Metropole

  ‘Tuluplubru klött apalapa gróz paratléba ... Klött, klött, klött ... !’

  Listening to this Budai could make out the expression klött, which he had earlier established to be a mode of address. And gróz, if he was not mistaken, was their word for the number 2 ... He studied the two sheets of paper. The top one seemed familiar and he quickly came to the conclusion that it was a carbon copy of his last hotel bill, the one he had received last Friday, the one he had not yet settled. Next to it was a similar form with a similar rubric complete with notes, differing only in its bottom-line figure which was a little less than the other one – presumably the bill for this week.

  The speech he had just heard must therefore have meant something like: First you must settle the two outstanding bills, yes you, you! ... In other words: We are keeping your belongings and passport as surety, you can have them back once you have paid up. That was if he was guessing correctly and the clerk was not saying something altogether different.

  Budai did not have enough money, of course, not nearly enough; after all his morning shopping he only had a little change left. He realised that the arranged meeting with Devebe would not take place now. What bothered him most was that she would be knocking at the door of 921, all set for their rendezvous, only to confront the new occupants of the room. What a shock it would be. And there wasn’t even a way of leaving a message for her. This, above all, was unbearable, maddening, agonising. The blood rushed to his head: it was like a cloud hovering over him. The storm was inside him. He wanted to hit out, to break things, to murder someone. He no longer cared about anything. Quite beside himself now, he stamped and groaned and screamed in his mother tongue: no matter if no one else understood him, he could not contain his despair.

  ‘Scandalous! ... Absolutely scandalous! Crooks and bastards the lot of you ... filthy swine, bastards!’

  He was making a proper scene, causing an affray. A curious crowd gathered round and surrounded him. Then the fat doorman in fur collar, gold braid and peaked cap appeared – he must have been called over – grabbed him by the arm and started dragging him through the throng in the lobby, determined to throw him out. Budai was not yet in control of himself, his whole body was shaking, quite incapable of resistance. When they reached the door the doorman opened it and indicated that he should scram. When Budai did not move he gave him a rough shove and might even have kicked him on the backside. In any case Budai found himself out in the street.

  Feeling dizzy, he swayed all over the pavement without knowing what he was doing and it was a good while before he thought to pull himself together. His hat had rolled away but he found it. His coat was open. He had lost two buttons and the shoulder was frayed. He hadn’t the least idea what to do. He drifted with the flow of the crowd and eventually found himself by the ice-rink he had discovered that afternoon. It was dusk already, the streetlamps were coming on, the skaters were weaving circles in the harsh light to equally harsh music. Later he arrived at the skyscraper in construction and felt obliged to count the floors again. There were seventy-five now, three more than before.

  Filth and mess everywhere – had it been like this from the beginning or had he simply not noticed? When the wind blew, as it was doing now, it lifted and carried the discarded wrappers and other rubbish with it; a newsstand was caught in the gust, a thousand newspapers were swirling about his feet. He noticed how many old people there seemed to be in town: lame, crippled, halt and half-paralysed, they stumbled, lurched and staggered on sticks through the crowd that pressed against them and separated them. Waves of alien humanity regularly washed over them. Frail old grannies, sickly frightened little sparrows, struggled against the overwhelming crowd, dragging their helpless bodies along, trying to cross at traffic lights, trying to board and squeeze themselves on to buses, constantly being shoved aside, squashed and trodden on in the mêlée. What power maintained them? What strength enabled them to go on living here? Why did they not move into the outer suburbs, into a more amenable environment, to some estate? Then there were the crazies, those who wriggled and babbled, who talked and muttered to themselves, the furious who screamed and roamed the streets uttering terrible cries, madmen who rushed about with knives threatening people who cleared a way for them. Then the mumbling beggars thrusting tins in front of passers-by, the moaning, the insane, the paralysed, the skeletal, the subnormal crawling on all fours – all of them full of the desire to live, all pressed together, each of them brushing past another, covering every inch of pavement like a flood, blocking the traffic, their myriad lives impatient to possess and mob the world.

  It occurred to Budai that he might have been evicted on account of Bebe! That it wasn’t the unpaid bill, no, that was a misunderstanding, it was their relationship that had been discovered, the fact that the woman had been with him. And this puritan attitude would not have been based on any formally ethical or religious code or because relations between guest and staff were forbidden. There must be a deeper reason, namely that sexual contact might result in a child, a new being, thereby adding to the already overcrowded population. Maybe that is what they were accusing him of! It might be one of the most serious crimes against society: the wilful exacerbation of a demographic crisis.

  It was growing darker: there were lights in the sky, white, red, lilac and green. Some glowed steadily, other spun or alternated or swayed or sparkled; some seemed to swim slowly away, others to appear suddenly out of the darkness only to disappear again as mysteriously. What were they? Stars? Aircraft? Signals on towers or on tops of skyscrapers to prevent aircraft crashing into them? Were they rockets? Spaceships? But he didn’t feel like speculating about such things now, it was his appointment in the evening that mattered most, for the hour was approaching when he was due to meet Petebe. He hurried back to the hotel.

  But the doorman who had till now greeted him so courteously, opening the swing door for him, now stood in front of him as soon as he saw him, his fat, wide body blocking the way. He wasn’t a mere dummy after all it seemed, nor a robot as Budai had earlier suspected: the man recognised him, remembered his face and the incident that afternoon. And he stood before him now utterly immobile, with as expressionless a face as before, his stupid little eyes blinking. This time though his arm was raised in rejection instead of invitation.

  Budai did not go away but merely moved a little to the side. Where should he have gone after all? However humiliating the behaviour of this ridiculous lump of lard might be, there was no choice for him, no other option but to try his luck here. His plan was to wait for an opportunity to sneak in when a larger group arrived and the doorman would salute them with a touch of his peaked cap. Budai carefully sauntered up to one such and joined it as though he were of the company. But the doorman was alert to that: he let everyone through but when Budai tried to enter he quickly stepped forward and blocked him with his enormous belly. It was no use: however he schemed and plotted the doorman was too alert. At his third or fourth attempt Budai went at it with such determination that the pair of them came right up against each other and were struggling in the doorway, each trying to shove the other out of the way. Budai was no weakling and thought he could handle a mound of blubber like the doorman but the latter proved to have much more stamina than he thought, and in any case he had propped himself against the doorframe which gave him an advantage. In the end they reached a stalemate and the two of them stood there, back to square one, neither of them having gained an inch. This effectively meant defeat for Budai since it was he who had wanted to advance. Now he had to retreat.

  But wasn’t there a side entrance to the hotel? There might be. It was possible that Tyetye entered through a door reserved for staff. He set off to find something of the sort, turning the next corner to take a tour of the building for surveillance purposes. Surely he would come across it. Yes, but it so happened that the hotel was stuck in the middle of a group of other buildings of various sizes, the roads behind it winding either side so the side streets led him away fro
m his intended route or towards a road-up sign that forbade entrance. After a while he realised he was lost and had no idea whether he was still in the area of the hotel as he had planned or somewhere else altogether.

  Then he found himself in front of the ice-rink once more, the third time that day. They were just closing it, or rather were aspiring to close it but the skaters would not leave. However those in charge shepherded them towards the stairs, however they pushed and tried to corral them with the wide brushes they used to clean the ice, the crowd swarmed back in, surging between and around them, squeezing or sneaking in somehow, crowing in triumph as they did so, covering the ice once more so the whole process had to start from scratch.

  This was quite entertaining and Budai would have been happy to watch it for a while but suddenly anxiety seized him: what if, right now, while he was wasting his time here, Dede was arriving at the main entrance? He was hungry too, not having eaten anything since the morning. What had happened to the packages of food he had left on the windowsill of his room? He had forgotten those when he pushed his way in and now he felt deeply annoyed about it. Could the big family have consumed it all? Or had those ugly cats scoffed the lot?

  If he went into the self-service buffet now or bought something in a shop that would mean standing in a queue again and he feared missing her. So he refrained and worked his way back in the direction from which he had come to the main entrance of the hotel. He arrived at the precise moment that the usual priestly delegation was emerging from a big black car. The doorman swept his hat off with ostentatious reverence, greeting them and bowing low as the bearded, purple-vested, gold-chained ancients entered. Budai tried mingling with them, hoping the fat nincompoop would be too absorbed in the task to notice him. But the man still spotted him, grabbed him and pushed him out: he was not to be fooled.

  Was the doorman never off duty? Though now that he took a careful look at him he was not at all sure that he was the same man he had seen earlier. But even if it was someone else, he resembled the first one so closely, not only in his uniform of fur-collared coat, flat peaked cap and gold braid, but in the dull blinking of his tiny eyes, the way he squinted. There was the same puffed up, characterless, empty, buffoonish, primitive expression on his face as on the last.

  A long time passed, it might have been hours, hours when nothing changed except the weather. It started raining. Budai took shelter in the awnings before the entrance. The doorman did not mind this and seemed to pay him no attention at all, but Ebede failed to appear. There was no sign of her. Was there any hope of her turning up at all now? If his guess had been correct and it was the relationship between them that had led to his eviction, his partner-in-crime was also likely to have to face the consequences! Being his lover, she might have been dismissed or disciplined in some other way. Was it possible that he would still be waiting for her this time next year?

  He was almost dying of hunger by now as well as being faint with exhaustion after the stresses of the day. After all that walking he still had no clue what to do. He leaned against the wall for support. But there must be something – he roused himself – something he had not yet tried! What was it? Maybe he could distract the doorman the way children used to by pointing to something behind him or by throwing some object so that he turned away and momentarily became defenceless. But what distraction could he devise for this vast heap of lard? Lesser distractions would be useless: there was no point in throwing a pebble or a screwed-up piece of paper at him, he was too suspicious to be taken in by that ...He had to make a sacrifice, to take chances, he had learned that much. There was a price to be paid for everything in this town.

  With a bitter sigh he dipped into his pockets and fished out a fistful of change, and when there was relative quiet in the street and no one was passing the hotel he threw the change on the ground in front of the doorman. It was done with an easy sweep of his arm and executed from a certain distance. He didn’t have much. The coins hit the road with a sharp chink and did not roll away in various directions. He had calculated correctly. The fat pig’s ears pricked up, he bent down and looked around curiously to see what it was. Budai had planned to use just this moment to sidle in behind him and to disappear quickly into the building.

  He had all but reached the swing doors and seemed to be practically inside when a large group pressed forward from the hall towards the exit – the same door being used for both entrance and exit, a rather eccentric and incongruous feature in a hotel as busy as this. There were a lot of them, tall slender youths, some Africans among them, all in bright pink track-suits, laughing, gesticulating, chattering incomprehensibly, larking about. They looked to be sportsmen of the kind he had seen in the enormous stadium. They were packed together in a solid mass so he was unable to work his way between them, and by the time they were all outside, some twenty or twenty-five of them, the stout Cerberus was back on guard, as alert a watchdog as before.

  Desperately disappointed, Budai set out to collect up the coins so he might try again but the doorman put his enormous foot down over most of them so he could recover only the lesser amount. He thought the doorman was joking but it was useless pushing at his foot or trying to shift it, useless making noises to suggest he should raise it, the man did nothing of the sort. Budai turned all his fury on the nincompoop and kicked him on the ankle as hard as he could. The doorman blew a loud whistle. Budai ran away.

  Only on the next corner, once he had recovered his breath, did he reflect on why he had been so frightened. No doubt the sound of the whistle had reminded him of his adventure with the police and he had no wish to get mixed up with them again. And it was likely that, having attacked him, that idiot of a doorman would in fact have been whistling for the police. Whatever else happened now at least he had the satisfaction of having given the idiot a good kick and taken it out on him ... He felt terribly sleepy and could hardly stand up, and as for his hunger it was worse than ever. The trouble was he did not see any way of getting back into the hotel tonight. Even if he did get back in, he couldn’t move into his room and they would not give him another one where he could lie down. That much was clear from the doorman’s behaviour. He’d end up cruising the corridors or sitting in the lobby.

  His usual bistro was open and he quickly ate his way through a few sandwiches. And now? What should he do? Where should he go? So far he had at least enjoyed a degree of comfort, a tolerable bolthole where he could lay his head, hide, bathe, rest and gather his thoughts. But what was he to do without any of his possessions, with most of his remaining money under the doorman’s heel? Where could he stay? Should he, by some chance, stumble across another hotel – though he had no idea just then where he might find one – he would not be allowed in without his passport and other documents. And Gyegye? How would he find Egyegye again?

  It was still raining. Little by little his hat, coat and shoes were being drenched through. Being near the metro entrance he instinctively slip-slopped his way towards it to seek shelter. It was the route he took when he was working as a casual labourer at the market. Down on the platform he took the usual train out of habit, too weak and numb to think of anything else.

  As he already knew, work at the market continued right through the night, the ramp at the side entrance always being busy. But he did not come here to work now but to find somewhere to lay his head, any crude approximation to a bed where he could lie down and stay dry. In this respect he was just like the tramps he had seen earlier who, after work or a few drinks, always found a corner to curl up in. Pretty soon he found himself quite a comfortable nook at the back, near the end of the ramp where there was less bustle than elsewhere, a place full of empty crates piled into towers behind which a man might sleep without being noticed. There were a few old sacks on the concrete floor. The space must have been used as a refuge by others before him. Wet through as he was, he lay down and covered himself with his damp coat that smelled of the rain, made a crude pillow of sacks and, overcoming his inbred disgust of anything un
hygienic, turned over and fell into a deep exhausted sleep.

  He woke feeling hot, dizzy and shivering, not fully awake, in fact less than half awake. It was dark. Rays of lamplight filtered in from outside, as did the sounds of porters, the vibration of truck engines and the squeaking of the conveyor belt. Was this the same night or the one after? He had a fever, there was no doubt about it. He must have got chilled through in the rain, hanging about for hours like that in front of the hotel. Maybe it was flu. Cold shivers ran through him. He might even have contracted pneumonia.

  He hadn’t been as low as this since leaving home. He felt utterly bereft, lost without a doctor or medicine: in his present condition he couldn’t even think of stumbling down to the clinic where the dentist had pulled his tooth. Not even a dog would take notice of him in this god-forsaken hole. No dogs were sniffing around him. Nor was he interested in anyone else. All he wanted to do was what mere animals did, to hide and be left alone with his troubles. He sank into himself and stayed there, his mind wandering at the rock bottom of his consciousness. The sickness numbed his body and spirit: he tossed and turned in his own heat, his own perspiration.

  He was in a twilight condition with very few needs and, in so far as he had any will left at all, it was to reduce his needs still further since there was no way of requiting them. There was no food but then he had no desire to eat. A cup of tea might have been nice for his dry throat and to mask the bad taste in his mouth but what to buy it with? Best not to think about it; other matters were still less pleasant to think of though they were desperately urgent. A few days ago he had discovered a filthy latrine at the back of the market, though some people, it seemed, preferred to conduct their business by the wall. That was something he had to attend to. But first he had to raise his body and get over there, tasks that seemed to be beyond him now. Nevertheless, he was determined not to soil the spot he currently occupied. He could not imagine doing so, not while he had a spark of consciousness left at any rate.