Metropole (20 page)

It was, however, not a cinema but a department store, a pretty big department store when it came to it, some eighteen to twenty storeys high with people streaming in and out of its various doors. The range of available goods didn’t seem – not on the ground floor at least – to be any greater than elsewhere: fancy, slightly out-of-fashion clothes, household objects, mass-produced items, modest stuff generally of inferior, market-stall quality, or crudely functional articles sold by the dozen. But he didn’t want to buy anything in any case – what was there to buy? – so he didn’t go in but turned and hurried towards home. There was still the downtown area to explore and with some effort he remembered which metro station he should aim for. Once he had been somewhere he was generally pretty good at finding his way back.

It was a weekday but the streets were almost as crowded as they had been before. As the sky darkened so neon lights began to sparkle and mechanical music to rise from bars and cafés. Drunks were teetering across the pavement, bellowing, blowing paper trumpets. He discovered the narrow side street where he had previously entered one of the houses: the woman with the white tulle, dark lashes and the pearl-bright face was smiling in the window again with a modest Madonna-like gaze. Budai thought a little nostalgically of the days when he had money for such things, to enter such a house, to take a boat out, to have a few drinks and enjoy a pancake.

There was no sign of a cinema but he was glad to pass this way again. He had been so lonely – the longer he spent in the city and the more populated he recognised it to be the more neglected he felt – that the simple fact of returning somewhere he had been before established a kind of relationship, a tenuous foothold in a sea of unknowns. The ferris wheel, the swing-boat, the target-shooting, the Fat Lady. He still couldn’t work out whether there really were no cinemas or if he had somehow missed them. But he did not feel this was so important now, or maybe he just knew a little less than he thought he did.

It was his own fluctuating state of mind that preoccupied him for the time being. Briefly he found himself enjoying the heaving crowd of which he was a part, finding it bearable, quite pleasant in fact. Above all it was a sense of irresponsibility, the one not-entirely-to-be-dismissed pleasure that lightened his mood. It was good not to have anyone else be dependent on him, no one to question what he was doing why. He might eventually get used to the manner of life here, to the eternal waiting, to the queues, to the rough crowd; he might stop noticing it altogether: it might become as natural to him as to everyone else. All this of course was just a passing mood, or possibly the result of a creeping emotional anaesthesia, a brief break from its direct opposite. And somewhere at the core of the tiny spark of happiness there was Epepep too, that tingle of certainty that today or tomorrow he would see her again.

The next moment he was besieged by doubt and bitterness once more. No, no, no – he could never get used to it, however long he remained here, not to the food, the drinks or even the taste of the air, that sooty-sweet, granular concoction that was so heavy and cloying it seemed there was less oxygen in it; nor to the eternal jostling, shoving, elbowing and kicking: the saturation, the whole impatient, mad rhythm of life. Budai preferred sunny, wide-open spaces like Italian piazzas with their fresh breezes. What was he to do in this constantly crowded, apparently endless brick and concrete mass that looked like one enormous suburb? And he missed his wife, his family, his work, his home and the ordered circumstances of his life more each day. Furthermore, he had to fight to dismiss the constant agony of imagining what they might make of his disappearance, his vanishing without trace.

The wildest ideas occurred to him as his mind chugged along on empty, throwing out endless questions with not a single answer. Was it possible, for instance, that his arrival in the city was not the result of a misunderstanding? That it wasn’t that he had blundered onto the wrong flight but that someone had deliberately misdirected him, in other words abducted him? They could have slipped a sleeping draught into his food so he shouldn’t be able to tell how long they had been in the air. Might they be deliberately keeping him here, preventing his return home? But who might they be and why? What possible purpose could it have? And why him? Was he somehow in somebody’s way? What had he done wrong? Whom had he harmed?

That actually would have been his preferred option. Anger, malice, hatred ... they cut both ways. Passion can be resisted with passion: one could work oneself up into the appropriate state, search out the enemy, take him on, do battle with him and, in this way, defeat him. If, on the other hand, it was only blank stares and mere indifference that were detaining him – which looked more likely – there was only negative energy to draw on, an immobility that would prevent him attracting anyone’s attention or interest. And how, in that case, was he to extricate himself from this tepid slough of feeling when there was nothing to cling to, no firm ground on which to set his feet?

It was vital not to go mad! He must not to allow himself to be overcome by confusion, by pandemonium, by isolation. Time and again it swept through him, the fear that he would give up the hopeless struggle and sink into the surrounding chaos, or alternatively become indifferent and surrender to melancholy and torpor. He had no weapon but his consciousness: it was the one beam of light he could aim at the waking nightmare.

He considered the cumulative effect of his various meditations and enquiries, weighing up how far he had got with the tools available to him. He recognised a few phrases he had picked up from everyday speech and knew roughly what they meant; he knew the numbers one to ten and how to greet and address someone. Beyond this he knew the approximate meaning of certain groups of written characters and could more or less pronounce them if Deded’s pronunciation was anything to go by. These were chiefly the names of articles for purchase and two or three longer terms. On the other hand, he could only read complete words and had failed every time to break them down into their constituent elements. So far he had had no success at all in assigning any specific sound to any character, nor, conversely, point to characters appropriate to this or that sound or group of sounds: worse still, he had not the least idea what form of writing they employed.

His achievements thus far were sickeningly insignificant. He hadn’t enough information to deduce a system: he could not even put a sentence together. And when he tried using the words he knew, or the words he supposed he knew, to enquire, for example, where he might find a café or a metro station he was surprised to find that he was either misunderstood or not understood at all. Could he be mispronouncing the words? That would not be unlikely, having heard the curious, alien-sounding articulations of the locals. Later though, in one of the underground tunnels of the metro, some kind of altercation broke out, and Budai noticed that everyone else was merely shouting and rambling, with no-one paying any attention to anyone else. Could it be that they themselves could not understand each other, that the people who lived here employed various provincial dialects, possibly even quite different languages? In a particularly feverish moment it even occurred to him that each one of them might be speaking his own language, that there were as many languages as there were people.

N
ext Friday on top of all this he found a new bill in box 921. The desk-clerk – another new face, how many were there? – calculated the total as 33.10, only a little less than last time. Budai accepted the bill with a silent nod but did not take it to the cashier to pay this time. There was nothing left to pay with. He couldn’t scrape that much together despite having spent less this time round.

What would happen now? When would they act and what would they do? Maybe some good might come of it, if they invited him into the manager’s office, for example, to seek an explanation. At least they’d be speaking to him and he could say something, ask for an interpreter ... But maybe nothing would happen, no one would say anything. How long could they put up with him staying here without paying? They were bound to find out. One way or the other the fact was he would soon run out of money. He counted up what he had left again: his entire wealth came to 9.75. That was what remained out of the two-hundred-plus he received when he presented his cheque.

He made some wild, panic-stricken calculations: if, in the first week, putting aside the rent for the room, he had spent some 130, and in the second, even after reducing his expenses to a bare minimum, his outlay was 26, the amount remaining would hardly be enough to see him through the next few days. What would happen to him if his luck did not turn? He had to get some money. But how?

To make matters still worse he now had a toothache. It was one of the back teeth on the top row that was causing the trouble. At first it was only a dull murmuring sort of pain that came and went and might have been merely his imagination, something he could ignore. But then it erupted, became acute, ever more furious, ever more intolerable. His jaw was inflamed, his face swelled up. He couldn’t delude himself that it would simply go away if he waited: the pain was well-nigh unbearable now and he had no drugs, no analgesic. The small box of miscellaneous pills his wife had packed for him was in his lost luggage.

It was pointless trying to explain this or to show anyone at the hotel what was wrong with him for no one would pay any attention or, if they did, they would just jabber on as they usually did. He was so desperate with the pain he ran out into the street just as an empty taxi was drawing up at the traffic lights. Budai yanked its door open without a word and leapt in. The driver, having turned round, Budai held the side of his face and mimed the pulling of a tooth to indicate where he wanted to go. The driver appeared to understand. He did not argue but put his foot down. He was a young, impassive man in a peaked cap and looked faintly Chinese.

Hardly had they started and turned down the first side-street when the traffic came to a standstill. There was no way ahead or back: every available space was filled with vehicles nosing forward or stuck. They spent long minutes in the same spot, then the lines of cars moved slowly forward until coming to a stop again within a few yards. Their progress was unbearably, infuriatingly slow: far in front of them there must have been a crossroads or traffic-light holding things up, allowing just a few people through at a time. The meter on the taxi kept ticking even when they were not moving but there was not the faintest hope of early escape from this endless traffic jam. Budai could bear it no longer and tried talking to the driver. The man did not want to turn round so he tapped him on the shoulder, pointing once again to his swollen face. But the driver was not to be disturbed. He retained his traditional oriental imperturbability, paying him no attention at all, showing no sign of understanding either him or the need for a dentist.

The next time he glanced at the meter he was horrified to see that it had just leapt past the figure of 8 and would soon be at 8.40, then 8.80 and so on though the car had made hardly any progress. The engine was merely ticking over. Within a few minutes the meter had crept up to 10 which was more money than he had in his pocket, and who knows how many extras there would be to add. His anxiety and fury were so intense now and his toothache so agonising that he had begun to regard the cab as his prison, a cell jammed between legions of cars, and regretted ever having got in. Things had come to such a pass that he would have beaten his way out with his fists if he could. He would happily have instructed the driver to smash at full speed into the truck in front of them: let there be wrecks and explosions, let there be anything, but let things change.

The more sober part of his judgement was in favour of escape. What would happen if he could not pay the fare? Would there be an outcry? Would the police be called? In his current condition both these options seemed perfectly dreadful, but what else was there? ... What else? The next moment, just as the driver put the car in gear again and they were rolling gradually forwards, Budai pushed the door open and leapt out. He stumbled over the kerb but was otherwise unhurt. He turned back for a split second to see the driver’s Chinese eyes but the next time he looked the taxi had disappeared in the traffic. He too was looking to vanish into the crowd.

He hadn’t been in this area before though they can’t have got far from the hotel. The first man he stopped to show he had a toothache immediately grasped the problem and pointed to a nearby multi-storey yellow building. It looked to be a hospital, a clinic or some other medical institution, stately with wings and extensions and a crowd of people streaming both ways through its arched portal. There was an ambulance-like vehicle, a closed white car with siren blaring, turning out of the gateway ... Might it be that his Chinese-looking driver had brought him to the right place after all? And now the poor chap – the only man willing to help him – had to pay the fare out of his own pocket ...

Everyone here understood his gestures and he was quickly directed to the dentistry department. As he expected, there were vast numbers waiting in the surgery corridors, not just standing and sitting on benches, but squatting on the stone floor, some even lying down on it, many with bandages or sticking plaster on their faces and cotton wool dangling from their mouths. It was slow progress, mind-numbingly slow, people probably being called in the order in which they had arrived. Nevertheless, the order of their going was constantly subject to dispute with squabbles breaking out here and there. There were at least thirty people before Budai at the door he had decided to wait at. But he had no choice and was lucky he had found his way here at all.