Metropole (12 page)

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. Were 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.

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.