Metropole

  There were boats for hire too if you were prepared to wait long enough though he no longer cared about time. Time didn’t matter any more: who cared what the clock said! He paid and was helped into a one-man punt. A slow current carried him down a barrel-vaulted, cave-like tunnel where music blared, some swaying barcarolle, and atmospheric coloured lanterns dangled either side, some even floating on the water. There were miniature castles and forts along the way, waterfalls, sluices, power stations, bridges and the rest; all the usual stuff, nothing special. For him though it was the greatest, most unexpected pleasure of the day, his first moment of pleasure since arriving.

  Back home he used to canoe on the Danube. He’d start early in the morning and row a long way up the winding tree-and shrub-lined stream. The water never quite formed a smooth mirror as he proceeded between islands and sandbanks: it was constantly folding, trembling and sparkling, patches of dark billowing beneath the surface. Even on a windless day the river was alive and breathing. He usually tied the boat up on the same tiny unnamed island and took a rest: at high water it would be covered by the Danube, and later, once the water had retreated, the grass would remain exactly as it had been bent by the current, grass blades and the bases and branches of shrubs still tangled in wisps of water-weed but dry, as if the trees had grown beards. A narrow lagoon divided the islet into two, the water continuing to trickle through it. The little boat was easily maneouvrable and could be guided past bending branches and lianas that hid it from view. He never met anyone here, he disturbed a few birds at most. The current picked up where the lagoon ended, the river suddenly lurching into movement, clear and transparent right down to the pebbles at the bottom. This was where he best liked to bathe, the current carrying him, filling the pores of his skin, the water sweetish and soft on skin and tongue. One May morning he saw wild ducks by the sandy bank and observed them silently so they did not see him. The mother duck was teaching her brood to swim, dive and catch fish.

  He set off back to the hotel in a light reverie full of happy memories. He had noted the name of the metro station he was aiming for, had even written it down, but just at the moment he didn’t know where he should get on. He was a long way from the station where he had arrived and was unlikely to find his way back to it, nor did he have any success in discovering another entrance with those characteristic yellow rails. He started asking around again in the hope that there might just be someone who understood him, stopping passers-by and pointing down at the paving. Finally a Tataric-looking woman in brown overalls seemed to grasp what he required and encouraged him to come with her, even taking his arm, and indeed, a mere two blocks on, she had succeeded in conducting him to the entrance of an underground public convenience.

  By this time he feared he was permanently lost, no longer able even to find the hotel. It was getting late, close on midnight when he realised what he should do: he should watch the crowd and see where it was densest, see what direction it was moving in and note the main current. He located that current and tried to follow it, careful never to be parted from it. There were ever more people around him. Then they turned a corner into an even wider stream that a few hundred metres further on poured into a flat-roofed round building with steps leading down into the metro. Once there it was easy enough to find his way around: he could locate the map, seek out the relevant line on the correct level and note where he had to change trains.

  He arrived in the little square from which he had started out that morning. The skyscraper he had been gazing at was still in construction. He counted the floors again to check: there were sixty-five though he clearly remembered there having been sixty-four before. He counted them twice more but it was sixty-five both times with the framework for the sixty-sixth already in place. They must have managed to finish a whole floor since he last looked ... The fat doorman blinked, saluted and pushed open the swing door. Surely he was a robot, thought Budai, not human at all, a machine dressed in uniform programmed to perform two or three movements. He felt like tapping him to see what he was made of, though he immediately recoiled from the thought: he might get an electric shock ...

  Waiting for his key, he faintly recalled having left a letter at the desk addressed to the management. What if there were an answer waiting for him in the pigeon hole? Might they have returned his passport? There was nothing there. It was a different clerk again and he couldn’t be bothered with repeating the whole pointless charade. He took his key without a word and went to stand in the queue for the lift.

  He hadn’t expected the blonde woman operator to be on duty since she had been there in the morning: it surprised him to see her as the doors opened. She looked exhausted and broken, her face too red, her eyelids drooping as she played the keys with her long, carefully manicured fingers. Could she have been working all this time? Or was this a second shift after a break at home? Where did she live, in fact, in the hotel or with a family? Does she have a family, a husband? ... The air in the lift was more oppressive than usual and only later did he notice that the ventilator was out of commission. Entering he had positioned himself so as to be quite close to the girl. Under the light, tiny drops of perspiration twinkled on the faint down of her brow. Budai’s inhibitions had been loosened by drink and he used his newspaper to fan the girl’s neck and forehead. She slowly turned, more in amazement than protest, and said something too, giving a short laugh. It was the first time Budai had seen her smile. Suddenly he felt weak and tender: he wanted to stay with her, so that she could relax at his side ... Yes, whatever way he looked at it, thinking about her and about himself, that was all he wanted, to lie down with her in one bed and wait patiently as she nodded off, hearing her breathing, seeking out the pulse on the tight skin of her wrist: indeed, that would be the most satisfying thing he could possibly do. She had to remind him to get off when they reached the ninth floor. So she remembered. She had noticed him.

  His room had been tidied again and the bed made but the telephone directory he had pinched yesterday had gone. They must have discovered it as they were making the room up and taken it away along with the notes he had made at the back of the book. He had the paper and could start again but really did not feel like it now. His muscles ached with tiredness, after all, he had been on his feet all day, coming and going, tramping here and there – thinking that, he realised he had wasted another day, or, rather, that he didn’t know whether he had or had not made any progress at all and was seized by a mixture of terror and ironic self-recrimination. He removed his clothes in confusion: one moment he was shuddering and feverish, disgusted by the thought of failure, the next he was drowsy and faintly drunk, thinking ‘who the hell gives a damn’. He showered and lay down without turning off the bedside lamp. The fault must be in his character: he found any kind of aggression or self-promotion distasteful. The truth of this dawned on him slowly as he dozed. If he could not overcome his shyness and sensitivity, his instinctive reluctance to put people out, he would never get out of here, nor would anybody find out where he was or lift a finger to help him. He must fight this battle alone, there were no two ways about it: he must transform himself from top to toe, it was the only way to rediscover himself and assert his being.

  Awake now, he felt so indignant that he smashed his fist on the bedside table and the glass on it cracked and cut his hand. He was bleeding quite badly. He bandaged the cut with his handkerchief then twisted a towel around it for good measure but the blood still seeped through: he hated, he utterly loathed this town that was nothing but cuts and blows, that was forcing him to act against his nature, that gripped him and would not let him go, that hung on to him and pulled him back.

  He was having a recurring dream. He was in Helsinki, in that long familiar harbour town, walking its cool damp streets and wherever he set out from – whether it was from the cathedral, the opera, the fish-market or the Olympic Stadium – he always arrived at the sea. He liked this dream. He liked seeing the horizon slowly brightening to blue behind the rows of brown and white
houses: he could almost conjure it up when awake, draw it forth from his distant memories in the period of shallow consciousness hovering between light and dark while waking or falling asleep. The conference would be pretty near over by now as it was only programmed to last, at most, some three or four days, depending on the number of speakers. He had hardly seen any water since arriving here, no river, no lake, none that he could remember, except perhaps at the fair where he took a boat, or in the park the pond where children played with model yachts.

  The cut on his hand was slow to heal. It hurt and pulsed and he had to bandage it several times using clean handkerchiefs. He decided to keep off drink as he seemed to have become rather too accustomed to it here. He wanted his mind to be clear and sharp, not muddled, and he kept his resolution over the next few evenings. He developed an interim regime for himself. He ate twice, in the morning and the afternoon, usually in the same self-service buffet near the skyscraper, and spent the rest of the time exploring the streets and the metro system. Two or three times when he left the hotel he did not hand in his key so as to save queuing when he returned. But then he thought better of it: it would only lead to confusion if people were looking for him and were unable to determine when he was in his room or outside somewhere. Besides all this, his passport had failed to reappear and he never saw the grey-haired clerk with whom he had left it that first evening.

  There were ever new schemes and plans to consider that served to conceal the nature of his situation for there were days when he simply could not face it. One of his schemes was to make several copies of a notice in six languages that he posted at various places in the hotel – along the corridors, in the lift and in the entrance lobby – asking whoever might read and understand it to seek him out in Room 921, or, if he wasn’t there, to leave a message for him at the desk in return for a handsome reward. Having put those up he knocked at a few neighbouring doors but mostly he received no answer: it might not have been the best time, the guests might not have been in their rooms, or it may be that he knocked too quietly. When he did find someone in it seemed he had disturbed them. At one door an aggressive female voice demanded to know something, at another when, having received an incomprehensible answer, he opened the door he stumbled in on two young olive-brown men in pyjamas who sprang apart, one of whom – a short, bespectacled, skinny chap – ran past him out into the corridor and disappeared round a corner. The door next to it was already open and he peered through the crack before warily stepping inside but an overwhelming smell, worse than a pigsty, stopped him in his tracks. There was no one there, only cages containing fat, overgrown angora rabbits. The room was full of rabbits: on the floor, on the chairs, on the luggage rack, on top of the cupboards, even under the bed, in the bathroom, in the shower cubicle, in the toilet bowl, all nibbling, all snuffling in their cages, all stupidly mizzling and stinking with urine.

  Then he came up with a new idea. At dawn he would go down to the hotel entrance and wait there for the bus that had brought him from the airport. But he was no longer able to remember either what time the bus had arrived or what colour it was for he hadn’t seen it from the outside, and though he had been the last to get off it was by no means certain that this was the bus’s last stop, it might have been pure chance, the bus stopping only for a moment. That was why he started hanging about outside in the constantly seething crowd among all those elbows and knees. He stood firm, careful not to be swept away, but was unable to identify the right bus in the traffic. It might have been that the flight on which he had arrived was not a daily service.

  The excursions were not wholly useless though because, seeing a passing policeman with his rubber truncheon, he suddenly had an idea, his best and most important yet, something so brilliantly simple and sure to succeed that he actually gave a whoop when it occurred to him. If he were to be taken away by the police, for whatever reason, he was bound to be questioned and listened to, and if they did not understand him they would be obliged to supply an interpreter to whom he could finally tell his story ... He hurried back to his room to rest, to think the scheme through and settle on a course of action that would be certain to end in his arrest. He could start a fight, he could assault a passer-by, put a brick through a shop window or the pane of a telephone booth. He could puncture the tyres of cars stuck at traffic lights, possibly even smash their headlights. He could light a fire in a square or a park using newspapers and scraps of waste paper. He had, however, always felt nervous about committing any common breaches of the law and was concerned in case angry local people hurt him before the police arrived. He had seen a fountain in the shape of a stone elephant in the old town: what would happen if he decided to bathe in it? It might be enough to undress in the street but his natural reticence shrank from the idea. And what if he pretended to be ill, to simulate an epileptic fit, to throw himself on the ground with some soap in his mouth to make it froth, the way some conmen did?

  He made no final decision but went down again and stood in front of the hotel, trusting to a moment of inspiration. He didn’t have to wait long for soon enough a policeman appeared pressing his way through the crowd at the edge of the pavement. Budai took a deep breath and hesitated three times to gather courage before worming his way over and choosing the most effective method of attracting the policeman’s attention. He gave the policeman a sharp jab in the ribs with his elbow. The policeman must have thought it was merely the normal bustle of traffic for he drew aside to let him pass, but Budai could not leave it at that. He was egging himself on by now and with one bold movement he knocked the policeman’s peaked cap right off his head. It exposed his low brow, shiny and red, lightly covered by a tight crop of hair. Once he realised what had happened the policeman blew angrily on his whistle then gave his assailant such a rap on the head with his rubber truncheon that Budai’s eyes misted over. A second thwack and he lost consciousness.

  He woke in a small crowded place with faint light filtering through a small barred window. It must have been a police van. His head was ringing and his fingers felt two very painful bumps the size of nuts on his brow, but apart from that he felt a deep sense of satisfaction that he had achieved his aim, or in any case was well on the way to doing so. They were travelling for quite a long time, half an hour perhaps. He squatted on the low wooden seat still dizzy from the beating. It had begun to rain outside. He could hear it pattering on the roof of the van and this made him doze off again.

  He woke suddenly to find they had stopped and the back doors being opened. Two policemen appeared, neither of them the one he had assaulted, and indicated that he should get off. They were in a large yard with high grey walls on all four sides where lots of uniformed and non-uniformed figures were moving to and fro. He was escorted from the van into the building and a long crowded corridor. He moved unresistingly between the two policemen, following wherever they led him but unwilling to engage in conversation with them since it would be hopeless anyway and soon there would certainly be far better opportunity to talk. It was very warm, the air heavy as in a greenhouse, stuffy and humid, not an open window in sight.

  He was ushered into an office where a fat officer with a purple face and drooping moustache sat at a table covered with an ink-blotched green broadcloth. The officer’s tiny eyes were sunken and kept blinking. He was eating, cutting up a piece of gently dissolving, rank-smelling bacon that lay on a ragged sheet of paper soaked through with grease. It was unbearably hot here too and Budai couldn’t think why the place had to be kept at such a temperature and how the people who worked here could bear it. The officer gave him a sleepy look, wiped his mouth and his perspiration-covered face with a chequered handkerchief while the constables gave him a lazy salute and the one on the left babbled something, probably giving the reason for the arrest. The officer nodded slowly, audibly breathing, and without asking Budai anything, fixed his narrow, whey-coloured eyes on him, dried his greasy finger on the tablecloth then grunted something in an enquiring tone.

  Now was the
time, Budai judged, and took a small step forward – but stopped in his tracks. This was when he most needed his passport: it would have served as proof, as excuse and statement all at once and obviated the necessity for long explanations. He could have set it down before him and they’d know what to do ... As things were, he was forced to try all the various languages and gestures he had already tried countless times before, such as pointing to himself, repeating his name, his nationality, his place of residence and requesting an interpreter. There was not the slightest glimmer of understanding in the officer’s eyes. The stuffy atmosphere was sapping Budai’s energy too. He was losing his earlier determination and the dressing on his hand, as he noticed in the heat, was soaked through with blood again, though that might have been a result of the tussle with the first policeman. The officer in the meantime had finished his bacon and had taken out a crumbling piece of rancid cheese that had already begun to sweat and melt. He set it down before him, gazed at it for a while then slowly began to consume that too. The telephone beside him was ringing but he waited before he reluctantly picked it up. His conversation consisted of a series of incomprehensible answers employing the minimum effort. Every so often he belched into the receiver while wiping his face and neck with his hankie. Once he was done with the call Budai had another go, this time a touch more insistently, beating the desk with his fist, demanding to be interrogated, to be allowed to give proof of his identity, to defend himself and explain his behaviour, and so forth ... The officer simply stood up, strolled over in a leisurely fashion and with the same careless movement smacked him across the face as hard as he could, then returned to his chair, breathing hard. He slumped indifferently down again while continuing to eat. His palm was plump and soft but it must have been used to slapping people about since Budai could feel all five fingers complete with a broad signet ring. He was shocked and humiliated by this unexpected insult – the rubber truncheon had at least been expected – and fell completely silent, struck dumb by incomprehension. Nor did he put up any resistance when they handcuffed him and passed him on to another uniformed man who took away his tie, belt and shoe-laces then escorted him out of the presence of the cheese-and-perspiration-smelling officer who was presumably not only a policeman but a kind of magistrate too.