Metropole (3 page)

There were as many people clogging up the lobby as there had been last night, maybe more. Some stood around in haphazard clusters, others were stuck in long queues, while still others were hurrying from place to place, forcing their way through the rest. Were they all guests at the hotel, or if not, what were they doing here? It was impossible to tell. He struggled through them to the reception desk but it took quite a long time again before he was face to face with the desk-clerk on duty. The man, however, was not one of those he had already met. The only thing he had in common with them was that he too failed to understand a single word, jabbering away himself instead. Budai was so furious he could no longer contain himself: he grew red in the face and beat the counter, bellowing in various languages.

‘Skandal. ein Skandal! ... C’est un scandale, comprenez-vous ... ?’

He hardly knew what he was shouting. He demanded his passport and aeroplane ticket; he wanted to see the manager, he called for an interpreter, he raged and threatened, repeating:
pass, passport, passaporto
, now in one language, now in another while ever more people gathered around listening to him. Finally, when the elderly desk-clerk simply spread his hands out in incomprehension, Budai leaned across, grabbed him by the shoulders and started shaking him, screaming at him, waving his hands in front of his face. All this accomplished nothing, of course, since it was perfectly obvious that neither the man nor any of the nearby witnesses to the scene understood him. In any case, there were so many waiting behind him that they too began to grow restive, pressing forwards, each of them preoccupied with his own affairs. It was pointless. The desk-clerk readjusted his jacket. Budai himself grew uncertain and confused. He waited a little longer, looking everywhere, hoping to discover where guests’ passports might be stored, at which counter, in which cupboard, but there was no way he could get to the other side of the counter and into the office from here, and he had begun to feel a little ashamed of himself for creating such a fuss. It really wasn’t like him. There was no point in making things worse: it would only be more trouble. Nor could the people behind him wait there forever. So, having first mopped his neck and brow with his handkerchief, then, having blown his nose in it, he allowed himself to be elbowed discreetly aside, having achieved nothing.

There were a number of large circular tables in the lobby with armchairs arranged round them and one of them had just become available. He sat down in it and closed his eyes: perhaps this was all a dream, perhaps he was actually in Helsinki or at home, maybe he hadn’t even set out from home yet. Or, if he was where he appeared to be, other people would know about it by now, seek him out, apologise and explain, and it would all be cleared up, back to normal. Maybe he just had to wait a minute or two, to count to sixty or, at most, a hundred ... But having done so and looked up, he saw he was still there in the same hotel lobby with heaving crowds pressing this way and that, the printed notices still incomprehensible, the same foreign posters, photographic enlargements, landscape paintings on walls and pillars, the same mysterious papers and magazines at the newsagent’s stand, the same men, women, old and young and people of all shapes and sizes. There was a small exotic-looking group close to him now, a collection of church dignitaries of some sort moving through the hall, composed mostly of dark-skinned, bearded ancients in long, black kaftans, wearing lilac hats, highly colourful sashes and heavy, gold chains round their necks: the crowds opened for them so that they might continue their dignified progress.

He forced himself to be calm: he’d not get anywhere at all by shouting and complaining. He tried to put his thoughts in order: firstly, and most urgently, he should recover his passport, followed, naturally, by the ticket for his flight because until he had these he could not get to Helsinki and thence home once the conference was over. He could work out where he was, how he had got here, who was to blame and how he had got into this stupid situation once he had both these items in his hand ... But before any of this he needed a bite since he could hardly regard what he had had so far as a proper breakfast, at least that was what his stomach was telling him. No wonder he was so tense. The hotel was bound to have a restaurant of some kind. He got up to look for it.

He explored the lobby as far as he could, given the difficulty of negotiating the dense crowd and found it very large, some 100 to 150 metres long and about half as wide.

T
here were shops selling souvenirs and knick-knacks by the walls: he cast his eye over the dolls, statuettes, decorated boxes, bracelets, brooches and baubles, the cameras with unfamiliar brand names and the opera glasses. He even picked a key-ring off the glass counter. It had a fortress or tower motif with some writing underneath it, one of the town’s monuments no doubt together with its name, though it wasn’t a building he recognised and the writing was no help. Nevertheless, he determined to buy one of these as a memento before he left, to remind him of this crazy adventure, of the night he had spent here.

But he found no trace of a restaurant though he had paid close attention to each corner of the lobby and had even stopped to address one man, repeating the words
restaurant
and
buffet
. This having produced no more than an uncomprehending gaze, he tried to demonstrate his desire to eat by miming and lifting his hand to his mouth. It seemed that the tall, lean man with the hooked nose understood him, since he replied in a loud, sharp voice, almost shouting, asking:

‘Gorrabittepropopotu? Vivi tereplebeubeu?’

He might of course have been saying something completely different, his articulation being as peculiar as that of the others. Despite doing his best to listen Budai was not sufficiently expert in this case to note down the phonetic symbols employed by students of linguistics to indicate the most minute distinctions between types of accent and enunciation, though he knew them well enough and regularly used them in his work. Meanwhile the man went on in an unpleasantly harsh voice, almost as though challenging him, going so far as to grab him by the lapels even as he was pointing to something above them, impossible to say where. It would have been good to be free of him now but the man had hold of him and did not let go, bellowing into his face, waving his arms, gesturing, so that in the end Budai had to use brute force to be rid of him.

Later, rather to his surprise, he came upon a set of stairs in the far corner of the lobby. They were wide, red-carpeted stairs with a marble balustrade but they only led as far as the mezzanine, or possibly first floor, where it opened onto a corridor but no further. The corridor itself led to a set of glazed doors both of whose wings were open and hooked to the wall. Behind the door lay a large, vaulted hall, filled floor to ceiling with scaffolding and decorators working away at the distant top, shouting to each other in echoing voices, clambering up and down. In the middle of the hall, in a space left by scaffolding, stood a draped statue or some kind of fountain, behind which extended an enormous serving counter, and beyond that a raised platform with a draped piano, while a mass of tables and chairs lay piled in the corner, all flecked with paint, the floor itself being covered with mortar and rubble. This was, no doubt, the restaurant, but out of service for the time being owing to redecoration. Now he realised what the lean man had been trying to tell him as he was pointing upwards. One of the workmen shuffled over to the door. He was dressed in filthy overalls and carried a bucket, his head covered with a paper hat. Budai accosted him too, using hands and feet to make himself understood, trying to discover where he might find something to eat. The man blinked, mumbled something incomprehensible, waved his hand as if to deny something and described a broad circle with his arm indicating, perhaps, that there were no eating facilities in the building.

This was a peculiarly bad piece of luck, coming as it did on top of everything else. After yesterday evening’s unfortunate excursion he shrank from the thought of having to step out into the street again. Nevertheless he still had to eat, and having taken a little consideration, he estimated it to be getting on for noon: even without his wristwatch, his stomach reminded him of the time, the reminders growing ever more urgent. He resolved to keep calm and avoid tension however long he had to wait. Flights usually left early and by now he would have missed the morning one to Helsinki in any case. Just for once he wanted a really good meal and would sacrifice the morning to that end. Having eaten, he could find out about the afternoon or evening flight.

He ambled back into the lobby, patiently waited in the queue for the lift and was finally conveyed upstairs so he could get his coat. Although he had eventually found his room last night he was once again confused by the corridors and it took him a while to locate 921. Once at the door he could hear the telephone so he quickly turned the key and ran inside. But by the time he reached the phone it had stopped ringing and when he picked up the receiver he heard only the same low purring he had heard before ... He wondered who might have been calling him: had someone discovered what had happened to him and tracked him down? Were they even now working out how to get hold of him and take him where he was supposed to be? He sat down on the bed, not daring to move in case they rang again, beating his brow, furious with himself for not having arrived half a minute earlier. However he prayed for it to ring, the telephone remained stubbornly silent: on the other hand, his hunger had not abated at all so having twice gone out into the corridor then darted back into his room to allow the phone a few more minutes, he eventually took a decision and went out.

He handed in his key at the desk downstairs by simply reaching across the long snaking queue: this much, apparently, was permitted to those who did not stand in line. The traffic in the street was not one whit less busy than it had been the night before, with just as many cars and pedestrians and just as much honking, shoving and jostling. He couldn’t begin to think where they were all rushing to, what way flowing, from where to where. To work? From work? And who, in any case, were they, and how come the incessant stream? No one paid any attention to him, not for a moment, and if he let his mind wander for a second and did not concentrate he would find himself being pushed so violently that he found himself being spun about, almost falling. He too would have to resort to force, to shoulder and elbow his way through if he was to get anywhere. But no sooner had he thought that he dismissed the whole disgraceful idea: he wasn’t after anything or heading anywhere, all he wanted was a good dinner after which he would leave immediately then bye bye! That would be the end of it.

It was cold and dull outside, everything was frozen and the wind was still blowing, steady and uncomfortable. He turned up his collar, pulled his hat down over his brow and set off in the opposite direction from the night before, trying, since he happened to be here, to take better note of his environment. There was a range of old and new buildings along the way, skyscrapers next to single-storey houses, some clapboard dwellings, a few five- or six-storey tenements with peeling stucco walls, another skyscraper all glass and reinforced concrete, then a building still under construction. He was unable to determine whether he was in the city centre, or in some suburb on the outskirts. He paid more attention to the road too and in all the close traffic he distinguished three different kinds of bus: one green, one red and one brown-and-white, as well as trolleybus routes 8, 11 and 137, though he had no idea whatsoever of their routes. He spotted taxis too, if that’s what they were: grey, uniform, with a red stripe down the side, and a meter upfront with a little flag the driver could flip up or snap down. He tried waving to one or two of them without success: either there were passengers sitting in them already or, if not, the drivers took no notice of him, having perhaps been called somewhere. True, his waving was a little half-hearted, as if he guessed that it would be pointless trying to communicate with them however he explained or gestured since they would not understand where or how far he wanted to go.

Not far from the hotel he found a small square with the traffic flowing around it and in it a set of yellow rails next to stairs that led underground, where, as ever, a great crowd was pressing down and up. The colour and shape of the rails rang a bell with him: the night before when he was still on the airport bus they had driven past rails like that. Once the traffic lights showed green he joined the black flood of pedestrians crossing the road and was quickly swept into the middle of the little square then down the stairs. It was as he thought: he was at one of the stations of the city metro, a fair-sized oval hall accommodating various lines branching off in different directions with arrows painted on walls and a number of – to him, as ever, incomprehensible – notices of the larger and smaller variety indicating the various routes. People from all points of the city converged here, those arriving, departing or changing trains, those standing in long rows, pushing in, hastening and squirming this way and that: they filled up the place to such an extent it was practically impossible to get through. On top of that, on the opposite platform, he could see an escalator to a lower level that constantly swallowed or spewed forth yet more people. The congestion was so bad that Budai found it difficult to stay on his feet. Nevertheless he tried to make some progress towards an enormous diagrammatic plan of the metro-system he had glimpsed in the distance. Having set out, he found himself caught up in the stream of people heading towards another set of escalators and was swept along by them willy-nilly though he had no desire to travel anywhere, not in this city at any rate. But it was impossible to turn round against the wide flow of a regiment in full battle order, still less to prevent its forward momentum, only at the cost of individual hand-to-hand combat employing knees and fists, and so he fought his way to the edges and broke through to where some others were proceeding in the counter-direction, thereby somewhat easing the forward pressure.