Metropole (5 page)

Near the diner he discovered an unexpectedly empty telephone booth. There was a paper notice stuck to the glass probably to the effect that the phone was out of order but the door could be opened and there were those thick directories in rows, in steel clasps, chained to the wall. He set to work examining them, working out how he could unscrew them, and was fiddling at the screws with his penknife when he noticed that he was being observed by a man in a grey uniform. He wore a short coat and flat cap, a white truncheon hanging from his belt. A policeman, no doubt. Budai remembered that he had no documents with him and that it would be pointless trying to explain what he as doing. He leafed through the book from front to back and vice versa pretending to look for a number or address. The policeman did not move but stood relaxed, steadily observing him. Then Budai had another thought. He stepped out of the booth and went straight over to the policeman. He tried speaking to him in German, English, Italian and several other languages, but was so flustered that he couldn’t remember what information it was that he sought: how to get where, whether to an embassy or a tourist office, even what kind of help he needed. Whatever he said the policeman nodded and jabbed at him with his finger:

‘
Chetchenche glubglubb? Guluglulubb?
’

That’s what he said or something like it then took out a small notebook bound in black, leafed through it in no great hurry and started to explain something while pointing here and there. He spoke slowly and at length then made another gesture, indicating something behind him, pedantically repeating this or that phrase so as to avoid any misunderstanding, though Budai hadn’t the faintest clue as to even what the subject was. Finally the policeman jabbed him again as if to ask whether it was all clear:

‘
Turubu, shettyekehtyovovo ... ?
’

There was nothing Budai could do except open his arms wide in exhaustion and shrug, at which point the policeman saluted and went off. That was enough experimentation for Budai. He was anxious to know whether the notes he had handed to the desk-clerk had found their way to an appropriate person for, if so, they might already have begun to sort things out and were perhaps looking for him, unable to find him. With this in mind he hurried back. For once it was the same clerk at the desk as before, in other words the man to whom he had handed his sheets of notepaper, in fact he recognised him at a distance from where he stood in the queue. But the sickly-looking, sour-faced clerk glanced at him as if he were a stranger and when Budai took the slip of paper with his room number from his pocket and handed it to him, the man put the key down, his face as expressionless as if he had never seen him before. Budai strained to see if there was anything else in box 921 besides the hook for the key but it was empty as the desk-clerk confirmed by spreading his palms. This was so surprising to Budai that he tried once again to explain through words and gestures that he was expecting an answer, some news or information, that there had to be some kind of message, but the man shook his head, carried on gabbling and had already turned his attention to the next guest. It was of course possible that someone was waiting upstairs in his room or at his door, that they might have left some instructions as to where he should go and whom he should see, and that everything would be sorted out. He was about to make his way over to the lift when he noticed a fat volume lying on the counter, clearly a copy of the telephone directory. The clerk happened to be looking the other way. Budai himself was surprised later at his nerve stealing it in front of all those people. He must have decided – his very nervous system must have decided – that whatever the risk he had to have a list of names, that was why he had come down in the first place. It was as if his hands had a will of their own. He stuck the book under his arm as though it belonged to him and calmly walked away with it.

But there was nothing waiting at his door, no notice on the handle, no sheet of paper lying on the threshold, nor in the crack, nor indeed anywhere, though he twice checked the number of the room just to make sure he was in the right place. Nor was there anyone inside, no note, not a scribbled message on the table or anywhere else, however hard he looked. He didn’t know how to account for it: maybe his request had not yet been dealt with, maybe they had not done anything yet. Was it possible that, if it came to it, he had to spend another night here? If that were so he would only get to the conference in Helsinki on the second day, and even then only to the afternoon session at the earliest! The thought made him so cross the blood rushed to his head: he was forced to dismiss the thought. The constant running about, on top of everything else, had exhausted him: his shirt was soaked in sweat and he desperately wanted a shower. But in order to do this he had, shamefully, to unpack again, to take the toiletries out of his hand luggage, as well as the washing powder he carried on such trips to give his underwear a quick rinse.

Having refreshed himself a little he sat down comfortably at the writing table in his pyjamas and slippers and set to study the stolen directory. It had hard brown covers with several lighter coloured letters of various sizes embossed on it in three lines of unequal length in the usual unfamiliar script. The title page displayed twenty to twenty-five densely set words and groups of words with numbers beside them, undoubtedly the numbers of various public utilities. Straight after this followed some seven pages of unbroken text with hardly any spaces between the words, presumably the regulations regarding use of the telephone and postal service, then some diagrams, most likely showing the tariff for various kinds of call. The list of names ran to somewhere between eight hundred and a thousand large-format pages, each with five columns, in letters so small Budai had to strain his eyes to read them. As far as he could tell without any clue as to what the words meant, by means of the typography alone, the list was not alphabetical but sorted under different sub-headings, possibly of a commercial kind, an endless set of numbers, headings, text and numbers. But the curious thing was that the numbers – not only the ones at the front but those in the body of the book – were not of equal length: two, three or four figures, five, six, seven, even eight-figure numbers appeared one after the other, jumbled up, without any apparent system. He tried dialling a few of the numbers set in bold type, those presumably of public utilities, but with little success: there was no connection, the line did not respond or was engaged, the buzzing broken, and even when there was distinctly the sound of ringing, few of them picked up the phone, or, if they did, gabbled in the usual incomprehensible way however many languages he tried.

There was no point in going on like this, he realised, so he turned his attention to the text. Although the history of writing was never his area of specialisation he did remember from his earlier studies how Champollion succeeded in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics, Grotefend the runes on Ancient Persian stones, and how someone recently managed to decrypt the inscriptions of the Maya and the wooden boards of the Easter Islanders. In all these cases the scholars were dealing with items in two or three languages or scripts like the Rosetta Stone or the trove at Persepolis, sometimes with the advantage of earlier, possibly somewhat puzzling, superscriptions that might, however, be deciphered, given enough patience, hard work and a bit of luck. The procedure was much the same in most cases: it was to assume that certain signs or group of signs approximated to certain words, names, or known combinations of sounds, then to look for clusters of such and substitute the assumed meanings until the meanings of others could be inferred to the point that the whole was rendered readable. And yet, even with the aid of the most up-to-date equipment, how many had failed and how often! Furthermore, those who did succeed might have shed decades of bitter tears in the effort. And nowadays of course there were fabulously powerful computers to facilitate the analysis of mountains of data.

What was he to do then, stuck without any help, all by himself, faced with the unfamiliar script of an unfamiliar language? What assumptions could he make, what range of data should he match up with another when he had nothing to go on, at least nothing so far, and was able to associate neither this or that group of characters with a particular word nor any particular word with any meaning? What set of characters could he try replacing with what? Despite all this he set about writing down all the different characters he could find in the telephone directory, the last page of which happened to be blank. Here he copied them one after the other, as many different ones as he could find in the text. This quiet activity, the rhythm of which resembled that of his normal scholarly process at research stage, had the effect of slowly calming him, restoring his temper, and, for a while, entirely reconciling him to his situation, so that once he had focused his attention on a restricted range of data and the nature of his problem was better defined, he had almost forgotten where he was and how he had got here. He had had such a full meal at the buffet that he never touched the remnant of food on the windowsill though he did uncork his second bottle of wine.

Once again he concentrated and began to speculate on what kind of alphabet it might be. The characters were extremely simple, consisting of two or three strokes at most, a little like Old Germanic runes or Ancient Sumerian cuneiform, though it seemed odd and rather ridiculous to compare what he was now looking at with those two long-dead scripts. He also noticed a conspicuous lack of diacritics, that there was no distinction between upper- and lower-case letters, at least none in this book, all letters here being of the same typeface and point size. He soon realised that he had noted over one hundred characters and that he was still discovering more. Sipping at the red wine he wondered what that meant and where the information would lead him? Could it be after all that each character was a word, each word a new character and that was why there were so many of them? Or maybe the characters stood for syllables as in ancient Crete and Cyprus? Or perhaps it was a complex system, like the Ancient Egyptian, comprising various elements: words, shorter phonetic clusters and individual phonetic signs in hieroglyphic form? It occurred to him that it might even be a series of combined phonetic symbols, the kind linguists worked with in order to differentiate between subtle levels of meaning and pronunciation. Or perhaps they simply employed a system that represented this particularly wide range of sounds? Questions, questions, nothing but questions! In the meantime, without noticing it, he had drunk the rest of the bottle. He couldn’t remember the next morning when and how he fell asleep.

He woke to the same even, grey light as on the previous morning. His head was muzzy and confused: he felt claustrophobic, full of guilt for drinking too much. He was angry with himself for having set himself a difficult task and failed. He did not dare think back over the last two days since the whole period seemed to be one of muddle and guilt and the feeling that he couldn’t go on like this. That, in fact, was the one thing he could see with absolute, blinding clarity. He turned on the cold tap in the shower and was soon shuddering and sniffling under the jet of water. This was all a nightmare, nothing but madness and bedlam and he had to wake from it because it couldn’t go on, it simply couldn’t go on!

He dressed, made a sandwich out of what remained from the day before and by the time he had eaten it had a plan of action: he was only amazed that he hadn’t thought of something so simple, so stupid much earlier. If all the hotel employees were idiots with whom one couldn’t exchange a solitary word, if there was no information desk or if it was located in such an obscure place that it couldn’t be found, then he had to find somewhere where there were bound to be foreigners: a tourist or information bureau. A railway station, for example, a long-distance bus terminal, an airport, an airline office, or a harbour or dock if there happened to be one. All he had to do was to find a taxi and somehow explain to the driver where he wanted to go. The rest was up to the driver and once they had arrived, surely there would be someone who could advise him. This appeared so obvious now that he was on the point of packing his bags and never again returning to his room but decided against it since he not only had a bill to settle but they had his passport too and he couldn’t go anywhere without that. He could always throw everything into his bag at short notice.

The blonde in the blue uniform was working the lift again and in his distraction Budai allowed his glance to linger on her. Once again he noticed how lithe and slim she was, how delicately boned and how refined was the structure of her long face. She wasn’t reading this time but staring straight ahead of her with a tired, blank expression. How many times had she made this same up-and-down journey? It was only once they reached the ground floor and the door opened that he detected the merest flash of recognition in her eye. Budai gave her a faint nod and smiled as he stepped out: he was unlikely ever to meet her again. He couldn’t help admitting to himself that he was a mite sorry about that: she was the only thing in the city he would be sorry to leave.

Somehow everything was different this morning, not only in the lift but down in the lobby too. He couldn’t tell at first in what way, what made the difference and why, it was simply something he sensed. The place was just as crowded as before, or pretty well as crowded, but there was less aggression in the air, the movement in the great hall seemed lazier and slower somehow, not quite so frantic, more patient perhaps. Later he noticed that the souvenir shop was closed, its glass cases empty, its front locked away behind metal shutters. The newsagent was closed too, sealed behind a metal grille, and the long bank of exchange counters that used to be busy was now being attended by no more than two or three women, the rest closed. It occurred to him that he had left home on Friday and that he had spent two night here so this must be Sunday and that here too it must be a holiday. It was only at the reception desk that the queues were still the same length as before and he took new fright at their sheer extent, but he waited all the same and handed in his key. Box 921 was still empty but he had stopped expecting to find anything there and would have been surprised if there was something. The exchange counters being empty, he decided to seize the opportunity and try one of the three women who were clearly left to deal with whatever business might come their way on a Sunday. He went over and waited by one of them but she paid him no attention so he knocked on the desk. She ignored that too so he knocked louder until she finally came over. He tried talking to her in various languages but she stared him with such incomprehension and contempt she had clearly taken him for the village idiot. He took out his notebook, drew a train as best as he could, then, underneath it, an aeroplane, and even extended his arms to imitate an aircraft, trying every possible way to convey what he was looking for and where he wanted to get to. The woman was middle-aged, somewhat yellow in complexion and wore her hair in a bun. She answered in a surprisingly sharp manner, apparently angered and offended, with a stream of incomprehensible but clearly rude words that Budai took to mean: ‘what a nuisance, what cheek, one can’t get a bit of peace even on a Sunday’, though it was possible she meant something completely different. He saw it was useless trying to explain so he took the bold step of pulling the largest denomination banknote from his pocket and putting it down on the counter in front of the woman. She carried on grumbling but took the note and went away with it so there was no harm in hoping that she might, after all, help. She quickly returned and subjected him to another annoyed tirade while giving him a few notes and a bit of change – exchanging the large denomination note for some smaller ones – then turned on her heel and left him there.