Metropole

  And so he set to asking passers-by again, trying the word sea in various languages, using his hands, palm down, to indicate the motion of the waves, and making swimming movements with his arms. He repeated the word time and time again, in this language and that language, in all the languages he knew, even in Greek:

  ‘Thalassa! Thalassa!’

  It was soon clear that no-one understood him, everyone hurrying about his or her business, some of them too preoccupied to attend to his tedious private affairs. After a while Budais’ lack of success started to inhibit him. His tongue grew stiff in his mouth. He lost heart and stopped asking. Nevertheless he kept pressing forwards through the constant crowd, driven on by an instinct stronger than any conscious notion. Having determined not to give up, he had to see something through to the end, utterly committed, whatever the result.

  Fog, cold and sharp, was settling on the streets, so dense in places he could hardly see six feet in front of him. Cars had put on their lights and were moving at walking pace, locked together to the music of horns, cries and revving engines. Budai paid particular attention to landmarks now since he would have to find his way back. In a clear patch between wads of fog there rose a circus tent, a huge, peaked, white canvas structure, then it disappeared again. It was of no interest to him. What was it to do with him? He strode on swathed in grey-and-lilac mist. Now there was an illuminated gateway. What might it be?

  Eventually he noticed that there were far fewer cars and that he was surrounded by a ring of tiny swaying lights. They blinked mysteriously, flickering here and there through the milky vapour that had suddenly descended. Were they stars? Nightmares? He couldn’t tell how far away they were, all perspective lost in the soft-thick air. It was only later, having stumbled over mounds of freshly dug earth and into some blocks of stone and marble that he realised he had wandered into a cemetery and that the little lights were candles and tapers, some on graves, some in the hands of visitors. There were so many of them proceeding down the narrow cinder paths between the tombs and the mausoleums that there seemed to be no space left. Budai wondered if it was All Souls Night? But who knows whether they kept such feasts here? Or had he got himself mixed up in a particular funeral procession, that of a well-known figure perhaps, whose burial would attract a great crowd? Or was it simply that in this city everything was crowded? There was music coming from somewhere, impossible to say from where, the sound of an organ or some other heavy, dense sound and human voices too perhaps, a slow, attenuated wail that might have its origins far above or far below him. The monuments seemed to be of various shapes and sizes as far as he could tell in the fog, some with statues, some with pictures of the deceased, some with flowers or vases for holding flowers, but the differences between them were, as ever, minor with only the cross missing or perhaps it was just that he couldn’t make it out on the ones he was close enough to see. The inscriptions were in the usual cuneiform lettering. There was not much opportunity of examining them at leisure since he was continually being pushed forwards, nudged this way and that, so it seemed likely that the flood of people was actually heading in a specific direction. Then he found himself outside the cemetery as suddenly as he had found himself in it.

  The fog was slightly less thick now. He was on a workers’ estate, in a row of uniform small houses with plaster falling off the walls and tiles missing from roofs, their yards serving as minimal kitchen gardens. He came to a high stone wall with a large stone gate. A great mass of people was gathered here, many hundreds, not standing in queues but in loose knots as elsewhere, jostling, loud masses of them, all pressing inwards, swarming through the entrance. Budai’s attention was drawn to them and their noisy mysterious endeavour but all the time the size of the curious horde behind him was increasing. He couldn’t turn back now even if he wanted to. They continued slowly to press forward though the gates were too narrow to accommodate them all. New people kept arriving, ever more of them, pushing and shoving. At one point they were so jammed together he feared being crushed to death or being trampled down. When he finally got in he felt he had been through a grinder.

  He seemed to have arrived in a zoo or at least an ape and monkey enclosure because there were no other animals here. Of apes, however, there was no lack: cage after cage were full of them. But there were just as many visitors staring at the cages, shouldering and elbowing their way through in the effort to get ever closer to the bars, mainly children of course but a good number of adults too. There was a very wide range of anthropoids, at least in so far as he, with his limited knowledge of zoology, could establish: chimpanzees, macaques, baboons, huge gorillas and tiny silk-monkeys, gibbons, mandrills, marmosets. The odd thing was that however many there were they were all individual, each clearly different from the other as one could see if one looked at them long enough, and, furthermore, each was of a wholly unique character, some running, some dangling, some stalking impatiently to and fro, some nibbling with careworn expressions, some peeling fruit, some playing, some scratching or absentmindedly hunting fleas, some proud, some uncouth, some charming, some terrifying, pulling faces that were now pious, now meditative, some screaming, some muttering, some chattering, some croaking, some crowing, some excited, some bored, some loathing each other, some devoted to each other, fighting, mating, or simply squatting in a corner, resigned to a kind of world weariness, dreaming of forests and freedom.

  There were notices everywhere on the cages carrying longer or shorter texts. Budai preferred the short ones of course. They were the ones most likely to give no more confusing information than the species of monkey on display together with its Latin equivalent as was the general custom in zoos. It wouldn’t even be a problem if the latter were written in the so far indecipherable local characters, in fact that might help in offering a key to understanding them. For example, if he knew what the Latin for baboon was – and he happened to remember it was papio – it would be easy enough to work out what character represented what sound, or group of sounds, and that information could then be carried forward to the next word and so on until the whole alphabet was solved ... This was all very well but there were so many notices, some of which might be warnings or instructions regarding the feeding of the animals or information about the extent of the animal’s natural habitat, its lifecycle or other such matter, or simply directives not to smoke or leave litter and so forth. Given such a profusion of notices it seemed an impossible task to work out which of them referred to the specific species of monkey behind the bars, particularly in Latin, that is if the Latin name was provided at all.

  There were very long queues for the green-painted lavatories with separate ones for men and women, and since there was no way of avoiding them he had to wait for as long as it took ... Later, standing on a bridge, having chosen for no particular reason to go one way rather than another, he saw an open-air lido in the distance. There were many pools, both bigger and smaller, and despite the cool wintry weather, all of them were crowded, the various bathers hardly having any space in which to move and yet everywhere one or other figure was leaping into the water, splashing about and making a general noise. People were hanging like grapes off the diving boards. He looked to find the place where the used water might drain away but it was hard to see through the mist and steam and there seemed to be nothing on the surface, no ostensible way of conducting the water. There had to be underground pipes.

  It seemed much more like an outer suburb now with fewer houses and those broken up by vacant sites, lawns and play areas, though the traffic on the main roads was no less busy. The fog had lifted: it felt cold and dry and soon the soot-red disc of the sun appeared, its edges sharply defined in the dirty sky. Here and there a few improvised dwellings stood, made out of cardboard or the carcasses of old buses, while in the distance a rust-coloured slag heap closed off the horizon.

  He came to a place where both pedestrians and road traffic seemed stuck in a bottleneck so there was no forward motion at all except by thrusting his way through the
crush, using his shoulders and hips: there must have been some kind of obstacle stopping them. Budai felt his mission was more urgent than theirs and, knowing there was no alternative, he set about shoving people aside. After some ten to fifteen minutes of struggle and a good few kicks and blows received in retaliation he reached the point at which they were being held up.

  Cattle were being driven across the street, a lot of them, an entire herd, proceeding slowly, their lowing mingled with the sound of whips cracking, dogs barking and a general sound of lamentation. The herdsmen wore rubber boots and leather or cord jackets, as well as wide brimmed hats or berets. They looked a cross between cowboys and drifters ... Budai thought it might be a good idea to follow them so he left the road and made his way over the grass to walk beside the cattle though he was dressed quite differently from the herdsmen. He couldn’t have explained quite why he was doing this but it hardly mattered which way he went now as long as it was out of town. No one asked him what he was doing there and his presence hardly registered in the constant confusion, in the clouds of dust and the universal movement, from which, occasionally, one of the wilder young bulls would break ranks, causing a great to-do as excited dogs barked and determined herdsmen whooped as, together, they drove it back into the herd.

  Now they were on sandy ground, moving past a lumberyard where circular saws whined cutting tree trunks into smaller sections, then past another built-up estate where the herd clattered and beat on the paving with a noise like dull thunder that took a while to die away. Eventually they drove their mobile market into a fenced-off area like a sheep-pen and from there directly into a high-vaulted building. Budai forged ahead of the others here, partly out of curiosity, partly carried along by his own momentum, but once inside noticed that while most of the cattle had already ambled a long way into the great hall he could no longer see the head of the herd which must have been accommodated in spaces further off. Men and cattle completely filled the hall. Beside the drovers there were men in canvas overalls too, bustling about while the mooing and bellowing noise grew ever more baleful, each sound echoing off the bare walls, the air thick with warm, living-sickly smells. This must, no doubt, be the slaughterhouse.

  The whole noisy melée was goaded into one vast hall lit by a great skylight. The floor here was running with slippery scarlet blood. The animals must have scented the danger because the smell of blood, if nothing else, made them halt and resist though there was no way back, nowhere to run, because ever more cattle were being driven in behind them. When it came to their turn each was suddenly surrounded by a group of strapping men, one holding its horns, another tying it down with a rope, until it was forced to stand astraddle. Then, whoever had the cleaver brought it down on the nape of its neck. Its poor legs gave way and collapsed. At the moment of collapse another man delivered a blow to its brow, cutting it open. But the beast must have lived on a good while yet for it fell sideways and carried on kicking on the stones, throwing its head back now and then, even when they buried a knife in its throat and drained its life blood, at which point the sad martyred look on its face very gradually glazed over.

  Budai could not bear to look. He wanted to turn away but whichever way he gazed there were dying animals sprawling on the ground, ten, twenty, maybe thirty at a time, who would then immediately be dragged further along, cut into pieces, skinned and sliced, while all the while fresh ones took their places under the cleaver so that they too might be cut down in turn, the process lasting, it seemed for ever, blows raining down again and again. It was if every cow in the world were being driven to slaughter. There was no end to it. Budai could not go back for fear of being crushed by the incoming herd so had to move forward right through the thick of the killing, treading over skin and guts and viscera and sections of flesh, wading through blood and the steam of blood, between butchers and youths covered in blood, past blood-stained walls, past bloody pillars. He’d faint if he did not get out soon.

  When finally he emerged from the hall he found himself in a corner of the courtyard. A variety of processing chambers opened on to it, rooms for sausage and salami production. There were machines for mincing the meat and turning it to slop. The further he got from the cleavers, from the indifferent industry of slaughter for the meat trade, the harder he found it to forget what he had seen. His knees were trembling and he felt so weak he had to grasp a nearby metal bar to avoid collapsing. Frail and lonely, seeking a comforting thought to help him recover from the shock, he brought to mind the lift girl puffing away at her cigarette on the top floor of the hotel. He felt very close to her now, as close as to a life-support machine. He wanted to hold her tightly, even if only in imagination. Unable to speak her language, he would never be capable of sharing his nightmare experience with her. He didn’t even know how to address her in his thoughts: Bébé? Tetéte? Epepe?

  He found the back door out of the abattoir and followed the line of a long ditch. He saw that the water in it was moving but the fallen leaves on its surface did not even tremble, simply sat there, muddied, in a mush of fermentation. Further along, rather surprisingly, the terrain became more urban once more: there were more buildings of a greater variety with a modern round-tower rising into the sky at one street corner. Could he have turned in the wrong direction after the metro station after all, or had he turned off at some stage and found himself back in one of the central districts from where the train had set out? Or was this an altogether different town? But would one be built so close to the first?

  In front of him was a shoe shop where a young man, paralysed from the waist down, was sitting in a wheelchair and playing the violin – though he was losing track of events so fast he could not be sure later whether he had actually seen him or if he was a memory from some other, earlier occasion. The empty violin case was next to the wheelchair on the pavement. It was open and there was a note of some sort fixed to it whose meaning Budai tried to work out by considering the context. It must be an effective cry for pity since passers-by, as many here as elsewhere, were busily dropping coins into the case with even more coins lying on the ground. A considerable crowd had formed a circle round the young man, obstructing the traffic. The boy played reasonably well, handling the instrument with confidence and was probably a music student as the text might possibly have indicated. It was a strange melody he was playing, simple enough to be catchy, the phrases clear and packed, suggesting an aching desire for something, or at any rate that was how Budai interpreted it. Feeling in no particular hurry to move on he joined the ring of listeners. The young man in the meantime continued playing the same melody over and over again, his useless withered legs and shod feet dangling from the wheelchair. His face a trifle puffy, he bent his locks over the instrument and kept bowing away, ever the same tune, never looking up, ignoring everyone, his gaze empty above the violin. Might he have been blind?

  Going by the audience response and the steady accumulation of offerings, he guessed the text on the case might have suggested something to the effect that the crippled young man was enrolled at a school for music and required support to help him continue his studies, studies he had had to abandon on account of a financial crisis. And whether this was merely what he imagined to be the situation or whether that was what the writing actually suggested – even though the whole thing might have been a confidence trick, one of many such played on the naïve susceptibilities of a credulous urban public – Budai still found it touching and was moved. True, he was feeling bereft himself with no idea how long he was doomed to tread the pavements of these endless streets with their acres of brick dwellings and countless inhabitants, but despite having decided to strictly limit his spending henceforth and to buy only what was absolutely necessary, he too threw a coin to the violinist.

  Then he went on his way, forging on. Now he seemed to have arrived in an area that felt more central: the roads narrowed, there were traffic policemen on certain street corners, one or two older grand houses appeared and another tall fortress or ruined bastion of t
he kind he had seen before. He was tired with all the walking he had done by now but there was no park or bench on which he might sit and take a rest.

  Seeking a resting place he entered a glazed and vaulted building complete with tower and dome, with four great clocks telling the same time on its dignified façade. Behind it stretched a vast long hall whose front and side doors were continually packed with people entering and leaving. The form of it was so familiar there must be one of these everywhere in the world. Might this be a railway station? Budai’s heart beat faster. But there were no carriages, no engines and no platforms inside that hangar-like, enormous space, roofed with a vast cloak of glass rimmed in steel. In fact, something about the sweep and movement of the crowd suggested something quite different. And yet the whole building, at least from outside, in its main features, and, examining it more closely, even in its floor plan, resembled a station to the degree that he felt obliged to consider the possibility that it might have been planned as such, and that only later was it adapted to some other purpose. What purpose that was he could not immediately tell; the wide hall full of people must have served as a general waiting room for something. To either side, right and left, opened a series of colonnaded passages full of groups of people, some standing silently, others engaged in vigorous discussion, mostly gathered near the exit doors. There was, however, nowhere to sit down.