He had just slunk out into the street full of shame for having given up hope of supper for the night when he spotted an old woman on the corner selling roast chestnuts with only some three or four people waiting by the hot iron grill. He was there in less than a minute, but his linguistic skills failed him again, the two dozen languages he could speak or stutter as ineffective as the signs he tried to make with his hands and fingers. He might as well have been talking to the deaf and dumb. He finished up buying all the chestnuts on the stall, some forty of them. He had never bought as many at a time. He gave the old woman one of the smaller banknotes and received some change. He gobbled down the chestnuts immediately, there on the pavement, burning his mouth in the process and grew tearful as he did so. He felt sorry for himself: he had never felt so lost or so foreign in any city. Must get away, he kept thinking. Back to the hotel, grab luggage and find a plane or train, anything not to be here a day or hour longer.
Once more the doorman at the hotel opened the door for him but there was a new face at the desk now. Despite standing in the inevitable queue Budai had no more luck with this clerk than he had with the last. However he pointed to his key hanging on the hook among the rest the man simply shook his head as if slightly bored. So he wrote the number 921 down on a piece of paper, which did the trick. The lift operator was once again the tall blonde girl in blue. He nodded to her but she looked straight through him distractedly, and soon the space between them was filled with more people so he only caught a glimpse of her on leaving.
Back in his room he discovered that his body was covered in blue and green bruises from the blows he had received in the street when fighting his way through the crowd. He was not only bruised but tired and was shocked to realise that he had not accomplished anything and had made no contact with anyone, neither with people back home, nor with the people waiting for him at his destination. Neither at home nor at Helsinki would they have any idea where he had vanished. The strangest thing though was that he himself had no clue, not for the time being anyway: he was no wiser now than he had been on arriving here. Furthermore, he had no idea how he might set about finding out, about leaving, about where to go, about whom to speak to or what procedure to follow ... He had a bad feeling and felt deeply uneasy, thinking he must have missed something or failed to do something, something he should have done but he couldn’t think what. He tried the phone again in his anxiety, fretfully dialling numbers anywhere, but it was late at night now, the phones kept ringing and only rarely did a sleepy voice respond and then in that peculiar, foreign-sounding, incomprehensible and indistinguishable language that sounded like stuttering.
Budai’s instinct for language had been sharpened by his studies: etymology was his area of interest, the way words developed, their origins. He had had to deal with the strangest languages in the course of his research, both Hungarian and Finnish in the Finno-Ugrian group, but also to some extent Vogul, Ostyak, Turkic, some Arabic and Persian, and beyond these Old Slavic, Czech, Slovakian, Polish and Serbo-Croat. The language here did not remind him of any of them, nor of Sanskrit, Hindi, Ancient or Modern Greek, nor of High Germanic either, for he knew German proper, as well as English and Dutch. Besides these, he was also acquainted with Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish as well as having a smattering of Portuguese, Romanian, Italian Retoroman and a smidgeon of Hebrew, Armenian, Chinese and Japanese. Most of these he could only read to a so-so standard of course, to the point that they were useful for tracking the development of one or other word, but he knew them sufficiently well to recognise that this language did not resemble any of them. It belonged to a group he could not locate by ear. All he could hear was something that sounded like ededede and gagagaga.
He removed the framed and printed notice from its nail by the door and examined it with fresh care by the light of the table lamp. But this did not get him anywhere either for whatever templates he applied he had not come across the characters before. He couldn’t even tell whether they were characters in the European sense, parts of words as to some extent in Japanese or Chinese, or a series of bare consonants like ancient Semitic and Aramaic. He found the occurrence of normal Arabic numerals disruptive. By now he was so tired he could not think, so having decided to postpone his investigations till the next day, he undressed and went to bed.
Accustomed to reading for half an hour before going to sleep he noticed that there was nothing to read: he had packed all his books, as well as his notes and his speech to the conference, in the other, bigger case. He got up again and unpacked his hand luggage to check but there was nothing there. He felt angry. Why hadn’t he bought a newspaper or magazine at least on the plane? He tossed and turned, unable to sleep so eventually opened one of the bottles of red wine he had brought with him. He tried to extricate the cork using one of the blades of his penknife, but the cork broke up in the process so he had to push it back into the bottle. Not being able to cork it up again he drank his way, little by little, through the lot and finally sank into a hazy sleep without a thought in his head.
He woke next morning with a headache: the day outside was grey and dry. He looked out on the street through the closed window. Even from the ninth floor he could see the crowds rolling by, a continuous black stream of traffic and pedestrians. There was something wrong with his stomach too: he had drunk too much last night. He took a long time brushing his teeth to get rid of the foul taste in his mouth. He took a shower, scrubbing his face in the jet of hot water, then rubbed his whole body vigorously with the fluffy towel until he was quite red. He looked in his bag and found a salami-filled roll that he had overlooked. His wife must have packed it as a snack for the journey. It served as some kind of breakfast though it would have been nice to have had some tea as well. He sought in vain for a bell to call for service. Maybe the telephone was there to serve that purpose though he would have to know what number to dial and how to ask the question; in other words he was back exactly where he had been last night ... Suddenly he was all impatience and ready for action. Enough of this nonsense! He had urgent business to attend to in Helsinki! It was the first day of the conference to which he had been delegated, he had to get there, even if a little late, and make his speech. He packed his belongings, put the bag down on the luggage rack ready for departure and hurried downstairs to settle matters once and for all.
There was large group of people waiting at the lifts, before all eight lifts, and judging by the illuminated buttons all the lifts were in use. It seemed to be an even busier morning than usual. Budai couldn’t find the stairs on this level either, or at least none of the corridors seemed to lead to them, so he was obliged to join the others in the furthermost queue. The lifts didn’t seem to stop on this floor very often, rumbling past it for several minutes without opening their doors. And when one did happen to stop it only had room for four or five people: everybody, it seemed, was going down, leaving rooms on the floor above his. The lifts were crammed by the time they reached here. His queue was the slowest moving of the lot, of course, and a clear ten minutes went by without the characteristic low hum of the lift opening its automatic doors. Thinking it must be out of order, Budai moved to the back of another queue. But no sooner had he done so than it was his old queue that was moving forwards whereas his new queue was at a standstill, and even when the lift did stop at the new queue the indicator immediately showed it returning to the upper floors. It was enough to drive one crazy. Budai’s entire body was covered in sweat as he struggled to contain his helpless fury. He felt hot and cramped. Eventually a lift stopped and he reached the ground floor.
There were as many people clogging up the lobby as there had been last night, maybe more. Some stood around in haphazard clusters, others were stuck in long queues, while still others were hurrying from place to place, forcing their way through the rest. Were they all guests at the hotel, or if not, what were they doing here? It was impossible to tell. He struggled through them to the reception desk but it took quite a long time again before he was
face to face with the desk-clerk on duty. The man, however, was not one of those he had already met. The only thing he had in common with them was that he too failed to understand a single word, jabbering away himself instead. Budai was so furious he could no longer contain himself: he grew red in the face and beat the counter, bellowing in various languages.
‘Skandal. ein Skandal! ... C’est un scandale, comprenez-vous ... ?’
He hardly knew what he was shouting. He demanded his passport and aeroplane ticket; he wanted to see the manager, he called for an interpreter, he raged and threatened, repeating: pass, passport, passaporto, now in one language, now in another while ever more people gathered around listening to him. Finally, when the elderly desk-clerk simply spread his hands out in incomprehension, Budai leaned across, grabbed him by the shoulders and started shaking him, screaming at him, waving his hands in front of his face. All this accomplished nothing, of course, since it was perfectly obvious that neither the man nor any of the nearby witnesses to the scene understood him. In any case, there were so many waiting behind him that they too began to grow restive, pressing forwards, each of them preoccupied with his own affairs. It was pointless. The desk-clerk readjusted his jacket. Budai himself grew uncertain and confused. He waited a little longer, looking everywhere, hoping to discover where guests’ passports might be stored, at which counter, in which cupboard, but there was no way he could get to the other side of the counter and into the office from here, and he had begun to feel a little ashamed of himself for creating such a fuss. It really wasn’t like him. There was no point in making things worse: it would only be more trouble. Nor could the people behind him wait there forever. So, having first mopped his neck and brow with his handkerchief, then, having blown his nose in it, he allowed himself to be elbowed discreetly aside, having achieved nothing.
There were a number of large circular tables in the lobby with armchairs arranged round them and one of them had just become available. He sat down in it and closed his eyes: perhaps this was all a dream, perhaps he was actually in Helsinki or at home, maybe he hadn’t even set out from home yet. Or, if he was where he appeared to be, other people would know about it by now, seek him out, apologise and explain, and it would all be cleared up, back to normal. Maybe he just had to wait a minute or two, to count to sixty or, at most, a hundred ... But having done so and looked up, he saw he was still there in the same hotel lobby with heaving crowds pressing this way and that, the printed notices still incomprehensible, the same foreign posters, photographic enlargements, landscape paintings on walls and pillars, the same mysterious papers and magazines at the newsagent’s stand, the same men, women, old and young and people of all shapes and sizes. There was a small exotic-looking group close to him now, a collection of church dignitaries of some sort moving through the hall, composed mostly of dark-skinned, bearded ancients in long, black kaftans, wearing lilac hats, highly colourful sashes and heavy, gold chains round their necks: the crowds opened for them so that they might continue their dignified progress.
He forced himself to be calm: he’d not get anywhere at all by shouting and complaining. He tried to put his thoughts in order: firstly, and most urgently, he should recover his passport, followed, naturally, by the ticket for his flight because until he had these he could not get to Helsinki and thence home once the conference was over. He could work out where he was, how he had got here, who was to blame and how he had got into this stupid situation once he had both these items in his hand ... But before any of this he needed a bite since he could hardly regard what he had had so far as a proper breakfast, at least that was what his stomach was telling him. No wonder he was so tense. The hotel was bound to have a restaurant of some kind. He got up to look for it.
He explored the lobby as far as he could, given the difficulty of negotiating the dense crowd and found it very large, some 100 to 150 metres long and about half as wide.
There were shops selling souvenirs and knick-knacks by the walls: he cast his eye over the dolls, statuettes, decorated boxes, bracelets, brooches and baubles, the cameras with unfamiliar brand names and the opera glasses. He even picked a key-ring off the glass counter. It had a fortress or tower motif with some writing underneath it, one of the town’s monuments no doubt together with its name, though it wasn’t a building he recognised and the writing was no help. Nevertheless, he determined to buy one of these as a memento before he left, to remind him of this crazy adventure, of the night he had spent here.
But he found no trace of a restaurant though he had paid close attention to each corner of the lobby and had even stopped to address one man, repeating the words restaurant and buffet. This having produced no more than an uncomprehending gaze, he tried to demonstrate his desire to eat by miming and lifting his hand to his mouth. It seemed that the tall, lean man with the hooked nose understood him, since he replied in a loud, sharp voice, almost shouting, asking:
‘Gorrabittepropopotu? Vivi tereplebeubeu?’
He might of course have been saying something completely different, his articulation being as peculiar as that of the others. Despite doing his best to listen Budai was not sufficiently expert in this case to note down the phonetic symbols employed by students of linguistics to indicate the most minute distinctions between types of accent and enunciation, though he knew them well enough and regularly used them in his work. Meanwhile the man went on in an unpleasantly harsh voice, almost as though challenging him, going so far as to grab him by the lapels even as he was pointing to something above them, impossible to say where. It would have been good to be free of him now but the man had hold of him and did not let go, bellowing into his face, waving his arms, gesturing, so that in the end Budai had to use brute force to be rid of him.
Later, rather to his surprise, he came upon a set of stairs in the far corner of the lobby. They were wide, red-carpeted stairs with a marble balustrade but they only led as far as the mezzanine, or possibly first floor, where it opened onto a corridor but no further. The corridor itself led to a set of glazed doors both of whose wings were open and hooked to the wall. Behind the door lay a large, vaulted hall, filled floor to ceiling with scaffolding and decorators working away at the distant top, shouting to each other in echoing voices, clambering up and down. In the middle of the hall, in a space left by scaffolding, stood a draped statue or some kind of fountain, behind which extended an enormous serving counter, and beyond that a raised platform with a draped piano, while a mass of tables and chairs lay piled in the corner, all flecked with paint, the floor itself being covered with mortar and rubble. This was, no doubt, the restaurant, but out of service for the time being owing to redecoration. Now he realised what the lean man had been trying to tell him as he was pointing upwards. One of the workmen shuffled over to the door. He was dressed in filthy overalls and carried a bucket, his head covered with a paper hat. Budai accosted him too, using hands and feet to make himself understood, trying to discover where he might find something to eat. The man blinked, mumbled something incomprehensible, waved his hand as if to deny something and described a broad circle with his arm indicating, perhaps, that there were no eating facilities in the building.
This was a peculiarly bad piece of luck, coming as it did on top of everything else. After yesterday evening’s unfortunate excursion he shrank from the thought of having to step out into the street again. Nevertheless he still had to eat, and having taken a little consideration, he estimated it to be getting on for noon: even without his wristwatch, his stomach reminded him of the time, the reminders growing ever more urgent. He resolved to keep calm and avoid tension however long he had to wait. Flights usually left early and by now he would have missed the morning one to Helsinki in any case. Just for once he wanted a really good meal and would sacrifice the morning to that end. Having eaten, he could find out about the afternoon or evening flight.
He ambled back into the lobby, patiently waited in the queue for the lift and was finally conveyed upstairs so he could get his coat. Although
he had eventually found his room last night he was once again confused by the corridors and it took him a while to locate 921. Once at the door he could hear the telephone so he quickly turned the key and ran inside. But by the time he reached the phone it had stopped ringing and when he picked up the receiver he heard only the same low purring he had heard before ... He wondered who might have been calling him: had someone discovered what had happened to him and tracked him down? Were they even now working out how to get hold of him and take him where he was supposed to be? He sat down on the bed, not daring to move in case they rang again, beating his brow, furious with himself for not having arrived half a minute earlier. However he prayed for it to ring, the telephone remained stubbornly silent: on the other hand, his hunger had not abated at all so having twice gone out into the corridor then darted back into his room to allow the phone a few more minutes, he eventually took a decision and went out.
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