Metropole

  Whatever the answer, he decided he would go no further that day. Not primarily because of his exhaustion: as far as that was concerned he could continue; he had, after all, plenty of stamina and determination, having kept fit at home by engaging in various sports and developing the discipline to stick to a chosen target without sparing himself or indulging in feelings of self-pity. But he knew that he could find his way back to the hotel from the temple and was less likely to do so from further off, especially in darkness. He would find it impossible to keep all the various landmarks in mind. And if he had really wandered into another town, what hope or assurance had he that he would find his way round this one more easily? The language, the alphabet and other such details would be just as incomprehensible and it was exactly the same indifferently jostling crowd here as there. Ideally he would start again at the very beginning, take proper bearings, gather the right information, get used to the traffic system and give up the lifestyle he had so carefully and painstakingly constructed for himself at home. He hadn’t anything to his name here, no back up. Where could he spend the night but at the hotel and, if he were forced to ask for accommodation elsewhere, how would he frame his request?

  The lights started coming on in blocks, each estate or major road in one go, all the tiny pieces slowly fitting together as an entire lit area rose out of the grey-blue. There was no end of it as far as he could see. In the far distance the rows and clusters of illumination melted into a single mass, its edges lost in glimmering fogs and milky galaxies like the stars in the Milky Way whose light comes to us from a distance of thousands or millions of light years ... Budai had been a city dweller all his life, the city, for him, being the only possible place of work, routine and entertainment. He was constantly drawn to the great cities of the world: the metropolis! And while the proportions of this one horrified and imprisoned him, he could not deny its sheer enormous urban beauty. Looking down on it from such a height he was almost in love with it.

  Budai had accumulated a number of texts since he first arrived, texts that he thought might prove useful in studying the local written language. First were the notices he had ample opportunity to observe on the hotel walls that probably referred to house rules. He also had a newspaper that he had bought on his first Sunday evening in one of the downtown areas but hadn’t yet looked at. For now, however, he was concentrating on the receipt the hotel had given him on his payment of the first bill, that being the only piece of writing to hand that offered some clue as to what it might say. He had already noticed that the totals were indicated in numerals only, not in letters, but he still thought it worth closer study.

  The printed form had the figure 921 at the very top among a group of unintelligible notes. Presumably the figure referred to the payer since he was the occupier of the room referred to but whether the rest of it was his name – that is to say if they knew him by name at all – was beyond proof or falsification, at least on the basis of his examination so far. He tried to figure out what each column might stand for and how they had arrived at the total of 35.80. The biggest figure would no doubt be the cost of the room and the rest would probably relate to it, including telephone charges or perhaps the heating or some kind of tax. But he couldn’t find a particularly significant amount: 5.40 was the biggest, the others including 2.70, 3.80 and so forth. There would have to have been some multiplication too, the per-night figure times seven for the week since he had received the bill precisely a week after he had arrived. But despite going through it untold times he was unable to find evidence of any such operation, neither multiplication nor addition.

  And so he started looking for the date, checking the top and bottom of the sheet: nothing of the kind there. It was impossible that there should be no date – could it be part of the text, written out in letters? But why? Or was this the custom here? ... Then he thought again and concentrated only on the printed columns but no one had filled them in by hand. He supposed that the reason these columns were empty was that they were for services he hadn’t required, such as breakfast, laundry, ironing and so forth. Stuck for ideas, he tried to isolate individual groups of letters hoping blindly to guess what each was, but that was no good of course because he would first have to know how they sounded in the local language. That’s when it struck him how short the words were, most of them consisting of one or two characters and not much more. Might they be abbreviations? In so far as they were, they would have been common enough for him to notice in other texts he had seen about the place, such as electricity or telephone bills, though if that was the kind of thing they were, his task would be extraordinarily difficult, not to say impossible.

  So he studied the newspaper instead, examining it, turning the pages over and over wondering what he could learn by studying them. But as he was doing this he had a peculiar and nasty surprise. Up to this moment he had worked on the assumption that the characters here would read from left to right, the lines from top to bottom as in Latin and other European scripts. That is what the bill, the house rules and the phone book he had pinched from the desk-clerk, the one that later disappeared from his room, told him. But now that he examined the paper more closely all kinds of doubts assailed him. For the name of the paper – in much bigger and bolder type – was not only at the top of the front page but also on the back page, precisely as it was on the front. So where to start reading? From the front? From the back? From the top or vice versa? Or maybe it could be read in mixed order, like Ancient Greek, in boustrophedon or ‘ox-turning’ manner where the direction of writing changes in every line, now left to right, now right to left?

  Or might it be that this newspaper was produced in a different language using a different script from the others? He tried a random test, picking out a letter here, a letter there and right from the beginning he found correspondences. He understood it less and less ... But there was no date here either, not in figures at least, and however he looked there was no way of telling whether this or that group of letters referred to the name of the city or the place where the newspaper was printed. Should he look for it in the title? Below it? Above? It seemed logical that such information should be displayed somewhere near the title, but which title, the one at the front or the one at the back?

  Then he thought of something else. He took out his remaining cash and sorted it by denomination. The notes showed portraits of unknown people, some landscapes with unfamiliar buildings seen from a distance, a few allegorical figures and some decorative motifs as most banknotes tended to do. Nor did the coins differ much from coins elsewhere: female heads, sheaves of corn, flowers, birds. He tried to work out the names of numbers by examining the text under the numerals for that is where they should have been on the notes. But there was a lot of writing there of various sorts, the entire banknote crowded with letters, words and phrases of various sizes, including reproductions of scrawled signatures. These might have referred to almost anything: the issuing bank or institution or the state itself, possibly the legislature by whose order the notes appeared. Perhaps he could find the usual formula to the effect that on presentation of this banknote the possessor was entitled to receive such and such amount, that forgery was a punishable offence and a good many other statements that are at times included – but whatever the case there was too much here to be certain of anything.

  It looked more promising to study the inscriptions on coins: coins, as far as he could remember – and indeed according to his experience of other countries – usually contained only the numeral, the unit of currency and the name of the state that had minted them. He jingled his change: there were 50s, 20s and 10s. The writing on all of them however was circular, on the perimeter, without any gaps, the end, wherever it was, leading back to the beginning. Given this, he not only failed to discover the name of the currency but even where he should start reading the various characters.

  He wasn’t going to get anywhere like this: it was like going around blindfolded, seeing nothing ... Should he set about writing down such i
ndividual letters as he could discern in the various inscriptions? And what good would that do? It was pointless, he hadn’t enough material to work on, not a single solid piece of information on which he could build a case or develop a view, nothing to go on at all. He needed a dictionary, or some bilingual piece of text, some brochure or other.

  He should look for a bookshop then, which is what he did, searching the town until he found one. True, he had a feeling that he had seen one in the course of his earlier explorations, in the quarter behind the building site with the skyscraper – which he found had reached the sixty-ninth floor. The streets were narrow there and the traffic was dense even by local standards, people packed together, the crush before certain shops almost life-threatening. He might have stumbled into the end-of-season sales. He had left home in mid-February and sales were generally held at the end of winter there too. All round him salesmen were crying their wares even out on the pavement, offering suits, knitwear and underwear at a clearly reduced price: shoppers rushed them, surrounded them in tight impermeable groups, the merchandise passing from hand to hand, in and out of boxes and cases as people bargained for them, everything mixed up and confused. The shops too were full to bursting point. Some had pulled down their shutters so as to keep more from entering but there was a scramble even in front of these, people shouting at those inside, clinging to the ironwork, some managing to push the shutters up and forcing their way in, ever more waves of them, pressing through, ever denser, ever more crushed. Here were vast numbers of shoes, carpet slippers and stockings on offer along with many other items. A blind sweet-vendor was repeating his trade cry in a high, falsetto, sing-song.

  Things were no different at the bookshop. Hordes were picking over towers of books, some searching the piles on the floor, some at the tables, some taking books off stands and discarding them just anywhere, throwing up great clouds of dust while others clambered up steps to examine the top shelves. It was such a chaotic state of affairs that Budai couldn’t work out which among them was the vendor. Jammed as he was in the crowd he tried in vain to address various customers, even bellowing in their ears but there was so much extraneous noise no one took any notice of him. People were either reading or browsing. It was only after he had spent a considerable time casting his eye about that he spotted a fat, liverish-looking man with a fleshy nose in the depths of the shop. The man wore a soft leather coat and drew attention to himself by being particularly loud and aggressive: he was busily putting books out, wrapping them and tying them up with string while at the same time vigorously bargaining, now taking books from the pile, now adding to it. He might just as easily have been selling potatoes or tomatoes. There was certainly no great opportunity here to explain anything or make a request, not even to point to something for however he tried to get close to the liverish man and make him understand what he wanted there were always others swarming around him, all talking at once. Whatever Budai had to say was lost in the hubbub.

  So he too started searching the stands hoping to come across a dictionary or at least a bilingual publication such as a travel guide, anything in a language he might recognise so that he could hold it open and explain to the owner that it was in fact a dictionary he wanted. But however many books he took down they were all in the same runic writing. Most of them were old antiquarian copies in various shapes with various bindings, often ragged and squashed, but there were also some almost new books with uncut pages. He tried to determine the direction of the text in these, left to right or vice versa, as he suspected had been the case with the newspaper. Simply leafing through the books like this offered no clue either way though there were some that seemed to have two title pages, one at the front and one at the back, or perhaps it was the main title page at one end and the half-title at the other.

  Here too there were reductions in price, the numbers written on the inside of the back cover being ruled out with ink and smaller figures inserted. But even so the prices looked frighteningly high compared to the cash he had in his pocket. The lowest were priced 3 or 4, the rest at 10, 15 and 25, which was more than he had altogether. He carried on browsing for over an hour flicking through a great variety of books. There were volumes of verse, things that looked like novels, small press publications, popular books in cloth and paper bound editions, technical and scientific material printed on shiny paper about what was likely to be an extraordinary range of fields, not to mention diploma works on chemistry and mathematics complete with diagrams and footnotes, the textual parts of which might have been worth studying in greater detail were he not so abysmally ignorant of their subjects. There were also periodicals of uncertain content, complete runs of them, bound catalogues with serial numbers and endless notes and figures indicating who knows what; folios of drawings and caricatures of people he did not recognise, some with indecipherable signatures and even a few lines of verse; theatre and concert programmes; magazines about this or that wholly unfamiliar actress photographed in various costumes; then children’s books, story books – if that is what they were – and maybe a few school text-books too, and much else ... But he did not come across a single book written in another language, not even in part. For want of anything more helpful he would have taken a handbook of grammar but he found not one among the many thousands on thousands of books on sale.

  All this was depressing enough and exhausting too with all the pushing, shoving and noise, though everything would immediately have been all right if he could have explained his need for a dictionary. The crush was such that he failed to make any sort of contact with the dealer who was surrounded by an impatient crowd of customers. He tried communicating with him but simply could not get his attention. Having had enough of this farce and judging any further attempt to be pointless he finally chose a book for himself. He had just enough time to catch the dealer’s eye, show him the book and pay him the money.

  The book seemed to be a collection of short stories, that at least was what the typography suggested, that and the amount of dialogue in the text. Here, however, unlike in the other books, the writing ran unambiguously from left to right and top to bottom as he could tell by the titles of the stories and the way the beginnings and ends were presented. The book was not particularly thick and the price was relatively low too, a mere 3.50. The cover showed an exotic landscape in green and blue pastel colours: a bay, palm trees, a hillside with a crowd of white villas, roof rising above roof in the background. It might have been the deep blue water and the wide horizon that first attracted him. The flap carried a photograph, presumably of the author, a man of about forty or so in a polo-neck jumper, his face round, his hair cut short, his body relaxed, apparently unposed. He was standing in front of a slatted fence, his eyes narrowing, his expression tired or slightly bored, with a slightly mocking smile playing about his lips as if he were in the act of suppressing a yawn. Everything about the image looked familiar but he couldn’t remember where he had seen it. In any case, his look, his pose, his general appearance was clearly that of a contemporary writer, Budai felt, which might have been another reason he had noticed the book. He wouldn’t, after all, get far with an old work using archaic language or with one written in high poetic manner, nor with anything technical, scientific, jargon-laden, specialist, didactic or abstract. What he needed was something written in contemporary colloquial language, the sort of language spoken on the street, which he would have to learn word by word. The most likely books, in fact the only books properly fit for the purpose, would be short stories or something like them.

  Once back home he stopped in the hotel lobby and studied the maps displayed in the gift shops. There were various kinds for sale, almost all different, and he was suddenly confused as to which he should choose. He picked up one at random and opened it out, assuming it would show the city. But he found it hard to orientate himself in it: the streets and squares looked tiny in the densely scrawled plan that entirely filled the sheet and there was no sign of the outskirts of town where estates should thin out,
or was this perhaps a map of the inner city only, or of a single postal district? He saw no railway lines, at least none of the thin black lines that normally represented them. Nor was there a river, not at least in the area covered by the map, only a few tiny dots of blue that might have been municipal ponds or the water reservoirs he had seen here and there. In the bottom right-hand corner of the map he found a long narrow light blue band that would clearly have continued on another sheet, the other end of which, however, snaked on until it simply stopped, thereby dashing Budai’s hopes that it might represent flowing water. It must have been at most a minor tributary of some distant river though there was no way of being certain of that. More likely it was a ditch of the kind he walked past near the slaughterhouse.

  He would like to have discovered the hotel on it and to work out its relationship to the maps he saw in the underground. But how could he begin to do so when he didn’t even know which way up to hold it? He couldn’t remember which end was the top when he picked it up. He had noted down the name of the metro station nearest the hotel; it was just that he couldn’t find it on the map. He couldn’t even see metro lines, neither the continuous line nor the dotted one normally used to indicate networks that ran underground. There were no single or double circles, empty or full, with or without a single line through them that stood for stations on other maps. Most cities, he recalled, represented metro stops with a capital M. Yes, but what letter was the equivalent of M here? Or could it be that the quarter of town represented had never historically possessed an underground system? Might it be that this wasn’t a local map at all? But then what town was it?