Metropole

  He couldn’t really spend all his time trying to solve the obscure wherewithal of texts of which he did not recognise a single letter. He lacked the determination, he lacked the detachment: he feared going mad. In any case, to go out was to risk missing the girl: there were times when she worked both mornings and nights. But he couldn’t just sit around in his room doing nothing: he was constantly restless, anxious to carry on researching and sniffing out the truth, to come and go, fearing that if he simply stood still no one would look for him.

  So he spent most of his time in the lobby keeping track of the movements of the lift. The vast hall was always full, even at night, people sitting in armchairs, dozing or teetering sleepily to and fro. The queue at reception was always long with ever more guests carrying ever more luggage. What was strange was that he had only seen luggage enter the hotel: nothing seemed to leave it. Guests must be departing all the time, their luggage must be somewhere. Perhaps if he were to investigate that ... Might the luggage be carried out through another door? And where would that door be? Surely it could not be that people arrived here never to leave?

  He glanced up and spotted the delegation of exotic hierarchs he had seen that first morning, that motley crew of bearded, brilliantly dark-skinned, caftan-and-chain-wearing elders in high fur caps, who were once more proceeding in silent and dignified manner past respectful crowds that opened before them. Nothing they wore hinted at what part of the world they came from or indeed which religion they represented.

  He took a short walk in the street, passing the fat doorman who always greeted him by raising his hand to his cap. He only went as far as the skyscraper-in-construction to see how far they had got. They were still working away at great pace, armies of builders swarming over the structure, welders sparkling, mobile platforms rising and sinking under floodlights. It was odd that the building had only grown by an extra floor since he had last seen it and counted the floors – they had got to seventy – though he had been here longer.

  There was just as much bustle at night as at any other time. People were constantly pouring in and out of the metro, great ranks of exhausted workers, their faces puffy with sleep, heading towards industrial estates on the outskirts to their dawn occupations. Others were merely dawdling, drifting along aimlessly, bumping into each other on corners or in squares, getting involved in arguments, discussing sporting events or waiting for the morning papers. There were syrupy alcoholic drinks on sale, the kind that had made him drunk before. He would have welcomed a little alcohol, the tipsy light-headedness it offered, the lack of responsibility it conferred, but he stood by his resolution and was thrifty with his money, what remained of it.

  Far in the distance he noticed the same neon lights alternating between red and blue. What might they be advertising? From a basement room nearby there rose something he had thus far missed: the sound of drums and music, waves of general noise. Out of curiosity he looked in. It was a large room, a kind of dance hall packed to the rafters, though owing to the smoke, the racket and the crowds that filled every nook and cranny, he couldn’t make out where the floor was. People were dancing between the tables, at the bar, by the wall and on the steps leading down. Of course it was mainly the young wearing the brightly fashionable or ostentatiously ragged universal uniform of youth. It wasn’t just boys dancing with girls, but girls with girls and boys with boys too. They weren’t really in pairs: it was more everyone with everyone, all higgledy-piggledy yet each alone, each an island unto himself or herself in the general movement. The sexes were hard to distinguish in any case, many of the boys sporting long feminine hairstyles, a lot of the girls in trousers. Apart from that, it seemed the whole world was there, each part of it, every human race represented by someone, all mixed up topsy-turvy, tugging and shrugging, kicking up heels, waving arms to the rhythm of the music.

  There was no trace of musicians though: it must have been a record-player or some similar equipment. It was unbearably loud, non-stop, one piece exactly like another, consisting entirely of beat with practically no trace of melody, the whole thing broken, syncopated, aggressive, shameless, rhythmic. But it was the volume above all that hurt Budai, his head almost exploding with it: he couldn’t understand how people could bear the constant pounding.

  He was about to leave when there was a kind of disturbance or panic by the far wall. At first he couldn’t tell what precisely it was, it was just that the movement was different, no longer to the rhythm of the music. After a few seconds he realised the cause of it: a fight had broken out, and, as the space cleared, he could see it was between blacks and whites. He had no idea what it was about and could only guess, for no very good reason, that the slim, straw-blonde girl who appeared for a moment between the groups of brawlers, the one with the indifferent, mocking expression on her face, had something to do with it.

  By the time Budai noticed it it was practically over, the groups having been separated from each other. Officials appeared as if from nowhere, uniformed men wearing those ubiquitous brown boiler suits. They blew whistles and formed a line that served as a living barrier between the two camps. Despite this, the groups continued threatening each other with unchecked fury, trying to break the line, pulling faces and screaming. Budai was curious as to what they were saying, it might well help him in his quest for understanding. As far as he could make out under the music – for that had gone on uninterrupted – the imprecations and challenges consisted of raising one’s fists and shouting something like:

  ‘Gyurumba! ... Ugyurumbungya!’

  This could mean any number of things, like: Filth! Dickhead! Bastard! You just wait! Come on then! I’ll smash your face in! Oh yeh?! All the same, Budai noted them down in his book phonetically along with the range of possible meanings.

  At that point one of the white youths, a thickset young man in a pullover, reached across the line of boiler-suited figures and before anyone could stop him smashed a bottle in the face of a lanky black boy. There was a shattering sound – was it the bottle breaking or bones? The man who had been hit swayed about with dark red blood running down his dark face. The security men – or whatever they were – blew their whistles excitedly and tried to press forward to separate the combatants. But now, on the other side of the barrier, one of the other black boys snapped his flick-knife open, ducked under the linked hands of the guards and, lightning-quick, stabbed the man in the pullover. The man who had been stabbed looked around with a foolish, startled expression, wondering what had happened. He pressed his palm to his waist where the blade had penetrated and slowly, very slowly, fell forward and doubled up with the same blank stare of incredulity that this should have happened to him of all people. His body soon grew still in his companions’ arms, the look on his face unchanged.

  A siren started outside: it would have been police or the ambulance. The girl’s blonde hair floated briefly through the mêlée, then the police burst in, their feet drumming on the stairs, using rubber truncheons to clear the way. Budai had no desire to resume his acquaintance with them. He sneaked away as best he could. However disturbing the scene had been he had not forgotten that his chief business was with Epépé. He didn’t want to be away too long since she might be back on the lifts by now. He headed back to the hotel.

  She was not there so he tried the telephone in his room again. He had a few numbers now that generally answered at night and he could even recognise one or two of the voices. It was a strange, dreamlike experience conversing with someone without being able to understand a word of the language. He rang them time and again. He was nourishing a hope that the voice at the end of the line might eventually give his own number as people often did when they had been misdialled. In actual fact, of course, it was impossible to sort the mumble and jabber from the information he was seeking and yet, despite the pointlessness of the exercise, he enjoyed saying hello, asking questions, listening to the person at the other end, knowing that he too was being listened to and imagining what kind of person it was ... Interesting
ly enough there were some people who didn’t put the phone down for a while, who, despite knowing there was no sense in carrying on the conversation, nevertheless entered the spirit of this absurd game – perverts of some sort possibly. Or maybe they were simply bored with nothing better to do.

  One time though, just as he was preparing to call someone, the telephone rang. This surprised him so much he suddenly felt terrified and did not dare lift up the receiver. And once he did pick it up he was at a loss as to what language to use and was able to do no more than mutter a faint hello. It was a female voice, fast, garbled, like someone in a hurry, wanting to get a brief message through, the tone of the last-but-one syllable pitched higher than the rest, suggesting a possible question? Having recovered a little, Budai tried to explain in English, French, Russian and Chinese that he did not understand her. Her response was to repeat what she had said more slowly, accentuating each syllable, but that of course made no difference. He tried various other languages as and when they occurred to him, but the woman did not hear him through and, giving a curt laugh, cut the connection.

  Who was it? What did it mean? Had someone discovered his whereabouts? Was someone at home looking for him? Might it have been the airline realising there had been a mistake? Or was it someone answering one of the notices he had put up? Could the management have received the letter he had sent them? But they would know from that that he did not speak their language, for that after all was precisely what his letter had explained. And would they be calling him this way, by telephone? Or could it be a wrong number?

  Suddenly he had an idea. It must have been Bébé! Why didn’t he think of that before?! In all those trips up and down she was bound to have noticed his key with the number on it, why shouldn’t she have rung him? And if it was her she would have been wanting to tell him that she had arrived and was back on duty, waiting for him.

  And indeed there she was in one of the opening lift doors, smiling and winking at him. He could hardly wait till they could be alone together. Once he was inside the lift with her he tried to mime a telephone call, dialling with his fingers, putting an imaginary receiver to his ear to show that he had received her message and had come in response to it ... She smiled at him a few times while operating the lift but with a certain guardedness now. This made him wonder whether he was misinterpreting Veve’s behaviour, thinking it was intimacy when it was no more than her normal kindness.

  Once they had arrived on the eighteenth Budai tried to discover her telephone number by handing her his notebook and encouraging her to write it down, air-dialling, imitating the sound of the telephone bell and so forth. But she just shrugged, smoked her cigarette and seemed to understand nothing – or maybe just pretended not to understand, not wanting to give him her number. Might it be that she did not have a telephone? And in any case, where did she live, and with whom? Did she have a husband or was she still unmarried? Did she live with her family or alone? He knew nothing about her but if he was honest with himself such facts did not interest him too much anyway. What he required from her had nothing to do with her circumstances, or if her circumstances came into it at all it was only in so far as they allowed her enough time to be occupied with him. The circumstances might be of even less importance than that since what he assumed was that the minutes they spent on the top floor were stolen by Ete from her work. He couldn’t afford the luxury of having his attention diverted, could not allow the one straw that chance had offered him to slip from his grasp. There was only one thing Budai wanted from the girl for the time being and everything else was secondary. He wanted her to be his language tutor.

  They were still on numbers. He thought they might sound different because in her answers she was confusing cardinals with ordinals though these could sound very different indeed, as in one, two and first, second in English or egy, kettö and elsö, második in Hungarian ... But after long, exhausting, patient and sometimes nerve-jangling questioning he did succeed in establishing – albeit uncertainly and sometimes downright dubiously – the first ten numbers. So 1 is dütch, 2 is klóz or gróz, 3 is tösh, or possibly bár, 4is dzsedirim, 5i s bár or tösh (the numbers 3 and 5 seemed to be curiously interchangeable, or it might have been that he simply couldn’t distinguish), 6 is kusz, 7 is rodj or dodj, 8 is hododj, 9 is dohododj, 10 is etsrets.

  These names did not remind him of any language living or dead. True, there was some slight, if imagined, similarity between dzsedirim (4) with the Russian chitiri for the same number. Kusz (6) did sound somewhat like the Finnish kuus, and etsrets (10) recalled the Arabic asr. But these were mere coincidences. It was surprising to find the 7, 8 and 9 so clearly related to each other, though that too might owe something to misunderstanding or mishearing.

  What made his life generally more difficult was that he could never be quite sure what sound he was hearing. At home he had developed a sure-fire ability to make fine phonetic distinctions as part of his work. It was just that in this city the locals employed strange articulations he had not met elsewhere. They seemed to voice words differently somehow, less clearly, not according to the normal rules – in civilised countries anyway – of enunciation. They spoke gutturally, from the throat, but not like the Chinese, Japanese or Arabs: the vowels were more murmured, their tones inconsistent; the consonants croakier, more chewed over, full of rattling, clicking noises. That seemed to point to an African language, that of the Bushmen/Hottentots, but the frequent use of tl suggested Central American Aztec. The preponderance of ö and ü sounds reminded him of Turkish. But this was all no more than impression, far short of certainty. Scholars had calculated that there were close to 3000 languages in the world. How could he relate this one to the others on the basis of such poor evidence?

  His next recourse was to identify modes of address, hoping to catch some of them in Tyetye’s speech. He listened intently to everything but however he tried there was only one sound he could pick out: klött or klütt, that was if he had heard it properly, recalling that on his first major excursion, at the market hall, the driver, who had taken him for an unemployed lout and had called him over to stack packages, had addressed him using the same word, as if to say, Oy! You! It was just that here it seemed to be the only form of address, a simple universal instead of the various alternatives on offer elsewhere, such as tu, vous, you, mister, darling, ducky, sir, madam, miss, comrade, mate, buddy and so forth. This was of little or no help. If the same form was directed to men, women, children and old people on every social level, with no hint whether the relationship was superior or inferior, the information, from a linguist’s point of view, was not worth much. There was nothing he could do with it, no conclusion he could draw, little he could learn: it was a blind alley.

  It was a similar problem with the form of greeting – parasara or patarechera. This was another term he recalled from earlier, at the hotel entrance, for example, where the fat man in the gold braid would mutter it while holding open the swing door: he said it morning, noon and night, when he left and when he returned. He kept saying it. It was another piece of information, useless from the linguistic point of view, a verbal unit incapable of being split into constituent parts.

  Then he looked for common idioms, such as please, excuse me, danke, bitt, etc. It occurred to him that he himself could elicit some of these. If, for example, he bumped into someone in the street, or he invited someone to step on the metro escalator before him, the other person would be likely to reply with the equivalent of sorry, or thank you ... He got nowhere at all with personal pronouns though he spent long enough on them trying to isolate the appropriate words and work out how I or you or he or she might sound. He certainly tried hard enough, gesturing and asking the same question time and time again but however he quizzed Dededé the girl seemed not to understand at all. She simply shook her head and blew out smoke with an expression that said there was no point in continuing. Why was she being so negative now when she had been so kind and prepared to help before? It might be, thought Budai, that t
here were no personal pronouns here. It was theoretically possible that they addressed each other in a kind of nursery fashion, using only the third person singular that stood in for all else. That was the way children talked about themselves: Johnny eating, baby walking, walkies. There were some primitive peoples where such rules operated. But how did a city with skyscrapers square with stone-age inflections?

  He hadn’t really given the matter a thought but he soon realised through bitter experience how hard it was to settle on specific meanings and how difficult it was to set up a situation in which only one kind of reaction was possible. He either received answers that were too long and impenetrable or heard something completely different every time he asked the same question, words or mime. Take simple gestures: you wouldn’t imagine the range of meanings they seemed to convey! Western Europeans moved their heads horizontally when wishing to indicate a negative, Greeks threw their heads back. Bulgarians nodded and called you by spreading their arms wide. Eskimos supposedly rubbed noses instead of kissing. There was a lot of this kind of thing – but who could explain the meaning of gestures to him here?

  But his mind was tireless and never stopped working on ever newer schemes. The best of them was that he should concentrate on and collect public texts and notices where the meaning was clear and unambiguous or could be rationally worked out. For example, there was the word that appeared on the fronts of taxis to which there could be no obvious alternative. Or the notice that appeared on the yellow barriers of metro entrances. However it might be pronounced it seemed unarguable that the word should mean ‘underground railway’. It was the same with out-of-order public telephone booths, from which he had tried to steal the directory before the policeman appeared. Or the sign on closed shops, the short single word that should mean closed. Besides these he noted down words he guessed might mean restaurant (or inn or grill or diner) or buffet (canteen, café, bistro) as well as working out the letters involved in laundry (or possibly cleaner, dry-cleaning, launderette).