Metropole (4 page)

The metro map was behind a pane of glass and gave a diagrammatic sketch of the underground network with various colours to signify individual lines and to indicate various stations and interchanges, the lines dense and generally concentric or radiating as they crossed over or flowed into each other. There was a kind of keyboard underneath, with, it seemed, a button for each station: when people pressed one of them a line was suddenly illuminated. He waited his turn, for here too there was a considerable crowd, then pressed a few buttons at random. There were clearly a number of routes directly leading here, while others required two or three changes, but since the topological map showed only the relationship between the various metro stations and nothing of the streets and squares above, he found it impossible to locate anything, For even if he had been able to read the names of the stations he wouldn’t have been able to tell where they were in relation to all the other unfamiliar places in this vast stone-deaf vacancy. The station he was currently at was indicated by a red circle that was rather more smeared than the others because of the great number of fingers tracing routes from it. He was, of course, as incapable of reading the name as he had been of reading anything else and could only make out that the station was located near the bottom left hand corner of the map at the intersection of one of the radiating and one of the concentric lines, and that it seemed to be roughly halfway between the inner city and the outskirts; in other words that he was in one of the south-westerly suburbs. That was if he could safely assume that north was at the top, and so forth.

He went back out into the street: a little further off they were building a skyscraper higher than any he had so far seen. Craning his neck, Budai counted sixty-four floors so far, but there were clearly more to come. An enormous number of people were working on the steel framework and half-completed walls, swarming like ants over the scaffolding, the structure practically black with them, ascending and descending on pulleys that also carried materials, prefabricated components and enormous panels – the proportions of the building inspiring not so much admiration as fear, as if the lot could at any moment collapse around his head and bury him for ever ... But his purpose was not to stand and stare. He went into the nearest grocery and waited patiently like the other customers. And though they did not understand him here either, he refused to shift or give way until they had measured out for him whatever he pointed at. He then had to stand in another queue to receive his cold meat, his butter, cheese and bread, and then in another for some roast fish he fancied. Having only been given a receipt for this he had to stand in line at the till once more. He paid, not knowing how much he had given, put away the change, then stood at the food counter again. The whole process took half an hour.

It was the fat doorman with his gold-braided cap on duty at the hotel again: Budai wondered when the man slept. He received his key the same way by writing down the number 921, carefully storing the piece of paper in his top pocket. He noted which of the lifts was being operated by the blonde attendant – it was the middle one – and he joined that queue. The girl was reading and did not look up as the passengers called out their floors but simply pressed the appropriate buttons. It was only when Budai, unable to tell her it was the ninth floor, touched her on the arm that she looked up. She gazed up at him, blinking one or twice, as if waking from a dream, then the door opened and he stepped out.

They had tidied his room while he was out, swept the floor and made the bed. He found his pyjamas under the blanket and his slippers in the bedside cupboard. He was frightened for a second in case they regarded him as a permanent guest, but he immediately dismissed the thought: after all, it is not the job of the staff to know that, what do they know ... ? He opened his packages and fell greedily to eating, slicing the bread with his penknife and making sandwiches. Everything tasted strange, different from what he was used to at home, somehow sweeter, the meat, the bread, the cucumber and even the fish. He carefully packed away what remained and put it in the window. At last he was well fed, all he needed now was coffee to finish the meal. But he did not feel like making a special trip downstairs for it. He would rather take a short rest. So, with a touch of self-satisfaction for filling his stomach despite all the difficulties, he kicked off his shoes and stretched out on the fully made-up bed.

He can only have snoozed two or three minutes before he suddenly sat up, his heart beating with anxiety. What was wrong with him? Was he mad? They were waiting for him in Helsinki where the conference would be in full swing by now! And he was due to deliver his speech, possibly on the first or second day, and, for all he knew, he might have been drafted onto this or that committee, and they would not understand why he wasn’t there. What was he doing here, and, furthermore, where was
here
, what town, what country, what part of the world, what godforsaken spot on the globe? He tried once more to think through the whole impossible set of events: he trusted in logic, in the highly developed power of scientific method and its way of reaching conclusions, and, not least, in his own experience of travel, since he had been travelling ever since his student days. But however he examined the events of the last twenty-four hours he could not work out what he should have done differently, whom he might have consulted, what possible alternatives existed. And while the misunderstanding that had resulted in his being here would, no doubt, be resolved sooner or later, at which point he could immediately leave and move on, he felt somewhat at a loss for now: he was without friends, acquaintances, indeed documents, and to all intents and purposes, utterly on his own, in an unknown city of whose very name he was ignorant, where no one spoke any language that he could understand even though he knew a great many languages, and where he had yet to find anyone with whom he might exchange a word or two.

He tried to piece together such fragments of knowledge about the place as he had so far managed to gather. It must be a large city, that much was obvious, a metropolis, a cosmopolitan city he had never before visited. For the time being he could not even begin to place it on the globe or tell how far it lay from home or in what direction. He might, it occurred to him, have been able to attempt a rough calculation as to the number of hours they had travelled by seeing how much his beard had grown on the plane while he was asleep. But he hadn’t thought of it last night when he had arrived and shaved. He was probably feeling a little woozy at the time and now he simply couldn’t remember how much hair he had scraped from his jaw ... It was a densely populated city, that was clear enough, more populous than any he had known, though what ethnicity, what colour constituted the majority, was hard to determine going by what he had seen so far. The most conspicuous feature of the place was that people did not seem to speak foreign languages here, none at least that he was familiar with, not even in a hotel as enormous as this, only their mother tongue. And that sounded peculiar, utterly unlike anything else, almost mere gabble. The written version was a vacuous, incomprehensible jumble. Nor was the weather of any help: dry, cold, wintry, exactly like February back home when he left. As for the grocery shop, nothing in the items on sale gave a clue to the whereabouts of the country, being pretty much what was found anywhere, meaning a range of cold and ready-to-cook meats, cheeses, apples, lemons, oranges, bananas, preserves, jams in jars, fruit juice, coffee, sweets, sea-fish and so on. There was no way of telling what was local, what imported. Items of clothing offered nothing different from the usual garments found in the rest of the civilised world, products of boutiques and department stores, differing only in quality, each individual item straight out of some international catalogue, ready to wear. It added up to little more than nothing: it was an equation without known quantities.

What to do? No local body, certainly not the hotel administration, would be likely to know that he had arrived here by mistake, quite unintentionally, otherwise they would have done something by now, returned his passport and so forth ... The passport was another mystery: it was quite incomprehensible why they should have kept it or where they were keeping it since it was normal practice everywhere else to return it once the formalities of registration were over. And where had the grey-haired desk-clerk got to, the one who had taken his passport from him, and whom he had not seen since? Who should he hold responsible? From whom should he request his airline ticket and passport, and to whom should he explain all this and in what language and how? Even now he shuddered to think of the painful events of yesterday morning, of his pointless, idiotic gesturing – and yet he couldn’t just leave it like that. How long was he going to spend hanging about here, in a place that had nothing to do with him, on the ninth floor of a strange hotel in a strange city?

He tried to consider methodically where he might turn for help. To the management? To the information desk? To an interpreter, a travel agent, the airline? These ideas passed before him but how was he to locate any of these agencies? Who was there to ask in the dreadful whirl of traffic where no one had the time to address his problems but left him muttering idiotically to himself? They must speak other languages in banks and financial institutions and, possibly, in various public offices, but where to find such places, how to identify them among the mass of buildings, when he couldn’t make the slightest sense of the notices on them? What if he sought out a foreign embassy, his own or some other country’s? How would he find it and recognise it? Would it be flying the flag at the entrance? He must keep his eyes peeled: surely, if he explored the city systematically, examining everything he passed, continually on the alert, it would be impossible not to discover one. And above all, here in the hotel itself, in such an enormous international establishment, it was unimaginable that he should not eventually meet someone with whom he could talk. The point was not to drift. He had to overcome his natural reticence and awkwardness, to shake himself free of his mental lassitude and extricate himself from this whole dumb episode.

His first thought was to jot everything down in his note-book – he never went anywhere without one in case he had some bright idea on his travels. He should write a brief account, in English, of what had happened to him, where he came from, where he wanted to go and so on, and then add a note requesting the management to act promptly, to help him smoothly on his way or provide him with someone to whom he might explain the situation. He wrote the note and signed it, adding his name and the figures 921, much as a prisoner might give his number, laughing as he did so. He then translated the same text into French and Russian. Once he had handed these in at the desk it stood to reason, plain as the nose on his face, that somebody would understand one of these texts and take the necessary steps.

At the same time he thought he’d try the telephone again and dialled what he thought might be public lines, such as began with 0, 00, 01, 02, 11, 111, 09, 99 and the like, but there was no answer from any of them except, occasionally, a rapid pulsing sound. He was growing furious. Why was there no telephone book in the room? It was the thing that most annoyed him right now and he kept wildly clicking at the phone, tugging at it angrily, slamming the receiver down, bellowing fierce hellos and finally throwing the set down so forcefully it was lucky it didn’t break. He had to get a list of names from somewhere. He quickly put on his shoes, calmed himself and dashed out.

His aim was to shortcut the queue and slip his key to the desk clerk as before, but though they took his key, he was pushed out of the way by the crowd before he could hand over his piece of paper and was directed to the back of the queue. So once again he had to stand patiently in line until he reached the desk again and passed the clerk his note written in three languages. The man blinked, turned the piece of paper over and over in his hand, examined his own files, and gabbled something that sounded like a question, but Budai did not stay to listen to him, preferring to disappear into the crowd.

He looked this way and that in the lobby, searching for a public telephone. There wasn’t one anywhere, at least he could not find one, though it seemed to him that he had passed one that morning. He went out into the street again where the traffic was as busy as before, sweeping him this way and that so he had to struggle against it, and there it was, albeit a block further off than he had remembered. There really was a phone booth there but it was occupied of course with a tidy queue in front of it. He felt there was no point in waiting for his turn especially because he saw that the list of codes fixed to the wall was long and that the directories themselves were numerous and thick so there was no chance of him removing them with so many people around. He refused to admit defeat though and wandered on looking for another booth as if locating a telephone directory was the most important thing in the world. He took the stairs down into the metro again, and he was right: it was as he remembered, a dozen or so booths lined one of the walls of the station, all of them occupied, the long snaking queues blending with the general crowd. Here too he felt that it was hopeless waiting, but since he was here he determined to study the map he had discovered that morning a little more closely. He ended up not much wiser than he had then, though he did at least establish the name and location of the station and even copied its name and draw its position in his notebook, writing down the characters just outside the little red circle so that he should be able to find his way back to it from anywhere, should he get lost.

Upstairs meanwhile the sky was growing darker and the street lights had come on. It was about this time that the bus had brought him here. That must mean he had spent an entire twenty-four hours in the place. But that was not the most important thing on his mind as he pressed anxiously ahead: he had learned by now to shove, to struggle and carve out a path among the tides of others, like all the rest ... The skyscraper was still rising and there were as many men working under floodlights as there had been during the day. He spotted another diner a little further on, one he had not entered yet, so he peeked through the door. It was a self-service establishment with customers taking ready-prepared dishes from various stands and it was only after having done so that they queued up at the cash desk with their tray. Budai was delighted. The crowd was no worse than elsewhere. This was the first time he had come across something that struck him as a vaguely pleasant surprise so he went straight in. He collected a large range of food: soup, stuffed eggs, a roast with trimmings, some cheese and a slice of gateau – how, after all, did he know when he would be able to have a decent meal again? – and poured himself a small coffee from a machine for good measure. He passed over a handful of change to the woman at the till so she could take the necessary amount, then sat down at the nearest counter and ate it all up. There it was again, that same peculiar sweet taste, as if both meat and egg had been flavoured with sugar.