Metropole (2 page)

Neon signs were blinking high above him. Most of the shops were still open. They were selling all kinds of things with a very wide range of choice, as the window displays made clear – clothes, shoes, dinner sets, flowers, household equipment, carpets, furniture, bicycles, perfume, plastic items – these, at least, were what he noted. And there were no end of customers, or so it seemed, with long queues inside, some of them extending out into the street. The most crowded were the two groceries that Budai passed on his short journey, a journey he just about found strength to make since the pavement was becoming ever more crowded, the customers who could not get into the shops congregating in the doorways or forming close-packed columns: he had no idea how long it would take to get round to buying something. But the hunger pains were increasingly acute so he was delighted to find a restaurant a little further along, the tables with their tablecloths behind the big plate-glass window, the guests at their dinners, the waiters in their white coats.

Unfortunately there was a queue here too, quite a long one at that, because they only let in as many guests as were leaving so it was rather slow progress. He tried to size up the others in the queue without drawing attention to himself. Some were white, some coloured: right in front of him were two coal-black, wire-haired, young men, a little further off an oriental-looking, pale-yellow woman with her daughter, but there were some tall Germanic types, one tubby Mediterranean gleaming with perspiration in his camel-coloured coat, a few brown-skinned Malays, some Arab or Semitic people, and a young redheaded woman with freckles in a blue woollen jumper, carrying a tennis racquet: it was hard to tell what race or shade formed the majority here, at least in front of the restaurant.

After a good forty minutes of creeping along he too was finally allowed in and left his coat at the counter in exchange for a number. The tables were all occupied, and it took some time to find him a place near the back of the hall. He asked in English if he might sit down but it seemed nobody could understand him, people glancing blankly up at him from their plates before immediately returning to their food. It was obvious that everyone here was in a hurry but it was another quarter of an hour before the waiter appeared since he was clearly so busy he could not have got to him earlier. He cleared and set the table for Budai, gathering up the used dishes and putting a menu down in front of him, though Budai couldn’t make head or tail of the contents. He started to explain this to the old waiter but the man simply shrugged and gabbled something and was, in any case, called away by someone else. Budai tried to address the others at the table. He spoke to them in six or eight languages but without any success whatsoever; they gave no sign of comprehension and didn’t even pay him much attention. He was growing ever more irritated, his stomach tense with excitement, but there wasn’t even a slice of bread nearby. It was another twenty minutes before the waiter returned with a large and fulsome dish of garnished chicken for his fellow diners but there was no point in Budai indicating his hunger and asking for some of the same for the waiter was called away again and it was impossible to say whether he had made a note of the order at all. In the meantime other diners came and went. The waiter reappeared at the far end of the table with new dishes and clean cutlery and was paid by some but he took not the least notice of Budai and soon enough he was called away to another table. Nevertheless, Budai kept whistling and waving until at last he returned only to rattle on in an annoyed and melancholy manner, his voice heavy with passion, though Budai couldn’t tell whether he was simply asking him to be patient or expressing his exasperation and wanted nothing more to do with him. Budai could barely contain himself: he felt helpless not knowing whether it was worth waiting or whether he should do something else. When the waiter returned and once again failed to serve him he smacked his hands down on the table, kicked his chair and stalked off in indignation. He had, of course, to join another queue for his coat, since there was a lot of coming and going, but he barged past them in his fury. He left a small coin for the cloak-room attendant, the old man there possibly grateful, muttering something that might have been a thanks.

Yes, but he had still not eaten and was now incapable of thinking about anything else. He fought his way through the traffic that was just as dense as before, thrusting ahead, using both hands and feet until, at the cost of several more blows and one or two near-confrontations, after an infinitely long half a mile down the road he found himself at something like a self-service buffet. This too was jam-packed with customers who jostled or just stood about but it was impossible to tell what they were waiting for so he stood in one of the queues and waited to see. The queue made pretty slow progress and he found out rather late that it led to a cash desk where people were being given numbered receipts and that another queue beyond that continued right across the long hall to a counter on the far side where the food was dished out. When he did eventually arrive at the cash-desk the woman in the blue coat glanced at him as if to ask what he wanted to order but he was thrown into such confusion that he was unable to utter a word, though naturally it would not have made the slightest difference what he wanted to say as she would not have understood him. The woman addressed him in the strange language he had heard often enough by now and he muttered something in Spanish, he himself being uncertain as to why. In the meantime the people behind him started to grumble, wondering why he was taking all that time, rattling their small change, pushing him and practically treading on his heels so he found himself beyond the cash desk without a receipt. Someone behind him was talking to the woman in blue, and further back the queue was so long with recent arrivals that it was impossible to worm his way back in: they would clearly not allow him to do so, not till he went right to the back anyway. To stand in the counter queue under the circumstances seemed more than useless for not having a receipt he would not be served, but there was no option, his sheer helplessness drove him forward. He queued until he reached the counter where people were handing over their receipts to the person in the white chef’s hat to take away the food and drink of their choice while he could only wave his empty hands about uselessly trying to explain why he was doing so. Having no receipt they paid him no attention but attended to the general crush passing dishes of roast meat and pastries over him and around him, right before his nose. He was all but dancing with rage by this time, his arms threshing the air, without any assurance at all that there might be a different outcome if he stood in another queue.

He had just slunk out into the street full of shame for having given up hope of supper for the night when he spotted an old woman on the corner selling roast chestnuts with only some three or four people waiting by the hot iron grill. He was there in less than a minute, but his linguistic skills failed him again, the two dozen languages he could speak or stutter as ineffective as the signs he tried to make with his hands and fingers. He might as well have been talking to the deaf and dumb. He finished up buying all the chestnuts on the stall, some forty of them. He had never bought as many at a time. He gave the old woman one of the smaller banknotes and received some change. He gobbled down the chestnuts immediately, there on the pavement, burning his mouth in the process and grew tearful as he did so. He felt sorry for himself: he had never felt so lost or so foreign in any city. Must get away, he kept thinking. Back to the hotel, grab luggage and find a plane or train, anything not to be here a day or hour longer.

Once more the doorman at the hotel opened the door for him but there was a new face at the desk now. Despite standing in the inevitable queue Budai had no more luck with this clerk than he had with the last. However he pointed to his key hanging on the hook among the rest the man simply shook his head as if slightly bored. So he wrote the number 921 down on a piece of paper, which did the trick. The lift operator was once again the tall blonde girl in blue. He nodded to her but she looked straight through him distractedly, and soon the space between them was filled with more people so he only caught a glimpse of her on leaving.

Back in his room he discovered that his body was covered in blue and green bruises from the blows he had received in the street when fighting his way through the crowd. He was not only bruised but tired and was shocked to realise that he had not accomplished anything and had made no contact with anyone, neither with people back home, nor with the people waiting for him at his destination. Neither at home nor at Helsinki would they have any idea where he had vanished. The strangest thing though was that he himself had no clue, not for the time being anyway: he was no wiser now than he had been on arriving here. Furthermore, he had no idea how he might set about finding out, about leaving, about where to go, about whom to speak to or what procedure to follow ... He had a bad feeling and felt deeply uneasy, thinking he must have missed something or failed to do something, something he should have done but he couldn’t think what. He tried the phone again in his anxiety, fretfully dialling numbers anywhere, but it was late at night now, the phones kept ringing and only rarely did a sleepy voice respond and then in that peculiar, foreign-sounding, incomprehensible and indistinguishable language that sounded like stuttering.

Budai’s instinct for language had been sharpened by his studies: etymology was his area of interest, the way words developed, their origins. He had had to deal with the strangest languages in the course of his research, both Hungarian and Finnish in the Finno-Ugrian group, but also to some extent Vogul, Ostyak, Turkic, some Arabic and Persian, and beyond these Old Slavic, Czech, Slovakian, Polish and Serbo-Croat. The language here did not remind him of any of them, nor of Sanskrit, Hindi, Ancient or Modern Greek, nor of High Germanic either, for he knew German proper, as well as English and Dutch. Besides these, he was also acquainted with Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish as well as having a smattering of Portuguese, Romanian, Italian Retoroman and a smidgeon of Hebrew, Armenian, Chinese and Japanese. Most of these he could only read to a so-so standard of course, to the point that they were useful for tracking the development of one or other word, but he knew them sufficiently well to recognise that this language did not resemble any of them. It belonged to a group he could not locate by ear. All he could hear was something that sounded like
ededede
and
gagagaga
.

He removed the framed and printed notice from its nail by the door and examined it with fresh care by the light of the table lamp. But this did not get him anywhere either for whatever templates he applied he had not come across the characters before. He couldn’t even tell whether they were characters in the European sense, parts of words as to some extent in Japanese or Chinese, or a series of bare consonants like ancient Semitic and Aramaic. He found the occurrence of normal Arabic numerals disruptive. By now he was so tired he could not think, so having decided to postpone his investigations till the next day, he undressed and went to bed.

Accustomed to reading for half an hour before going to sleep he noticed that there was nothing to read: he had packed all his books, as well as his notes and his speech to the conference, in the other, bigger case. He got up again and unpacked his hand luggage to check but there was nothing there. He felt angry. Why hadn’t he bought a newspaper or magazine at least on the plane? He tossed and turned, unable to sleep so eventually opened one of the bottles of red wine he had brought with him. He tried to extricate the cork using one of the blades of his penknife, but the cork broke up in the process so he had to push it back into the bottle. Not being able to cork it up again he drank his way, little by little, through the lot and finally sank into a hazy sleep without a thought in his head.

He woke next morning with a headache: the day outside was grey and dry. He looked out on the street through the closed window. Even from the ninth floor he could see the crowds rolling by, a continuous black stream of traffic and pedestrians. There was something wrong with his stomach too: he had drunk too much last night. He took a long time brushing his teeth to get rid of the foul taste in his mouth. He took a shower, scrubbing his face in the jet of hot water, then rubbed his whole body vigorously with the fluffy towel until he was quite red. He looked in his bag and found a salami-filled roll that he had overlooked. His wife must have packed it as a snack for the journey. It served as some kind of breakfast though it would have been nice to have had some tea as well. He sought in vain for a bell to call for service. Maybe the telephone was there to serve that purpose though he would have to know what number to dial and how to ask the question; in other words he was back exactly where he had been last night ... Suddenly he was all impatience and ready for action. Enough of this nonsense! He had urgent business to attend to in Helsinki! It was the first day of the conference to which he had been delegated, he had to get there, even if a little late, and make his speech. He packed his belongings, put the bag down on the luggage rack ready for departure and hurried downstairs to settle matters once and for all.

There was large group of people waiting at the lifts, before all eight lifts, and judging by the illuminated buttons all the lifts were in use. It seemed to be an even busier morning than usual. Budai couldn’t find the stairs on this level either, or at least none of the corridors seemed to lead to them, so he was obliged to join the others in the furthermost queue. The lifts didn’t seem to stop on this floor very often, rumbling past it for several minutes without opening their doors. And when one did happen to stop it only had room for four or five people: everybody, it seemed, was going down, leaving rooms on the floor above his. The lifts were crammed by the time they reached here. His queue was the slowest moving of the lot, of course, and a clear ten minutes went by without the characteristic low hum of the lift opening its automatic doors. Thinking it must be out of order, Budai moved to the back of another queue. But no sooner had he done so than it was his old queue that was moving forwards whereas his new queue was at a standstill, and even when the lift did stop at the new queue the indicator immediately showed it returning to the upper floors. It was enough to drive one crazy. Budai’s entire body was covered in sweat as he struggled to contain his helpless fury. He felt hot and cramped. Eventually a lift stopped and he reached the ground floor.