Metropole

Looking back on it later it could only have happened because Budai had gone through the wrong door in the confusion at the transit lounge and, having mistaken an exit sign, found himself on a plane bound elsewhere without the airport staff having noticed the change. After that it was impossible to say how far or for how long he had flown, for as soon as the engine purred into life he reclined his seat and fell asleep. He was quite exhausted, hardly having rested the last few days, working himself to a standstill, and apart from anything else there was the speech for the linguistic conference in Helsinki for which he had just now been preparing. He was woken only once during the flight when they brought him his meal, then he promptly fell asleep again, it might have been for ten minutes or for ten hours. He didn’t even have his wristwatch with him since he intended buying one out there and didn’t want to have to present two watches at customs back home, so he didn’t have the least clue how far he was from home. It was only later, once he was in town, that he discovered it wasn’t Helsinki and was shocked that he didn’t know where he actually was. The passengers had been put on board a bus at the airport. It was dark; a cold and windy evening, or perhaps it was already night and he was still half asleep. The bus stopped in various places and a lot of people got out. Budai had been in Helsinki before but now he sought in vain for familiar buildings or the seafront. At one of the stops everyone got off, including the driver, who gestured for him to do likewise. He found himself at the glass doors of a hotel with great crowds of people pressing past him, quickly separating him from his fellow passengers, and it took him a good while to push through the crowd flowing both ways. The doorman, an enormous portly figure wearing a fur coat and a gold-braided cap, greeted him courteously and opened the swing door before him, but when Budai addressed him in Finnish he plainly did not understand and answered in an unknown language, ushering him into the lobby where the influx of new guests prevented further conversation.

There was a crowd gathered by the hotel reception as well so he had to join the queue and, by the time he found himself face to face with the grey-haired desk-clerk, a man in a dark-blue uniform, there was a large, noisy family — mother, father, three unruly children, plus a mass of luggage — all squashed up behind him, practically pushing him forward with barely disguised impatience. From this point on everything speeded up. He tried to address the receptionist in Finnish, then in English, French, German and Russian, all clearly to no avail since the man replied in a different unknown language. So he showed the man his passport and the desk-clerk took it from him, no doubt to jot down the details, handing him a copper-weighted key in return. Budai had slipped his dollar cheque, the daily stipend for trips abroad, into his passport, and the porter took that too, then consulted his pocket calculator, read off the result and quickly filled out a pre-stamped form which must have been a credit note in the local currency, or so Budai guessed from his rapid gabble. He tried protesting that he didn’t want to cash his cheque in now but no one understood him and since the loud and large family behind him were growing ever more impatient, waving documents, the children screaming, and since the desk-clerk was pointing to the neighbouring cash-desk, Budai gave up the struggle, let the family through and stepped over to the next window.

There was a similarly long queue there moving at snail’s pace so he took his place at the end ever more irritated, thinking he would have to undergo the same idiotic procedure all over again. The clerk here simply gabbled the same incomprehensible language. Once again he had no time to explain, not that he had any clear idea what it was he wanted to explain nor what language to attempt. The upshot was that he was given a wad of unused banknotes, some bigger, some smaller, a few screwed-up ones and half a fistful of change in coins that he pocketed along with the notes without examining them closely. This was all quite ridiculous and infuriating of course but he had only just begun to speculate on what might have happened. Maybe the weather was bad in Helsinki and the flight had been diverted and that was why they had landed in some other town. But, surely, in that case his luggage would have been returned to him, yet all he had with him now was the little case he had carried on board and had stowed in the compartment over his head. Whichever way he looked the only conclusion he could come to was that he had boarded the wrong flight in transit which meant his suitcase must have arrived in Helsinki without him, though now he came to look for it he could not find his ticket either, nor could he remember anyone taking it from him at the airport. That presented a serious problem since he had left his personal ID and other papers at home, shoving them into a drawer at the last minute, so he was without any documents. But that wasn’t what most agitated him right now, that could be sorted out later; what mattered was that he should get to Helsinki as soon as possible. In order to do that he first had to explain to the relevant authorities how he had arrived here and from where, which entailed locating those appropriate authorities who would, most probably, be the representatives of the airline. Unfortunately he had no idea where to find them. The queue at reception was even longer than before so he had no desire to join it again, indeed all the windows were fully occupied, and he couldn’t work out which window was for what and where he should go for mere information. There were notices here and there over particular windows along the long desk but he could not make them out, the letters being of some unknown alphabet, as were the captions under the pictures hanging on the walls, the messages of the posters and the text of the newspapers and magazines at the newsagent’s counter. In any case he was unable to examine them properly because the lobby was full of the dense, constantly shifting crowd and whenever he tried to stand still he was jostled and swept along elsewhere. So he decided to wait and arrange things by telephone from his room.

The copper weight on his key said 921 so he guessed the room would be on the ninth floor. He found the lifts at the end of the lobby though only three of the eight seemed to be working and each of those had a large group of people waiting by it. Budai would have gone up by the stairs but casting his eyes round for the stairs he couldn’t see them and he was unwilling to lose his place in the queue. It took another quarter of an hour before he managed to get into the lift which was so full that there was no room to move. The blue-uniformed lift girl was tall, young and blonde. She called out in her mysterious language, announcing the floors, and indeed they seemed to stop at every one. But as soon as the compartment emptied it filled up again since a whole new crowd piled in at each floor. There was a small, working ventilator fixed to the wall next to the girl yet Budai couldn’t help wondering how she could work in such a stuffy, airless compartment with such a constant press of people, working perhaps for hours at a time or on an entire shift. But he quickly dismissed the thought: it wasn’t his problem, he was going to be away from here, today with a bit of luck, by tomorrow morning at the latest. He signalled that he wanted to get out at the ninth floor and squeezed out with the rest when they arrived, their places being immediately occupied by others. He met no one in the corridor as he searched for his room, wandering to and fro, counting forward and back in the attempt to locate room 921. There was always a doorway or a junction that broke the sequence and he could not pick it up again. Twice he found himself back at the lift until he finally stumbled on 921 at the very end of a distant branch corridor.

The room was tiny but the fittings were modern and comfortable, complete with a settee, a cupboard, a writing desk, a standard lamp and a bedside reading light. In the tiny en suite there was a shower, a basin with hot and cold running water, a toilet bowl, as well as mirrors and towels. Both rooms were pleasantly warm though there was no sign of a heater: it must have been hidden in the wall. The windows were provided with curtains and canvas blinds and through them, opposite, he saw a tall, wide building, the same height as the hotel, dotted with many lit and darkened windows of its own. There was a single picture on his own wall, an oil painting, glazed, showing a gently undulating snowbound landscape with two pine trees and some scampering fawns in the distance. There was also a framed text beside the door, an inventory perhaps or the house rules, its orthography resembling that of the one downstairs. He didn’t recognise the alphabet, knowing only that it wasn’t like anything he had noted in passing, not Latin, not Greek, not Cyrillic, not Arabic, not Hebrew, but not Japanese, Chinese or Armenian either: he had taken a quick survey course of all these languages back in his student days. What did stick out, however, was that one or two Arabic numerals appeared in the mass of unrecognisable writing. He took out the money he had been given in exchange for his cheque and found much the same, the writing incomprehensible but the figures under the landscapes and portraits much as usual: eighteen brand new tens, a few ones and twos, and some coins of greater or lesser value. But he felt too drowsy and dull now to continue his investigations and dirty too after his long journey. He took out his bathroom items and put away some of his few belongings. Fortunately he and his wife had been wary of exceeding the 20kg limit in the suitcase so they stuffed what they could into the zip-up canvas shoulder-bag, including underwear, pyjamas, slippers, the wash-bag, a spare pair of shoes, a jumper, two bottles of wine to give away as presents, that kind of thing… It was odd how he had failed to seek out his baggage on arrival, though the fact was there seemed to be no opportunity to do so in the rush, in the dreamlike confusion when the passengers were herded onto the bus. But he had a faint memory of looking for something in it, that the suitcase was on the bus with him in the luggage compartment.

He showered and shaved in front of the mirror, put on clean underwear, immediately washing out what he had just worn, hanging his pants and vest on the taps and the shower head. Having done so he tried out the phone. Since there did not appear to be a phonebook or anything like it in the room, he simply kept dialling until he got somebody on the other end of the line. There were in fact a number of voices at the ends of the various lines, male and female both, but whatever language he chose to ask a question in, however often he repeated that question in another language, practically shouting out the word information! he was answered in the same incomprehensible way, in a language without discernible inflections, a continual jabbering — ‘bebebe’ or ‘pepepe’ or ‘checheche’. However he adjusted his sharp ears to the most delicate distinctions, to the most subtle tonal variations, he heard only a kind of muttering or burbling. In the end he slammed the receiver down with a bitter laugh, frustrated that everything and everyone was proving so difficult. In any case, he was hungry and had no idea when he had last eaten. He got dressed, locked his room and set off in search of food.

There was an older woman in charge of the lift now, not the blonde girl, or maybe he himself had got into a different lift, though this was as packed as the last had been. Downstairs in the lobby the grey-haired desk-clerk had also been replaced, but the queue had not grown any shorter. Budai had no more luck with this desk-clerk than he had with the last; it was ridiculous that a hotel as big as this should employ incompetents who could not speak any of the major world languages, but the people behind him in the queue were growing loud and those at the back were shouting and gesturing at him for pushing in, insisting that he should get to the back of the long serpentine row, so, feeling confused again, he put his key down on the desk and moved on.

The crowd in the lobby was just as dense as before, pushing and shoving, and he had to thread his way carefully through to the revolving doors. Once again the fat, gold-braided, fur-coated doorman saluted him, but the street was no less crowded than the hall, its tide of humanity swirling, flooding and lurching this way and that. Everyone was in a hurry, panting, elbowing and fighting to get through; one elderly woman in a headscarf kicked him as hard as she could on the ankle and he received a good many more blows on his shoulder and ribs. The traffic in the roadway was equally packed, the cars nose to tail, now stopping, now starting, making absolutely no allowance for pedestrians, as if they were stuck in some eternal bottleneck, engines continually revving, horns furiously blaring: there was a wide variety of them, saloons and trucks, enormous public conveyances, trolleys and buses, and he was surprised to discover he did not recognise any of the makes he knew from home or from previous visits abroad. Clearly he must have emerged in the evening rush hour and whichever way he turned, now left, now right, the crowd was such that he could not escape but repeatedly found himself back at the hotel entrance. So he turned down a side street, but there too the crowd was dense, the pavement heaving with pedestrians, the roadway jammed with cars: any move he made entailed a real effort. Not that he wanted to go too far of course in case he should get lost and not find his way back to the hotel.

Neon signs were blinking high above him. Most of the shops were still open. They were selling all kinds of things with a very wide range of choice, as the window displays made clear — clothes, shoes, dinner sets, flowers, household equipment, carpets, furniture, bicycles, perfume, plastic items — these, at least, were what he noted. And there were no end of customers, or so it seemed, with long queues inside, some of them extending out into the street. The most crowded were the two groceries that Budai passed on his short journey, a journey he just about found strength to make since the pavement was becoming ever more crowded, the customers who could not get into the shops congregating in the doorways or forming close-packed columns: he had no idea how long it would take to get round to buying something. But the hunger pains were increasingly acute so he was delighted to find a restaurant a little further along, the tables with their tablecloths behind the big plate-glass window, the guests at their dinners, the waiters in their white coats.

Unfortunately there was a queue here too, quite a long one at that, because they only let in as many guests as were leaving so it was rather slow progress. He tried to size up the others in the queue without drawing attention to himself. Some were white, some coloured: right in front of him were two coal-black, wire-haired, young men, a little further off an oriental-looking, pale-yellow woman with her daughter, but there were some tall Germanic types, one tubby Mediterranean gleaming with perspiration in his camel-coloured coat, a few brown-skinned Malays, some Arab or Semitic people, and a young redheaded woman with freckles in a blue woollen jumper, carrying a tennis racquet: it was hard to tell what race or shade formed the majority here, at least in front of the restaurant.

After a good forty minutes of creeping along he too was finally allowed in and left his coat at the counter in exchange for a number. The tables were all occupied, and it took some time to find him a place near the back of the hall. He asked in English if he might sit down but it seemed nobody could understand him, people glancing blankly up at him from their plates before immediately returning to their food. It was obvious that everyone here was in a hurry but it was another quarter of an hour before the waiter appeared since he was clearly so busy he could not have got to him earlier. He cleared and set the table for Budai, gathering up the used dishes and putting a menu down in front of him, though Budai couldn’t make head or tail of the contents. He started to explain this to the old waiter but the man simply shrugged and gabbled something and was, in any case, called away by someone else. Budai tried to address the others at the table. He spoke to them in six or eight languages but without any success whatsoever; they gave no sign of comprehension and didn’t even pay him much attention. He was growing ever more irritated, his stomach tense with excitement, but there wasn’t even a slice of bread nearby. It was another twenty minutes before the waiter returned with a large and fulsome dish of garnished chicken for his fellow diners but there was no point in Budai indicating his hunger and asking for some of the same for the waiter was called away again and it was impossible to say whether he had made a note of the order at all. In the meantime other diners came and went. The waiter reappeared at the far end of the table with new dishes and clean cutlery and was paid by some but he took not the least notice of Budai and soon enough he was called away to another table. Nevertheless, Budai kept whistling and waving until at last he returned only to rattle on in an annoyed and melancholy manner, his voice heavy with passion, though Budai couldn’t tell whether he was simply asking him to be patient or expressing his exasperation and wanted nothing more to do with him. Budai could barely contain himself: he felt helpless not knowing whether it was worth waiting or whether he should do something else. When the waiter returned and once again failed to serve him he smacked his hands down on the table, kicked his chair and stalked off in indignation. He had, of course, to join another queue for his coat, since there was a lot of coming and going, but he barged past them in his fury. He left a small coin for the cloak-room attendant, the old man there possibly grateful, muttering something that might have been a thanks.

Yes, but he had still not eaten and was now incapable of thinking about anything else. He fought his way through the traffic that was just as dense as before, thrusting ahead, using both hands and feet until, at the cost of several more blows and one or two near-confrontations, after an infinitely long half a mile down the road he found himself at something like a self-service buffet. This too was jam-packed with customers who jostled or just stood about but it was impossible to tell what they were waiting for so he stood in one of the queues and waited to see. The queue made pretty slow progress and he found out rather late that it led to a cash desk where people were being given numbered receipts and that another queue beyond that continued right across the long hall to a counter on the far side where the food was dished out. When he did eventually arrive at the cash-desk the woman in the blue coat glanced at him as if to ask what he wanted to order but he was thrown into such confusion that he was unable to utter a word, though naturally it would not have made the slightest difference what he wanted to say as she would not have understood him. The woman addressed him in the strange language he had heard often enough by now and he muttered something in Spanish, he himself being uncertain as to why. In the meantime the people behind him started to grumble, wondering why he was taking all that time, rattling their small change, pushing him and practically treading on his heels so he found himself beyond the cash desk without a receipt. Someone behind him was talking to the woman in blue, and further back the queue was so long with recent arrivals that it was impossible to worm his way back in: they would clearly not allow him to do so, not till he went right to the back anyway. To stand in the counter queue under the circumstances seemed more than useless for not having a receipt he would not be served, but there was no option, his sheer helplessness drove him forward. He queued until he reached the counter where people were handing over their receipts to the person in the white chef’s hat to take away the food and drink of their choice while he could only wave his empty hands about uselessly trying to explain why he was doing so. Having no receipt they paid him no attention but attended to the general crush passing dishes of roast meat and pastries over him and around him, right before his nose. He was all but dancing with rage by this time, his arms threshing the air, without any assurance at all that there might be a different outcome if he stood in another queue.

He had just slunk out into the street full of shame for having given up hope of supper for the night when he spotted an old woman on the corner selling roast chestnuts with only some three or four people waiting by the hot iron grill. He was there in less than a minute, but his linguistic skills failed him again, the two dozen languages he could speak or stutter as ineffective as the signs he tried to make with his hands and fingers. He might as well have been talking to the deaf and dumb. He finished up buying all the chestnuts on the stall, some forty of them. He had never bought as many at a time. He gave the old woman one of the smaller banknotes and received some change. He gobbled down the chestnuts immediately, there on the pavement, burning his mouth in the process and grew tearful as he did so. He felt sorry for himself: he had never felt so lost or so foreign in any city. Must get away, he kept thinking. Back to the hotel, grab luggage and find a plane or train, anything not to be here a day or hour longer.

Once more the doorman at the hotel opened the door for him but there was a new face at the desk now. Despite standing in the inevitable queue Budai had no more luck with this clerk than he had with the last. However he pointed to his key hanging on the hook among the rest the man simply shook his head as if slightly bored. So he wrote the number 921 down on a piece of paper, which did the trick. The lift operator was once again the tall blonde girl in blue. He nodded to her but she looked straight through him distractedly, and soon the space between them was filled with more people so he only caught a glimpse of her on leaving.

Back in his room he discovered that his body was covered in blue and green bruises from the blows he had received in the street when fighting his way through the crowd. He was not only bruised but tired and was shocked to realise that he had not accomplished anything and had made no contact with anyone, neither with people back home, nor with the people waiting for him at his destination. Neither at home nor at Helsinki would they have any idea where he had vanished. The strangest thing though was that he himself had no clue, not for the time being anyway: he was no wiser now than he had been on arriving here. Furthermore, he had no idea how he might set about finding out, about leaving, about where to go, about whom to speak to or what procedure to follow… He had a bad feeling and felt deeply uneasy, thinking he must have missed something or failed to do something, something he should have done but he couldn’t think what. He tried the phone again in his anxiety, fretfully dialling numbers anywhere, but it was late at night now, the phones kept ringing and only rarely did a sleepy voice respond and then in that peculiar, foreign-sounding, incomprehensible and indistinguishable language that sounded like stuttering.

Budai’s instinct for language had been sharpened by his studies: etymology was his area of interest, the way words developed, their origins. He had had to deal with the strangest languages in the course of his research, both Hungarian and Finnish in the Finno-Ugrian group, but also to some extent Vogul, Ostyak, Turkic, some Arabic and Persian, and beyond these Old Slavic, Czech, Slovakian, Polish and Serbo-Croat. The language here did not remind him of any of them, nor of Sanskrit, Hindi, Ancient or Modern Greek, nor of High Germanic either, for he knew German proper, as well as English and Dutch. Besides these, he was also acquainted with Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish as well as having a smattering of Portuguese, Romanian, Italian Retoroman and a smidgeon of Hebrew, Armenian, Chinese and Japanese. Most of these he could only read to a so-so standard of course, to the point that they were useful for tracking the development of one or other word, but he knew them sufficiently well to recognise that this language did not resemble any of them. It belonged to a group he could not locate by ear. All he could hear was something that sounded like ededede and gagagaga.

He removed the framed and printed notice from its nail by the door and examined it with fresh care by the light of the table lamp. But this did not get him anywhere either for whatever templates he applied he had not come across the characters before. He couldn’t even tell whether they were characters in the European sense, parts of words as to some extent in Japanese or Chinese, or a series of bare consonants like ancient Semitic and Aramaic. He found the occurrence of normal Arabic numerals disruptive. By now he was so tired he could not think, so having decided to postpone his investigations till the next day, he undressed and went to bed.

Accustomed to reading for half an hour before going to sleep he noticed that there was nothing to read: he had packed all his books, as well as his notes and his speech to the conference, in the other, bigger case. He got up again and unpacked his hand luggage to check but there was nothing there. He felt angry. Why hadn’t he bought a newspaper or magazine at least on the plane? He tossed and turned, unable to sleep so eventually opened one of the bottles of red wine he had brought with him. He tried to extricate the cork using one of the blades of his penknife, but the cork broke up in the process so he had to push it back into the bottle. Not being able to cork it up again he drank his way, little by little, through the lot and finally sank into a hazy sleep without a thought in his head.

He woke next morning with a headache: the day outside was grey and dry. He looked out on the street through the closed window. Even from the ninth floor he could see the crowds rolling by, a continuous black stream of traffic and pedestrians. There was something wrong with his stomach too: he had drunk too much last night. He took a long time brushing his teeth to get rid of the foul taste in his mouth. He took a shower, scrubbing his face in the jet of hot water, then rubbed his whole body vigorously with the fluffy towel until he was quite red. He looked in his bag and found a salami-filled roll that he had overlooked. His wife must have packed it as a snack for the journey. It served as some kind of breakfast though it would have been nice to have had some tea as well. He sought in vain for a bell to call for service. Maybe the telephone was there to serve that purpose though he would have to know what number to dial and how to ask the question; in other words he was back exactly where he had been last night… Suddenly he was all impatience and ready for action. Enough of this nonsense! He had urgent business to attend to in Helsinki! It was the first day of the conference to which he had been delegated, he had to get there, even if a little late, and make his speech. He packed his belongings, put the bag down on the luggage rack ready for departure and hurried downstairs to settle matters once and for all.

There was large group of people waiting at the lifts, before all eight lifts, and judging by the illuminated buttons all the lifts were in use. It seemed to be an even busier morning than usual. Budai couldn’t find the stairs on this level either, or at least none of the corridors seemed to lead to them, so he was obliged to join the others in the furthermost queue. The lifts didn’t seem to stop on this floor very often, rumbling past it for several minutes without opening their doors. And when one did happen to stop it only had room for four or five people: everybody, it seemed, was going down, leaving rooms on the floor above his. The lifts were crammed by the time they reached here. His queue was the slowest moving of the lot, of course, and a clear ten minutes went by without the characteristic low hum of the lift opening its automatic doors. Thinking it must be out of order, Budai moved to the back of another queue. But no sooner had he done so than it was his old queue that was moving forwards whereas his new queue was at a standstill, and even when the lift did stop at the new queue the indicator immediately showed it returning to the upper floors. It was enough to drive one crazy. Budai’s entire body was covered in sweat as he struggled to contain his helpless fury. He felt hot and cramped. Eventually a lift stopped and he reached the ground floor.

There were as many people clogging up the lobby as there had been last night, maybe more. Some stood around in haphazard clusters, others were stuck in long queues, while still others were hurrying from place to place, forcing their way through the rest. Were they all guests at the hotel, or if not, what were they doing here? It was impossible to tell. He struggled through them to the reception desk but it took quite a long time again before he was face to face with the desk-clerk on duty. The man, however, was not one of those he had already met. The only thing he had in common with them was that he too failed to understand a single word, jabbering away himself instead. Budai was so furious he could no longer contain himself: he grew red in the face and beat the counter, bellowing in various languages.

‘Skandal. ein Skandal!… C’est un scandale, comprenez-vous…?’

He hardly knew what he was shouting. He demanded his passport and aeroplane ticket; he wanted to see the manager, he called for an interpreter, he raged and threatened, repeating: pass, passport, passaporto, now in one language, now in another while ever more people gathered around listening to him. Finally, when the elderly desk-clerk simply spread his hands out in incomprehension, Budai leaned across, grabbed him by the shoulders and started shaking him, screaming at him, waving his hands in front of his face. All this accomplished nothing, of course, since it was perfectly obvious that neither the man nor any of the nearby witnesses to the scene understood him. In any case, there were so many waiting behind him that they too began to grow restive, pressing forwards, each of them preoccupied with his own affairs. It was pointless. The desk-clerk readjusted his jacket. Budai himself grew uncertain and confused. He waited a little longer, looking everywhere, hoping to discover where guests’ passports might be stored, at which counter, in which cupboard, but there was no way he could get to the other side of the counter and into the office from here, and he had begun to feel a little ashamed of himself for creating such a fuss. It really wasn’t like him. There was no point in making things worse: it would only be more trouble. Nor could the people behind him wait there forever. So, having first mopped his neck and brow with his handkerchief, then, having blown his nose in it, he allowed himself to be elbowed discreetly aside, having achieved nothing.

There were a number of large circular tables in the lobby with armchairs arranged round them and one of them had just become available. He sat down in it and closed his eyes: perhaps this was all a dream, perhaps he was actually in Helsinki or at home, maybe he hadn’t even set out from home yet. Or, if he was where he appeared to be, other people would know about it by now, seek him out, apologise and explain, and it would all be cleared up, back to normal. Maybe he just had to wait a minute or two, to count to sixty or, at most, a hundred… But having done so and looked up, he saw he was still there in the same hotel lobby with heaving crowds pressing this way and that, the printed notices still incomprehensible, the same foreign posters, photographic enlargements, landscape paintings on walls and pillars, the same mysterious papers and magazines at the newsagent’s stand, the same men, women, old and young and people of all shapes and sizes. There was a small exotic-looking group close to him now, a collection of church dignitaries of some sort moving through the hall, composed mostly of dark-skinned, bearded ancients in long, black kaftans, wearing lilac hats, highly colourful sashes and heavy, gold chains round their necks: the crowds opened for them so that they might continue their dignified progress.

He forced himself to be calm: he’d not get anywhere at all by shouting and complaining. He tried to put his thoughts in order: firstly, and most urgently, he should recover his passport, followed, naturally, by the ticket for his flight because until he had these he could not get to Helsinki and thence home once the conference was over. He could work out where he was, how he had got here, who was to blame and how he had got into this stupid situation once he had both these items in his hand… But before any of this he needed a bite since he could hardly regard what he had had so far as a proper breakfast, at least that was what his stomach was telling him. No wonder he was so tense. The hotel was bound to have a restaurant of some kind. He got up to look for it.

He explored the lobby as far as he could, given the difficulty of negotiating the dense crowd and found it very large, some 100 to 150 metres long and about half as wide.

There were shops selling souvenirs and knick-knacks by the walls: he cast his eye over the dolls, statuettes, decorated boxes, bracelets, brooches and baubles, the cameras with unfamiliar brand names and the opera glasses. He even picked a key-ring off the glass counter. It had a fortress or tower motif with some writing underneath it, one of the town’s monuments no doubt together with its name, though it wasn’t a building he recognised and the writing was no help. Nevertheless, he determined to buy one of these as a memento before he left, to remind him of this crazy adventure, of the night he had spent here.

But he found no trace of a restaurant though he had paid close attention to each corner of the lobby and had even stopped to address one man, repeating the words restaurant and buffet. This having produced no more than an uncomprehending gaze, he tried to demonstrate his desire to eat by miming and lifting his hand to his mouth. It seemed that the tall, lean man with the hooked nose understood him, since he replied in a loud, sharp voice, almost shouting, asking:

‘Gorrabittepropopotu? Vivi tereplebeubeu?’

He might of course have been saying something completely different, his articulation being as peculiar as that of the others. Despite doing his best to listen Budai was not sufficiently expert in this case to note down the phonetic symbols employed by students of linguistics to indicate the most minute distinctions between types of accent and enunciation, though he knew them well enough and regularly used them in his work. Meanwhile the man went on in an unpleasantly harsh voice, almost as though challenging him, going so far as to grab him by the lapels even as he was pointing to something above them, impossible to say where. It would have been good to be free of him now but the man had hold of him and did not let go, bellowing into his face, waving his arms, gesturing, so that in the end Budai had to use brute force to be rid of him.

Later, rather to his surprise, he came upon a set of stairs in the far corner of the lobby. They were wide, red-carpeted stairs with a marble balustrade but they only led as far as the mezzanine, or possibly first floor, where it opened onto a corridor but no further. The corridor itself led to a set of glazed doors both of whose wings were open and hooked to the wall. Behind the door lay a large, vaulted hall, filled floor to ceiling with scaffolding and decorators working away at the distant top, shouting to each other in echoing voices, clambering up and down. In the middle of the hall, in a space left by scaffolding, stood a draped statue or some kind of fountain, behind which extended an enormous serving counter, and beyond that a raised platform with a draped piano, while a mass of tables and chairs lay piled in the corner, all flecked with paint, the floor itself being covered with mortar and rubble. This was, no doubt, the restaurant, but out of service for the time being owing to redecoration. Now he realised what the lean man had been trying to tell him as he was pointing upwards. One of the workmen shuffled over to the door. He was dressed in filthy overalls and carried a bucket, his head covered with a paper hat. Budai accosted him too, using hands and feet to make himself understood, trying to discover where he might find something to eat. The man blinked, mumbled something incomprehensible, waved his hand as if to deny something and described a broad circle with his arm indicating, perhaps, that there were no eating facilities in the building.

This was a peculiarly bad piece of luck, coming as it did on top of everything else. After yesterday evening’s unfortunate excursion he shrank from the thought of having to step out into the street again. Nevertheless he still had to eat, and having taken a little consideration, he estimated it to be getting on for noon: even without his wristwatch, his stomach reminded him of the time, the reminders growing ever more urgent. He resolved to keep calm and avoid tension however long he had to wait. Flights usually left early and by now he would have missed the morning one to Helsinki in any case. Just for once he wanted a really good meal and would sacrifice the morning to that end. Having eaten, he could find out about the afternoon or evening flight.

He ambled back into the lobby, patiently waited in the queue for the lift and was finally conveyed upstairs so he could get his coat. Although he had eventually found his room last night he was once again confused by the corridors and it took him a while to locate 921. Once at the door he could hear the telephone so he quickly turned the key and ran inside. But by the time he reached the phone it had stopped ringing and when he picked up the receiver he heard only the same low purring he had heard before… He wondered who might have been calling him: had someone discovered what had happened to him and tracked him down? Were they even now working out how to get hold of him and take him where he was supposed to be? He sat down on the bed, not daring to move in case they rang again, beating his brow, furious with himself for not having arrived half a minute earlier. However he prayed for it to ring, the telephone remained stubbornly silent: on the other hand, his hunger had not abated at all so having twice gone out into the corridor then darted back into his room to allow the phone a few more minutes, he eventually took a decision and went out.

He handed in his key at the desk downstairs by simply reaching across the long snaking queue: this much, apparently, was permitted to those who did not stand in line. The traffic in the street was not one whit less busy than it had been the night before, with just as many cars and pedestrians and just as much honking, shoving and jostling. He couldn’t begin to think where they were all rushing to, what way flowing, from where to where. To work? From work? And who, in any case, were they, and how come the incessant stream? No one paid any attention to him, not for a moment, and if he let his mind wander for a second and did not concentrate he would find himself being pushed so violently that he found himself being spun about, almost falling. He too would have to resort to force, to shoulder and elbow his way through if he was to get anywhere. But no sooner had he thought that he dismissed the whole disgraceful idea: he wasn’t after anything or heading anywhere, all he wanted was a good dinner after which he would leave immediately then bye bye! That would be the end of it.

It was cold and dull outside, everything was frozen and the wind was still blowing, steady and uncomfortable. He turned up his collar, pulled his hat down over his brow and set off in the opposite direction from the night before, trying, since he happened to be here, to take better note of his environment. There was a range of old and new buildings along the way, skyscrapers next to single-storey houses, some clapboard dwellings, a few five- or six-storey tenements with peeling stucco walls, another skyscraper all glass and reinforced concrete, then a building still under construction. He was unable to determine whether he was in the city centre, or in some suburb on the outskirts. He paid more attention to the road too and in all the close traffic he distinguished three different kinds of bus: one green, one red and one brown-and-white, as well as trolleybus routes 8, 11 and 137, though he had no idea whatsoever of their routes. He spotted taxis too, if that’s what they were: grey, uniform, with a red stripe down the side, and a meter upfront with a little flag the driver could flip up or snap down. He tried waving to one or two of them without success: either there were passengers sitting in them already or, if not, the drivers took no notice of him, having perhaps been called somewhere. True, his waving was a little half-hearted, as if he guessed that it would be pointless trying to communicate with them however he explained or gestured since they would not understand where or how far he wanted to go.

Not far from the hotel he found a small square with the traffic flowing around it and in it a set of yellow rails next to stairs that led underground, where, as ever, a great crowd was pressing down and up. The colour and shape of the rails rang a bell with him: the night before when he was still on the airport bus they had driven past rails like that. Once the traffic lights showed green he joined the black flood of pedestrians crossing the road and was quickly swept into the middle of the little square then down the stairs. It was as he thought: he was at one of the stations of the city metro, a fair-sized oval hall accommodating various lines branching off in different directions with arrows painted on walls and a number of — to him, as ever, incomprehensible — notices of the larger and smaller variety indicating the various routes. People from all points of the city converged here, those arriving, departing or changing trains, those standing in long rows, pushing in, hastening and squirming this way and that: they filled up the place to such an extent it was practically impossible to get through. On top of that, on the opposite platform, he could see an escalator to a lower level that constantly swallowed or spewed forth yet more people. The congestion was so bad that Budai found it difficult to stay on his feet. Nevertheless he tried to make some progress towards an enormous diagrammatic plan of the metro-system he had glimpsed in the distance. Having set out, he found himself caught up in the stream of people heading towards another set of escalators and was swept along by them willy-nilly though he had no desire to travel anywhere, not in this city at any rate. But it was impossible to turn round against the wide flow of a regiment in full battle order, still less to prevent its forward momentum, only at the cost of individual hand-to-hand combat employing knees and fists, and so he fought his way to the edges and broke through to where some others were proceeding in the counter-direction, thereby somewhat easing the forward pressure.

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.

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.

Even the crowds in the street seemed a little less pushy. The road traffic was no less dense but was moving in a more relaxed way. He worked his way over to the kerbside and waved energetically at passing taxis. But there weren’t many of them and when they did appear they were already occupied, often full to overflowing, some by nine or ten people, men, women, children, old ladies all together. And those few that were empty were proceeding without the available sign showing or in a lane far away from the kerb so it was impossible for them to pull over against the dense traffic. Finally he saw a taxi approach slowly right in front of him, one that was empty and available, but however he shouted and waved, even putting a foot out into the road, the driver did not stop but looked right through him and might even have run him over had he not smartly jumped out of the way. By the time he recovered the taxi was almost lost in the distance… So he fought his way back to the hotel entrance and addressed the fat, fur-collared doorman in various languages, using a range of gestures, attempting to convey the fact that he needed a taxi or a taxi rank, adding that surely there must be one in the vicinity, obstinately, determinedly repeating the word that meant the same everywhere:

‘Taxi! Taxi… taxi? ’

The man blinked at him stupidly, continuing to salute him, tipping his gold-braided hat and looking at him with those tiny eyes in his fat face before politely opening the swing door for him. When Budai leaned closer and shouted what he wanted practically into his face, the doorman merely muttered:

‘Kiripudu labadaparatchara… patarashara…’

Then he saluted once more and pushed the door open again as if he were no more than a robot able to choose between only two options. In the meantime others were pushing their way into the hotel, bumping into them as they jostled at the door. Budai didn’t want to block the way any longer and was worried in case his temper got the better of him and he actually punched the idiot, so he returned to the kerbside. He had no better luck trying to wave down a taxi and had begun to wonder whether the red flash at the side of those grey cars actually meant that they were taxis. He had all but given up when one at which he had made only a vague, uncertain gesture, suddenly stopped right in front of him. The driver leaned out and asked him something with his mouth full, something to the effect as to where he would like to go, thought Budai. He quickly tried to explain, making flapping motions with his arm to indicate a plane, then imitating the pistons of a railway engine, even adding the characteristic choo-choo sound. The driver laughed and shook his head, though whether that was because he didn’t understand or because he had no intention of taking him to those places was not clear. Meanwhile other vehicles were stuck behind him impatiently sounding horns, revving engines, creating ever more of a bottleneck. The next lane was so busy they could not get round the stationery vehicle. Frightened that he would lose this opportunity, Budai brought out a large banknote and waved it in front to him. The tone of the driver’s reply was that he had been ordered elsewhere, or that he was at the end of his shift and was on his way to the garage. But all the while the never-ending traffic behind him was growing ever louder, ever more impatient, the horns of the jammed cars blaring furiously, so the taxi driver eventually turned the key and put his foot down on the gas. In his despair Budai drew out another note and pushed it through the window but the taxi was moving by now in the dense traffic so the money was swept from his hands into the cab where it remained and there was no way of getting it back.

For a minute or two Budai stood stock still, quite paralysed by his latest failure, though maybe it was not a failure, and what he took to be a whole chain of misfortunes was simply the rule here, for someone like him at least, someone who did not know the language. But eventually he pulled himself together and decided that one should be able to find a station even without a taxi. He was only sorry to have lost his money, those two notes of whose value he could not be certain though, on the basis of what he had learned so far, it would not be negligible.

Most of the shops were shut, even the groceries, but the metro was as busy as ever. By the time he got to the steps in the round little traffic island he had worked out how he might achieve his goal. He pushed his way over to the large map again, it being the only fixed point of certainty he had so far been able to cling to. Here he only had to identify his position and could then move forward. He looked for intersections between lines, those circled stations that appeared more important, since in every major city the metro service was directly connected to the main railway routes. He reasoned that the names of metro stations at the main terminals might comprise two or more words, and that one or other of the stations might be like the Paris terminals, Gare de l’Est, Gare du Nord, Gare de Lyon, and so forth. He was constantly jostled as he stood there, often being shoved right away from the map but time and again he steered his way back. With great difficulty he located a few of these two-and-more-word stations, the last word of which was the same, or pretty nearly the same in every case, the difference probably being merely grammatical. He made note of a number of them, copying the unfamiliar characters. The first and nearest of them was on the yellow line.

He had to stand in a queue at the ticket window — everyone was paying with the same kind of coin — and then at the down escalator since the crowd descending had swollen. Once down there he was carried along a confusion of corridors, the crowd swirling this way and that, past placards and posters, round bends, past crossings and adjoining tunnels, coming to yet more stairs that led down first, then up again. Coloured arrows pointed out different routes, electric signs with blue, green, red, black and yellow writing. Budai followed the last of these though he lost track of it at one point, the crowd possibly having swept him past an opening, and it was only after a good fifteen minutes of searching that he found another one. He was careful this time, paying absolute attention, and slowly the other colours disappeared, leaving only the yellow and there he was on the platform with the rumble of trains approaching and departing and the draught of busy tunnels. He was only concerned not to set off in the wrong direction, so he took out his notebook, looked up the name of the station he was seeking and had written down, and scanned the list of stations by the two arrows to see which of them contained it.

The train arrived and the crowd rushed to get on board, struggling through the equally dense crowd getting off, a chaos of swirling bodies at each door. Budai managed to squeeze his way on just in time before the black conductor blew his whistle. It was close and hot on the train: he had thought to ask someone for information, to explain or draw some image of where he wanted to get to, but the passengers were so tightly packed he could hardly raise his hands and in any case he was prevented by the constant lurching, shoving and fighting for position between those who meant to get out and those getting on. At least he didn’t have to worry about missing his station since there were a number of maps on the walls showing where he was at any one time and the stations to come, so he easily found the three-word station whose name he had noted down, and correctly anticipated where he had to leave the very fast, sharply braking train whose jerky movement resulted in passengers constantly landing in each other’s laps.

There was the same confusion of corridors here too so he scurried and stumbled about for a long time before realising that it was the bigger white arrows that led to the exit and followed them up another infinitely long set of escalators… He arrived in a wide square. A fine, cold rain was quietly falling, the sky just as murky here, just as impenetrable. Nor was the crowd thinner. He set out without any sense of where he was going and soon wandered into a market or shopping centre. There were people selling things everywhere, on stalls, at tables, even directly from the pavement. Salesmen were shouting, music playing, loudspeakers blaring. It was mostly second-hand clothes for sale as far as he could see. The crowd carried him slowly along as they drifted round the square, past furniture stores, chandeliers, fabrics, threadbare fur coats, dinner services, carpets, junk, antiques, factory rejects, toys, balls, great piles of sponges and plastic goods, tubes of various colours and sizes rolled into rings, as well as tyres, hoses and sheets of plate glass. A loud record player was booming in a tent, the shelves inside groaning under the weight of countless records. Budai tried to worm his way through to it, pressing through groups of bystanders in the hope of hearing a familiar tune or discovering a label he could actually read. That might give him something to hang on to, a solution of some sort, one he might be able to use to solve further enigmas. But however he burrowed among the records, going through the whole stock — there were other potential customers exploring it — he found nothing familiar, and only the same incomprehensible writing on all the labels. The record player continued booming and someone right next to him was continually blowing a cracked, rasping trumpet, the same two notes all the time, a fat man in a stripy sailor-top, looking a little like a Chinese ship’s cook. It was insufferable. He abandoned the search and moved on.

There was white fluffy candy-floss and little spicy sausages spluttering in fat but so many people were waiting to be served he thought he’d not get near enough to buy one. Stalls offered their wares of seeds, flowers and soil, then, a little further on, a range of animals: white rabbits, domestic pigeons, canaries, cockatoos, tortoises, and — something he had never seen before — a kind of scaly, crested, six-legged serpent-like creature sitting in a cage, motionless and glassy-eyed, stiff as death. A huge, red-faced man wearing a chequered jacket with a threadbare velvet collar — his enormous hands and feet reminiscent of Patagonians in travellers’ tales — was demonstrating some cleaning fluid, pouring ink, oil and tomato juice over a pair of light-coloured trousers brought out for the purpose, then making the stains disappear while continually jabbering on in patois. A little further off a fishmonger in a blood-stained apron took Budai, who had just glanced at him, for a customer, grabbed hold of him and was pulling at his coat, trying to sell something that might have been a fair-sized sturgeon, waving his cleaver, explaining, persuading, drawing the blade across the fish’s delicate skin to show how fresh it was, dangling it before his nose, gesticulating, demanding, practically throwing the fish at him… But in most instances it was a case of Budai addressing others, trying first oriental, then Slavonic languages and then again English, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese. The answers he received were once again incomprehensible: some people simply stared at him in a puzzled, faintly foolish fashion, while others paid him no attention at all, or shoved him out of the way, clearly regarding him as a nuisance, possibly even as a beggar. Unable to take any more of this Budai relapsed into awkwardness and confusion.

Nor could he see any sign of a railway station whichever way he looked. There was a big, grey building of glass and steel near the market but as he approached it turned out to be a covered market-hall that was temporarily closed. Only at the side entrances was there any sign of activity: packages were being stacked, empty crates and piles of sacks were being thrown onto waiting trucks while, behind them, incoming goods were arriving on conveyor belts with cranes to lift the heavier bales and hoppers while workers carried on heaving barrels, vats packed in straw, blocks of ice and lard and frozen meat. Then a new truck appeared loaded with vegetables — leeks or some such thing — and the stout, blue-overalled driver got out. Seeing Budai standing and staring at the ramp, he grabbed Budai’s arm and pulled at him, indicating the loading area beyond, saying something that sounded like:

‘Duhmuche bruedimruechuere! Kluett!’

The man had taken him for a tramp thinking that was why he was hanging about here. Had he been looking for amusement he would have found this amusing but as it was he made his way back to the underground station to continue his investigations in the queue as he made a note of the stations that might turn out to be railway terminals.

According to the map he should follow the purple line, then change to the green one. The carriages were no less full than before. He made a brief anthropological survey of his fellow travellers to see what was the most common skin colour, type and shape of face. There was a wide variety even in this narrow sample from coal black through brown to the extremely pale, though pure racial types were, as he noted, quite rare, few at least that might be considered pure European, African or Far Eastern. Not that any part of the world was likely to be ethnically homogenous, since larger cities, such as ports, for example, would expect to have mixed populations. Whatever the case, the majority of people here seemed to be of mixed race or at some transitional point between various races like that Japanese-looking, slant-eyed, young woman with light blonde hair and slightly Negroid lips who had just stepped from the carriage alongside him carrying a handbag and so many shopping bags that they got tangled up with each other. Budai seized the opportunity to turn to her and since speaking proved useless to imitate an engine with his arms in order to communicate his request. The woman smiled as if she understood him and even said something, then hurried on nodding to him to follow her. At last Budai felt he made contact with someone and kept close to her making quite sure they were not separated while she nodded to him from time to time indicating the way ahead. The exit was relatively near at this station — once again broad white arrows indicated the direction — and they must have been quite close to the surface, the corridor leading into a large star-shaped hall from which other corridors radiated, when out of one of the side passages a great wave of humanity suddenly broke over them and by the time he had recovered they had been swept apart by an irresistible force so that however he struggled, whatever he tried, he could not keep up with her. Her blonde hair flashed before him one last time a few metres ahead, then another seething mass bore her away and she disappeared without trace in the dense impenetrable swirl of anonymous others. Budai waited for her in the street a while but failed to spot her among those emerging from the station.

He set off to the left, the direction indicated by the woman. This part of town was not quite like the others, looking older, with a more intimate air, the streets narrower, though just as crowded. It must be the city centre, he thought, that is if the city had one. He walked past an old-looking wall that was part of a somewhat later house but deliberately revealed by the surrounding stucco, with a carved inscription above it, no doubt something to the effect that this was a historical monument, possibly part of the ancient city wall. The shops here were shut too. He turned down a winding lane where paint had peeled from the walls of crumbling houses, where rubbish, dirt, and fruit peelings littered the ground and cats wound between people’s feet, slipping into foul-smelling gateways. A light drizzle started again: blank-faced firewalls rose damp and grey into the empty air.

He arrived at a square with a fountain at its centre, a stone elephant spraying water from its trunk. The traffic flowed around it in a ceaseless and forbidding stream as if it had been there for ever and would continue into eternity. Another similarly busy square opened from this one, the cars sweeping through a wide gate to a fort several floors high, its ramparts, complete with arrow slits, running around the walls and a dome on top. The whole thing seemed vaguely familiar but he couldn’t place it. He examined it from various angles until suddenly he recognised it: miniature copies of the tower were being sold as souvenir key-rings back at the hotel! What age and what style the fort was built in was rather difficult to say. The lower part with its pointed windows might have been Gothic but the hemispherical dome seemed more oriental, possibly Moorish. The fort must have served as a military post at some time but architectural monuments of this type, to a tyro like Budai at least, tended to look pretty much alike, comprising heavy dense masses, raw unshaped stone, all amounting to a chilly utilitarianism such as may be found in Roman stockades, medieval watch-towers, even the Great Wall of China.

There was, however, no railway station here either though he reasoned that the various airline offices should be situated somewhere in the area and that he would recognise them even if they happened to be closed today for there would be model aeroplanes, maps and pictures of possible destinations in their windows. But all he saw were squares and streets, tenements large and small, closed shops, drawn blinds, cars, people, more streets and more squares. He began to wonder whether he was in the city centre after all since the old town, the historic centre, might not be the centre of the city as it now was, much as the City of London was no longer the centre of London. Or was there an even older quarter somewhere? Or maybe there were other inner cities? Whom would he ask? How would he find out?

He took the underground again, getting off at the stop where he had studied the map. He soon found himself wandering to and fro between various anonymous, unremarkable buildings; the rain had started again and even when it stopped clouds continued to hang darkly over the rooftops. Then he found himself in a park that was just as crowded as the streets with children in sandpits or scampering over lawns, setting tiny boats afloat on the pond, swinging on swings watched by mothers with prams along with dogs on leads, dogs without leads, every bench occupied, queues of people forming even there waiting to sit down. He bought a pretzel from a stall and saw they were frying sausages here of the kind he saw elsewhere so he ate one for lunch: it had a delicious aroma but the taste was slightly sweet and sickly. Could it be that the much repeated word on the map that he had taken to mean ‘station’ meant simply street or ring-road or square or gate or some such thing? Could it be a kind of epithet such as ‘old’ or ‘new’? Might it be a famous figure, a general or poet after whom various places were named? Or might it, who knows, even be the name of the town?

Next time, he got off the train where most other people seemed to, where the carriage all but emptied. Everyone was heading towards a stadium, a huge, grey, concrete structure that seemed to float through the air above them like a vast ocean liner. Even from a distance he could hear the rumble of the crowd. The weather cleared up. Aeroplanes criss-crossed in the early afternoon sky. Budai bought a ticket like everyone else and followed the masses flowing up the steps at the back of the grandstand right to the top tier. The bowl of over several hundred metres diameter was packed and buzzing with countless numbers of spectators and ever more kept coming: the seats had long been filled and the crowds in the stands that ringed the upper tiers were growing denser, still more swollen with newcomers, so much so that the whole place looked likely to collapse. The pitch below was hardly distinguishable from the spectators, it too being utterly packed with at least two or three hundred players in tight groups or running here and there in ten or fifteen different sets of team colours. The crowd seethed and roared. A thin, unshaven, weasel-faced figure in a yellow cap was bellowing furiously right next to Budai, his voice cracked, shaking his fists. However attentively Budai watched the movements of the players below him, trying to work out the rules, he understood nothing. He couldn’t even tell how many teams were on the field. The rectangular playing surface was marked with white and red lines that divided it into smaller areas and there were at least eight balls in use, the players kicking, throwing, punching, heading and rolling them hither and thither or just holding them under their arms as they argued. There seemed to be no goal, no net anywhere, though the pitch was surrounded by a wire fence that was some four or five metres in height in some places while scarcely shoulder-high in others.

The action at this point became more concentrated: the players were actually standing in ranks. Suddenly one of them sprang from the rank with the ball in his hands and scrambled up the wire fence, presumably with the intention of leaving the field. As soon as they spotted this the others threw themselves on him and, though he had his left leg over the fence already, they got hold of the right and started pulling him back. The crowd roared making a fearful noise. The fugitive fought in vain to free himself but there were too many below him unwilling to let him go and in the end they succeeded in dragging him back, so in the end he just lay on the grass, the ball having bounced away and the rest left him in peace, not bothering with him. Then a tall black player in striped kit broke away on the far side, right where the fence was at its highest and, being remarkably nimble, looked as though he was going to escape. Everyone rushed to tackle him, including the man who had just failed the lower fence, racing after the dark figure, and they only just managed to grab him so that however he kicked and hung there eventually he too was brought back down. The crowd was going wild, now encouraging, now threatening, though it was far from clear to Budai which of them was supporting whom. Whenever somebody tried to escape from the pitch there were shouts of support for him, though once the others were in pursuit, grabbing and tugging at him, the crowd seemed to transfer its sympathies to the pursuers, roaring them on with furious, bloodthirsty vehemence.

The most enthusiastic grabber and downer of fugitives was a brave, powerfully-built, little fellow who stole the ball from the tall black man. He sprang from the ruck with such vigour, so unexpectedly, that he was quickly up and on top of the fence and by the time the others got to it he had leapt over, scrambling down the other side. They made to snatch at him through the fence and got hold of his vest, trapping him tightly against the wire so he hung there as if transfixed. But the little guy was not giving up so easily. He kept thrusting and twitching, wriggling until suddenly he freed himself from the vest that continued to hang on the net and sprang to his feet, bare-chested, waved happily to the crowd and dashed off into the dressing room, patting and bouncing the ball as he went, disappearing just below the stand Budai happened to occupy. The others stared after him from beyond the fence as they might from a cage in the zoo. The crowd too took a deep breath, resolving the tension by clapping, laughing, drumming, and having formed a solid mass before, now dissolved and began to leave in a series of slowly pulsing, wave-like movements. Budai too drifted out, his heart light with a dizzy kind of joy, all confidence and delight.

After that he wandered here and there, all over town. It was evening again and the streetlamps came on while far off in the distance the red and blue neon letters on top of a skyscraper started their regular rapid blinking. He found himself in some kind of downtown area with bars, clubs and theatres from which music of both the live and mechanical kind poured into the street where lights flashed and sparkled and the window displays were filled with images of performers, dancing girls and strippers. This part of town was just as packed with heaving crowds; there were even people dancing on the pavement, the rhythm of constant movement faster here, an infinite rolling patchwork of yellow skins, black skins, creoles wearing flowers in their hair reminding him of gypsies, and a number of soldiers. There seemed to be a lot of uniforms about generally. Policemen with rubber truncheons patrolled the area, mingling with the crowd. He had noticed them earlier in the market and by the stadium too. And besides them there were bus and underground employees of both sexes, firemen in red helmets (if that is what they were), postmen — or were they railway workers? — in blue tunics, and a number of children, many schoolgirls in a uniform of green raincoat and similar coloured trousers or skirts. Most numerous, however, were the heavy, brown canvas dungaree-wearing manual workers whose uniforms carried no insignia, men and women dressed exactly the same, probably for practical reasons. Or were they perhaps members of some organisation?

It felt like the evening of a public holiday, a leisurely jostling in the streets, vendors selling things from trays, shouting their wares, and everywhere the press of the crowd. Budai was tempted to behave like them and spend the money in his pocket, so he went on a spree, buying and consuming whatever he could, for did he not owe himself this much at least? He bought a paper from a paper boy so he could examine it properly back at the hotel, then stood in queue for pancakes being fried at a stall by a young man in a white coat, a bowtie and straw hat, whose copper-coloured Native American skin was glistening with sweat. Having bought a pancake, he bought a drink first here, then there, sipping at a slightly sickening, sweet liquor they measured out at long counters. The drink did little to quench his thirst but he craved more and more of it. A man covered in sores stood on the corner in a torn pullover bellowing and jabbering, busily binding his companion — a miserable little hunchback — up in chains while regularly taking time off to accost bystanders for money. Having secured the chain, he wrapped him up in paper then wound a length of thick rope round him several times over, tying knots until the shape became quite unidentifiable, like a mummy or a parcel in a warehouse and he ended by pulling a sack over the lot and tightening a rope over the opening. He blew on a whistle and the bound man started squirming, gingerly at first, then, as he gained a little more freedom of movement in the depths of the package, thrusting with shoulders and feet. The act might have consisted of him freeing himself entirely through his own efforts though that looked impossible since he was well and truly trussed from head to toe. But the feeble little creature was struggling ever harder, every part of him wriggling, his knees and elbows vigorously thrusting against the fabric, aiming presumably to free one of his limbs inside, a finger at least, emitting a low growling sound while the man in the pullover offered a loud commentary on the proceedings, gesturing and demanding money. The sack tipped over and rolled and squirmed along the pavement: it seemed the hunchback was engaged in a painful struggle, working on the fabric that imprisoned him, expending all his strength and powers of invention, muttering and blowing furiously, tugging, thrashing, even throwing himself into the air. Suddenly the knots yielded and a thin little finger appeared in the opening, then a hand, and then an arm. From this point on it all happened quite quickly, his limbs emerging one by one, then his head, his shoulders and finally the hunched back. One more minute and he had shaken off the lot, sack and chains and all. He stepped clear and took a bow. His face was freckled and twisted as he looked about him blinking in confusion. The crowd applauded and threw money into the bowl.

Budai was feeling thirsty again so he took a drink. There must have been alcohol in the sweet syrupy concoction for it was slowly going to his head: he felt dizzy and his skin was prickly. He still saw everything clearly, perhaps more clearly than before, it was just that he saw it as if from a distance, not as part of the proceedings. He was detached from his situation, almost indifferent to it, that is if he considered it at all, or maybe it was rather that he was numbly, mechanically searching the back of his mind: after all, it wasn’t his fault that things had turned out like this, he had never wanted to come here, it was up to others, those who had planned the conference to search for him and find him… For the time being he was more interested in the evening traffic, those thousands of tiny incidents on the pavement and in the road: he allowed himself to become part of the noisy, colourful, celebrating crowd. There were a lot of drunks swaying and singing with paper hats on their heads, squirting water-pistols at each other, grabbing at things, lurching this way and that. Being slightly light-headed, he felt himself to be one of them and wanted to be in their company. He followed one loud, unruly gang of youths who were shouting, pointing, pulling faces, fooling about, jokingly pushing each other around, playing leapfrog, blowing water through glass tubes and splashing passing girls. He followed them as they turned down a side street, still crowing.

It was a funny little street with extremely narrow houses no wider than could be compassed by a pair of outstretched arms, their walls painted bright green, bright red and orange, some of them even in chequered patterns. The windows, on the other hand, particularly those on the ground floor, were relatively large, high and wide, some extending the whole width of the building. In every one of them there sat a woman wearing heavy make-up and an evening dress with deep décolletage or else some other item of clothing that revealed her shoulders and curves, drawing attention to her breasts. The women winked at the men and beckoned them in. Budai, of course, could tell what kind of quarter he had stumbled into even without the invitation. And though he had not frequented such places since his own student days — they tended to repel him now and he would avoid such streets at home — it occurred to him that here at last he might establish some contact, speak to someone, ask them a question that they might be able to answer, or that he could at least try to explain if only there was someone prepared to listen… Suddenly he felt so excited the sweat soaked through his shirt. He stopped at the next bar and stood in a queue again for a drink to work up courage and overcome his shyness.

There were as many kinds of women on display as there were colours of houses: honey blondes, young girls, women with slant eyes and combs in their hair like Japanese geishas, even one coal-black beauty wearing a heavy silver necklace. There was a woman dressed in white tulle who had a heart-shaped face and long dark lashes and gave a lingering Madonna-like smile, who did not invite anyone but just sat there looking out on the street. She attracted Budai’s attention. He walked to and fro in front of her window so she was bound to have noticed him but still she did not beckon him, only followed his movements with the same modest and happy half smile… Making a sudden decision, with heart in mouth, he rang her bell like a guilty schoolboy. An answering buzz told him he could enter.

He found himself in a dim-lit hall with an old woman sitting at a table. As he passed her she gave him a tiny slip of paper with the number 174 on it. He didn’t understand what this was for and handed it back to her enquiringly, but the old woman just muttered a complaint of some sort, and pointed upwards. He had to go up to the first floor where a bald, withered old man stood by the door, his face red and wrinkled as a baked apple. He asked for Budai’s ticket, punched a hole in it, then tore a ticket from a book of tickets and handed it to him. Not being able to understand each other it took a while to establish that there was something to pay here, a note bearing the number 10. Budai felt this was expensive and didn’t even know whether it was an entrance fee or whether it covered everything. He was already regretting having come in.

He was ushered into a circular room with four doors beside the one he had come in by opening off it. There were chairs and benches arranged around the wall, all of them occupied by some twenty to twenty-five men waiting as if at the dentist’s so there was nowhere for him to sit down. A speaker was playing waltzes, guests were chattering and laughing. Budai felt no inclination to engage in the usual sign language, suspecting it would be pointless in any case: he doubted that he could explain his presence. Once we are face to face, he thought… From time to time one of the doors opened and a lightly-clad woman turned around and flicked up her dress. This was what the guests had been waiting for — they had got to number 148 so far — and one of them would go off and disappear with her. But there were occasions when no one came forward, in which case the possessor of the next number accompanied the woman while the first man waited for one of the others. Eventually the whole range of women had made an appearance but the one with the Madonna face was not among them. Perhaps she was just for window-display?

Business was pretty brisk, doors opened and closed with great regularity: the women would spend between ten and fifteen minutes with each guest, sometimes less, while all the time new customers continued to arrive. The loud, constantly changing crowd had practically used up all the oxygen in the room. Several people were smoking though there was no sign of ventilation anywhere. The air was thick with a heavy male smell combined with smoke, sweat, cheap perfume and some insidious disinfectant or insect repellent. Eventually Budai found a seat though he felt no better for that since his head was swimming and his stomach heaving: he blamed the drink he had consumed. He wanted the whole thing to be over but was worried in case it looked like he was running away: he had missed any opportunity of leaving. He regretted spending the money too. In the end he decided not to be choosy but to go with whoever came for him, it didn’t matter which woman it was. The sheer speed and volume of the traffic had put him off in any case.

It was a good long time before they got to 174: a big, stout, red-haired girl with brown skin or possibly a deep tan called the number out. Budai rose and followed her silently into the neighbouring booth. Though they closed the door behind them they could still hear the music as well as the chatter and laughter of the waiting room. The woman was wearing a lightweight white blouse, a wide green skirt, beneath which flashed her healthy stout thighs, and a pair of summer sandals. She immediately started to undress and had already pulled the blouse over her head when he raised his finger to stop her. He addressed her in several languages, pointing to himself, making sweeping movements with his arms, opening his palms in enquiry. What he wanted to know was the name of the town and the country, that kind of thing. But she can’t have understood him though she raised her eyebrows and asked him something twice in a deep, harsh, nicotine-stained voice. He tried to respond by drawing the shape of Europe as best he could in his notebook, complete with its three major southern headlands and major rivers, marking his own birthplace beside the Danube and the city he had come from, repeating its name carefully, syllable by syllable, jabbing at his own breast. The girl gazed thoughtfully at the drawing while indicating that he should sit down and make himself comfortable. He was still fully dressed and unwilling to remove any of his clothing apart from his coat, which he laid on the chair. He hovered in the tiny room, preoccupied, so the girl signalled to him to sit down beside her on the leather couch. She did not hurry him, nor did she show any impatience, though there must have been new customers arriving all the time outside to judge by the rattling, scuffling and scrapings of chairs, as well as the music that continued to pulse. In all the noise, and despite the language problem, she must have been touched by the loneliness of the foreigner and guessed that he was after something different.

Budai tore the page out and gave it to her along with the pencil to indicate that she should draw her own map. The woman misunderstood him, folded the sheet and put it in a metal box that she drew out from beneath the bed. He tried to discover her name as a beginning, then held up his fingers as if to count, one, two, three… But he could not be sure whether the overlong and slow answer she gave, giving an occasional bitter laugh, was in fact to his question. It was hard to know. She took her box out again, removing a number of miscellaneous items: buckles, brooches, ribbons, scraps of paper with writing on them, old letters, photographs, a pair of opera-glasses, a ring, some coloured marbles and a glass pearl. This must be where she kept her souvenirs and mementos. She closed then opened the box again and carried on talking in the deep hoarse voice:

‘Tevebevedre atchipachitapp! Atchipachitapp?.. Buttureu jebetch atchichitapp?’

She kept repeating the sound atchichitapp, as she picked out a child’s shoe from among her things, her eyes suddenly full of tears. Budai had no idea who the shoe belonged to, to the woman in her childhood? Or to a child of her own? And if she had a child where was it?… But she hugged the little shoe so passionately one couldn’t help but pity her: he stroked her hair, soft, red, electric, so it almost sparked as he touched it, caressing her brow and neck too. The woman caught his hand and put it to his face, to her mouth, smearing it with her tears: he felt awkward but he lost his coldness and was overcome by deep emotion. There was much annoyed shuffling and drumming in the waiting room, someone even knocked on the wall. Being hurried like that made Budai nervous and he would have disengaged himself but the girl wouldn’t let him, clinging to him, pressing his head into her lap, practically kneeling before him. He wanted to pull her up but found himself sinking down beside her instead and that was how they remained, clumsy, between floor and couch, in a most unnatural position but in a tight embrace, almost of one body.

People were shouting and banging outside: they really had to hurry now. The woman kissed him on the lips as if in farewell but that only made him sink down again… He turned away as he put on his coat, and after a moment of hesitation, awkwardly placed another ten-unit banknote on the chair. She wasn’t looking at him but was silently adjusting her hair in the mirror. Budai left by the back door, down side stairs that stank of cats.

The narrow street opened onto a square where a giant ferris wheel was turning and streams of many-coloured lights flashed over booths offering games, target shooting, dodgems, boat-swings, carousels, all the fun of the fair. There was an enormous illuminated roller-coaster; people were shrieking, shouting and trumpeting, small explosions were being set off. Everywhere the unceasing swirl of the crowd, no less dense, no less packed than elsewhere. There were slides, ghost trains, stalls with hoopla and ring-the-bell, conjurers, acrobats, sword-swallowers and fire-eaters, an Indian Rubber Man who could wind his legs around his neck and a two-ton woman who simply stood on a platform immobilised by her own weight, helpless and vast as a Polynesian idol.

There were boats for hire too if you were prepared to wait long enough though he no longer cared about time. Time didn’t matter any more: who cared what the clock said! He paid and was helped into a one-man punt. A slow current carried him down a barrel-vaulted, cave-like tunnel where music blared, some swaying barcarolle, and atmospheric coloured lanterns dangled either side, some even floating on the water. There were miniature castles and forts along the way, waterfalls, sluices, power stations, bridges and the rest; all the usual stuff, nothing special. For him though it was the greatest, most unexpected pleasure of the day, his first moment of pleasure since arriving.

Back home he used to canoe on the Danube. He’d start early in the morning and row a long way up the winding tree-and shrub-lined stream. The water never quite formed a smooth mirror as he proceeded between islands and sandbanks: it was constantly folding, trembling and sparkling, patches of dark billowing beneath the surface. Even on a windless day the river was alive and breathing. He usually tied the boat up on the same tiny unnamed island and took a rest: at high water it would be covered by the Danube, and later, once the water had retreated, the grass would remain exactly as it had been bent by the current, grass blades and the bases and branches of shrubs still tangled in wisps of water-weed but dry, as if the trees had grown beards. A narrow lagoon divided the islet into two, the water continuing to trickle through it. The little boat was easily maneouvrable and could be guided past bending branches and lianas that hid it from view. He never met anyone here, he disturbed a few birds at most. The current picked up where the lagoon ended, the river suddenly lurching into movement, clear and transparent right down to the pebbles at the bottom. This was where he best liked to bathe, the current carrying him, filling the pores of his skin, the water sweetish and soft on skin and tongue. One May morning he saw wild ducks by the sandy bank and observed them silently so they did not see him. The mother duck was teaching her brood to swim, dive and catch fish.

He set off back to the hotel in a light reverie full of happy memories. He had noted the name of the metro station he was aiming for, had even written it down, but just at the moment he didn’t know where he should get on. He was a long way from the station where he had arrived and was unlikely to find his way back to it, nor did he have any success in discovering another entrance with those characteristic yellow rails. He started asking around again in the hope that there might just be someone who understood him, stopping passers-by and pointing down at the paving. Finally a Tataric-looking woman in brown overalls seemed to grasp what he required and encouraged him to come with her, even taking his arm, and indeed, a mere two blocks on, she had succeeded in conducting him to the entrance of an underground public convenience.

By this time he feared he was permanently lost, no longer able even to find the hotel. It was getting late, close on midnight when he realised what he should do: he should watch the crowd and see where it was densest, see what direction it was moving in and note the main current. He located that current and tried to follow it, careful never to be parted from it. There were ever more people around him. Then they turned a corner into an even wider stream that a few hundred metres further on poured into a flat-roofed round building with steps leading down into the metro. Once there it was easy enough to find his way around: he could locate the map, seek out the relevant line on the correct level and note where he had to change trains.

He arrived in the little square from which he had started out that morning. The skyscraper he had been gazing at was still in construction. He counted the floors again to check: there were sixty-five though he clearly remembered there having been sixty-four before. He counted them twice more but it was sixty-five both times with the framework for the sixty-sixth already in place. They must have managed to finish a whole floor since he last looked… The fat doorman blinked, saluted and pushed open the swing door. Surely he was a robot, thought Budai, not human at all, a machine dressed in uniform programmed to perform two or three movements. He felt like tapping him to see what he was made of, though he immediately recoiled from the thought: he might get an electric shock…

Waiting for his key, he faintly recalled having left a letter at the desk addressed to the management. What if there were an answer waiting for him in the pigeon hole? Might they have returned his passport? There was nothing there. It was a different clerk again and he couldn’t be bothered with repeating the whole pointless charade. He took his key without a word and went to stand in the queue for the lift.

He hadn’t expected the blonde woman operator to be on duty since she had been there in the morning: it surprised him to see her as the doors opened. She looked exhausted and broken, her face too red, her eyelids drooping as she played the keys with her long, carefully manicured fingers. Could she have been working all this time? Or was this a second shift after a break at home? Where did she live, in fact, in the hotel or with a family? Does she have a family, a husband?… The air in the lift was more oppressive than usual and only later did he notice that the ventilator was out of commission. Entering he had positioned himself so as to be quite close to the girl. Under the light, tiny drops of perspiration twinkled on the faint down of her brow. Budai’s inhibitions had been loosened by drink and he used his newspaper to fan the girl’s neck and forehead. She slowly turned, more in amazement than protest, and said something too, giving a short laugh. It was the first time Budai had seen her smile. Suddenly he felt weak and tender: he wanted to stay with her, so that she could relax at his side… Yes, whatever way he looked at it, thinking about her and about himself, that was all he wanted, to lie down with her in one bed and wait patiently as she nodded off, hearing her breathing, seeking out the pulse on the tight skin of her wrist: indeed, that would be the most satisfying thing he could possibly do. She had to remind him to get off when they reached the ninth floor. So she remembered. She had noticed him.

His room had been tidied again and the bed made but the telephone directory he had pinched yesterday had gone. They must have discovered it as they were making the room up and taken it away along with the notes he had made at the back of the book. He had the paper and could start again but really did not feel like it now. His muscles ached with tiredness, after all, he had been on his feet all day, coming and going, tramping here and there — thinking that, he realised he had wasted another day, or, rather, that he didn’t know whether he had or had not made any progress at all and was seized by a mixture of terror and ironic self-recrimination. He removed his clothes in confusion: one moment he was shuddering and feverish, disgusted by the thought of failure, the next he was drowsy and faintly drunk, thinking ‘who the hell gives a damn’. He showered and lay down without turning off the bedside lamp. The fault must be in his character: he found any kind of aggression or self-promotion distasteful. The truth of this dawned on him slowly as he dozed. If he could not overcome his shyness and sensitivity, his instinctive reluctance to put people out, he would never get out of here, nor would anybody find out where he was or lift a finger to help him. He must fight this battle alone, there were no two ways about it: he must transform himself from top to toe, it was the only way to rediscover himself and assert his being.

Awake now, he felt so indignant that he smashed his fist on the bedside table and the glass on it cracked and cut his hand. He was bleeding quite badly. He bandaged the cut with his handkerchief then twisted a towel around it for good measure but the blood still seeped through: he hated, he utterly loathed this town that was nothing but cuts and blows, that was forcing him to act against his nature, that gripped him and would not let him go, that hung on to him and pulled him back.

He was having a recurring dream. He was in Helsinki, in that long familiar harbour town, walking its cool damp streets and wherever he set out from — whether it was from the cathedral, the opera, the fish-market or the Olympic Stadium — he always arrived at the sea. He liked this dream. He liked seeing the horizon slowly brightening to blue behind the rows of brown and white houses: he could almost conjure it up when awake, draw it forth from his distant memories in the period of shallow consciousness hovering between light and dark while waking or falling asleep. The conference would be pretty near over by now as it was only programmed to last, at most, some three or four days, depending on the number of speakers. He had hardly seen any water since arriving here, no river, no lake, none that he could remember, except perhaps at the fair where he took a boat, or in the park the pond where children played with model yachts.

The cut on his hand was slow to heal. It hurt and pulsed and he had to bandage it several times using clean handkerchiefs. He decided to keep off drink as he seemed to have become rather too accustomed to it here. He wanted his mind to be clear and sharp, not muddled, and he kept his resolution over the next few evenings. He developed an interim regime for himself. He ate twice, in the morning and the afternoon, usually in the same self-service buffet near the skyscraper, and spent the rest of the time exploring the streets and the metro system. Two or three times when he left the hotel he did not hand in his key so as to save queuing when he returned. But then he thought better of it: it would only lead to confusion if people were looking for him and were unable to determine when he was in his room or outside somewhere. Besides all this, his passport had failed to reappear and he never saw the grey-haired clerk with whom he had left it that first evening.

There were ever new schemes and plans to consider that served to conceal the nature of his situation for there were days when he simply could not face it. One of his schemes was to make several copies of a notice in six languages that he posted at various places in the hotel — along the corridors, in the lift and in the entrance lobby — asking whoever might read and understand it to seek him out in Room 921, or, if he wasn’t there, to leave a message for him at the desk in return for a handsome reward. Having put those up he knocked at a few neighbouring doors but mostly he received no answer: it might not have been the best time, the guests might not have been in their rooms, or it may be that he knocked too quietly. When he did find someone in it seemed he had disturbed them. At one door an aggressive female voice demanded to know something, at another when, having received an incomprehensible answer, he opened the door he stumbled in on two young olive-brown men in pyjamas who sprang apart, one of whom — a short, bespectacled, skinny chap — ran past him out into the corridor and disappeared round a corner. The door next to it was already open and he peered through the crack before warily stepping inside but an overwhelming smell, worse than a pigsty, stopped him in his tracks. There was no one there, only cages containing fat, overgrown angora rabbits. The room was full of rabbits: on the floor, on the chairs, on the luggage rack, on top of the cupboards, even under the bed, in the bathroom, in the shower cubicle, in the toilet bowl, all nibbling, all snuffling in their cages, all stupidly mizzling and stinking with urine.

Then he came up with a new idea. At dawn he would go down to the hotel entrance and wait there for the bus that had brought him from the airport. But he was no longer able to remember either what time the bus had arrived or what colour it was for he hadn’t seen it from the outside, and though he had been the last to get off it was by no means certain that this was the bus’s last stop, it might have been pure chance, the bus stopping only for a moment. That was why he started hanging about outside in the constantly seething crowd among all those elbows and knees. He stood firm, careful not to be swept away, but was unable to identify the right bus in the traffic. It might have been that the flight on which he had arrived was not a daily service.

The excursions were not wholly useless though because, seeing a passing policeman with his rubber truncheon, he suddenly had an idea, his best and most important yet, something so brilliantly simple and sure to succeed that he actually gave a whoop when it occurred to him. If he were to be taken away by the police, for whatever reason, he was bound to be questioned and listened to, and if they did not understand him they would be obliged to supply an interpreter to whom he could finally tell his story… He hurried back to his room to rest, to think the scheme through and settle on a course of action that would be certain to end in his arrest. He could start a fight, he could assault a passer-by, put a brick through a shop window or the pane of a telephone booth. He could puncture the tyres of cars stuck at traffic lights, possibly even smash their headlights. He could light a fire in a square or a park using newspapers and scraps of waste paper. He had, however, always felt nervous about committing any common breaches of the law and was concerned in case angry local people hurt him before the police arrived. He had seen a fountain in the shape of a stone elephant in the old town: what would happen if he decided to bathe in it? It might be enough to undress in the street but his natural reticence shrank from the idea. And what if he pretended to be ill, to simulate an epileptic fit, to throw himself on the ground with some soap in his mouth to make it froth, the way some conmen did?

He made no final decision but went down again and stood in front of the hotel, trusting to a moment of inspiration. He didn’t have to wait long for soon enough a policeman appeared pressing his way through the crowd at the edge of the pavement. Budai took a deep breath and hesitated three times to gather courage before worming his way over and choosing the most effective method of attracting the policeman’s attention. He gave the policeman a sharp jab in the ribs with his elbow. The policeman must have thought it was merely the normal bustle of traffic for he drew aside to let him pass, but Budai could not leave it at that. He was egging himself on by now and with one bold movement he knocked the policeman’s peaked cap right off his head. It exposed his low brow, shiny and red, lightly covered by a tight crop of hair. Once he realised what had happened the policeman blew angrily on his whistle then gave his assailant such a rap on the head with his rubber truncheon that Budai’s eyes misted over. A second thwack and he lost consciousness.

He woke in a small crowded place with faint light filtering through a small barred window. It must have been a police van. His head was ringing and his fingers felt two very painful bumps the size of nuts on his brow, but apart from that he felt a deep sense of satisfaction that he had achieved his aim, or in any case was well on the way to doing so. They were travelling for quite a long time, half an hour perhaps. He squatted on the low wooden seat still dizzy from the beating. It had begun to rain outside. He could hear it pattering on the roof of the van and this made him doze off again.

He woke suddenly to find they had stopped and the back doors being opened. Two policemen appeared, neither of them the one he had assaulted, and indicated that he should get off. They were in a large yard with high grey walls on all four sides where lots of uniformed and non-uniformed figures were moving to and fro. He was escorted from the van into the building and a long crowded corridor. He moved unresistingly between the two policemen, following wherever they led him but unwilling to engage in conversation with them since it would be hopeless anyway and soon there would certainly be far better opportunity to talk. It was very warm, the air heavy as in a greenhouse, stuffy and humid, not an open window in sight.

He was ushered into an office where a fat officer with a purple face and drooping moustache sat at a table covered with an ink-blotched green broadcloth. The officer’s tiny eyes were sunken and kept blinking. He was eating, cutting up a piece of gently dissolving, rank-smelling bacon that lay on a ragged sheet of paper soaked through with grease. It was unbearably hot here too and Budai couldn’t think why the place had to be kept at such a temperature and how the people who worked here could bear it. The officer gave him a sleepy look, wiped his mouth and his perspiration-covered face with a chequered handkerchief while the constables gave him a lazy salute and the one on the left babbled something, probably giving the reason for the arrest. The officer nodded slowly, audibly breathing, and without asking Budai anything, fixed his narrow, whey-coloured eyes on him, dried his greasy finger on the tablecloth then grunted something in an enquiring tone.

Now was the time, Budai judged, and took a small step forward — but stopped in his tracks. This was when he most needed his passport: it would have served as proof, as excuse and statement all at once and obviated the necessity for long explanations. He could have set it down before him and they’d know what to do… As things were, he was forced to try all the various languages and gestures he had already tried countless times before, such as pointing to himself, repeating his name, his nationality, his place of residence and requesting an interpreter. There was not the slightest glimmer of understanding in the officer’s eyes. The stuffy atmosphere was sapping Budai’s energy too. He was losing his earlier determination and the dressing on his hand, as he noticed in the heat, was soaked through with blood again, though that might have been a result of the tussle with the first policeman. The officer in the meantime had finished his bacon and had taken out a crumbling piece of rancid cheese that had already begun to sweat and melt. He set it down before him, gazed at it for a while then slowly began to consume that too. The telephone beside him was ringing but he waited before he reluctantly picked it up. His conversation consisted of a series of incomprehensible answers employing the minimum effort. Every so often he belched into the receiver while wiping his face and neck with his hankie. Once he was done with the call Budai had another go, this time a touch more insistently, beating the desk with his fist, demanding to be interrogated, to be allowed to give proof of his identity, to defend himself and explain his behaviour, and so forth… The officer simply stood up, strolled over in a leisurely fashion and with the same careless movement smacked him across the face as hard as he could, then returned to his chair, breathing hard. He slumped indifferently down again while continuing to eat. His palm was plump and soft but it must have been used to slapping people about since Budai could feel all five fingers complete with a broad signet ring. He was shocked and humiliated by this unexpected insult — the rubber truncheon had at least been expected — and fell completely silent, struck dumb by incomprehension. Nor did he put up any resistance when they handcuffed him and passed him on to another uniformed man who took away his tie, belt and shoe-laces then escorted him out of the presence of the cheese-and-perspiration-smelling officer who was presumably not only a policeman but a kind of magistrate too.

Down he went, down more endless corridors, just as crowded as the others had been to be met at a cage door near the crossing of two corridors by a tall black warder or guard. The man was dressed in the uniform he had seen about the streets: a brown jerkin, this time with a belt bearing a large ring full of keys. The policeman who passed Budai on to him must have told him he was drunk because the warder gave a laugh, showing his healthy white teeth and red gums, slapped Budai on the back in a friendly manner, removed his handcuffs and half-shoved, half-ushered him down a side passage. There was a whole row of cells here, all with the same steel doors, going a long way down. The black guard stopped at one of them, laughed again then bawled at him, indicating he should get in, helping him on his way with a push. He slammed the heavy door so hard the whole corridor was set echoing.

The cell was for two and was lit by a single bare bulb hanging from the high ceiling. One of the bunks was already occupied by a sleeping figure turned to the wall who didn’t bother to look up when Budai entered. This place too was overheated, the air damp and suffocating, the radiator constantly crackling with no means of turning it down. Budai had had a headache ever since they brought him in. It was the only thing he could think about now. Why it was so unbearably hot in here, why was there no ventilation, nor indeed any window? He lay down full length on the spare bunk, closed his eyes and waited for the shooting pains in his skull to stop.

He had probably dropped off for a while — he was feeling rather numb after the beatings — and woke to see his cellmate sitting up, watching him. He must have been another drunk; that must have been how he got here, having disturbed the peace one way or another. He was bearded, disreputable looking, middle-aged, his clothes dirty and torn, his face scarred and bruised with violet patches. He looked confused. When he noticed that Budai had opened his eyes he jabbed at him with his finger and addressed him in a deep, throaty voice, his breath stinking of alcohol.

‘Tschlom brattyibratty?’

He was probably asking something like, Who are you? Budai felt less resolved than he had done, nor had his headache greatly improved but his instinct told him that instead of trying to explain or introduce himself it might be better to ask the same thing of the other man. That is, if he had heard him properly.

‘Tschlom brattyibratty?’

The bearded man snorted, gave a wave and started searching in his pockets. He spent a long time looking and muttering, turning the pockets inside out — there were holes in them — feeling around the lining before emerging with a mass of miscellaneous items: a dirty handkerchief, the dry end of a loaf, matchsticks, a worn-down pencil, nails, rusty screws and, finally, a miserable looking cigarette from which most of the tobacco had fallen out but of which he offered half to Budai. Budai spread his palms to indicate that he did not smoke. Could the original question have been: Have you got a cigarette? Or: Would you like a cigarette? Who knows? Budai tried the usual languages, German, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, not to mention Turkish and Persian, even Ancient Greek, but in vain. The other man took little notice, interrupting him.

‘Sherederebe, tódzsig hodové guehruehguehleu pratchch… Anta pratchch, vara ledebedime karitcharaprattye…’

‘What? What do you want?’ Budai bellowed in his own tongue, breaking the words up into syllables so the other man should better understand him. ‘Tell-me-what-it-is-you-want!?’

The bearded man looked at him a while with empty, clouded eyes, lit the cigarette, drew deeply on it, blew out the smoke and carried on talking exactly as he did before. Budai tried hand gestures and facial expressions to convey the fact that he was a stranger here and did not know the language but there was no way of cutting across him. The man just carried on jabbering, apparently indifferent as to whether he was understood or not. He had launched out on some longer story, his powerful, hoarse voice becoming more sweeping, more epic, pausing only to puff at the cigarette which had burned down practically to the end almost to his fingernails, at which point he chucked it away and trod on it. He continued talking, going on and on, growing ever more passionate, sometimes employing vehement gestures, occasionally croaking, bringing up phlegm, snorting, clicking his tongue, raising his voice at moments of high emotion, giving Budai the odd comical, conspiratorial wink as if to say: I’m right, aren’t I? Budai was dying to get a word in but the other cut him off with a decisive gesture:

‘Durunj!…’

And so he carried on telling his story, droning on without a break, making Budai quite giddy. His headache was coming back too. On the other hand, being locked up like this with one man was really his best opportunity yet to establish communication with someone, to discover at last where he was, to glean from his cellmate — surely there must be a way of doing this — a few key words that he might build on later. Again and again he tried to interrupt the bearded man, drawing figures in his notebook, pointing out numbers with his fingers, jabbing at himself, then at the other man in an enquiring manner, finally losing his temper and shouting at him. But nothing he did could make him shut up, he just kept talking and talking and talking.

Another thing: whenever he reached a particularly important part of his oration, he raised his left hand, closed his eyes and, for a few seconds, fell silent as if in a reverie, overcome by his own passion, breaking it with a burst of theatrical laughter. He beckoned Budai closer, bidding him just listen to this, his voice shifting, singing. It was a rich bass voice singing an unfamiliar air, an aria from an opera perhaps, in any case a more solemn, serious kind of music. You could tell from the steadiness, modulation and intonation of the voice that he was gifted, indeed trained, and that it was only his low quality of life, his itinerancy, the alcohol and nicotine that had ruined the voice, blurred it, distorted it and made it croaky. The performance seemed to take up every ounce of his being. He was completely lost in his singing, his voice recognising ever fewer barriers as it soared. The aria culminated in a grand passage in which he first climbed the scale then descended it slowly, note by note, step by step, ever lower until it seemed impossible that there should be anything lower, but then lower again, reaching his finale at the deepest point of experience, on a long-extended, dark closure.

Budai didn’t know whether to applaud or not. After the undoubted effort exerted in delivering his aria the bearded man was clearly exhausted and had started looking for another cigarette but continued to ignore Budai’s questions, staring straight ahead instead, his face grey and waxen. He blew out some more smoke, then stretched out full length on his bunk and turned to the wall. It was hotter than ever. They seemed to have turned the heat up but there was no draught anywhere. Budai’s shirt was soaked through. He took off his coat and jacket, laying them down beside him. The whole thing was so impossibly stupid, the heat so unbearable even though he was in shirtsleeves, the radiator noise so intensely disturbing that he suddenly felt so angry he started banging at the steel door, demanding that they take him away and give him a proper hearing with an interpreter present, repeating that they could not keep him in this airless cell locked up with a mad opera singer.

He made so much noise that eventually the little observation flap opened. The black warder’s face appeared, laughing again, all his teeth showing, amused by these two idiotic drunks. But when Budai shouted at him, demanding to know what right they had to treat him like this, he angrily closed the tiny flap and no amount of noise could summon him again.

The bearded man was either sleeping or talking — he talked so much in the end he must have told his entire life story. It clearly did not matter to him whether anyone was listening or what the other person said. Budai had started to think the man was deaf and that that was the reason he paid no attention to the questions he asked. To test his hypothesis he tapped the radiator with his ballpoint pen in the middle of one of the man’s tirades but the man stopped for a second and took notice — in other words he could hear — then continued as though nothing had happened, blathering on.

It had been evening when they brought him in here and he hadn’t eaten since the morning. But it seemed to be past dinner time here, at least there was no sign that they’d be receiving food soon. His cellmate seemed to be preparing for the night, squatting astride the slop pail, his trousers shamelessly round his ankles, though that did not stop him talking. He must have been cursing someone, because he was stamping his feet, threatening the unknown man with his fists, his face full of hatred and bitterness. It took the man some time to calm down, though his fury soon got the better of him again and he quickly slapped at the air twice more before turning away as if he had finished with his adversary. He wiped his hands on his trousers and spat.

Budai found it difficult to sleep on the hard prison bed, being kept awake by heat, hunger and helplessness. And when, after a long while, he did eventually succeed in dropping off with his whole body covered in perspiration, he had a vague feeling that the man had sat down beside him and was still talking, waving his hands about in front of his face, breathing cheap brandy at him. It might have been no more than a dream. It was very hot and now it was not only his head but his hand that ached.

In the morning the black warder handed them two pieces of dark brown bread and a mess-tin with some coffee-coloured liquid in it. The bearded man took a swig of it, then handed the tin to Budai who didn’t fancy it. The warder reappeared after a short interval and beckoned Budai to go with him. He was led along the same corridors as he had been the previous evening, back to the same officer with the fat pock-marked face. The policeman was still eating — a soft, over-ripe watermelon, this time, spitting the pips here and there. The room was just as hot and foul-smelling as it had been before. No one can have opened a window in the meantime. They returned Budai’s belongings to him and after finishing his melon, the policeman picked his teeth, wiped his moustache with his chequered handkerchief and barked at him:

‘Goroge tutun epetetye! Wiripij.’

Budai stood before the ink-stained desk. What else was he to do? The officer was still breathing heavily, staring at him, his small slant eyes as sleepy and as bored as before, his eyelids closing now and then. He raised both hands to Budai, spread out his fingers, took them down then raised them again. Budai was unable to guess what he wanted but then the telephone started ringing so the officer picked up the receiver and replied slowly and deliberately, searching out some papers while scratching the back of his thick, veiny neck. He took some time to work his way through them, then looked up at Budai as if to say, Good heavens, what’s going on, are you still here? Nevertheless he continued sitting there for some time, sluggish and obese before reaching for a scrap of paper and writing down the number 20. He gave the sheet to Budai. Budai did not appear to understand so the man drew out his own wallet and produced two ten-unit notes of currency, pushing them in front of him. It seemed unlikely that he was being offered money. Budai suddenly guessed what was expected of him. He was being given a fine: that must have been what those two lots of hands and fingers meant.

Pleased to have finally understood, he had no wish to argue, fearing that if he complained too much it might end not just in a fine but in more time in the cell and he didn’t want that. So he fished in his pockets for two tens and put them down on the green tablecloth: he didn’t have much money left. The officer did not give him a receipt, instead he was forced to write his name in a large book, the officer pointing out where with his fingers. The man’s nails were dirty.

And with that the matter was more or less over. Budai had one or two more goes trying to explain why he had had himself brought in but hardly anyone was listening now. The black warder had disappeared and the fat officer was on the phone again, having taken a blue saucepan with some cold stew in it from one of the drawers. He sniffed at it, then set about rapidly consuming it. He made a horrible slurping sound and the sauce kept dribbling from the spoon so his moustache was completely covered and he had to wipe it again with his handkerchief. Budai was afraid that if he spoke up too loudly he’d get another box on the ear. In any case, the stale, muggy heat seemed to fill every corner of the enormous building and he was finding it ever harder to bear. All in all he was quite relieved when they led him out and he could breathe easily for the first time, free at last.

He found the nearest metro entrance the same way he had done before, that is by following the main drift of the crowd. Once underground he consulted the map and located the station he was currently at, it being marked with a red circle at the top right hand corner, and quickly found his way back to the station nearest the hotel… Arriving, he saw the same skyscraper under construction with a lot of men at work on it and great loads on pulleys being conveyed up and down. Out of sheer curiosity he counted the number of floors. There were two more now, making sixty-seven in all.

He took some tea in the self-service buffet and was already sipping at his oversweet drink when he realised that he had picked up his breakfast without noticing he had had to queue for everything. His heart started thumping in his chest. He had been convinced it was the last thing he should get used to, for once he accepted, however unconsciously, the necessity of these queues it meant he had given up, surrendered the one hope that remained, the hope that he was different from the natives, a visitor, someone who did not belong here, someone who, by the same token, could not be detained.

He hurried back into the hotel. This time he no longer thought or expected but knew for certain that there would be something waiting for him. He was almost happy to see the fur-collared, blinking automaton at the door, to have him salute and push the door open, though the little multilingual notice he had put up before his adventure with the police seemed to have disappeared.

When he took his place in the queue for his key at the desk — once again there was a new clerk on duty, a smooth-faced, blond-haired young man, practically a child — he could see even at a distance that there was a roll of paper in box 921 though whether it was a letter or a folded note such as those on which hotels use to write messages was not clear. He was seized by such excitement that his fingers began to dance on the counter as the queue slowly moved forward. Never before had he found the wait for the desk-clerk so unbearably long. Could it be a reply to the message he had sent the management? To his multilingual notice? Or had someone rung him, the airline perhaps looking to find him, someone seeking him from home or possibly Helsinki, though he hadn’t managed to arouse anyone’s interest in town and not even the police could be bothered to find out his name? Suddenly his eyes filled with tears and he was unable to contain them. His chest and Adam’s apple started to heave so violently he feared drawing attention to himself as he struggled to control his emotion. Meanwhile the queue moved on one place.

At last he got to the young clerk and showed him his room number that he kept safely in his pocket. The clerk bowed politely, took down both the key to 921 and the note or whatever it was from the pigeon-hole. The sheet was folded into four. Budai spread it out on the counter as the clerk mumbled a few incomprehensible words: it looked like a kind of form with printed text and some numbers in ink. With quick, practised movements the clerk set up and entered information on his hand-held computer, presumably checking the figures, then wrote down the sum with his ball-point pen, twice underlining the total, scrawled something beneath it in large letters, and slickly rattling off some well-learned text, handed it over to Budai. It was clear by now that this was a bill. He calculated that he had been at the hotel precisely a week since arriving last Friday. Guests, it seemed, were required to pay by the week.

It was the amount that was the most frightening: the bottom line read 35.80. If he subtracted that from what money remained in his pocket he would have practically nothing left. It was true that since he had cashed his cheque he had been spending rather freely as if it were toy money and it had never occurred to him that he might run out… The clerk pointed to a neighbouring window, presumably where he had to pay, at the very counter where Budai had collected eighteen freshly minted ten-unit notes. With heavy heart he now returned four of these — that’s after a good half-hour of queuing, of course — and realised with bitter irony that he had gone through much of the value of the cheque without even learning the name of the currency.

He stuffed the bill in his pocket and waited for the lift while counting up again how much he had left. There were three tens and a few smaller notes, ones and twos as far as he could make out from the faint screwed-up bits of paper, plus some small change. It was dangerously, horrifyingly little: he hardly dared think what might happen once he had spent it. He just had to stay here. What other choice had he? He counted feverishly, adding and multiplying, calculating how long he could make it last if he carried on spending at the current rate, or rather what was the best way of rationing it — he had to eat, after all. Or should he give up travelling? Should he just sit in his room and wait for relief to arrive?

His mind worked overtime but he was running on empty: then, suddenly, just as the lift was arriving at the ninth, he was full of ideas, each better than the last, however late. This one should work! Here was another he could try! That was if he did not have to watch every last penny… He could, for example, show someone a ten-piece note in one hand and a notebook sketch of an aeroplane in the other, and that would make it clear that he was seeking the latter, that is to say either the airport or the airline office. The trick was to show the money but to withdraw it while brandishing the drawing so the other person understood that he would only pay if he was actually conducted to the place. Or he might tempt one of the poorer-dressed people on the metro, the way one might entice an animal with food, by rattling his change while making train noises to imply that he wished to be taken to a railway station. He could try it on one of the hotel employees, using much the same ruse, persuading them to get him a taxi or some other car that would be certain to carry him wherever he wanted, for a fee of course, he being pretty certain he could settle with the driver. All these and other schemes flashed before him, but behind them all remained the sense of chill horror: what would happen if none of these worked and his money ran out; whom should he turn to, whose help could he count on? Going by his experience of local people so far he could die of starvation as far as they were concerned.

Nothing had changed in his room since he left it except he had fresh sheets, new towels, a new bedspread and a different oilcloth on the table. They must do these things weekly. Budai looked down on the street at the inexhaustible flow of traffic. The conference in Helsinki would have been long over by now, the delegates departed each to his or her own home: even the most distant of them would have arrived… He took off his clothes, drew the curtains and lay down on the bed, drawing the covers over him. Within a minute he felt his body stiffen, his torso and limbs grow numb as if he had been hypnotised. He was incapable of getting up again or even turning over. He could not move at all. Nor did he want to: all he wanted was to lie absolutely still, his eyes closed for as long as possible, not to rise even to get a drink of water; he simply wanted to lie there without moving a muscle, not thinking, for hours or even days, for ever.

If he counted from the day he left home it would have been the fourth, fifth, or at the latest, sixth day and they would have expected him back by now; in any case he should have been there a good while ago. What might they have been thinking when he hadn’t written, phoned, sent a telegram or given any sign of his being alive? At what point would they have started to look for him, and where? In Helsinki? There they would quickly have been informed by the committee of his absence from the conference, that they had waited in vain for him to turn up. At the airline, at the transit points, working their way through the various possible airports he might inadvertently have found himself at? Where would they have turned, how would they have gone about it? In an increasing panic? Where in the world might he have disappeared to in such mysterious fashion? What would they put it down to, his relatives, his friends, his colleagues, and, above all, his wife? How would she explain it, what must she be feeling? And his small son? And his dog?… By now all this was causing him actual physical pain, imagining their astonishment, their anxiety, their puzzlement, their ever more despairing attempts to locate him, their horrible suspicions that he might have met with an accident, imagining his helplessness: it was intolerable, their situation was a hundred times worse than his. He had to dismiss these thought or chase them away whenever they assailed him.

He couldn’t tell how long he lay in bed: two or three nights might have passed like this. In all that time no one appeared, called or knocked on his door, at least he did not hear anyone. They didn’t even come to clean the room. He woke suddenly to find it was morning again, the dirty grey light filtering in through the window, as overcast, as leaden and melancholy as before. Since he had arrived here there had been only an hour or two of sunshine. He roused himself, went into the bathroom, took a shower and shaved. He took another brief glance at the bill he had stuffed into his pocket: as far as he could make out the details, they consisted entirely of numbers, not letters. If only he could only work out which group of signs corresponded to which numbers! Once he knew that much he could try to learn — provided he got the right kind of question and could actually ask it — the sounds of the various numbers, and so, step by step, he might eventually be able to decipher the writing too, and then the language, though all this would of course take some time. And that was only provided he had a text in which the numbers, one way or another, were actually written down in letter form. The trouble was these forms had nothing like that… Recognising this he put the bill away for now along with the various related questions to deal with later.

He had more important, more serious matters on his mind now and he decided to do most of his thinking in the room, leaving it only to eat in the familiar buffet, or, to save money, to buy food of the possibly cheaper sort in the shops; some bread, ham, cucumbers and so forth. He didn’t actually have much of an appetite, not even after days of doing nothing physical, all his energy being absorbed by intense mental activity. He hadn’t yet lost all confidence in logical thought: if he could only force his mind to review everything that had happened to him from the first minute of stepping off the plane when the bus brought him into town, something would reveal itself. A total would appear at the bottom of the column of figures. He sat at the writing desk, drawing and scribbling as he used to do back home when faced with a difficult and complex question in linguistics, shuffling tiny slips of paper bearing the various phonemes he had jotted down here and there, grouping and regrouping them, playing with them until, sooner or later, they suddenly appeared in a clear and logical order. That was if they fitted in the first place… He had a certain trust in his ingenuity, in his quick and nimble mind, in the way he could delve into the heart of complex matters, in the vital role of inspiration even in scientific enquiry and maybe in luck too which, so far in his career, had always seemed to be on his side, so that when he began something he generally finished it. He was accustomed to thinking systematically: that was his craft, his vocation, his living. He felt exhilarated as he drew various diagrams and scribbled bits of shorthand in his notebook. Even now he was enjoying this instinctive mark making — it was almost a pleasure working on a logical problem that meant pitting his solitary wits against the city’s million and more secrets. He just needed to make an inventory of all his experiences, to feed the accumulated data into his mind as he might into a computer, and he would simply have to wait for it to come up with an answer.

The most important conclusion he came to was that, however painful, however bitter the process, there was nothing for it but to discover precisely where he was, for until he did so there would be no going home. There was no getting round this order of events or trying to change the relationship between them, since one followed from the other. He could wait for ever for chance to intervene on his side: all ad hoc attempts to escape had proved unsuccessful so far and there was no guarantee that they would prove more successful in the future. He was persuaded that whatever shore fate had abandoned him on he would not easily get away.

It was not that his leaving was not a matter of urgency, but perhaps the very fact that he was in too great a hurry was a problem: he had been in such a rush to escape that he had quite neglected to discover whether this place was on the map at all or if he was the first of his kind to arrive here. Because if he was the first he should not be in quite such a hurry: the explorer in him should commit himself to make basic notes and observations. He should determine the location of the city, the name of the country and continent, find out who lived here and what language they spoke, so that he might return home fully informed about everything.

Was he on planet earth at all or in some other part of the cosmos? In an age of space exploration and science fiction the question did not seem utterly ridiculous. But no, let us keep a cool head about this, it must be earth really. Many signs pointed to the fact: the plants he had noted in the parks and public spaces were certainly terrestrial trees, grass, flowers, as was the limited range of animals he had so far encountered, dogs, cats, doves, sparrows, insects and those angora rabbits in the hotel room he had walked into. Then there were the fish on the market stalls, the canaries, the parrots, and the tortoises in the livestock market, though there was a six-footed lizard too of a kind he hadn’t seen before. The air tasted and felt much the same as it did at home. And above all, most obviously, there were the people, people in unprecedented numbers, in buildings, in streets, in the hotel, in traffic, in vehicles, on the metro, as dense a throng of people, or pretty near as dense, as you would find in any other great city. And apart from this there was an entire recognisable way of life, the whole rhythm of it, the shops, the cafés, the food, the circulation of money, the way they cashed his cheque, the Arabic numerals and the use of the decimal system. Not to mention the week being divided into seven days, the Sunday holiday. And, and…

He hadn’t seen any stars yet, the sky generally having been overcast, but fortunately it cleared for an hour the next evening. Budai had no great knowledge of astronomy and could identify only one or two constellations, the Pleiades, Orion and the Plough, from which last he had learned as a child to calculate the position of the pole star. After a brief survey he succeeded in finding them, which suggested that he was in the northern hemisphere, for he was pretty sure the Plough could not be seen in the southern one. But if he was on earth, at what longitude and latitude? He had never taken much interest in these matters and could remember only what he had read in children’s books and travelogues. He struggled to recall the proper method of calculating such data and tried to work it out through sheer intelligence. He got so far as to take midday here, that is the point at which the sun was at its height, and compare it with the time at home, that is if he had had his watch with him and had not adjusted it, and to calculate the distance from the difference, dividing twenty-four hours by 360 degrees, meaning that every difference of four minutes would signify one degree. He might, in other words, have worked out whether he was east or west of his starting point, but he had forgotten his watch. Without it the method of divining distance would be a matter of speculation, at best a matter of strenuous mental gymnastics. The most promising way would be to measure the angle of the pole star relative to the horizon, but in order to do that he would need specialist instruments — a sextant or a theodolite — and where would he find one of those? With his naked eye he could only guess the rough height of the pole star — if that indeed was the pole star — and compare it to its height at home. The two being roughly the same, he was left to conclude he was on roughly the same latitude. But where? In Europe? Asia? America? Or in some hitherto unknown part of the globe?

He had already considered the unpleasant climate and the ethnic diversity of the populace but it was hopeless trying to work anything out from that. There was nothing particular about the forms of dress here either, it was what you would find in most large European cities, just a little greyer and dingier on the whole, with a preponderance of uniforms. This reminded him that the black warder at the police station had been wearing the same kind of one-piece canvas boiler suit he had seen in many other places. Could it be that all those wearing similar uniforms, regardless of gender, were also guards and warders?

In the meantime there was the blonde lift operator going up and down. He tried to work out what shift she was working but was confused each time because sometimes she was there when he calculated she should be, at other times not and, conversely, just when he felt sure she would be off duty there she was again by the noisy opening door. They had got round to greeting each other by now and there were occasional signs that she was showing some interest in him too. Twice she addressed Budai as he was about to get out and he smiled and shrugged his shoulder by way of an answer to show he had not understood. The crowd in that narrow space gave no time for explanations and he was quickly swept away by the others getting off.

The next time they reached the ninth floor she put her hand on his arm to detain him and Budai finally understood that she wanted to take him somewhere. He remained in the cabin as it climbed floor by floor, slowly emptying, the numbers lighting up one after the other until they were on a much higher level. It was the top floor, the eighteenth, and by that time there were just the two of them. The girl opened the door and signalled for him to get out with her.

The layout was quite different here. There can’t have been too many rooms, not for guests at least. There were large white containers and tubes of various sizes and thicknesses, probably part of the building’s heating system or related to the lift mechanism along with cogwheels and steel hawsers. And there was a kind of cafeteria or bar, closed just now, probably only deployed in the summer when it was hotter, a kind of top floor tower restaurant with a vista surrounded by an open terrace, as far as he could tell through the locked glass doors.

The girl lit a cigarette and offered him one. Budai didn’t smoke and politely turned it down. She on the other hand was clearly a heavy smoker. She drew the smoke down hungrily and blew it out again as though she was well used to it. Smoking cannot have been permitted in the lift. She smiled at him somewhat apologetically as she smoked. Now that she was rested and relaxed, her face clear of exhaustion, her manner was easy, bright and careless. Her hair and make-up looked perfect. She did not try to force conversation, knowing it would be hopeless but did address a word or two to him.

‘Yeye tlehuatlan… Muula alalálli?’

She gave a soft, slow, melodic laugh, puffing out more smoke, her back propped on one of the containers. There was a buzz in the open lift, someone downstairs was calling it but neither of them moved. Budai pointed to himself and repeated his name a few times then pointed at her questioningly. She gave another laugh and answered with a two-syllable word. He didn’t quite catch it, and asked again.

‘Pepe? Tchetche?’

Her pronunciation was so odd it might have been Bebe, Veve, Gege, Dede or anything else: each time she said it, it sounded different, sometimes it even sounded as if it had three syllables — Edede or Bebébé, though this might have been merely a pet name or an inflected version of her proper name. There was constant buzzing by this time, hordes of people must have been waiting on the floors below. Her brief break over, she stubbed out her cigarette and Budai entered the lift with her. As they descended it filled up with passengers again wedging themselves between him and her so they could not see each other at all. Only once they had reached the ninth floor could their eyes meet and exchange a complicit glance of farewell.

It was light in the darkness: a thread, however narrow, that constituted a relationship, a connection, the first in fact since he had arrived here and, if he was careful not to lose it, that he might be able to follow out of this monstrous swarming labyrinth. Perhaps he would make a discovery that would startle the world and the time would come when, all things being equal, he might think himself fortunate to have found his way here, to have stumbled on it like an explorer. On the other hand he might simply have been fooling himself.

Whether he was or not, the fact remained that he had to carry through the tasks he had set himself now, the first of those being to make some estimate of the city’s extent. So next morning he set out early, got into the first metro that passed that way and rode to the end of the line where the whole train emptied. By that time he was wondering which way to go once he was above ground so that he would be moving away from the centre rather than back towards it. It seemed logical to note the direction of the track he had travelled on to make sure he would go the same way, though the exit routes from the platform were so complex and winding with corridors, stairs, bends and intersections that he was lost by the time he arrived outside and had to make a snap decision as to which unknown direction to walk down. In order not to get lost on the way back he drew little pictures in his notebook of the salient corners, crossroads and buildings as he passed them.

It was like all outer suburbs with endless stone walls, fences, chimneys, gasometers, wide and muddy streets, row on row of dull brick houses, a large factory in the distance, its roof jagged like a saw, its vast bulk silhouetted against the grey sky, the air smoky and sooty, bitter-tasting. Here and there he spotted a few grocery shops, some rag-and-bone tradesmen, and one or two general stores whose window displays were packed with dubious items. And wherever he went there were exactly the same dense crowds, no less dense than in the city centre. Could he have got on the wrong train? Did the rail network not extend to the city limits? Had the town outgrown itself? He wondered how it felt to have been born and spent all one’s life here. Perhaps they no longer noticed the overcrowding of every street, no longer cared about the eternal queuing and the terrible and degrading effect it was bound to have on their lives. Or could they no longer imagine anything else? Did they think it natural? Were they simply used to it? Is it possible to get used to something like this?

Nor was the motor traffic any lighter here. Budai tried to read the number plates but couldn’t make much sense of them: the letters remained indecipherable, accompanied by a number composed of three or four or five figures, with not an international number-plate to be seen, nothing from which he might deduce the country he was in. Were he able to drive he could try to get hold of a car — to steal one in other words — and then consider at leisure what he might do with it. But he couldn’t drive and he didn’t want, didn’t dare, had no inclination to steal one, and in any case he was by no means sure he would be better off navigating the labyrinth of all these streets and squares without a map in a never-ending rush hour. It occurred to him that he had seen a bicycle in a shop window somewhere but he didn’t think he had enough money left to buy it and was not altogether sure whether it would help having one. It might make it just that much easier to get lost.

Once again there was no sign of a railway station, not even of a railway bridge or railway cutting where he might at least begin to follow tracks. It was equally impossible finding an airport though every so often he would hear an aeroplane droning high above him. But it was useless speculating where it was going to land or where he might board one. If the city was on the coast it would be a good idea to find the way to the harbour or to trace the line of the sea until he discovered ships at dock, then proceed from there, sailing away, free as the wind. Any direction would do. But he could find no river nor canal, nor any kind of moving water that might lead him to the sea if only he walked long enough, since sooner or later all moving water had to arrive there. All he found were a few artificial pools between houses on a vacant site, their waters dirty, turning black and stagnant, like reservoirs constructed during the war. And an ornamental pond in a neglected park that he crossed but there was no waterway leading from it. It was full of wastepaper and empty bottles. Pools of oil floated on it.

And so he set to asking passers-by again, trying the word sea in various languages, using his hands, palm down, to indicate the motion of the waves, and making swimming movements with his arms. He repeated the word time and time again, in this language and that language, in all the languages he knew, even in Greek:

‘Thalassa! Thalassa!’

It was soon clear that no-one understood him, everyone hurrying about his or her business, some of them too preoccupied to attend to his tedious private affairs. After a while Budais’ lack of success started to inhibit him. His tongue grew stiff in his mouth. He lost heart and stopped asking. Nevertheless he kept pressing forwards through the constant crowd, driven on by an instinct stronger than any conscious notion. Having determined not to give up, he had to see something through to the end, utterly committed, whatever the result.

Fog, cold and sharp, was settling on the streets, so dense in places he could hardly see six feet in front of him. Cars had put on their lights and were moving at walking pace, locked together to the music of horns, cries and revving engines. Budai paid particular attention to landmarks now since he would have to find his way back. In a clear patch between wads of fog there rose a circus tent, a huge, peaked, white canvas structure, then it disappeared again. It was of no interest to him. What was it to do with him? He strode on swathed in grey-and-lilac mist. Now there was an illuminated gateway. What might it be?

Eventually he noticed that there were far fewer cars and that he was surrounded by a ring of tiny swaying lights. They blinked mysteriously, flickering here and there through the milky vapour that had suddenly descended. Were they stars? Nightmares? He couldn’t tell how far away they were, all perspective lost in the soft-thick air. It was only later, having stumbled over mounds of freshly dug earth and into some blocks of stone and marble that he realised he had wandered into a cemetery and that the little lights were candles and tapers, some on graves, some in the hands of visitors. There were so many of them proceeding down the narrow cinder paths between the tombs and the mausoleums that there seemed to be no space left. Budai wondered if it was All Souls Night? But who knows whether they kept such feasts here? Or had he got himself mixed up in a particular funeral procession, that of a well-known figure perhaps, whose burial would attract a great crowd? Or was it simply that in this city everything was crowded? There was music coming from somewhere, impossible to say from where, the sound of an organ or some other heavy, dense sound and human voices too perhaps, a slow, attenuated wail that might have its origins far above or far below him. The monuments seemed to be of various shapes and sizes as far as he could tell in the fog, some with statues, some with pictures of the deceased, some with flowers or vases for holding flowers, but the differences between them were, as ever, minor with only the cross missing or perhaps it was just that he couldn’t make it out on the ones he was close enough to see. The inscriptions were in the usual cuneiform lettering. There was not much opportunity of examining them at leisure since he was continually being pushed forwards, nudged this way and that, so it seemed likely that the flood of people was actually heading in a specific direction. Then he found himself outside the cemetery as suddenly as he had found himself in it.

The fog was slightly less thick now. He was on a workers’ estate, in a row of uniform small houses with plaster falling off the walls and tiles missing from roofs, their yards serving as minimal kitchen gardens. He came to a high stone wall with a large stone gate. A great mass of people was gathered here, many hundreds, not standing in queues but in loose knots as elsewhere, jostling, loud masses of them, all pressing inwards, swarming through the entrance. Budai’s attention was drawn to them and their noisy mysterious endeavour but all the time the size of the curious horde behind him was increasing. He couldn’t turn back now even if he wanted to. They continued slowly to press forward though the gates were too narrow to accommodate them all. New people kept arriving, ever more of them, pushing and shoving. At one point they were so jammed together he feared being crushed to death or being trampled down. When he finally got in he felt he had been through a grinder.

He seemed to have arrived in a zoo or at least an ape and monkey enclosure because there were no other animals here. Of apes, however, there was no lack: cage after cage were full of them. But there were just as many visitors staring at the cages, shouldering and elbowing their way through in the effort to get ever closer to the bars, mainly children of course but a good number of adults too. There was a very wide range of anthropoids, at least in so far as he, with his limited knowledge of zoology, could establish: chimpanzees, macaques, baboons, huge gorillas and tiny silk-monkeys, gibbons, mandrills, marmosets. The odd thing was that however many there were they were all individual, each clearly different from the other as one could see if one looked at them long enough, and, furthermore, each was of a wholly unique character, some running, some dangling, some stalking impatiently to and fro, some nibbling with careworn expressions, some peeling fruit, some playing, some scratching or absentmindedly hunting fleas, some proud, some uncouth, some charming, some terrifying, pulling faces that were now pious, now meditative, some screaming, some muttering, some chattering, some croaking, some crowing, some excited, some bored, some loathing each other, some devoted to each other, fighting, mating, or simply squatting in a corner, resigned to a kind of world weariness, dreaming of forests and freedom.

There were notices everywhere on the cages carrying longer or shorter texts. Budai preferred the short ones of course. They were the ones most likely to give no more confusing information than the species of monkey on display together with its Latin equivalent as was the general custom in zoos. It wouldn’t even be a problem if the latter were written in the so far indecipherable local characters, in fact that might help in offering a key to understanding them. For example, if he knew what the Latin for baboon was — and he happened to remember it was papio — it would be easy enough to work out what character represented what sound, or group of sounds, and that information could then be carried forward to the next word and so on until the whole alphabet was solved… This was all very well but there were so many notices, some of which might be warnings or instructions regarding the feeding of the animals or information about the extent of the animal’s natural habitat, its lifecycle or other such matter, or simply directives not to smoke or leave litter and so forth. Given such a profusion of notices it seemed an impossible task to work out which of them referred to the specific species of monkey behind the bars, particularly in Latin, that is if the Latin name was provided at all.

There were very long queues for the green-painted lavatories with separate ones for men and women, and since there was no way of avoiding them he had to wait for as long as it took… Later, standing on a bridge, having chosen for no particular reason to go one way rather than another, he saw an open-air lido in the distance. There were many pools, both bigger and smaller, and despite the cool wintry weather, all of them were crowded, the various bathers hardly having any space in which to move and yet everywhere one or other figure was leaping into the water, splashing about and making a general noise. People were hanging like grapes off the diving boards. He looked to find the place where the used water might drain away but it was hard to see through the mist and steam and there seemed to be nothing on the surface, no ostensible way of conducting the water. There had to be underground pipes.

It seemed much more like an outer suburb now with fewer houses and those broken up by vacant sites, lawns and play areas, though the traffic on the main roads was no less busy. The fog had lifted: it felt cold and dry and soon the soot-red disc of the sun appeared, its edges sharply defined in the dirty sky. Here and there a few improvised dwellings stood, made out of cardboard or the carcasses of old buses, while in the distance a rust-coloured slag heap closed off the horizon.

He came to a place where both pedestrians and road traffic seemed stuck in a bottleneck so there was no forward motion at all except by thrusting his way through the crush, using his shoulders and hips: there must have been some kind of obstacle stopping them. Budai felt his mission was more urgent than theirs and, knowing there was no alternative, he set about shoving people aside. After some ten to fifteen minutes of struggle and a good few kicks and blows received in retaliation he reached the point at which they were being held up.

Cattle were being driven across the street, a lot of them, an entire herd, proceeding slowly, their lowing mingled with the sound of whips cracking, dogs barking and a general sound of lamentation. The herdsmen wore rubber boots and leather or cord jackets, as well as wide brimmed hats or berets. They looked a cross between cowboys and drifters… Budai thought it might be a good idea to follow them so he left the road and made his way over the grass to walk beside the cattle though he was dressed quite differently from the herdsmen. He couldn’t have explained quite why he was doing this but it hardly mattered which way he went now as long as it was out of town. No one asked him what he was doing there and his presence hardly registered in the constant confusion, in the clouds of dust and the universal movement, from which, occasionally, one of the wilder young bulls would break ranks, causing a great to-do as excited dogs barked and determined herdsmen whooped as, together, they drove it back into the herd.

Now they were on sandy ground, moving past a lumberyard where circular saws whined cutting tree trunks into smaller sections, then past another built-up estate where the herd clattered and beat on the paving with a noise like dull thunder that took a while to die away. Eventually they drove their mobile market into a fenced-off area like a sheep-pen and from there directly into a high-vaulted building. Budai forged ahead of the others here, partly out of curiosity, partly carried along by his own momentum, but once inside noticed that while most of the cattle had already ambled a long way into the great hall he could no longer see the head of the herd which must have been accommodated in spaces further off. Men and cattle completely filled the hall. Beside the drovers there were men in canvas overalls too, bustling about while the mooing and bellowing noise grew ever more baleful, each sound echoing off the bare walls, the air thick with warm, living-sickly smells. This must, no doubt, be the slaughterhouse.

The whole noisy melée was goaded into one vast hall lit by a great skylight. The floor here was running with slippery scarlet blood. The animals must have scented the danger because the smell of blood, if nothing else, made them halt and resist though there was no way back, nowhere to run, because ever more cattle were being driven in behind them. When it came to their turn each was suddenly surrounded by a group of strapping men, one holding its horns, another tying it down with a rope, until it was forced to stand astraddle. Then, whoever had the cleaver brought it down on the nape of its neck. Its poor legs gave way and collapsed. At the moment of collapse another man delivered a blow to its brow, cutting it open. But the beast must have lived on a good while yet for it fell sideways and carried on kicking on the stones, throwing its head back now and then, even when they buried a knife in its throat and drained its life blood, at which point the sad martyred look on its face very gradually glazed over.

Budai could not bear to look. He wanted to turn away but whichever way he gazed there were dying animals sprawling on the ground, ten, twenty, maybe thirty at a time, who would then immediately be dragged further along, cut into pieces, skinned and sliced, while all the while fresh ones took their places under the cleaver so that they too might be cut down in turn, the process lasting, it seemed for ever, blows raining down again and again. It was if every cow in the world were being driven to slaughter. There was no end to it. Budai could not go back for fear of being crushed by the incoming herd so had to move forward right through the thick of the killing, treading over skin and guts and viscera and sections of flesh, wading through blood and the steam of blood, between butchers and youths covered in blood, past blood-stained walls, past bloody pillars. He’d faint if he did not get out soon.

When finally he emerged from the hall he found himself in a corner of the courtyard. A variety of processing chambers opened on to it, rooms for sausage and salami production. There were machines for mincing the meat and turning it to slop. The further he got from the cleavers, from the indifferent industry of slaughter for the meat trade, the harder he found it to forget what he had seen. His knees were trembling and he felt so weak he had to grasp a nearby metal bar to avoid collapsing. Frail and lonely, seeking a comforting thought to help him recover from the shock, he brought to mind the lift girl puffing away at her cigarette on the top floor of the hotel. He felt very close to her now, as close as to a life-support machine. He wanted to hold her tightly, even if only in imagination. Unable to speak her language, he would never be capable of sharing his nightmare experience with her. He didn’t even know how to address her in his thoughts: Bébé? Tetéte? Epepe?

He found the back door out of the abattoir and followed the line of a long ditch. He saw that the water in it was moving but the fallen leaves on its surface did not even tremble, simply sat there, muddied, in a mush of fermentation. Further along, rather surprisingly, the terrain became more urban once more: there were more buildings of a greater variety with a modern round-tower rising into the sky at one street corner. Could he have turned in the wrong direction after the metro station after all, or had he turned off at some stage and found himself back in one of the central districts from where the train had set out? Or was this an altogether different town? But would one be built so close to the first?

In front of him was a shoe shop where a young man, paralysed from the waist down, was sitting in a wheelchair and playing the violin — though he was losing track of events so fast he could not be sure later whether he had actually seen him or if he was a memory from some other, earlier occasion. The empty violin case was next to the wheelchair on the pavement. It was open and there was a note of some sort fixed to it whose meaning Budai tried to work out by considering the context. It must be an effective cry for pity since passers-by, as many here as elsewhere, were busily dropping coins into the case with even more coins lying on the ground. A considerable crowd had formed a circle round the young man, obstructing the traffic. The boy played reasonably well, handling the instrument with confidence and was probably a music student as the text might possibly have indicated. It was a strange melody he was playing, simple enough to be catchy, the phrases clear and packed, suggesting an aching desire for something, or at any rate that was how Budai interpreted it. Feeling in no particular hurry to move on he joined the ring of listeners. The young man in the meantime continued playing the same melody over and over again, his useless withered legs and shod feet dangling from the wheelchair. His face a trifle puffy, he bent his locks over the instrument and kept bowing away, ever the same tune, never looking up, ignoring everyone, his gaze empty above the violin. Might he have been blind?

Going by the audience response and the steady accumulation of offerings, he guessed the text on the case might have suggested something to the effect that the crippled young man was enrolled at a school for music and required support to help him continue his studies, studies he had had to abandon on account of a financial crisis. And whether this was merely what he imagined to be the situation or whether that was what the writing actually suggested — even though the whole thing might have been a confidence trick, one of many such played on the naïve susceptibilities of a credulous urban public — Budai still found it touching and was moved. True, he was feeling bereft himself with no idea how long he was doomed to tread the pavements of these endless streets with their acres of brick dwellings and countless inhabitants, but despite having decided to strictly limit his spending henceforth and to buy only what was absolutely necessary, he too threw a coin to the violinist.

Then he went on his way, forging on. Now he seemed to have arrived in an area that felt more central: the roads narrowed, there were traffic policemen on certain street corners, one or two older grand houses appeared and another tall fortress or ruined bastion of the kind he had seen before. He was tired with all the walking he had done by now but there was no park or bench on which he might sit and take a rest.

Seeking a resting place he entered a glazed and vaulted building complete with tower and dome, with four great clocks telling the same time on its dignified façade. Behind it stretched a vast long hall whose front and side doors were continually packed with people entering and leaving. The form of it was so familiar there must be one of these everywhere in the world. Might this be a railway station? Budai’s heart beat faster. But there were no carriages, no engines and no platforms inside that hangar-like, enormous space, roofed with a vast cloak of glass rimmed in steel. In fact, something about the sweep and movement of the crowd suggested something quite different. And yet the whole building, at least from outside, in its main features, and, examining it more closely, even in its floor plan, resembled a station to the degree that he felt obliged to consider the possibility that it might have been planned as such, and that only later was it adapted to some other purpose. What purpose that was he could not immediately tell; the wide hall full of people must have served as a general waiting room for something. To either side, right and left, opened a series of colonnaded passages full of groups of people, some standing silently, others engaged in vigorous discussion, mostly gathered near the exit doors. There was, however, nowhere to sit down.

The glazed doors led to other, smaller areas. He forced his way into one and took a peek, A dark-suited man at a table on a raised stage sat facing an audience ranged on a row of benches. Further off in a corner of this first room stood a structure that might have been a kind of pulpit where a crop-headed black woman in a blue outfit was making a speech. There were the same arrangements in the next room where the pulpit was occupied by a tall man wearing a canvas tunic uniform. At first he thought he had wandered into a school or college, that those in the pulpit were lecturers and the rest students — but if that was the case why were they sitting there in overcoats and, anyway, how could they tolerate the constant coming and going? But he was too tired by now to think about it: he opened the door to one of the rooms at random and there being an empty place at the end of the last row, he sat down.

An insignificant-looking little man in the pulpit was explaining something in a somewhat laboured manner, his eyes rapidly blinking, having to stop now and then, getting lost, clearly unused to public speaking. From time to time another dark-suited man in the front row asked him a question, as did the man sitting on the raised platform. Budai finally guessed where he was: it was obviously a court of law, one where in all likelihood, judging by circumstances, tone and atmosphere, civil cases were being tried. The man he had first taken to be a lecturer must of course be the judge and the man asking the questions some kind of barrister, while the figure in the pulpit was the plaintiff or the accused or a witness. Beyond this there was not much he could understand, the garbled language of the place being an insuperable obstacle. It was true that he was not paying much attention; the long excursion that had begun in the early morning and the endless walking had quite exhausted him. He closed his eyes for a while. He might even have fallen asleep.