone else’s. He is simply delivering it. Slinging his holdall onto the passenger seat, he takes his place at the wheel.
He sits there for a few seconds, enjoying a feeling of inviolable solitude. Solitude, freedom. They seem like nearly the same thing as he sits there.
Then he starts the engine, which sounds loud in the silence of the square.
He is aware now that he does not know exactly which way to go. He looked yesterday and it all seemed simple enough, the way out of London, south-east, towards Dover. Now even finding his way to the river seems problematic. He tries to picture it, the streets he will need to take. When he has formed some sort of mental picture of where he is going, and only then, he pulls out.
He waits at a light on Park Lane, some posh hotel on one side, the park on the other, staring sleepily straight ahead.
When he gets to the river there might be a problem. He hopes there will be signs for Dover. The possibility of getting lost makes him mildly nervous, even though he would not be in any serious danger of missing the ferry. He has plenty of time. It is his habit, when travelling, always to allow more time than he needs.
He went to sleep very early last night. The previous night, Friday, he had been out late, with Macintyre, the Germanic philology specialist at UCL. And then he had had to get up early on Saturday to take the train to Nottingham and pick up the car from its previous ‘keeper’, a Pakistani doctor. (Dr N. Khan was the name on the documents.) He had done the whole thing on a hangover, which had made the day pass over him like a dream – made it seem even now like something he had dreamed, the time he spent in Dr Khan’s front room, looking through the service history, while the doctor’s cat watched him.
He swings around Hyde Park Corner, the sun pouring down Piccadilly like something out of Turner, the palaces opposite the park half-dissolving in a flood of light.
He squints, tries to push it away with his hand.
Macintyre had not been very helpful. He was supposed to have looked at the manuscript, the section on Dutch and German analogues in particular. They had talked about it for a while, in The Lowlander. Macintyre, with a suggestion of subtle mockery that was entirely typical of him, always insisted on meeting there. The early modern shifts in German pronunciation, for instance. The way some dialects …
He has to focus, as he flows through them, on the layout of the streets around Victoria station.
The way some dialects were still impervious to those shifts, after more than five hundred years.
The traffic system pulls him one way, then another, past empty office towers. He looks for the lane that will throw him left eventually, onto Vauxhall Bridge Road.
There.
No, Macintyre had not been as helpful as he might have been. Obviously, he was holding back. Professional jealousies were operative. He did not want to give too much away about what he was working on now. That was why he had wanted to talk about other things. Kept steering the talk away from shop. Wanted to know, when he had had a few Duvels, about his ‘sex life’. ‘How’s your sex life, then?’ he had said.
Well, he had mentioned Waleria. Said something about her. Something non-committal.
The lights halfway down Vauxhall Bridge Road start to turn as he approaches them and after a moment’s hesitation he stops.
Macintyre was married, wasn’t he? Kids.
The lights go green. Unhurriedly he moves off. A minute later – the Thames. That exhilarating momentary sense of space. The water, sun-white.
Then streets again.
In south London he feels even freer. These are streets he does not know, that may be why. Strange to him, these sleeping estates. These hulks, slowly mouldering. He has a vague idea that he needs to find the Old Kent Road. Old Kent Road. That insane game of Monopoly that happened in the SCR once. He thinks of that for a moment, and imagines the Old Kent Road to be liveried in a drab brown.
Signs for Dover draw him deeper into the maze of south-east London. The maze marvellously unpeopled – the low high streets with their tattered shops. The sun shining on their grubby brick faces. Dirty windows hung with curtains. Only at the petrol stations are there signs of life. Someone filling up.
Someone walking away.
He has so much time, he thinks he might make the earlier ferry. His own ‘sails’, as they still say, just after eight. So yes, he may well make the previous one – it is not yet five thirty and already he is in the vicinity of Blackheath, already he is merging onto an empty motorway, its surface shining like water. Speed. There is a tangle of motorways here. He must keep an eye out for signs.
Yes, Macintyre has several kids. No wonder he seemed so threadbare and fed up. So tetchy. Some little house somewhere in outer London, full of stuff. Full of noise. He and his wife at each other’s throats. Too worn out to fuck. Who wants it?
Canterbury, says the sign.
And he thinks, with a little frisson of excitement, This is the way Chaucer’s pilgrims went. Trotting horses. Stories. Muddy lanes. And when it started to rain – a hood. Wet hands.
His dry hands hold the leather-trimmed wheel. Through sunglasses he eyes the wide oncoming lanes. He has the motorway to himself.
Wonderful to imagine it, though. The whole appeal of medieval studies – the languages, the literature, the history, the art and architecture – to immerse oneself in that world. That other world. Safely other. Other in almost every way, except that it was here. Look at those fields on either side of the motorway. Those low hills. It was here. They were here, as we are here now. And this too shall pass. We don’t actually believe that, though, do we? We are unable to believe that our own world will pass. So it will go on for ever? No. It will turn into something else. Slowly – too slowly to be perceived by the people living in it. Which is already happening, is always happening. We just can’t see it. Like sound changes, spoken language.
‘Some Remarks on the Representation of Spoken Dialect in “The Reeve’s Tale”’.
The kick-ass title of his first published work. Published in Medium Ævum LXXIV. Originally written for Hamer�
�s Festschrift – Hamer who had supervised his doctoral work when he first turned up at Oxford, that first year. A tall, bald man with spacious elegant rooms in Christ Church. Would literally offer you a sherry when you arrived – that old school, that English. The author of works such as Old English Sound Changes for Beginners (1967). Professor Hamer lived, it had seemed, in a fortress of abstrusity. Asleep at night, he must have dreamed, so his young foreign pupil had thought, sipping his sherry, of palatal diphthongisation, of loss of h and compensatory lengthening.
And he had envied him those harmless dreams. Something so profoundly peaceful about them.
Something so profoundly peaceful about them.
Everything so settled, you see. It all happened a thousand years ago. And the medievalist sits in his study, in a shaft of sunlight, lost in a reverie of life on the far side of that immense lapse of time. The whole exercise is, in its way, a memento mori. A meditation on the effacing nature of time.
He likes the little world of the university. Some people, he knows, hate it. They long for London.
He likes it. The fairy-tale topography of the town. A make-believe world of walled gardens. The quietness of summer. The stone-floored lodge, and the deferential porter. Yes, a make-believe world, like something imagined by a shy child.
Somewhere to hide.
Dreaming spires.
Sun sparkles on wide motorway.
It is just after six and he will be at Dover, he estimates, in an hour.
Yes, he likes the little world of the university. He likes its claustral narrowness. Sometimes he wishes it were narrower still. That the world of the present was even more absent. He would have quite enjoyed, he thinks, the way of life of a medieval monastery – as a scholarly brother, largely exempt from manual labour. He would have enjoyed that.
With, naturally, the one obvious proviso.
Without noticing, he has pushed the car well into the nineties. It manages the speed without effort. He eases off the accelerator and the needle immediately starts to sink and for the first time this morning he feels sleepy – a mesmeric sleepiness induced by the level hum of the engine and the monotonous, empty perspective in front of him. It seems, for long moments, like something on a screen, something spewing from a CPU. Just pictures. Without consequences. He shakes his head, moves his hands on the wheel.