Metropole

by Ferenc Karinthy

  Nothing had changed in his room since he left it except he had fresh sheets, new towels, a new bedspread and a different oilcloth on the table. They must do these things weekly. Budai looked down on the street at the inexhaustible flow of traffic. The conference in Helsinki would have been long over by now, the delegates departed each to his or her own home: even the most distant of them would have arrived ... He took off his clothes, drew the curtains and lay down on the bed, drawing the covers over him. Within a minute he felt his body stiffen, his torso and limbs grow numb as if he had been hypnotised. He was incapable of getting up again or even turning over. He could not move at all. Nor did he want to: all he wanted was to lie absolutely still, his eyes closed for as long as possible, not to rise even to get a drink of water; he simply wanted to lie there without moving a muscle, not thinking, for hours or even days, for ever.

  If he counted from the day he left home it would have been the fourth, fifth, or at the latest, sixth day and they would have expected him back by now; in any case he should have been there a good while ago. What might they have been thinking when he hadn’t written, phoned, sent a telegram or given any sign of his being alive? At what point would they have started to look for him, and where? In Helsinki? There they would quickly have been informed by the committee of his absence from the conference, that they had waited in vain for him to turn up. At the airline, at the transit points, working their way through the various possible airports he might inadvertently have found himself at? Where would they have turned, how would they have gone about it? In an increasing panic? Where in the world might he have disappeared to in such mysterious fashion? What would they put it down to, his relatives, his friends, his colleagues, and, above all, his wife? How would she explain it, what must she be feeling? And his small son? And his dog? ... By now all this was causing him actual physical pain, imagining their astonishment, their anxiety, their puzzlement, their ever more despairing attempts to locate him, their horrible suspicions that he might have met with an accident, imagining his helplessness: it was intolerable, their situation was a hundred times worse than his. He had to dismiss these thought or chase them away whenever they assailed him.

  He couldn’t tell how long he lay in bed: two or three nights might have passed like this. In all that time no one appeared, called or knocked on his door, at least he did not hear anyone. They didn’t even come to clean the room. He woke suddenly to find it was morning again, the dirty grey light filtering in through the window, as overcast, as leaden and melancholy as before. Since he had arrived here there had been only an hour or two of sunshine. He roused himself, went into the bathroom, took a shower and shaved. He took another brief glance at the bill he had stuffed into his pocket: as far as he could make out the details, they consisted entirely of numbers, not letters. If only he could only work out which group of signs corresponded to which numbers! Once he knew that much he could try to learn – provided he got the right kind of question and could actually ask it – the sounds of the various numbers, and so, step by step, he might eventually be able to decipher the writing too, and then the language, though all this would of course take some time. And that was only provided he had a text in which the numbers, one way or another, were actually written down in letter form. The trouble was these forms had nothing like that ... Recognising this he put the bill away for now along with the various related questions to deal with later.

  He had more important, more serious matters on his mind now and he decided to do most of his thinking in the room, leaving it only to eat in the familiar buffet, or, to save money, to buy food of the possibly cheaper sort in the shops; some bread, ham, cucumbers and so forth. He didn’t actually have much of an appetite, not even after days of doing nothing physical, all his energy being absorbed by intense mental activity. He hadn’t yet lost all confidence in logical thought: if he could only force his mind to review everything that had happened to him from the first minute of stepping off the plane when the bus brought him into town, something would reveal itself. A total would appear at the bottom of the column of figures. He sat at the writing desk, drawing and scribbling as he used to do back home when faced with a difficult and complex question in linguistics, shuffling tiny slips of paper bearing the various phonemes he had jotted down here and there, grouping and regrouping them, playing with them until, sooner or later, they suddenly appeared in a clear and logical order. That was if they fitted in the first place ... He had a certain trust in his ingenuity, in his quick and nimble mind, in the way he could delve into the heart of complex matters, in the vital role of inspiration even in scientific enquiry and maybe in luck too which, so far in his career, had always seemed to be on his side, so that when he began something he generally finished it. He was accustomed to thinking systematically: that was his craft, his vocation, his living. He felt exhilarated as he drew various diagrams and scribbled bits of shorthand in his notebook. Even now he was enjoying this instinctive mark making – it was almost a pleasure working on a logical problem that meant pitting his solitary wits against the city’s million and more secrets. He just needed to make an inventory of all his experiences, to feed the accumulated data into his mind as he might into a computer, and he would simply have to wait for it to come up with an answer.

  The most important conclusion he came to was that, however painful, however bitter the process, there was nothing for it but to discover precisely where he was, for until he did so there would be no going home. There was no getting round this order of events or trying to change the relationship between them, since one followed from the other. He could wait for ever for chance to intervene on his side: all ad hoc attempts to escape had proved unsuccessful so far and there was no guarantee that they would prove more successful in the future. He was persuaded that whatever shore fate had abandoned him on he would not easily get away.

  It was not that his leaving was not a matter of urgency, but perhaps the very fact that he was in too great a hurry was a problem: he had been in such a rush to escape that he had quite neglected to discover whether this place was on the map at all or if he was the first of his kind to arrive here. Because if he was the first he should not be in quite such a hurry: the explorer in him should commit himself to make basic notes and observations. He should determine the location of the city, the name of the country and continent, find out who lived here and what language they spoke, so that he might return home fully informed about everything.

  Was he on planet earth at all or in some other part of the cosmos? In an age of space exploration and science fiction the question did not seem utterly ridiculous. But no, let us keep a cool head about this, it must be earth really. Many signs pointed to the fact: the plants he had noted in the parks and public spaces were certainly terrestrial trees, grass, flowers, as was the limited range of animals he had so far encountered, dogs, cats, doves, sparrows, insects and those angora rabbits in the hotel room he had walked into. Then there were the fish on the market stalls, the canaries, the parrots, and the tortoises in the livestock market, though there was a six-footed lizard too of a kind he hadn’t seen before. The air tasted and felt much the same as it did at home. And above all, most obviously, there were the people, people in unprecedented numbers, in buildings, in streets, in the hotel, in traffic, in vehicles, on the metro, as dense a throng of people, or pretty near as dense, as you would find in any other great city. And apart from this there was an entire recognisable way of life, the whole rhythm of it, the shops, the cafés, the food, the circulation of money, the way they cashed his cheque, the Arabic numerals and the use of the decimal system. Not to mention the week being divided into seven days, the Sunday holiday. And, and ...

  He hadn’t seen any stars yet, the sky generally having been overcast, but fortunately it cleared for an hour the next evening. Budai had no great knowledge of astronomy and could identify only one or two constellations, the Pleiades, Orion and the Plough, from which last he had learned as a child to calculate the position of the pole st
ar. After a brief survey he succeeded in finding them, which suggested that he was in the northern hemisphere, for he was pretty sure the Plough could not be seen in the southern one. But if he was on earth, at what longitude and latitude? He had never taken much interest in these matters and could remember only what he had read in children’s books and travelogues. He struggled to recall the proper method of calculating such data and tried to work it out through sheer intelligence. He got so far as to take midday here, that is the point at which the sun was at its height, and compare it with the time at home, that is if he had had his watch with him and had not adjusted it, and to calculate the distance from the difference, dividing twenty-four hours by 360 degrees, meaning that every difference of four minutes would signify one degree. He might, in other words, have worked out whether he was east or west of his starting point, but he had forgotten his watch. Without it the method of divining distance would be a matter of speculation, at best a matter of strenuous mental gymnastics. The most promising way would be to measure the angle of the pole star relative to the horizon, but in order to do that he would need specialist instruments – a sextant or a theodolite – and where would he find one of those? With his naked eye he could only guess the rough height of the pole star – if that indeed was the pole star – and compare it to its height at home. The two being roughly the same, he was left to conclude he was on roughly the same latitude. But where? In Europe? Asia? America? Or in some hitherto unknown part of the globe?

  He had already considered the unpleasant climate and the ethnic diversity of the populace but it was hopeless trying to work anything out from that. There was nothing particular about the forms of dress here either, it was what you would find in most large European cities, just a little greyer and dingier on the whole, with a preponderance of uniforms. This reminded him that the black warder at the police station had been wearing the same kind of one-piece canvas boiler suit he had seen in many other places. Could it be that all those wearing similar uniforms, regardless of gender, were also guards and warders?

  In the meantime there was the blonde lift operator going up and down. He tried to work out what shift she was working but was confused each time because sometimes she was there when he calculated she should be, at other times not and, conversely, just when he felt sure she would be off duty there she was again by the noisy opening door. They had got round to greeting each other by now and there were occasional signs that she was showing some interest in him too. Twice she addressed Budai as he was about to get out and he smiled and shrugged his shoulder by way of an answer to show he had not understood. The crowd in that narrow space gave no time for explanations and he was quickly swept away by the others getting off.

  The next time they reached the ninth floor she put her hand on his arm to detain him and Budai finally understood that she wanted to take him somewhere. He remained in the cabin as it climbed floor by floor, slowly emptying, the numbers lighting up one after the other until they were on a much higher level. It was the top floor, the eighteenth, and by that time there were just the two of them. The girl opened the door and signalled for him to get out with her.

  The layout was quite different here. There can’t have been too many rooms, not for guests at least. There were large white containers and tubes of various sizes and thicknesses, probably part of the building’s heating system or related to the lift mechanism along with cogwheels and steel hawsers. And there was a kind of cafeteria or bar, closed just now, probably only deployed in the summer when it was hotter, a kind of top floor tower restaurant with a vista surrounded by an open terrace, as far as he could tell through the locked glass doors.

  The girl lit a cigarette and offered him one. Budai didn’t smoke and politely turned it down. She on the other hand was clearly a heavy smoker. She drew the smoke down hungrily and blew it out again as though she was well used to it. Smoking cannot have been permitted in the lift. She smiled at him somewhat apologetically as she smoked. Now that she was rested and relaxed, her face clear of exhaustion, her manner was easy, bright and careless. Her hair and make-up looked perfect. She did not try to force conversation, knowing it would be hopeless but did address a word or two to him.

  ‘Yeye tlehuatlan ... Muula alalálli?’

  She gave a soft, slow, melodic laugh, puffing out more smoke, her back propped on one of the containers. There was a buzz in the open lift, someone downstairs was calling it but neither of them moved. Budai pointed to himself and repeated his name a few times then pointed at her questioningly. She gave another laugh and answered with a two-syllable word. He didn’t quite catch it, and asked again.

  ‘Pepe? Tchetche?’

  Her pronunciation was so odd it might have been Bebe, Veve, Gege, Dede or anything else: each time she said it, it sounded different, sometimes it even sounded as if it had three syllables – Edede or Bebébé, though this might have been merely a pet name or an inflected version of her proper name. There was constant buzzing by this time, hordes of people must have been waiting on the floors below. Her brief break over, she stubbed out her cigarette and Budai entered the lift with her. As they descended it filled up with passengers again wedging themselves between him and her so they could not see each other at all. Only once they had reached the ninth floor could their eyes meet and exchange a complicit glance of farewell.

  It was light in the darkness: a thread, however narrow, that constituted a relationship, a connection, the first in fact since he had arrived here and, if he was careful not to lose it, that he might be able to follow out of this monstrous swarming labyrinth. Perhaps he would make a discovery that would startle the world and the time would come when, all things being equal, he might think himself fortunate to have found his way here, to have stumbled on it like an explorer. On the other hand he might simply have been fooling himself.

  Whether he was or not, the fact remained that he had to carry through the tasks he had set himself now, the first of those being to make some estimate of the city’s extent. So next morning he set out early, got into the first metro that passed that way and rode to the end of the line where the whole train emptied. By that time he was wondering which way to go once he was above ground so that he would be moving away from the centre rather than back towards it. It seemed logical to note the direction of the track he had travelled on to make sure he would go the same way, though the exit routes from the platform were so complex and winding with corridors, stairs, bends and intersections that he was lost by the time he arrived outside and had to make a snap decision as to which unknown direction to walk down. In order not to get lost on the way back he drew little pictures in his notebook of the salient corners, crossroads and buildings as he passed them.

  It was like all outer suburbs with endless stone walls, fences, chimneys, gasometers, wide and muddy streets, row on row of dull brick houses, a large factory in the distance, its roof jagged like a saw, its vast bulk silhouetted against the grey sky, the air smoky and sooty, bitter-tasting. Here and there he spotted a few grocery shops, some rag-and-bone tradesmen, and one or two general stores whose window displays were packed with dubious items. And wherever he went there were exactly the same dense crowds, no less dense than in the city centre. Could he have got on the wrong train? Did the rail network not extend to the city limits? Had the town outgrown itself? He wondered how it felt to have been born and spent all one’s life here. Perhaps they no longer noticed the overcrowding of every street, no longer cared about the eternal queuing and the terrible and degrading effect it was bound to have on their lives. Or could they no longer imagine anything else? Did they think it natural? Were they simply used to it? Is it possible to get used to something like this?

  Nor was the motor traffic any lighter here. Budai tried to read the number plates but couldn’t make much sense of them: the letters remained indecipherable, accompanied by a number composed of three or four or five figures, with not an international number-plate to be seen, nothing from which he might deduce the country he was in. W
ere he able to drive he could try to get hold of a car – to steal one in other words – and then consider at leisure what he might do with it. But he couldn’t drive and he didn’t want, didn’t dare, had no inclination to steal one, and in any case he was by no means sure he would be better off navigating the labyrinth of all these streets and squares without a map in a never-ending rush hour. It occurred to him that he had seen a bicycle in a shop window somewhere but he didn’t think he had enough money left to buy it and was not altogether sure whether it would help having one. It might make it just that much easier to get lost.

  Once again there was no sign of a railway station, not even of a railway bridge or railway cutting where he might at least begin to follow tracks. It was equally impossible finding an airport though every so often he would hear an aeroplane droning high above him. But it was useless speculating where it was going to land or where he might board one. If the city was on the coast it would be a good idea to find the way to the harbour or to trace the line of the sea until he discovered ships at dock, then proceed from there, sailing away, free as the wind. Any direction would do. But he could find no river nor canal, nor any kind of moving water that might lead him to the sea if only he walked long enough, since sooner or later all moving water had to arrive there. All he found were a few artificial pools between houses on a vacant site, their waters dirty, turning black and stagnant, like reservoirs constructed during the war. And an ornamental pond in a neglected park that he crossed but there was no waterway leading from it. It was full of wastepaper and empty bottles. Pools of oil floated on it.