Metropole (25 page)

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 from 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 unhygienic, 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.

It took considerable effort to get to his feet: for a full quarter of an hour he kept encouraging himself to get up but postponed the moment because the task seemed so difficult. After a number of failed attempts he got as far as sitting up but felt so dizzy that he immediately collapsed again and lost consciousness for a while, drowning in a dark red mist. Once he came to his senses he tried again, obstinate, cursing, He would not resign himself to failure. If he gave up the attempt, he insisted to himself, he might as well throw it all in.

So he kept trying, struggling and cursing his helplessness until finally he succeeded in standing on his feet. Surely with such determination he had to succeed. He took one step at a time, his hand on the wall, feeling his way like a blind man, fighting for each yard with brief intermittent losses of consciousness at which point he had to grasp something not to fall. He was forced to stop from time to time, resting on a bale or a crate for a few minutes before continuing. The short journey there and back took over an hour and at the end of it Budai was utterly exhausted. By the time he dropped on his mean improvised bed again he had no reserves left.

He tossed and turned in the confused hinterland between wake and sleep, the two blurred, sometimes all but inseparable. One time it seemed he was seeing rats. It was as if they were running over his legs though he felt no fear of them. Afterwards he could not tell whether it had really happened – as it well might in a place like this – or if he imagined it. He tended to dream a lot in any case and even more now that he was feverish. The dreams were usually about finding someone, someone with whom he could talk. It was a different person each time, a different occasion under different circumstances. The figure tended to appear in the metro, but the man in the green overcoat, his fellow Hungarian, turned up in other situations too. In one dream he was struggling with the fat doorman, in another he was sliding awkwardly between a group of skaters, occasionally falling over. He dreamt he was on an aeroplane, on a train, on a ship, even on a horse though he had never ridden one before. They were galloping down a damp sandy field, the soft soil behind them clearly showing the horse’s hoof prints.

Images of his more recent experiences got mixed up with memories of home. Even if they were looking for him they would not find him here. He had neither accommodation nor address now. He was a homeless vagabond like the others: who could possibly know where he was? ... That was the one thing that could still bring tears to his eyes. It was what others would think of as his disappearance, the way he just vanished off the map. He wept quietly to himself on his bed of sacks behind the crates. All this might just be bearable if he had no ties, no family, no workplace, no friends, no dog. Or wife. He missed his wife most. She was the most powerful and deepest loss. They had lived together so long and so intimately, she was so much part of his own being, that the pain she must be feeling at home was his pain too. He would, if he could, have taken a scalpel to his own heart and cut her out of it.