War & War (13 page)

23.

It’s perfectly all right, you can walk beside me, the interpreter encouraged Korin who was continually hanging back next day as they proceeded down the street, through the subway and finally up the escalators on 47th Street; come along now, catch up, stop hanging back, here, walk beside me, it’s all right, but it was no use calling and gesturing, for Korin, involuntarily perhaps, kept falling ten or twenty paces behind, so in the end the interpreter gave up and thought to hell with him, as he recounted later, if he wants to trail behind then, very well, let him, after all it means damn anything to him where he chooses to walk, the essential point being, as he decided and made perfectly plain to Korin, that this was the last time they ventured out together, for frankly he had no time to spare, he was so busy, and he would help it this time, but that in the future Korin would have to stand on his own two feet, all by himself, right? he snapped, because it very much looked as if this was going in one ear and out of the other as far as Korin was concerned, lurking behind him like some retard, when he should at least listen, the interpreter barked furiously and pointlessly, for Korin was all ears and it was only that he had a hundred, no a hundred thousand other matters to attend to at the moment, this being the first time since his terrifying journey from the airport to The Sunshine Hotel that, thank God, he could look around in anything like normal fashion, the first time that he felt at all capable of comprehending events around him, even while being afraid, as he confessed next morning in the kitchen, afraid then and still afraid, without knowing what precisely it was that he should or should not be afraid of, what he should or should not look out for, and therefore, naturally, in a state of high alert at every step, right from the first, as he followed the interpreter, careful that he should not fall too far behind but at the same time careful not to hurry too much, careful to drop in his subway token at the machine precisely as required, fearing that the expression on his face, which might not be sufficiently indifferent, should call too much attention to him, in other words taking care to behave in an appropriate manner without knowing what an appropriate manner might be, which was why he was following Mr. Sárváry, in this exhausted condition, to a shop with the sign Photo above it on 47 th Street, so tired that he was barely capable of dragging himself along as they stepped in and had immediately to mount some stairs, which meant dragging himself up the stairs too, so that by this time he hardly knew where he was or what was happening as Mr. Sarváry, he told the woman, had a word with a Hasidic Jew behind a counter who replied something to the effect that they would have to wait, though there were very few other people in the shop, in fact only a single customer before them, but even so they waited at least twenty minutes before the Hasidic Jew came out from behind the counter, led them to a mass of computers and started to explain something of which he, Korin, as he said, naturally understood not a word, and only caught on when Mr. Sárváry informed him that they had found the best possible model for his purposes and asked him if he would like to create a
home page
, when, seeing his clueless expression, he gestured in a hopeless comical manner, said Korin, and, thank heaven, decided the matter for himself, so that all that remained was for him to fork out the sum of twelve hundred and eighty-nine dollars, which he did, in return for which he received a small light package to carry home, and so they started back though Korin did not so much as dare to ask a question on the way, because he was keenly aware of the value of twelve hundred and eighty-nine dollars on the one hand and of the small light package on the other, and so they proceeded silently through the subway, changing trains once or twice, and so forth, making their way toward 159th Street in silence, without a word, and though a word is not much, it was probably the case that Mr. Sárváry was also exhausted by the traveling, for they continued thus in absolute silence, he and the interpreter, the latter sometimes casting a forbidding look at him whenever he felt that Korin was on the point of saying something, for he was determined not to endure another idiotic monologue, preferring silence, at least until they got home, when, the interpreter told him, he would explain how the thing worked and what he had to do, as indeed he did, explaining everything, turning the computer on and showing him which key to press and when to press it, though he was not prepared to do more than that, he said, demonstrating for the last time what each key was for and how he could get the necessary diacritics, then asked him not for the agreed two hundred as he had intended the previous night when he offered to help with the purchase, but for four hundred, straight out, as a loan, seeing the guy seemed to be made of money, not just the cash in his overcoat, he laughed to his partner, sitting with her at the table, saying, just imagine the overcoat, the money being all sewn into the lining like that and him having to poke his hand in and get it out of there so he could pay the store, imagine that, have you ever heard anything like it, as if it were some kind of purse, he roared with laughter, and the guy just peeled off the four hundred greenbacks, like that, which makes a round thousand, sweetheart, then he left him, continued the interpreter, but before leaving he told him, perfectly straight, Mr. Korin, pal, you won’t survive long round here like that, because if you don’t take that money out of your coat lining there are people out there who can smell the stuff, and it’s beginning to stink to high heaven, so the next time you stick your nose out of the door, someone or other will kill you for the sheer smell of it.

24.

A conventional computer, the interpreter explained, normally consists of a monitor in a case, a keyboard, a mouse, a modem and various items of software one has to learn to use, and yours, he told Korin who was nodding without understanding anything, comprises all these items, and beside these has the extra facility, he pointed to the unwrapped laptop, not only of being plugged immediately into the Internet, which goes without saying, but of providing you with a template for a ready-made home page, which is all you need, for having put down a deposit of two hundred and thirty dollars, you have already paid for a provider several months ahead, so there is nothing else left for you to do except—but wait, let’s go from the top again, he sighed seeing Korin’s terrified expression—first you press this, he put his finger on a button at the back of the computer, to switch the set on, and when you do that these little colored icons appear, do you see? he asked pointing at each one of them, do you see all these? and began to go over it all again using only the simplest words and in the least technical detail, because the guy’s level of understanding, he told his partner, was negligible to the nth degree, and that’s not taking the speed of his reactions into account, so, never mind, he said, let’s start at the beginning, from the point at which you see what you do see on the monitor, at which point you should do this and that, and he would have gone on to explain why this or that action was necessary and what various things meant, but quickly realizing that this was utterly useless, he taught him only that which was mechanically required and made him practice it, since, when you came down to it, he told her, the only way was to make him go through the basic actions, everything but everything, time and time again, so as soon as he demonstrated something he asked him to repeat it and in this way, said the interpreter, after some three hours, the guy eventually learned the secrets of creating a home page, so though he hadn’t the faintest idea what he was doing he was capable of opening Word in Office 97 and typing in some piece of text, and, when he had finished for the day, of formatting what he had done as hypertext, saving it, then dialing up his server, typing his code-name, his password, his provider, his own name,
etcetera etcetera
, just about everything he needed to know in order to send the information to his home page, using his personal password, so that he himself could check that his text had got onto the server and that the material could be searched on the basis of a few key words using the search engine, and this, all this, said the interpreter, still somewhat incredulously, had to be accomplished with the most primitive of methods seeing that the guy’s brains were like cheese, full of holes, in one ear and out of the other, and whenever he was told something new his brow completely creased up with the effort, like the whole guy was one enormous straining mass but you can see the stuff that had just entered his head leaking out again, right out so there was nothing left, so you may imagine, as Korin himself said in the kitchen the next day, you may imagine what he went through trying to learn it all, for not only did he admit that his mind was not what it had been, but confessed outright that, as a mind, it was useless, ruined, kaput, finished, no good for anything anymore, and it was only thanks to Mr. Sárváry’s remarkable, enchanting gift of pedagogy, not to mention, Korin added with a forced smile, his endless patience, that he finally got something right, and, why deny it, there was no one more surprised than he that he should have at his command this miraculous, incredible triumph of technology that weighed no more than a few ounces, and it worked, against all the odds it actually worked, he told her, highly animated, just imagine, young lady, there it was sitting in his room, the machine, on the table, right in the middle of it, adjusted precisely to its central position, and all he had to do was to sit down in front of it and everything was under way, everything functioning as it should, he suddenly laughed out loud, simply because, and for no other reason, than that he had pushed this or that button, and it was all as Mr. Sárváry said it would be, so with a couple more days of practice, he quietly told the woman, who was before the gas burner as usual, with her back to him, saying nothing, he could start work, just a couple more days, he repeated, then after a couple of days of concentrated practice he could get the job properly started, wholeheartedly commit himself to it, put his back into it, make a real go of it, in other words a day or so and he’d be sitting there, writing something for posterity, for eternity, he, György Korin, on the top floor of number 547 West 159th Street, New York, for the price of one thousand two hundred and eighty-nine dollars all told, of which two hundred and thirty was deposit.

25.

He searched for the most secure place possible in the room then, taking the interpreter’s advice, took the remaining money out of his coat lining, attached it to a string and stuffed it nice and deep between the bedsprings, folded the mattress back over it and smoothed out the bedclothes, checking from a variety of viewpoints, some standing, some squatting, to ensure that there should be nothing there to catch a stranger’s eye; and this being taken care of, he was ready to get on with other things, for he had decided that between five in the afternoon and three in the morning, when, the interpreter had warned him, the single telephone line would be unavailable for working on the computer, he would start exploring the town in order that he might have some idea of where things were in relation to where he was, and in what particular corner of the city he now found himself, or, to put it another way, to discover what he had achieved in picking the center of the world, New York, as the most appropriate setting for the execution of his plan to comprehend the eternal truth and die, which was why, he told the woman in the kitchen, he now had to orient himself in it by walking everywhere until he got to know the place, which he did on the day after he had bought the computer and started to learn to use it, shortly after five o’clock when he descended the stairs, left the house and started walking down the street, just a couple of hundred yards and back at first, then repeating the exercise several times, glancing over his shoulder to ensure that he would know the buildings again by sight and later, after a good hour had passed, venturing down as far as the subway on the corner of 159th and Washington Avenue, where he took a long time studying the subway map without daring to buy a token, board a train or explore any further that day, though he had gathered courage enough by the next to purchase a token and board the first available train, riding down as far as Times Square because the name had a familiar ring to it, then walking along Broadway until he was perfectly exhausted by the effort; and this is what he did, day after day, always returning either on the bus the interpreter had recommended or on the subway, the result being that after a week of these ever more intrepid ventures, he had begun to learn to live in the city and no longer felt a mortal fear of traveling or of making a purchase at the Vietnamese store on the corner, and, more importantly, was no longer fearful of each and every individual who happened to stand next to him on the bus or pass him in the street: and all this he learned and it made a genuine difference, though one thing hadn’t changed, not even after a week, and that was his high anxiety level, the anxiety, that is, of knowing that despite all he had so painstakingly learned he still understood nothing of it, and that, because of this, the intensity of his feelings had not abated, and that he was still in thrall to the state of mind he first experienced on that unforgettable first taxi ride, the feeling that, among all these enormous buildings, he should be seeing something, but that however he peered and strained his eyes, he was failing to see it, and he continued to feel this every moment of his various journeys from Times Square to the East Village, from Chelsea to the Lower East Side, in Central Park, downtown, Chinatown and Greenwich Village, and the feeling was gnawing away at him, so that whatever he looked at reminded him with a ferocious intensity of something else, but what that was he had no idea, not a solitary inkling, he told the woman who continued to stand silently with her back to him at the stove, cooking something in a gray saucepan, so that Korin had courage enough to talk to her but not to address her directly nor tactfully to compel her to turn around for once and say something herself, which meant he was restricted to talking to her, genuinely talking to her, on those regular occasions they met in the kitchen at noon, telling her anything that came to his mind, hoping in this way to discover a way of engaging her in conversation or understanding why she never spoke, for he felt instinctively drawn to her, more, at any rate, than to anyone else in the building, and it was plain from his daily noontime exertions that he was seeking to establish some favor with her, talking to her all the time, every noon, telling her about everything from his experiences with the computer to his feelings about skyscrapers, staring at her bent back by the stove, at the greasy hair hanging in bunches over her thin shoulders, at the straps dangling at the sides of the blue apron covering her bony hips, and watching how she used a dishtowel to lift the hot pan from the fire then vanish from the kitchen into her room without a word, her eyes averted, as if she were permanently frightened of something.