War & War (10 page)

9.

It was still hurting when he reached the diamonds, and when he stepped into the hall with a painful expression etched into his face he entirely failed to notice either the diamonds or the seething crowds as he approached them, nor did the presence of the diamonds have anything to do with the hand with which he covered his stomach, for the pain was such that he was quite incapable of removing it from that spot, the pain affecting his stomach, his ribs, his kidneys and his liver, but still more his sense of injustice at the wickedness and sheer unexpectedness of the assault on his person, and that was a pain that infected every cell of his being, which was why the one idea in his mind was to get out of there as quickly as possible, looking neither left nor right, just moving in a straight line, onward and onward, not even noticing when the significance of the hand on his stomach changed from being a physical comfort and protection to an emblem of general, unconditional uncertainty in the face of dangers facing him, dangers that singled him out, but in any case, as he explained a few days later in a Chinese restaurant, that’s how it happened, his hand just assumed this position, and when he eventually succeeded in fighting his way through the packed chaos of the hall, and arrived, if not in the fresh air, at least under some concrete arcade, he was still using his left hand to ward off anyone in his vicinity, trying to communicate to everyone near to him the fact that he was extremely frightened and that in this state of fear he was prepared for any eventuality, that no one should approach him, and in the meantime he walked up and down, seeking a bus stop before he realized that while the place abounded in bus stops there was in fact not a single bus in sight, and so, fearing that he might be condemned to stay there forever, he crossed over to the taxi stand and joined a long queue at the head of which was a commissionaire of some sort, a big man dressed like a doorman at some hotel, and this was a very wise thing to have done, as he said later, throwing his lot in with the queue opposite the concrete arcade, because this meant he was no longer lurching this way and that in an ever more advanced state of helplessness, for having got so far he had arrived at a point in the vast institution of the airport where he no longer had to explain who he was and what he wanted, since everything could be decided in his own good time, and so he waited his turn in the queue, slowly shuffling forward to the big commissionaire, the natural end point of his despairing, yet fortunate decision, because it was all likely to be smooth going from here once he showed him the slip of paper he had received from the stewardess in Budapest, with the name of a cheap, often tried and trusted hotel on it, after examining which the commissionaire nodded and told him the cost would be twenty-five dollars, and without any further ado sat him in a huge yellow cab, and there they were moving past street cleaners, having already rushed down the lanes of the highway that led to Manhattan, Korin still holding his stomach, his hand clenched into a fist, unwilling to move it from there, prepared to defend himself and beat off the next attack just in case the space between himself and the driver should suddenly be barred off and someone throw a bomb in through the cab window at the next red light, or in case the driver himself should lean back, the driver who at first glance he took to be Pakistani, Afghan, Iranian, Bengali or Bangladeshi, and grabbing a great blunderbuss cry, Your Money—Korin nervously consulted the phrase book—Or Your Life!

10.

The traffic made him dizzy, said Korin in the Chinese restaurant, and he was in constant fear of assault at every road and traffic sign that flashed before him and remained in his mind as if engraved there—Southern State Parkway, Grand Central Expressway, Jackie Robinson Parkway, Atlantic Avenue, and Long Island, Jamaica Bay, Queens, Bronx and Brooklyn—because as they journeyed further and further into the heart of town, he said, it was not the unimaginable, hysterically pounding, mortally dangerous totality of the whole as exemplified by the Brooklyn Bridge, say, or by the skyscrapers downtown that he had read about and the effect of which he had anticipated from the information given in his heavily thumbed travel guides, but odd small details, the apparently insignificant parts of the whole, that struck him, the first subway grille next to a sidewalk from which the steam was perpetually pouring, the first, swaying, wide-bodied old Cadillac they passed by the gas station and the first enormous shiny steel fire truck, and something beyond that, that silenced something in him, or, something that, if he might put it that way, burned its way into his mind without burning it quite through, for what happened, he continued, was that as the taxi swept on without a sound, as if they were slicing through butter, while he was still holding his left hand in the defensive position, looking out of the window, now left and now right, he suddenly felt, and felt most intensely, that he should be seeing something that he wasn’t seeing, that he should be comprehending something he was not comprehending, that there was, from time to time, right in front of his eyes, something he should be seeing, something blindingly obvious, but that he did not know what it was, knowing only that without seeing it he had no hope of understanding the place he had arrived at, and that as long as he failed to understand it he could only keep repeating a phrase he had been repeating to himself all afternoon and evening, something to the effect of
Dear God, this really is the center of the world
and that he, there could no longer be any doubt about it, had arrived there, at the center of the world; but he got no further with this thought and they turned from Canal Street onto the Bowery and soon enough braked to a halt outside the Suites Hotel, that being their destination, said Korin, and that’s how it had been ever since, he added, meaning that he still hadn’t a clue what it was he should be seeing in that vast city, though he knew full well that whatever it was, was right there before him, that he was actually passing through it, moving through it, as indeed he had been when he paid $25 to the silent driver and got out in front of the hotel, when the taxi started back again, and he was left gazing, simply gazing at its two receding red lights until it turned at the crossroads and set off in the direction of the Bowery, toward the heart of Chinatown.

11.

Twice he turned the key in the lock and twice he checked the security chain, then stepped to the window and watched the empty street for a while, trying to guess what was going on down there, and it was only after he had done that, he explained several days later, that he was capable of sitting down on the bed and thinking things through, his whole body still trembling, and he couldn’t even begin to think of not trembling, because as soon as he tried he started remembering, and there was no way but to sit there and tremble, unable to calm down and think things through, for it was achievement enough, after all, to simply sit down and tremble, which is what he did for minutes on end, and, he wasn’t ashamed to admit it, in the long minutes that followed the trembling he cried for a full half hour, for he was, he admitted, no stranger to crying, and now that the trembling had begun to diminish the crying took over, a kind of cramp-inducing, choking form of sobbing, the kind that makes the shoulders shake, that comes on with excruciating suddenness and stops excruciatingly slowly, though that was not the real problem, not the trembling and weeping, no: the problem was that he was obliged to face so many issues of such gravity, of such variety and of such impenetrable complexity that when it was over, that is to say after the concomitant hiccupping had also stopped, it was as if he had stepped into a vacuum, into outer space, feeling utterly numb, weightless, his head—how should he describe it?—clanging, and he needed to swallow but couldn’t, so he lay down on the bed, not moving a muscle, and started feeling those familiar shooting pains in the nape of his neck, pains so intense that at first he thought his head was about to be ripped off, and his eyes started to burn and a tremendous tiredness overcame him, although it was not impossible, he added, that all these symptoms had been there for a long time, the pain, the burning and the tiredness, and that it was only that some switch had been turned on in his head to turn the lot on, but, well, never mind, said Korin, after all that you may imagine what it felt like to be in such outer space, in this state of pain, burning and fatigue, and then begin, at last, to get his head together and deal with everything that had happened and attempt to cope with it systematically, he said, all this while sitting in a cramped-up position on the bed, going first through each and every symptom, saying, this is what hurts, this is what burns, and this, meaning everything, is what exhausts me, then attending to the events, one after another, from the very beginning if possible, he said, from the surprisingly easy way in which he managed to smuggle money through Hungarian customs without any official intervention, this being the act that made everything possible because, having sold his apartment, his car, and the rest of his so-called effects, in other words when he had converted everything to cash, he had had to think about converting that cash, little by little, into dollars on the black market, but knowing that the chances of getting official permission to take the accumulated sum across the border were negligible, he had sewed the money, along with the manuscript, into the lining of his coat, and simply walked through Hungarian customs, out of the country, without so much as a dog sniffing at him, thus relieving himself of the most terrible anxiety, and it was this success, in every sense, that facilitated the untroubled flight across the Atlantic, and there hadn’t been a major hurdle since, not, at least, that he could remember, apart from the less than major issue of a pus-filled zit at the side of his nose and the problem of constantly having to look for his passport, for the slip of paper with the hotel’s name on it, for the phrase book and the notebook, to check constantly that he hadn’t lost them, to see if they were still where he thought he had put them, in other words, but there had been no problem with the flight, his very first experience of flying, no fear, no pleasure, only an enormous relief, that was until he landed and that was where such problems as he had began, starting with the Immigration Office, the boy, the bus stop, the taxi, but chiefly the problems in his own mind, he said, pointing to his head, where it was as if everything had clouded over, where he had an overwhelming feeling of being suspended in transit, a fact he understood once he had arrived on the first floor of the hotel, just as he understood that he had to change, to change immediately, and that that change must be a wholesale trans-for-ma-tion, a transformation that should begin with his left hand which he must finally relax and to relax generally, so that he might look ahead, because, in the end—and at this point he stood up and returned to the window—everything, essentially, was going well, it was only a case of finding what people referred to as peace of mind, and of getting used to the idea that here he was and here he would stay; and having once thought this he turned back to face the room, leant against the window, took in what lay before him—a simple table, a chair, a bed, a sink—and established the fact that this was where he would be living and that this was where the Great Plan would to be put into effect, and having made a firm decision in this respect he felt strong enough to pull himself together, not to collapse and not to start crying again, because he very easily could have collapsed and started crying again, he confessed, there on the first floor of the Suites Hotel, New York.

12.

If I multiply my daily forty dollars by ten, that gives me four hundred dollars for ten days, and that’s nonsense,
Korin said to the angel at dawn, once his jet-lagged sleepless night had eventually yielded him some sleep, but he waited for an answer in vain, there was no answer, the angel just stood there stiffly and continued staring, staring at something behind his back, and Korin turned over and told him,
I’ve looked there already. There’s nothing there.

13.

For a whole day he did not move out of the hotel, not even out of the room, for what was the point, he shook his head, one day wasn’t the end of things, and he was so exhausted, he explained, that he could hardly crawl, so why should he rush into action, and in any case, what did it matter whether it was today, tomorrow, the day after, or whatever, he said a few days later, and that’s how it all began, he said, in all that time doing nothing but checking the security chain, and on one occasion, when after failing to get a response to their knocking the cleaners had tried to get in using their own key, sending them away saying No, No, No, but apart from such alarms, he slept like the dead, like one beaten to death in fact, slept through most of the day while keeping an eye on the street at night, or at least those parts of the street he could actually see, watching dazed and for hours on end, letting his eyes graze over everything, identifying the stores—the one selling wood panels, the paint warehouse—and because it was night and there was little movement nothing changed, the street seemed eternal, and the tiniest details lodged in his mind, including the order of the cars parked by the sidewalk, the stray dogs sniffing round garbage bags, the odd local figure returning home, or the powdery light emanating from streetlamps rattling in gusts of wind, everything, all etched on his memory, nothing, but nothing, escaping his attention, including his awareness of his own self as he sat in the first-story window, sitting and staring, telling himself to remain calm, that he would rest during the day gathering both physical and mental strength, for it was no small thing this experience he had been through, it was enough, and if he itemized everything that had happened to him—being pursued at home, the scene on the railway bridge, the forgetting of his visa, the waiting and the panic at the Immigration Office, plus the assault at the airport and the taxi ride with that oppressive feeling of being blindly swept along by events—and added up all these individual experiences, the experiences of a man alone, without defenses or support, was it any wonder he didn’t want to venture outside? he asked himself and, no, it was no wonder he didn’t, he muttered time and again, and so he continued sitting, looking out, waiting by the window, numbed, rooted to the spot, thinking that if this was how things had shaped up on the first day following his arrival, they had shaped up even worse on the second after another fainting fit, or what seemed like a fainting fit, though who knows which day it was anyway, perhaps it was the third night, but whenever it was he had said exactly the same thing then as he had the previous night, swearing that he would not go that day, not yet, on no account that day, perhaps the next, or the the day after that, for certain, and he got used to walking round and round the room, from window to door, up and down, in that narrow space and it would be hard, he told them, to say how many thousands of times, how many tens of thousands of times, he had made the same round trip by the third night, but if he wanted to describe the total sum of his activity the first day all he could say was I
just stared
, to which, on the second day, he might add
I walked up and down
, for that was the sum total of it, pacing up and down, satisfying his hunger occasionally with a biscuit left over from the supper he had been served on the flight, continuing to go round and round between window and door until he all but dropped with fatigue and collapsed across the bed without having decided, even now that the third day was in prospect, what he should do.