Metropole

He woke with a start to hear the woman next to him standing up and loudly addressing the chair. She seemed to be making some comment on the proceedings. The woman must have been there before but he had not noticed her. She was wearing thick glasses and the eyes behind them were red and swollen as if she had been crying a lot. Despite that, she was rather handsome, not above thirty or so, with a green hat perched on her blonde bun of hair, her lips finely arched, her figure, as might be expected in her state of agitation, full, tense and desirable. She had clearly been upset by something the little blinking man had stuttered, her entire face red with excitement, her mouth partly open, ready, if necessary, to intervene again. Might he have been her husband? Could these be divorce proceedings?

The barrister asked another question and the man answered unusually firmly and immediately in a single word. That was when all hell broke loose. There was muttering in court and an elderly woman in the front row sprang to her feet waving her umbrella. Soon everyone was shouting. The judge started ringing his bell but it was not enough to staunch the flood of passion. Budai’s neighbour began to sob and an old grey man with a Kaiser Wilhelm moustache turned pathetically to the chair pointing to the woman. Uniformed guards and clerks appeared and tried to calm the situation, ushering people back to their seats, the judge continuing to ring his bell. At this point the woman in the green hat — no doubt one of those most touched by the case — pushed her way past him to the pulpit and threw herself at the man currently testifying. He clumsily tried to free himself from her. The woman staggered and cried out in pain. Now it was all fury. It was the insignificant-looking little man who looked most frightened, blinking in panic, making a grab for the woman, the expression on his face so anxious and tender it seemed quite out of character.

This time Budai made an exception and did not try to work out what was happening. Even if he had known the language he would probably have made little sense of it: it was a private matter, hopeless and infinitely complex, completely alien as far as he was concerned. It was nothing to do with him and he felt no desire to know more. Thinking this, he picked himself up, broke through the people crowding at the entrance and left.

Once out in the street he looked back at the remarkable elevation of the building and it occurred to him that if it was really intended to be railway station then it was possible that various other city stations, some of them at any rate, might be located in the same quarter, maybe on the ring road as in Moscow — and if that were the case might there not be one that had not been redeveloped for some other purpose? It was, admittedly, a long shot but a possibility nonetheless and he couldn’t think of anything better. In any case he set off down the street in the direction he thought most promising, but the street soon led to a T-junction with a narrower street and he looked uncertainly right and left wondering which way to go. Or was it pointless hoping to discover a system? Might the railway stations be scattered randomly only to appear in the most unexpected places the way they did in Berlin, Paris and London? Was there perhaps one single major terminus through which most traffic was obliged to pass as in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Rome? Or perhaps two, like Grand Central and Pennsylvania Station in New York?

He came to a square where a tall, wide church was crammed between ordinary houses, overlooking them. It looked like an ancient cathedral, an architectural monument with many towers and an enormous dome, complete with arches, buttresses, columns, balconies, friezes, statues, piers, ornamental masonry and other forms of decoration in such an eclectic welter of styles it was hard to tell when it was built, though it was likely to have been centuries ago as were most other cathedrals. There was a long queue comprised of people in pairs, at the main door, winding right round one of the aisles and disappearing. Having come so far, he felt, he should devote some time to this so he found the very back of the queue and joined it.

Pigeons strutted and spurted in dense flocks, impertinently pushing their way into the queue. Whenever they spotted anyone with breadcrumbs they did not wait for the crumbs to drop but grabbed them from people’s hands, settling on their shoulders and on the top of their heads, their wings beating the air, purring, rising in clouds and settling, dropping feathers and mess everywhere. Budai tried to start a conversation with an old lady wearing a fur collar just in front of him as she was feeding the birds but he must have been speaking too quietly or else she misheard him for she simply did not react but carried on dropping crumbs, cooing to the doves until they covered her completely. And he couldn’t even tell whether this great crowd was entering the church on a wave of religious enthusiasm or out of architectural curiosity.

When, after a long time — he no longer took note of how long anything took, his sense of time having been blunted — he finally reached the doors he hoped he might find a simple leaflet of the kind you’d normally find in places like this. But once through, the momentum of the thus far disciplined crowd suddenly swept him on, everyone dementedly rushing on to the various commercial stalls and salesmen stationed inside. There were oils, creams, and some suspicious-looking paste or plasticine for sale, mostly items connected with religion as far as he could make out, stuff required for local rituals as well as candles and incense, but no sign of a booklet or guide. People were pushing each other aside. Those who could grabbed a jar or little bottle and were immediately on their way back again, all knees and elbows. The sweet old woman who had been feeding the pigeons was now furiously kicking anyone who got in her way. Her worn fur collar had slipped off in the hand-to-hand struggle and was streaming behind her like a flag.

It was hard to make sense of this complex, heavily-decorated inner space so packed with believers and priests. Services were being conducted in various places, or that at least is what seemed to be indicated by the thicker knots of humanity gathered around gowned and capped figures who were busily intoning or singing. There were paintings, images, frescoes and mosaics covering the entire wall, as well as statues, stuccos, reliefs, baldachins, pulpits, booths, side chapels, arches, vaults, floors inlaid with marble, deep-piled carpets and heavy wrought-iron chandeliers everywhere, the lot in such rich profusion that he found it impossible to isolate any details. He tried to work out the dominant style in all the brilliant jumble but he didn’t entirely recognise any of them, no Romanesque, no Renaissance, no Baroque as such, though he couldn’t entirely rule out their influence. Not that he was any kind of expert. He couldn’t even identify the specific religion or myth that the various pictures, statues and ornaments represented: there were images of men and women, young and old, mostly in ancient monkish hoods, people in groups huddling together, hunting scenes, deer, fawn, dogs, a lion, standard bearers and archers, and a knight-in-armour tussling with a serpent. The images seemed to rush at him like a sudden assault on the eyes. Though the iconography was mysterious, one thing was certain: this was neither a Christian nor a Jewish place of worship for it lacked altars, crosses and Stars of David, nor could it have been an Islamic shrine since the Koran forbids images. But if he had wandered into some other kind of Eastern temple he would have expected to find seated Buddhas or a Shiva with its various arms… But now he was thinking of what wasn’t there, not what was. For all he knew there might have been other temples elsewhere just like this. The inscriptions on the wall and elsewhere were the usual runic, perhaps with more curlicues, a more archaic form of the script he saw everywhere. The language of liturgy might relate to living speech much as Church Latin did to Italian, or Old Slavonic to modern Russian.

The ritual itself was strange, rather barbaric. Budai joined one of the biggest groups near the entrance and saw that not far away a very large fat woman was lying on a sort of table covered with a roll of dark cloth. She was dressed in her best clothes and surrounded with flowers. She did not move. She was dead. Her large pink face might have been painted for the occasion; her neck and chin were as fat as the hand resting beside her body, a well-cushioned hand, plump and puffy, the gold rings on her fingers seeming to have grown into the flesh. The crowd who had come presumably to mourn the woman had, curiously enough, turned their backs on her and were listening to the priest who at that very moment was raising a large, rattling metal dish complete with chains — it looked rather like a teapot — his voice, as he did so, taking up a mournful chant. At this sign the faithful joined in wailing, lamenting, many of them throwing themselves against the stone floor with such power Budai thought they might break their heads open. They continued moaning and weeping like this, their lamentations rising into the vaults, echoing through the whole arena, blending with waves of litany from elsewhere. Some people were in tears. A thin woman in a black headscarf collapsed in a fit of sickness and had to be helped out through the crowd.

Boys in red surplices were fixing candles around the body of the dead woman though even now the crowd paid her no attention. They were staring at the priest who spread his arms wide so the sleeves of his gown rode up to his elbows. He shut his eyes and, his face transformed in ecstasy so that he looked almost lewd, cried out the same thing twice in a harsh, loud voice. Or maybe it wasn’t the same thing but two things that sounded similar, the two chiming like halves of a rhyming couplet, like this:

Zöhömö, pröhödö

Türidümi mödölnö

This drove the crowd to a point of mad excitement and even those who were standing quietly started sobbing and screaming and all but collapsed, remaining upright only because there was not enough room to fall. A gaunt old man, ripped his clothes off and threw them away, everything including his waistcoat, his shirt, his trousers and his boots, leaving himself clad only in a single chequered pair of knee-length underpants. His chest was covered in dense grey hair. His eyes were swivelling crazily this way and that.

Others were stripping off too despite the cold, even women and young girls, all apparently possessed as if offering up their nakedness… Strangely enough Budai felt neither outraged nor even surprised by the sight: he too was feeling the trance-like urge to throw himself on the marble floor, to kick off his shoes, undo his collar and loosen his tie. A heady joy seized him at being here, at being able to take part, to melt into the great communion of the faithful.

A censer had been lit ahead of him. The priest raised it and swung it high in the air. And now, as if they had been waiting for just this signal, everyone started to press towards him though even at the peak of their religious ecstasy they approached him in pairs. Some people did try to sneak into the queue from the side aisles in order to reach their goal all the sooner but the rest wouldn’t let them and pushed them back: there was real hand-to-hand combat between them for the privilege of being there first. One bowler-hatted, fat gentleman with a walking stick was cruelly trampled down in the process despite waving his arms and giving out thin little piglet-like squeals.

The point of all this pushing and shoving was to force a way through to the priest, cower at his feet and kiss the shoes that peeked out from under his robe. They were little black-lacquered shoes that must have been perfectly polished but their toecaps were quickly smeared by all the mouths that touched them. Having arrived at the front, Budai bowed down and made some pretence of putting his lips to the lacquer, shrinking back in disgust. Under his breath he gabbled a short sentence to the priest, first in Latin then in Greek, trying to use the brief moment allotted to him; then, for good measure, in Hebrew and Old Slavonic too, in fact in any language that might be employed in church ritual, anything that might be recognised by a man conversant with theology. The priest was utterly immobile, rooted to the spot, no sign on his heavy, bronze, finely-carved face that he had understood any of it. He swung the censer he was still holding above his head but Budai was being pushed from behind by a little walrus-moustached, bald, Chinese-looking man, all chest and shoulders, and had to give way so that the man might cover the priest’s black-lacquered shoes with kisses.

The service seemed to be over, the congregation drifting away, so he allowed himself to be carried along. He was tired and had no energy left to ask anyone anything. He was content to go where everyone else seemed to be going. The great mass of people started to ascend a spiral staircase that led gently upwards. He chose to follow them, climbing higher and higher, round and round with them. He was gasping for air by now and his legs felt numb but everyone was moving so fast he could not help but pick up their pace, driven on in any case by curiosity to see where they would end up.

Having climbed for some time so he could no longer recall how many spirals he had described, the steps changed direction. They had emerged into a circular passageway covered by a great bell-like dome. They were actually within the cupola. The corridor rails were set sufficiently wide apart to allow him to look into the dizzy depths some eighty or hundred metres down where the jostling crowds appeared to be no more than a dark grey mass of indifferent, undifferentiated heaving matter. But it was still more dizzying to look upwards, into the narrowing eye of the dome, the curved ribs rising to the apparently infinite height of a focal point far enough away to make the heart beat faster: it was at least as high again as the point he was looking at it from.

He had to go round the whole dome following the direction indicated by innumerable arrows. The tour then took him through another door, to another set of stairs that were much narrower and steeper than the ones before, people following each other in zig-zags through the shell structure. Then the stairs came to an end and one could only progress by ladders. Then the ladders too vanished leaving only narrow planks and precarious breakneck rope-ladders, ever more exhausting, requiring ever more stamina to climb until one might as well have been a circus acrobat to master them. But there was no turning back because there were people behind him, following him in an endless single file as far as he could see.

He must be close to the top now, he calculated, and indeed he found himself clambering up a last set of vertical steps into a round space surrounded by windows. This would have been the small cylindrical room intended to illuminate the area below: its technical name, he remembered now, was the lantern. Above it, at the highest point of the temple, was the eye of the dome, a little cap or hood of glass. A solitary rope ladder led up to it. The eye could accommodate only one person’s head and shoulders as he stood at the top rung. The discomfort was worth it, however, for the view. It offered a complete panorama.

The sun was going down. Budai could almost feel the sky turning an inky-blue-black though it was impossible to tell whether that was because of the smoke-and-soot-polluted air or because of a large rain cloud louring over the rooftops. The city spread over a plain into distances further than the eye could see. Whichever way he turned there was no end to it, nothing but houses and apartment blocks, streets, squares, towers, old and new quarters of town, mildewy storm-battered rented barracks and skyscrapers faced with modern marble, main roads and alleys, factories, workshops, gasometers and the clumsy-looking great hall that he recognised even from here as the slaughterhouse. And chimneys, chimneys everywhere he looked; chimneys like so many long-necked dragons stretching towards the sky, spouting white, black, yellow and purple smoke. The wind carried the smoke, churned it, thrust it into dirty bundles and shreds, chasing it here and there even around his look-out point. The wind battering at the dome was cold and fierce, making its ribs creak and groan beneath him, the lantern visibly swaying. Wind swept through the little cage where Budai was stationed. He shivered and trembled but remained, unable to drag himself away from the view.

He looked in vain though for any sign of railway tracks or terminals. It was dark of course and getting darker so it was hard to make out detail. Nor could he see a river or a bridge, let alone a shore, however he peered. There were, perhaps, only a few reservoirs of the kind he had passed twinkling for a few seconds in a late stray sunbeam before sinking back into the obscure depths. He thought of looking for the vacant plots he had crossed earlier, believing them to be the edges of town. He caught sight of one in the very last moment before it finally vanished, a narrow strip or band of derelict greeny-brown among heavily built-up areas. But what it divided from what, whether it was in fact a division of some sort or had any geographical significance at all remained a puzzle he could not begin to solve… He was no wiser for the panoramic view. Could he have found his way into another town or was it the same place?

Whatever the answer, he decided he would go no further that day. Not primarily because of his exhaustion: as far as that was concerned he could continue; he had, after all, plenty of stamina and determination, having kept fit at home by engaging in various sports and developing the discipline to stick to a chosen target without sparing himself or indulging in feelings of self-pity. But he knew that he could find his way back to the hotel from the temple and was less likely to do so from further off, especially in darkness. He would find it impossible to keep all the various landmarks in mind. And if he had really wandered into another town, what hope or assurance had he that he would find his way round this one more easily? The language, the alphabet and other such details would be just as incomprehensible and it was exactly the same indifferently jostling crowd here as there. Ideally he would start again at the very beginning, take proper bearings, gather the right information, get used to the traffic system and give up the lifestyle he had so carefully and painstakingly constructed for himself at home. He hadn’t anything to his name here, no back up. Where could he spend the night but at the hotel and, if he were forced to ask for accommodation elsewhere, how would he frame his request?

The lights started coming on in blocks, each estate or major road in one go, all the tiny pieces slowly fitting together as an entire lit area rose out of the grey-blue. There was no end of it as far as he could see. In the far distance the rows and clusters of illumination melted into a single mass, its edges lost in glimmering fogs and milky galaxies like the stars in the Milky Way whose light comes to us from a distance of thousands or millions of light years… Budai had been a city dweller all his life, the city, for him, being the only possible place of work, routine and entertainment. He was constantly drawn to the great cities of the world: the metropolis! And while the proportions of this one horrified and imprisoned him, he could not deny its sheer enormous urban beauty. Looking down on it from such a height he was almost in love with it.

Budai had accumulated a number of texts since he first arrived, texts that he thought might prove useful in studying the local written language. First were the notices he had ample opportunity to observe on the hotel walls that probably referred to house rules. He also had a newspaper that he had bought on his first Sunday evening in one of the downtown areas but hadn’t yet looked at. For now, however, he was concentrating on the receipt the hotel had given him on his payment of the first bill, that being the only piece of writing to hand that offered some clue as to what it might say. He had already noticed that the totals were indicated in numerals only, not in letters, but he still thought it worth closer study.

The printed form had the figure 921 at the very top among a group of unintelligible notes. Presumably the figure referred to the payer since he was the occupier of the room referred to but whether the rest of it was his name — that is to say if they knew him by name at all — was beyond proof or falsification, at least on the basis of his examination so far. He tried to figure out what each column might stand for and how they had arrived at the total of 35.80. The biggest figure would no doubt be the cost of the room and the rest would probably relate to it, including telephone charges or perhaps the heating or some kind of tax. But he couldn’t find a particularly significant amount: 5.40 was the biggest, the others including 2.70, 3.80 and so forth. There would have to have been some multiplication too, the per-night figure times seven for the week since he had received the bill precisely a week after he had arrived. But despite going through it untold times he was unable to find evidence of any such operation, neither multiplication nor addition.

And so he started looking for the date, checking the top and bottom of the sheet: nothing of the kind there. It was impossible that there should be no date — could it be part of the text, written out in letters? But why? Or was this the custom here?… Then he thought again and concentrated only on the printed columns but no one had filled them in by hand. He supposed that the reason these columns were empty was that they were for services he hadn’t required, such as breakfast, laundry, ironing and so forth. Stuck for ideas, he tried to isolate individual groups of letters hoping blindly to guess what each was, but that was no good of course because he would first have to know how they sounded in the local language. That’s when it struck him how short the words were, most of them consisting of one or two characters and not much more. Might they be abbreviations? In so far as they were, they would have been common enough for him to notice in other texts he had seen about the place, such as electricity or telephone bills, though if that was the kind of thing they were, his task would be extraordinarily difficult, not to say impossible.

So he studied the newspaper instead, examining it, turning the pages over and over wondering what he could learn by studying them. But as he was doing this he had a peculiar and nasty surprise. Up to this moment he had worked on the assumption that the characters here would read from left to right, the lines from top to bottom as in Latin and other European scripts. That is what the bill, the house rules and the phone book he had pinched from the desk-clerk, the one that later disappeared from his room, told him. But now that he examined the paper more closely all kinds of doubts assailed him. For the name of the paper — in much bigger and bolder type — was not only at the top of the front page but also on the back page, precisely as it was on the front. So where to start reading? From the front? From the back? From the top or vice versa? Or maybe it could be read in mixed order, like Ancient Greek, in boustrophedon or ‘ox-turning’ manner where the direction of writing changes in every line, now left to right, now right to left?

Or might it be that this newspaper was produced in a different language using a different script from the others? He tried a random test, picking out a letter here, a letter there and right from the beginning he found correspondences. He understood it less and less… But there was no date here either, not in figures at least, and however he looked there was no way of telling whether this or that group of letters referred to the name of the city or the place where the newspaper was printed. Should he look for it in the title? Below it? Above? It seemed logical that such information should be displayed somewhere near the title, but which title, the one at the front or the one at the back?

Then he thought of something else. He took out his remaining cash and sorted it by denomination. The notes showed portraits of unknown people, some landscapes with unfamiliar buildings seen from a distance, a few allegorical figures and some decorative motifs as most banknotes tended to do. Nor did the coins differ much from coins elsewhere: female heads, sheaves of corn, flowers, birds. He tried to work out the names of numbers by examining the text under the numerals for that is where they should have been on the notes. But there was a lot of writing there of various sorts, the entire banknote crowded with letters, words and phrases of various sizes, including reproductions of scrawled signatures. These might have referred to almost anything: the issuing bank or institution or the state itself, possibly the legislature by whose order the notes appeared. Perhaps he could find the usual formula to the effect that on presentation of this banknote the possessor was entitled to receive such and such amount, that forgery was a punishable offence and a good many other statements that are at times included — but whatever the case there was too much here to be certain of anything.

It looked more promising to study the inscriptions on coins: coins, as far as he could remember — and indeed according to his experience of other countries — usually contained only the numeral, the unit of currency and the name of the state that had minted them. He jingled his change: there were 50s, 20s and 10s. The writing on all of them however was circular, on the perimeter, without any gaps, the end, wherever it was, leading back to the beginning. Given this, he not only failed to discover the name of the currency but even where he should start reading the various characters.

He wasn’t going to get anywhere like this: it was like going around blindfolded, seeing nothing… Should he set about writing down such individual letters as he could discern in the various inscriptions? And what good would that do? It was pointless, he hadn’t enough material to work on, not a single solid piece of information on which he could build a case or develop a view, nothing to go on at all. He needed a dictionary, or some bilingual piece of text, some brochure or other.

He should look for a bookshop then, which is what he did, searching the town until he found one. True, he had a feeling that he had seen one in the course of his earlier explorations, in the quarter behind the building site with the skyscraper — which he found had reached the sixty-ninth floor. The streets were narrow there and the traffic was dense even by local standards, people packed together, the crush before certain shops almost life-threatening. He might have stumbled into the end-of-season sales. He had left home in mid-February and sales were generally held at the end of winter there too. All round him salesmen were crying their wares even out on the pavement, offering suits, knitwear and underwear at a clearly reduced price: shoppers rushed them, surrounded them in tight impermeable groups, the merchandise passing from hand to hand, in and out of boxes and cases as people bargained for them, everything mixed up and confused. The shops too were full to bursting point. Some had pulled down their shutters so as to keep more from entering but there was a scramble even in front of these, people shouting at those inside, clinging to the ironwork, some managing to push the shutters up and forcing their way in, ever more waves of them, pressing through, ever denser, ever more crushed. Here were vast numbers of shoes, carpet slippers and stockings on offer along with many other items. A blind sweet-vendor was repeating his trade cry in a high, falsetto, sing-song.

Things were no different at the bookshop. Hordes were picking over towers of books, some searching the piles on the floor, some at the tables, some taking books off stands and discarding them just anywhere, throwing up great clouds of dust while others clambered up steps to examine the top shelves. It was such a chaotic state of affairs that Budai couldn’t work out which among them was the vendor. Jammed as he was in the crowd he tried in vain to address various customers, even bellowing in their ears but there was so much extraneous noise no one took any notice of him. People were either reading or browsing. It was only after he had spent a considerable time casting his eye about that he spotted a fat, liverish-looking man with a fleshy nose in the depths of the shop. The man wore a soft leather coat and drew attention to himself by being particularly loud and aggressive: he was busily putting books out, wrapping them and tying them up with string while at the same time vigorously bargaining, now taking books from the pile, now adding to it. He might just as easily have been selling potatoes or tomatoes. There was certainly no great opportunity here to explain anything or make a request, not even to point to something for however he tried to get close to the liverish man and make him understand what he wanted there were always others swarming around him, all talking at once. Whatever Budai had to say was lost in the hubbub.

So he too started searching the stands hoping to come across a dictionary or at least a bilingual publication such as a travel guide, anything in a language he might recognise so that he could hold it open and explain to the owner that it was in fact a dictionary he wanted. But however many books he took down they were all in the same runic writing. Most of them were old antiquarian copies in various shapes with various bindings, often ragged and squashed, but there were also some almost new books with uncut pages. He tried to determine the direction of the text in these, left to right or vice versa, as he suspected had been the case with the newspaper. Simply leafing through the books like this offered no clue either way though there were some that seemed to have two title pages, one at the front and one at the back, or perhaps it was the main title page at one end and the half-title at the other.

Here too there were reductions in price, the numbers written on the inside of the back cover being ruled out with ink and smaller figures inserted. But even so the prices looked frighteningly high compared to the cash he had in his pocket. The lowest were priced 3 or 4, the rest at 10, 15 and 25, which was more than he had altogether. He carried on browsing for over an hour flicking through a great variety of books. There were volumes of verse, things that looked like novels, small press publications, popular books in cloth and paper bound editions, technical and scientific material printed on shiny paper about what was likely to be an extraordinary range of fields, not to mention diploma works on chemistry and mathematics complete with diagrams and footnotes, the textual parts of which might have been worth studying in greater detail were he not so abysmally ignorant of their subjects. There were also periodicals of uncertain content, complete runs of them, bound catalogues with serial numbers and endless notes and figures indicating who knows what; folios of drawings and caricatures of people he did not recognise, some with indecipherable signatures and even a few lines of verse; theatre and concert programmes; magazines about this or that wholly unfamiliar actress photographed in various costumes; then children’s books, story books — if that is what they were — and maybe a few school text-books too, and much else… But he did not come across a single book written in another language, not even in part. For want of anything more helpful he would have taken a handbook of grammar but he found not one among the many thousands on thousands of books on sale.

All this was depressing enough and exhausting too with all the pushing, shoving and noise, though everything would immediately have been all right if he could have explained his need for a dictionary. The crush was such that he failed to make any sort of contact with the dealer who was surrounded by an impatient crowd of customers. He tried communicating with him but simply could not get his attention. Having had enough of this farce and judging any further attempt to be pointless he finally chose a book for himself. He had just enough time to catch the dealer’s eye, show him the book and pay him the money.

The book seemed to be a collection of short stories, that at least was what the typography suggested, that and the amount of dialogue in the text. Here, however, unlike in the other books, the writing ran unambiguously from left to right and top to bottom as he could tell by the titles of the stories and the way the beginnings and ends were presented. The book was not particularly thick and the price was relatively low too, a mere 3.50. The cover showed an exotic landscape in green and blue pastel colours: a bay, palm trees, a hillside with a crowd of white villas, roof rising above roof in the background. It might have been the deep blue water and the wide horizon that first attracted him. The flap carried a photograph, presumably of the author, a man of about forty or so in a polo-neck jumper, his face round, his hair cut short, his body relaxed, apparently unposed. He was standing in front of a slatted fence, his eyes narrowing, his expression tired or slightly bored, with a slightly mocking smile playing about his lips as if he were in the act of suppressing a yawn. Everything about the image looked familiar but he couldn’t remember where he had seen it. In any case, his look, his pose, his general appearance was clearly that of a contemporary writer, Budai felt, which might have been another reason he had noticed the book. He wouldn’t, after all, get far with an old work using archaic language or with one written in high poetic manner, nor with anything technical, scientific, jargon-laden, specialist, didactic or abstract. What he needed was something written in contemporary colloquial language, the sort of language spoken on the street, which he would have to learn word by word. The most likely books, in fact the only books properly fit for the purpose, would be short stories or something like them.

Once back home he stopped in the hotel lobby and studied the maps displayed in the gift shops. There were various kinds for sale, almost all different, and he was suddenly confused as to which he should choose. He picked up one at random and opened it out, assuming it would show the city. But he found it hard to orientate himself in it: the streets and squares looked tiny in the densely scrawled plan that entirely filled the sheet and there was no sign of the outskirts of town where estates should thin out, or was this perhaps a map of the inner city only, or of a single postal district? He saw no railway lines, at least none of the thin black lines that normally represented them. Nor was there a river, not at least in the area covered by the map, only a few tiny dots of blue that might have been municipal ponds or the water reservoirs he had seen here and there. In the bottom right-hand corner of the map he found a long narrow light blue band that would clearly have continued on another sheet, the other end of which, however, snaked on until it simply stopped, thereby dashing Budai’s hopes that it might represent flowing water. It must have been at most a minor tributary of some distant river though there was no way of being certain of that. More likely it was a ditch of the kind he walked past near the slaughterhouse.

He would like to have discovered the hotel on it and to work out its relationship to the maps he saw in the underground. But how could he begin to do so when he didn’t even know which way up to hold it? He couldn’t remember which end was the top when he picked it up. He had noted down the name of the metro station nearest the hotel; it was just that he couldn’t find it on the map. He couldn’t even see metro lines, neither the continuous line nor the dotted one normally used to indicate networks that ran underground. There were no single or double circles, empty or full, with or without a single line through them that stood for stations on other maps. Most cities, he recalled, represented metro stops with a capital M. Yes, but what letter was the equivalent of M here? Or could it be that the quarter of town represented had never historically possessed an underground system? Might it be that this wasn’t a local map at all? But then what town was it?

He turned one of the folds over to see what lay there. It contained a dense body of text in various colours and sizes but it was not immediately apparent which of them was the most important, that is to say, the town or district. For even the words in the biggest font might have meant a range of things such as New, or Latest, or Map, or perhaps Cartographic Office. This or that word might be the name of the company, the street, the number of the building, or simply Welcome! or Greetings! or Be Our Guest! or maybe even, Happy New Year, or whatever else could or might be printed on such a document. They could have been advertisements for beer or vermouth or chocolate or perhaps for a restaurant or a hotel… The letters, legends and numbers on the map itself were tiny and covered every millimetre of every street: he’d have needed a magnifying glass to see them clearly. The thought was so daunting he didn’t even want to begin.

He turned to the saleswoman instead and tried, by miming, to get her to point out the name of the city on the map or where the hotel was or, if they did not appear on the map, to direct him to one where they did. But the woman was already looking at him rather crossly, no doubt thinking him picky, intrusive or attention-seeking while others were requiring her attention at the desk. However he tried she was unwilling to engage with him but simply grumbled something and waved him away. Even when Budai rattled his change at her and asked the price of the map she took some persuading to write down the figure 12 on a scrap of paper. Budai paid up and quickly left, mumbling and cursing at the cost.

Having cooled down, he started to wonder whether a map would really be useful. He couldn’t even be certain that the map was of this town, and if it was, of which district. Were the effort and expense worth it? Would they help him achieve his aims? Would they, in any case, be the most direct way of achieving them? Wasn’t there a quicker, more effective, more productive way? Nevertheless he returned to his room to begin a proper, thorough examination, making best use of modern scientific method and his own expertise. He was determined to employ the tools he had to hand, combining them to maximum effect to decode the local language and whatever variants of it existed.

Since arriving Budai had often regretted that he had paid such little attention to the history of writing and even less to cryptography. He had specialised in etymology, the study of the origin of words. However, he now recalled that, as a child, he had read Jules Verne and that Verne gave various accounts of the deciphering of secret messages. In Mathias Sandor it is a grid that helps solve the case, in Journey to the Centre of the World it is the principle underlying a certain rearrangement of a set of letters. More recently, in reading of the two world wars, he had learned that the secret services had developed mathematical and statistical models to produce perfect decoding systems capable of deciphering any given enemy message. Any code, even the most convoluted, was breakable by such methods. The code-breakers were working with languages they knew, of course, languages that had been merely disguised and reordered; that was why they could come up with the keys required to unlock the text. Budai, on the other hand, was faced with a language utterly unknown to him so that even if he succeeded in reading it he would not be able to make sense of it.

It was true that the ingenuity and patience of historical researchers had managed to solve even puzzles of this sort, and not only in the cases already mentioned when they were dealing with a range of languages. There were, for example, two great pieces of scientific bravura this century, the decoding of Hittite script and of the Cretan so-called Linear B, both from the all-but-unknown scripts of hitherto unknown ancient people. Nevertheless the qualifier all-but had offered a starting point, the slightest of nudges enabling scholars to take a first step. The clay tablets of the Hittites contained a good number of ideograms that could be identified with those in the earlier-deciphered Babylonian script. And the solver of Cretan Linear B, the English scholar Ventris, was able to employ these correspondences — clearly verifiable after some examination — by checking them against the long-solved runic of Cyprus. So one thing led to another and, after various speculations and combinations, this first selection of sound-equivalent syllable-characters made possible the working out of the rest. In other cases scholars had good reason to assume the recurrence of certain proper nouns in the various texts, such as the names of ancient Knossos and Amnisos on the Cretan tablets: that was a decisive element in their success.

Budai’s task was made still more difficult by the lack of any single recognisable character or any related script on which he might base a working theory. Not that he could actually conjure up memories of the various, mostly long-disused runes he had never properly studied. He had no hypothesis, nothing tangible, not a word or a name that could serve as a faint guiding light. But shouldn’t there have been one somewhere?

In determining the nature of a text the first consideration must be the number of characters used. Systems where a single word represents a concept tend to have a great many: Chinese, for example, supposedly employs 50,000 of them. Systems using syllables would, naturally, need fewer. The previously mentioned Ancient Cretan uses eighty-nine, Cypriot script forty-four, modern Japanese 140. Systems that rely on individual letters, like modern European ones, require even fewer; English has twenty-six, Russian thirty-two, French twenty-two, and so forth.

So he set about scribbling down as many characters as he could find in the book. These quickly exceeded a hundred without showing any sign of running out. Did that mean the script employed syllables? Individual groups of characters seemed too long for that. Was each character a word? He carried on working but his collection of signs seemed ever more difficult to sort into groups and examine. He started to wonder whether he had written out the same thing several times.

Having got to number 237 he lost hope of ever coming to an end and gave up. Now he tried another way, picking out characters at random and making quick improvised calculations to work out what characters occurred most or least frequently. Assuming that there tended to be fewer vowels than consonants, there should be more of the former. In Hungarian, for example, the commonest letters were e and a, followed by t, s, n, and l, the least common being x, q, and w. It would be different for different languages of course. The only problem was that if it turned out to be syllabic script each character was bound to comprise at least one consonant and one vowel and then all his efforts would be in vain.

Another question occurred to him. Did this language contain articles as Ancient Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, English, German, Italian, Spanish — and a variety of other languages — did? Because, if it did, he could use that as a starting point. Better still, it would be easier to detect such things in written text than in speech where the sound of the article might merge with the sound of the noun. The way the blue-uniformed lift girl pronounced her name on the eighteenth floor might have been a clue: it sounded longer the second time, Etyetye, Pepepe or whatever. Might there have been an article there? That e, pe or tye? And how might it be written? If he could discover that, he would have one or two letters that he might be able to read, even if only as ancillaries.

That was what he looked for now: short, identical or similar words that might be assumed to appear at the head of longer rows of words, at the beginnings of sentences or paragraphs, for example. But however he leafed through the newspaper and the newly acquired book, he found few such characters and even when he did discover some that seemed to resemble each other, they comprised five or six characters at least, which seemed to suggest that they were not articles. There was a group that might perhaps have served as such, a little word that did recur and consisted of two characters only but invariably it turned up at the end of paragraphs and at the end of certain chapters or short stories. He remembered that in Romanian, Bulgarian, Albanian and Mordvine an end-sign took the place of the article — could that be the case here? Or might there be no articles at all, as in Latin, Finnish, Chinese or the Slavonic languages? This little closing word might be the equivalent of a phrase or utterance such as the Latin dixi, or the uff, familiar from Indian novels.

If the words for yes and no exist in a language then it may be assumed that no should turn up relatively often. It is the same for how and but and and although they might be combined with other words, such as the Latin — que. He had once read that in Hungarian the most common agglutinating substantives are people, house, flat, country and so forth. But would that be the same here? And if so, how should he fish these out or sift them from the ocean of text before him? How would he be able to tell which was which?

What if he could hack his way into this jungle of language by studying the syntax? In order to do this he would have to look out for groups of characters that were similar but not identical. If, for example, the first few were similar but the latter part different, then one might assume that these were various inflexions or agglutinations.

He spent a whole day looking into this kind of thing, neatly noting down everything in columns for easier scrutiny. He found mostly those where only the first two or three elements were the same. Of course he couldn’t exclude the possibility that these were individual words, their resemblance merely coincidental, such as batter and battle, or like the English six and sister. But if they were root-words or syllables, exactly as he hoped they were, then what did the various agglutinations mean? Were they substantives, verbal inflections, formative syllables, notations, postpositions? Might they represent differences of gender as in the case of the French directeur and directrice? It might be that what he took to be root was verbal prefix, or the first term of an agglutination comprising several parts. Or indeed much else.

If, however, the last syllable matched — for he did come across some in his enquiries that did — it was possible to image that these were different words with one kind of inflection. In Hungarian, for example, there were szobában (in the room), házban (in the house), városban (in the town), or szobának (for the room), háznak (for the house) and városnak (for the town) and many others that worked in similar ways depending on how many inflections there were available in the language. But there was no way of establishing what suffix corresponded with what inflection or how they were to be sounded. It all lacked foundation. And what if it was not a case of inflection but simply a coincidental rhyme, such as paper and caper in English, and what about damper and hamper, not to mention pamper and the like? It might have been a verb that took a prefix, such as undergoing, thoroughgoing, partygoing and masses of other such, to judge by the thirty-odd languages he could more or less read. But then back to the basic problem: how to establish what was what?

It was no use: the whole thing was sterile, a series of guesses with practically nothing guaranteed. He’d not get far with vague theories, logic, hopeful chance substitutions and games of patience, or if he did get anywhere it would be at a snail’s pace. And even if he was capable of the titanic effort of performing correct calculations based on notions of statistical probability, calculations that required endless supplies of energy, even if he did somehow succeed not only in assembling an alphabet but in solving all the associated phonetic problems without utterly exhausting himself — an achievement that was nowhere in sight for he had not yet identified a single letter — that would still not mean he understood any of the language. Scholars can, for example, read the ancient Etruscan script without difficulty, but not even the finest minds employing the most up-to-date means have yet succeeded in making sense of the language, bar a few dozen words and two or three grammatical features. Furthermore, the very origins of the language, its place in the family of languages, remained mysterious and controversial — and this local epepe might be an idiomatic expression just as isolated and unrelated to other idioms and languages as did the Etruscan to the Basque or some of the African to Caucasian tongues.

On the other hand he was certainly in a far better position than someone having to reconstruct a dead language. Such a scholar would have only remnant texts to work with and would therefore be forced to rely on indirect, circuitous, speculative and fruitless experimental methods. Budai was confronted with a living language, that symphony of a million voices available in street, square, hotel and metro: he simply had to pay close enough attention and distinguish between specific strains and tones and score them later. Thinking this, he put the newspaper and other printed matter aside, for the moment at least, and decided to keep his ears open.

He could after all learn the language from any of the city’s inhabitants, slowly picking out words, absorbing the rules of grammar and so on, if only someone were willing to spend enough time with him. But courtesy and helpfulness seemed to be in short supply in a population that was constantly rushing and jostling: he needed someone to whom he could explain what he wanted, someone who just once paid attention to his attempts at deaf-and-dumb mime. That was what no one had time for. No one seemed capable of such human contact. Although there was one, just possibly, one…

He began by writing down the first ten numbers, hurrying out to the lift, finding Pepé, having her take him up to the top floor, then holding out the sheet of paper while pointing to the 1. It wasn’t clear what the girl replied and he was sure she hadn’t understood him or what he wanted, because she laughed, lit a cigarette and shrugged her shoulder saying something like:

‘Tuulli ulumúlu alaulp tleplé…’

That couldn’t be the name of a number. Budai did not let it rest there. He raised his thumb then showed her a one-unit banknote and waited. Bébé gave a shorter answer this time, a one-syllable answer.

‘Dütt!’

He went on to 2, 3, 4 and so on, noting down each answer phonetically. He had got as far as ten when the lift buzzer sounded. There must have been a lot of people down there. Just to be certain he pointed to the 1 again but this time the girl gave quite a different answer.

‘Shümülükada.’

This confused him. Did this word mean 1 or was it the word she gave before? The buzzer sounded ever more impatiently. The girl stubbed out her cigarette and gestured to show she was sorry but had to go. He tried to persuade her by means of gestures that it was a matter of urgency. Please come back if you can, I will wait here for you, he meant to say. She hesitated a moment. Budai must have looked so desperate it must have communicated itself to her across the chasm between their languages. Edede nodded solemnly and gave a flick of her blonde eyelashes to signal that it was all right, she understood.

It was half an hour before the lift door hummed open again and the girl reappeared. Budai went over the same numbers but was not satisfied with the answers. Only two or three of them sounded as they did before. True, it was hard to pinpoint the names of the numbers in Tete’s speech because she usually answered not with one word but with others that might mean something like good, that’s fine, yes, so there you are, I understand, just a moment, I’ve already said that or any other sentence-filling phrasal gesture of the conversational kind. Maybe there were several words for the same number, just as in certain languages the figure 0 can be indicated by nil, zero, nought or even love?

After this he kept going out to the lift waiting for Gyegyegye to turn up — even after repeated enquiries he had not managed to work out her precise name — so that they might continue their language classes. The girl had to work, of course, conveying a never-ending stream of passengers up or down, and someone no doubt would be keeping eyes on her to make sure she was doing it properly. Because of this they could only spend brief periods of time on the top floor and even then the lift was constantly being called in a way that got on Budai’s nerves. Sometimes he got back on the lift with her, having no alternative but to ride up and down in the eternally emptying and filling compartment as if he too were an arriving or departing guest. She would be fully occupied operating the lift, even having the odd telephone conversation with someone, possibly receiving instructions, so it was only occasionally that she could let him know with a flick of her eyes that she knew he was there and hadn’t forgotten him… The single fan in the lift did little to solve the problem of ventilation. It was one of the reasons he could hardly wait to get back to the eighteenth floor again, desperate to get a breath of fresh air and discover this or that snippet of information from the girl.

Strangely enough, not for a moment did she question the role Budai had allotted her. Indeed she was clearly ready and willing to act as his language tutor as though this were her responsibility, something she was positively aching to do. As soon as they got to the top floor she lit a cigarette, blew out the smoke and stood ready to help, prepared to answer any question he might have, though it would not have been a simple task for her either, trying to make sense of his scribbles and gestures. Surely she must be wondering what this guest was wanting with his impenetrable foreign words and phrases, what it was he was really after. Maybe she felt it was up to her to look after him, that she alone was capable of helping — or was it some other instinct that drove her?

However he tried Budai could not work out the precise terms of her employment or whether she had a fixed routine. There were times he could not find her when his life seemed empty, barren and pointless: it frightened him to think how vague his own place in the world was. He made no effort to experiment with other people, thinking it would only confuse him now and cast into doubt the tiny amount he thought he might have learned. And after all Dédé’s kindness and patience it would have felt a little like infidelity.

He didn’t flatter himself that he could stop the first person in the street and simply ask them to teach him the language: he already knew that was out of the question. There were a lot of drunks out there, especially after dark, not only in the street but in the metro, as well as in the hotel lobby: men and women, reeling about, singing, shouting, arguing, swearing and fighting — not much point asking them. It was chiefly the evenings he feared when his hotel room felt like a prison. If only he had something to read in whatever language as long as he understood it!

He couldn’t really spend all his time trying to solve the obscure wherewithal of texts of which he did not recognise a single letter. He lacked the determination, he lacked the detachment: he feared going mad. In any case, to go out was to risk missing the girl: there were times when she worked both mornings and nights. But he couldn’t just sit around in his room doing nothing: he was constantly restless, anxious to carry on researching and sniffing out the truth, to come and go, fearing that if he simply stood still no one would look for him.

So he spent most of his time in the lobby keeping track of the movements of the lift. The vast hall was always full, even at night, people sitting in armchairs, dozing or teetering sleepily to and fro. The queue at reception was always long with ever more guests carrying ever more luggage. What was strange was that he had only seen luggage enter the hotel: nothing seemed to leave it. Guests must be departing all the time, their luggage must be somewhere. Perhaps if he were to investigate that… Might the luggage be carried out through another door? And where would that door be? Surely it could not be that people arrived here never to leave?

He glanced up and spotted the delegation of exotic hierarchs he had seen that first morning, that motley crew of bearded, brilliantly dark-skinned, caftan-and-chain-wearing elders in high fur caps, who were once more proceeding in silent and dignified manner past respectful crowds that opened before them. Nothing they wore hinted at what part of the world they came from or indeed which religion they represented.

He took a short walk in the street, passing the fat doorman who always greeted him by raising his hand to his cap. He only went as far as the skyscraper-in-construction to see how far they had got. They were still working away at great pace, armies of builders swarming over the structure, welders sparkling, mobile platforms rising and sinking under floodlights. It was odd that the building had only grown by an extra floor since he had last seen it and counted the floors — they had got to seventy — though he had been here longer.

There was just as much bustle at night as at any other time. People were constantly pouring in and out of the metro, great ranks of exhausted workers, their faces puffy with sleep, heading towards industrial estates on the outskirts to their dawn occupations. Others were merely dawdling, drifting along aimlessly, bumping into each other on corners or in squares, getting involved in arguments, discussing sporting events or waiting for the morning papers. There were syrupy alcoholic drinks on sale, the kind that had made him drunk before. He would have welcomed a little alcohol, the tipsy light-headedness it offered, the lack of responsibility it conferred, but he stood by his resolution and was thrifty with his money, what remained of it.

Far in the distance he noticed the same neon lights alternating between red and blue. What might they be advertising? From a basement room nearby there rose something he had thus far missed: the sound of drums and music, waves of general noise. Out of curiosity he looked in. It was a large room, a kind of dance hall packed to the rafters, though owing to the smoke, the racket and the crowds that filled every nook and cranny, he couldn’t make out where the floor was. People were dancing between the tables, at the bar, by the wall and on the steps leading down. Of course it was mainly the young wearing the brightly fashionable or ostentatiously ragged universal uniform of youth. It wasn’t just boys dancing with girls, but girls with girls and boys with boys too. They weren’t really in pairs: it was more everyone with everyone, all higgledy-piggledy yet each alone, each an island unto himself or herself in the general movement. The sexes were hard to distinguish in any case, many of the boys sporting long feminine hairstyles, a lot of the girls in trousers. Apart from that, it seemed the whole world was there, each part of it, every human race represented by someone, all mixed up topsy-turvy, tugging and shrugging, kicking up heels, waving arms to the rhythm of the music.

There was no trace of musicians though: it must have been a record-player or some similar equipment. It was unbearably loud, non-stop, one piece exactly like another, consisting entirely of beat with practically no trace of melody, the whole thing broken, syncopated, aggressive, shameless, rhythmic. But it was the volume above all that hurt Budai, his head almost exploding with it: he couldn’t understand how people could bear the constant pounding.

He was about to leave when there was a kind of disturbance or panic by the far wall. At first he couldn’t tell what precisely it was, it was just that the movement was different, no longer to the rhythm of the music. After a few seconds he realised the cause of it: a fight had broken out, and, as the space cleared, he could see it was between blacks and whites. He had no idea what it was about and could only guess, for no very good reason, that the slim, straw-blonde girl who appeared for a moment between the groups of brawlers, the one with the indifferent, mocking expression on her face, had something to do with it.

By the time Budai noticed it it was practically over, the groups having been separated from each other. Officials appeared as if from nowhere, uniformed men wearing those ubiquitous brown boiler suits. They blew whistles and formed a line that served as a living barrier between the two camps. Despite this, the groups continued threatening each other with unchecked fury, trying to break the line, pulling faces and screaming. Budai was curious as to what they were saying, it might well help him in his quest for understanding. As far as he could make out under the music — for that had gone on uninterrupted — the imprecations and challenges consisted of raising one’s fists and shouting something like:

‘Gyurumba!… Ugyurumbungya!’

This could mean any number of things, like: Filth! Dickhead! Bastard! You just wait! Come on then! I’ll smash your face in! Oh yeh?! All the same, Budai noted them down in his book phonetically along with the range of possible meanings.

At that point one of the white youths, a thickset young man in a pullover, reached across the line of boiler-suited figures and before anyone could stop him smashed a bottle in the face of a lanky black boy. There was a shattering sound — was it the bottle breaking or bones? The man who had been hit swayed about with dark red blood running down his dark face. The security men — or whatever they were — blew their whistles excitedly and tried to press forward to separate the combatants. But now, on the other side of the barrier, one of the other black boys snapped his flick-knife open, ducked under the linked hands of the guards and, lightning-quick, stabbed the man in the pullover. The man who had been stabbed looked around with a foolish, startled expression, wondering what had happened. He pressed his palm to his waist where the blade had penetrated and slowly, very slowly, fell forward and doubled up with the same blank stare of incredulity that this should have happened to him of all people. His body soon grew still in his companions’ arms, the look on his face unchanged.

A siren started outside: it would have been police or the ambulance. The girl’s blonde hair floated briefly through the mêlée, then the police burst in, their feet drumming on the stairs, using rubber truncheons to clear the way. Budai had no desire to resume his acquaintance with them. He sneaked away as best he could. However disturbing the scene had been he had not forgotten that his chief business was with Epépé. He didn’t want to be away too long since she might be back on the lifts by now. He headed back to the hotel.

She was not there so he tried the telephone in his room again. He had a few numbers now that generally answered at night and he could even recognise one or two of the voices. It was a strange, dreamlike experience conversing with someone without being able to understand a word of the language. He rang them time and again. He was nourishing a hope that the voice at the end of the line might eventually give his own number as people often did when they had been misdialled. In actual fact, of course, it was impossible to sort the mumble and jabber from the information he was seeking and yet, despite the pointlessness of the exercise, he enjoyed saying hello, asking questions, listening to the person at the other end, knowing that he too was being listened to and imagining what kind of person it was… Interestingly enough there were some people who didn’t put the phone down for a while, who, despite knowing there was no sense in carrying on the conversation, nevertheless entered the spirit of this absurd game — perverts of some sort possibly. Or maybe they were simply bored with nothing better to do.

One time though, just as he was preparing to call someone, the telephone rang. This surprised him so much he suddenly felt terrified and did not dare lift up the receiver. And once he did pick it up he was at a loss as to what language to use and was able to do no more than mutter a faint hello. It was a female voice, fast, garbled, like someone in a hurry, wanting to get a brief message through, the tone of the last-but-one syllable pitched higher than the rest, suggesting a possible question? Having recovered a little, Budai tried to explain in English, French, Russian and Chinese that he did not understand her. Her response was to repeat what she had said more slowly, accentuating each syllable, but that of course made no difference. He tried various other languages as and when they occurred to him, but the woman did not hear him through and, giving a curt laugh, cut the connection.

Who was it? What did it mean? Had someone discovered his whereabouts? Was someone at home looking for him? Might it have been the airline realising there had been a mistake? Or was it someone answering one of the notices he had put up? Could the management have received the letter he had sent them? But they would know from that that he did not speak their language, for that after all was precisely what his letter had explained. And would they be calling him this way, by telephone? Or could it be a wrong number?

Suddenly he had an idea. It must have been Bébé! Why didn’t he think of that before?! In all those trips up and down she was bound to have noticed his key with the number on it, why shouldn’t she have rung him? And if it was her she would have been wanting to tell him that she had arrived and was back on duty, waiting for him.

And indeed there she was in one of the opening lift doors, smiling and winking at him. He could hardly wait till they could be alone together. Once he was inside the lift with her he tried to mime a telephone call, dialling with his fingers, putting an imaginary receiver to his ear to show that he had received her message and had come in response to it… She smiled at him a few times while operating the lift but with a certain guardedness now. This made him wonder whether he was misinterpreting Veve’s behaviour, thinking it was intimacy when it was no more than her normal kindness.

Once they had arrived on the eighteenth Budai tried to discover her telephone number by handing her his notebook and encouraging her to write it down, air-dialling, imitating the sound of the telephone bell and so forth. But she just shrugged, smoked her cigarette and seemed to understand nothing — or maybe just pretended not to understand, not wanting to give him her number. Might it be that she did not have a telephone? And in any case, where did she live, and with whom? Did she have a husband or was she still unmarried? Did she live with her family or alone? He knew nothing about her but if he was honest with himself such facts did not interest him too much anyway. What he required from her had nothing to do with her circumstances, or if her circumstances came into it at all it was only in so far as they allowed her enough time to be occupied with him. The circumstances might be of even less importance than that since what he assumed was that the minutes they spent on the top floor were stolen by Ete from her work. He couldn’t afford the luxury of having his attention diverted, could not allow the one straw that chance had offered him to slip from his grasp. There was only one thing Budai wanted from the girl for the time being and everything else was secondary. He wanted her to be his language tutor.

They were still on numbers. He thought they might sound different because in her answers she was confusing cardinals with ordinals though these could sound very different indeed, as in one, two and first, second in English or egy, kettö and elsö, második in Hungarian… But after long, exhausting, patient and sometimes nerve-jangling questioning he did succeed in establishing — albeit uncertainly and sometimes downright dubiously — the first ten numbers. So 1 is dütch, 2 is klóz or gróz, 3 is tösh, or possibly bár, 4is dzsedirim, 5i s bár or tösh (the numbers 3 and 5 seemed to be curiously interchangeable, or it might have been that he simply couldn’t distinguish), 6 is kusz, 7 is rodj or dodj, 8 is hododj, 9 is dohododj, 10 is etsrets.

These names did not remind him of any language living or dead. True, there was some slight, if imagined, similarity between dzsedirim (4) with the Russian chitiri for the same number. Kusz (6) did sound somewhat like the Finnish kuus, and etsrets (10) recalled the Arabic asr. But these were mere coincidences. It was surprising to find the 7, 8 and 9 so clearly related to each other, though that too might owe something to misunderstanding or mishearing.

What made his life generally more difficult was that he could never be quite sure what sound he was hearing. At home he had developed a sure-fire ability to make fine phonetic distinctions as part of his work. It was just that in this city the locals employed strange articulations he had not met elsewhere. They seemed to voice words differently somehow, less clearly, not according to the normal rules — in civilised countries anyway — of enunciation. They spoke gutturally, from the throat, but not like the Chinese, Japanese or Arabs: the vowels were more murmured, their tones inconsistent; the consonants croakier, more chewed over, full of rattling, clicking noises. That seemed to point to an African language, that of the Bushmen/Hottentots, but the frequent use of tl suggested Central American Aztec. The preponderance of ö and ü sounds reminded him of Turkish. But this was all no more than impression, far short of certainty. Scholars had calculated that there were close to 3000 languages in the world. How could he relate this one to the others on the basis of such poor evidence?

His next recourse was to identify modes of address, hoping to catch some of them in Tyetye’s speech. He listened intently to everything but however he tried there was only one sound he could pick out: klött or klütt, that was if he had heard it properly, recalling that on his first major excursion, at the market hall, the driver, who had taken him for an unemployed lout and had called him over to stack packages, had addressed him using the same word, as if to say, Oy! You! It was just that here it seemed to be the only form of address, a simple universal instead of the various alternatives on offer elsewhere, such as tu, vous, you, mister, darling, ducky, sir, madam, miss, comrade, mate, buddy and so forth. This was of little or no help. If the same form was directed to men, women, children and old people on every social level, with no hint whether the relationship was superior or inferior, the information, from a linguist’s point of view, was not worth much. There was nothing he could do with it, no conclusion he could draw, little he could learn: it was a blind alley.

It was a similar problem with the form of greeting — parasara or patarechera. This was another term he recalled from earlier, at the hotel entrance, for example, where the fat man in the gold braid would mutter it while holding open the swing door: he said it morning, noon and night, when he left and when he returned. He kept saying it. It was another piece of information, useless from the linguistic point of view, a verbal unit incapable of being split into constituent parts.

Then he looked for common idioms, such as please, excuse me, danke, bitt, etc. It occurred to him that he himself could elicit some of these. If, for example, he bumped into someone in the street, or he invited someone to step on the metro escalator before him, the other person would be likely to reply with the equivalent of sorry, or thank you… He got nowhere at all with personal pronouns though he spent long enough on them trying to isolate the appropriate words and work out how I or you or he or she might sound. He certainly tried hard enough, gesturing and asking the same question time and time again but however he quizzed Dededé the girl seemed not to understand at all. She simply shook her head and blew out smoke with an expression that said there was no point in continuing. Why was she being so negative now when she had been so kind and prepared to help before? It might be, thought Budai, that there were no personal pronouns here. It was theoretically possible that they addressed each other in a kind of nursery fashion, using only the third person singular that stood in for all else. That was the way children talked about themselves: Johnny eating, baby walking, walkies. There were some primitive peoples where such rules operated. But how did a city with skyscrapers square with stone-age inflections?

He hadn’t really given the matter a thought but he soon realised through bitter experience how hard it was to settle on specific meanings and how difficult it was to set up a situation in which only one kind of reaction was possible. He either received answers that were too long and impenetrable or heard something completely different every time he asked the same question, words or mime. Take simple gestures: you wouldn’t imagine the range of meanings they seemed to convey! Western Europeans moved their heads horizontally when wishing to indicate a negative, Greeks threw their heads back. Bulgarians nodded and called you by spreading their arms wide. Eskimos supposedly rubbed noses instead of kissing. There was a lot of this kind of thing — but who could explain the meaning of gestures to him here?

But his mind was tireless and never stopped working on ever newer schemes. The best of them was that he should concentrate on and collect public texts and notices where the meaning was clear and unambiguous or could be rationally worked out. For example, there was the word that appeared on the fronts of taxis to which there could be no obvious alternative. Or the notice that appeared on the yellow barriers of metro entrances. However it might be pronounced it seemed unarguable that the word should mean ‘underground railway’. It was the same with out-of-order public telephone booths, from which he had tried to steal the directory before the policeman appeared. Or the sign on closed shops, the short single word that should mean closed. Besides these he noted down words he guessed might mean restaurant (or inn or grill or diner) or buffet (canteen, café, bistro) as well as working out the letters involved in laundry (or possibly cleaner, dry-cleaning, launderette).

Shops promised to be a productive hunting ground, displays and stalls all showing names of goods along with their prices. In this way he collected words that should signify establishments such as florist, ironmonger, wood and coal merchant (unless the word simply said domestic heating or some such thing), carpets, furniture, crockery, glassware, chandelier, musical instruments, fabrics, off-the-peg (or ready-to-wear), haberdashery, toys, sports equipment and so on. These too involved a margin of error of course. A shop sign would after all probably also contain the name of the owner and an address, or some generic trade name, such as Weave (a carpet or a fabric shop), Kristal (glass wear, crockery, light fittings), Houseproud (items to do with home cleaning and maintenance) or Textile (clothes, materials, etc) as elsewhere.

It was the grocery shop displays that were most useful. If an item was accompanied by a label and that label showed something other than the price, it followed that the other thing must be the name of the product. He was particularly interested in goods such as oranges, lemons, bananas, sugar, coffee, tea, cocoa and chocolate whose names tended to be the same, or pretty similar, wherever one went, that is to say, international words with a local variation. Later he had to admit that even this method was not foolproof, since the labels might say things like cheap, fresh, sale, offer, top quality, delicious, buy now, special, must go or any other choice phrase by which shopkeepers recommended their wares to customers. He put a question mark next to them in his notebook.

Doing his rounds he noted down the following more-or-less identifiable words on signs: cloakroom, till, drinking water (or possibly not drinking water), no entry, bus stop, take care, freshly painted, do not walk on the grass, road works, pedestrians other side (that would have been a pretty good guess if it was right), high-tension, or danger do not touch, that kind of thing.

Once he had collected enough of these he planned to ask Ebébé to read each of them out loud to him. But the first time he tried the girl happened to be in a bad mood, thoroughly tetchy, not even wanting to go up to the eighteenth floor with him. Something must have offended her: she ignored him in the lift, turned her head away and kept pressing the buttons in an apathetic manner. Budai would not be deterred though and patiently stayed in the lift as it went up and down, waiting for her to take her brief smoking break upstairs. But she had hardly taken a puff or two of the cigarette and he had only said a couple of words when tears sprang to her eyes, eyes that were anyway red, and she took out a handkerchief and wept.

Budai looked at her in confusion. How to console her when he had no idea what troubled her or hurt her? He had no time to occupy himself with such matters, he couldn’t allow himself the liberty, he felt. He had no time, he had to be cold and matter-of-fact, selfish indeed, ruthless, for this was his only chance. He could only devote as much attention to the girl as would maintain their relationship, the rest was a waste of energy. And if she was labouring under some misapprehension about their relationship, well, it was up to him, he simply had to exploit it.

And so he stubbornly stood guard and would not let his victim go, eventually triumphing by sheer will: she put aside her mysterious frustrations and, ready to help again, started reading the list he placed in front of her, one item after another in a loud clear voice… For the first time perhaps since arriving in the city Budai felt he had achieved something by the power of logic. There were various signs of this, such as Tete’s facial expression and her gestures. He began to work out the meanings of individual words and groups of words. He was on the right track. In tiny ways he began to feel that the situation was not entirely hopeless. He redoubled his efforts, grasping every opportunity, almost enjoying the way the girl rolled off the list, repeating each word after her so that his ears and lips might retain the sound.

The trouble with the internationally-used words, he was disappointed to note, was that none of them was in, or even resembled, the forms he expected. Everything from taxi, bus, metro, hotel, buffet, orange, banana through to cocoa had a different name. What this suggested was that the people here — meaning particularly the linguists, the scholars and the press — must have been pretty fierce in their defence of the purity of the language against foreign influence. Or could it be that they were so isolated from the other peoples of the earth that there could be no question of influence at all?

He now had a store of some thirty to forty words and phrases, each with its pronunciation clearly noted along with its meaning and some possible options in cases of doubt. Even he was surprised how nicely all this rounded up. He whistled cheerfully as he rearranged his bits of paper, every so often with a glass of that sweet alcoholic drink. He decided not to seek out further material for now, preferring to make a thorough study of what he already had.

All the same, next morning he tried to persuade the girl to break his words down into signs and sounds, or at least to divide the most common phrases into individual words but this, to his surprise, proved a failure: they stumbled, started again and stumbled once more. The individual letters sounded different each time, now longer, now shorter, sometimes lacking any resemblance. Despite repeated questioning he got no better, no more coherent answers, quite the converse, in fact, for the longer he went on the more confusing it became. Maybe each sign was capable of being pronounced in a variety of ways depending on context, on the surrounding letters, syllables or words. Didn’t this happen in English and French? Or, to reverse the argument, might it be possible that a single sound was represented by a variety of signs?

Of course all these analogies only worked if their characters actually represented letters, not syllables — which thought led him to consider the further problematic possibility that they represented entire words, as in Chinese, where characters stood for concepts. He didn’t think that was very likely since Chinese characters tended to look more like pictures and involved more calligraphic marks than this script did and, more importantly, tended to express their contents more concisely. But in so far as they represented syllables they demanded a different approach since syllables tended to consist of a consonant and a vowel and if he happened to discover, say, the syllable, pe, he still wouldn’t be able to work out which was p and which was e. That was because in such a system there would be one character for pe and another for, say, pi, pa, po, as much as for me, re, j, etc., in other words, the two sounds he was looking for would be hidden inside other syllabic characters. And should there be three-, four- or five-letter syllables what would be the connecting thread that might help identify them?

But if he made little progress with assigning sound or meaning to letters he did at least recognise the characters and the rough appearance of a range of phrases. It was a shame that these were, by and large, of peripheral importance, of no great value in everyday conversation and conduct. More to the point there were still too few to help him achieve the object of getting home. It was therefore necessary to continue collecting from an ever wider area.

He went on to street names. Strange he hadn’t thought of this earlier. It looked like a well-planned city with street names clearly displayed on every corner, the format uniform on brick-shaped yellow boards with uniform black letters. Budai looked for common elements between them, words or clusters that would mean road, street, avenue, boulevard, alley, passage, ring, terrace and so forth. But however he looked he found no common terms. Could it be that they did not bother to provide such terms because they thought them redundant? Or maybe they employed the kind of name that did not need a qualifier, such as the Strand and Piccadilly in London, Broadway and the Bowery in New York, Rond-Point in Paris, the Graben in Vienna, and the Körönd or the old Oktogon in Budapest. These were exceptions in their cities but could this kind of name be the norm here?

He fared somewhat better with the advertisements, those on the steps of the metro, along its corridors, in the underground halls and on posters everywhere in the street, some of them enormous, filling entire walls. There were many he was sick to death of seeing: the blond pink-skinned man and the fat black cook who winked and bared her brilliant white teeth while lifting a serving spoon high in the air, the knight-in-armour with an umbrella raised above his head, the big family group sitting in a circle soaking their feet in a large common bowl and all the rest, though he didn’t see any advertisements for goods and services generally available in Europe. The problem with the wall-mounted posters was that it was very difficult to tell the brand-name from the actual product. For example if he read Ship Soda he wouldn’t know which was Ship and which was Soda. Nevertheless, he did manage to identify a few new terms such as washing-powder, tyres, laxative, cigarette-holder, lawnmower, stock-cube. Not that these were of any practical use to him.

There were a great many visual signs or icons intended to take the place of written instructions — pointing fingers, various diagrammatic figures, a number of silhouettes. The washrooms in the hotel displayed a bath or shower icon, the toilets a male or female head or alternatively men’s or women’s shoes. Telephone booths carried no text, only a simplified drawing of a telephone. If smoking was forbidden a smoking pipe was displayed with a red line through it, the red line being a feature of all notices forbidding something. Traffic signs too, he discovered, were of much the same kind as anywhere else and the directional signs in the metro were similarly reduced to their essence through colours and arrows. All these signs were of help in coping with everyday circumstances but it did not mean Budai was able to read the language. They simply enabled him to orientate himself and to conduct a fairly limited range of activities. At the same time, standing in as they did for written notices, such signs were merely a barrier to fuller understanding.

And then it occurred to him that when he was seeking the edges of town there had been an illuminated doorway glimmering through the fog but that he had hurried on and hadn’t taken a closer look at it. Might it have been a cinema? And even before that, on that first Sunday when he was walking through the downtown area that he had happened to wander into, were there variety theatres or cinemas among them?… He couldn’t recall. He hadn’t cared then but now it bothered him. He wondered whether to go back, whether it would be worth the effort and expense. His stock of cash was so low he resented spending it even on the metro. He didn’t dare think what would happen if it ran out. Should he try locating the building? He had had so many disappointments since arriving here was it worth risking another? It might be better to wipe the thing from his memory, to let it go hang and pretend he hadn’t noticed anything.

But he couldn’t dismiss the thought of it. It continued to worry at him: what if he should miss one vital clue? He had become convinced that if he didn’t do everything he possibly could, if he did not pursue every trail that seemed to hold out the faintest hope of success, if he once relaxed or tired, his instinct would be simply to give up and accept the situation. It would mean that he had lost the battle and was trapped here forever. In the end perhaps it wasn’t so much the cinema and the potential experience it offered that drove him as the desire not to have to reproach himself with anything.

He dedicated a whole day to it, from early morning to late night. First he took the metro to the same terminus as he had last time, then walked on from there exactly as before in exactly the same direction. He passed the long stone wall and the gasometers. There was the factory with the saw-tooth roof, there were the water reservoirs — he never thought he’d take this road again! The white circus tent appeared: it was here he should find the entrance he had taken to be a cinema. Fortunately it was not too far from the station. There was no fog this time which meant no illumination either but he hadn’t forgotten where it was and soon enough he found it on the other side of a busy overcrowded square.

It was, however, not a cinema but a department store, a pretty big department store when it came to it, some eighteen to twenty storeys high with people streaming in and out of its various doors. The range of available goods didn’t seem — not on the ground floor at least — to be any greater than elsewhere: fancy, slightly out-of-fashion clothes, household objects, mass-produced items, modest stuff generally of inferior, market-stall quality, or crudely functional articles sold by the dozen. But he didn’t want to buy anything in any case — what was there to buy? — so he didn’t go in but turned and hurried towards home. There was still the downtown area to explore and with some effort he remembered which metro station he should aim for. Once he had been somewhere he was generally pretty good at finding his way back.

It was a weekday but the streets were almost as crowded as they had been before. As the sky darkened so neon lights began to sparkle and mechanical music to rise from bars and cafés. Drunks were teetering across the pavement, bellowing, blowing paper trumpets. He discovered the narrow side street where he had previously entered one of the houses: the woman with the white tulle, dark lashes and the pearl-bright face was smiling in the window again with a modest Madonna-like gaze. Budai thought a little nostalgically of the days when he had money for such things, to enter such a house, to take a boat out, to have a few drinks and enjoy a pancake.

There was no sign of a cinema but he was glad to pass this way again. He had been so lonely — the longer he spent in the city and the more populated he recognised it to be the more neglected he felt — that the simple fact of returning somewhere he had been before established a kind of relationship, a tenuous foothold in a sea of unknowns. The ferris wheel, the swing-boat, the target-shooting, the Fat Lady. He still couldn’t work out whether there really were no cinemas or if he had somehow missed them. But he did not feel this was so important now, or maybe he just knew a little less than he thought he did.

It was his own fluctuating state of mind that preoccupied him for the time being. Briefly he found himself enjoying the heaving crowd of which he was a part, finding it bearable, quite pleasant in fact. Above all it was a sense of irresponsibility, the one not-entirely-to-be-dismissed pleasure that lightened his mood. It was good not to have anyone else be dependent on him, no one to question what he was doing why. He might eventually get used to the manner of life here, to the eternal waiting, to the queues, to the rough crowd; he might stop noticing it altogether: it might become as natural to him as to everyone else. All this of course was just a passing mood, or possibly the result of a creeping emotional anaesthesia, a brief break from its direct opposite. And somewhere at the core of the tiny spark of happiness there was Epepep too, that tingle of certainty that today or tomorrow he would see her again.

The next moment he was besieged by doubt and bitterness once more. No, no, no — he could never get used to it, however long he remained here, not to the food, the drinks or even the taste of the air, that sooty-sweet, granular concoction that was so heavy and cloying it seemed there was less oxygen in it; nor to the eternal jostling, shoving, elbowing and kicking: the saturation, the whole impatient, mad rhythm of life. Budai preferred sunny, wide-open spaces like Italian piazzas with their fresh breezes. What was he to do in this constantly crowded, apparently endless brick and concrete mass that looked like one enormous suburb? And he missed his wife, his family, his work, his home and the ordered circumstances of his life more each day. Furthermore, he had to fight to dismiss the constant agony of imagining what they might make of his disappearance, his vanishing without trace.

The wildest ideas occurred to him as his mind chugged along on empty, throwing out endless questions with not a single answer. Was it possible, for instance, that his arrival in the city was not the result of a misunderstanding? That it wasn’t that he had blundered onto the wrong flight but that someone had deliberately misdirected him, in other words abducted him? They could have slipped a sleeping draught into his food so he shouldn’t be able to tell how long they had been in the air. Might they be deliberately keeping him here, preventing his return home? But who might they be and why? What possible purpose could it have? And why him? Was he somehow in somebody’s way? What had he done wrong? Whom had he harmed?

That actually would have been his preferred option. Anger, malice, hatred… they cut both ways. Passion can be resisted with passion: one could work oneself up into the appropriate state, search out the enemy, take him on, do battle with him and, in this way, defeat him. If, on the other hand, it was only blank stares and mere indifference that were detaining him — which looked more likely — there was only negative energy to draw on, an immobility that would prevent him attracting anyone’s attention or interest. And how, in that case, was he to extricate himself from this tepid slough of feeling when there was nothing to cling to, no firm ground on which to set his feet?

It was vital not to go mad! He must not to allow himself to be overcome by confusion, by pandemonium, by isolation. Time and again it swept through him, the fear that he would give up the hopeless struggle and sink into the surrounding chaos, or alternatively become indifferent and surrender to melancholy and torpor. He had no weapon but his consciousness: it was the one beam of light he could aim at the waking nightmare.

He considered the cumulative effect of his various meditations and enquiries, weighing up how far he had got with the tools available to him. He recognised a few phrases he had picked up from everyday speech and knew roughly what they meant; he knew the numbers one to ten and how to greet and address someone. Beyond this he knew the approximate meaning of certain groups of written characters and could more or less pronounce them if Deded’s pronunciation was anything to go by. These were chiefly the names of articles for purchase and two or three longer terms. On the other hand, he could only read complete words and had failed every time to break them down into their constituent elements. So far he had had no success at all in assigning any specific sound to any character, nor, conversely, point to characters appropriate to this or that sound or group of sounds: worse still, he had not the least idea what form of writing they employed.

His achievements thus far were sickeningly insignificant. He hadn’t enough information to deduce a system: he could not even put a sentence together. And when he tried using the words he knew, or the words he supposed he knew, to enquire, for example, where he might find a café or a metro station he was surprised to find that he was either misunderstood or not understood at all. Could he be mispronouncing the words? That would not be unlikely, having heard the curious, alien-sounding articulations of the locals. Later though, in one of the underground tunnels of the metro, some kind of altercation broke out, and Budai noticed that everyone else was merely shouting and rambling, with no-one paying any attention to anyone else. Could it be that they themselves could not understand each other, that the people who lived here employed various provincial dialects, possibly even quite different languages? In a particularly feverish moment it even occurred to him that each one of them might be speaking his own language, that there were as many languages as there were people.

Next Friday on top of all this he found a new bill in box 921. The desk-clerk — another new face, how many were there? — calculated the total as 33.10, only a little less than last time. Budai accepted the bill with a silent nod but did not take it to the cashier to pay this time. There was nothing left to pay with. He couldn’t scrape that much together despite having spent less this time round.

What would happen now? When would they act and what would they do? Maybe some good might come of it, if they invited him into the manager’s office, for example, to seek an explanation. At least they’d be speaking to him and he could say something, ask for an interpreter… But maybe nothing would happen, no one would say anything. How long could they put up with him staying here without paying? They were bound to find out. One way or the other the fact was he would soon run out of money. He counted up what he had left again: his entire wealth came to 9.75. That was what remained out of the two-hundred-plus he received when he presented his cheque.

He made some wild, panic-stricken calculations: if, in the first week, putting aside the rent for the room, he had spent some 130, and in the second, even after reducing his expenses to a bare minimum, his outlay was 26, the amount remaining would hardly be enough to see him through the next few days. What would happen to him if his luck did not turn? He had to get some money. But how?

To make matters still worse he now had a toothache. It was one of the back teeth on the top row that was causing the trouble. At first it was only a dull murmuring sort of pain that came and went and might have been merely his imagination, something he could ignore. But then it erupted, became acute, ever more furious, ever more intolerable. His jaw was inflamed, his face swelled up. He couldn’t delude himself that it would simply go away if he waited: the pain was well-nigh unbearable now and he had no drugs, no analgesic. The small box of miscellaneous pills his wife had packed for him was in his lost luggage.

It was pointless trying to explain this or to show anyone at the hotel what was wrong with him for no one would pay any attention or, if they did, they would just jabber on as they usually did. He was so desperate with the pain he ran out into the street just as an empty taxi was drawing up at the traffic lights. Budai yanked its door open without a word and leapt in. The driver, having turned round, Budai held the side of his face and mimed the pulling of a tooth to indicate where he wanted to go. The driver appeared to understand. He did not argue but put his foot down. He was a young, impassive man in a peaked cap and looked faintly Chinese.

Hardly had they started and turned down the first side-street when the traffic came to a standstill. There was no way ahead or back: every available space was filled with vehicles nosing forward or stuck. They spent long minutes in the same spot, then the lines of cars moved slowly forward until coming to a stop again within a few yards. Their progress was unbearably, infuriatingly slow: far in front of them there must have been a crossroads or traffic-light holding things up, allowing just a few people through at a time. The meter on the taxi kept ticking even when they were not moving but there was not the faintest hope of early escape from this endless traffic jam. Budai could bear it no longer and tried talking to the driver. The man did not want to turn round so he tapped him on the shoulder, pointing once again to his swollen face. But the driver was not to be disturbed. He retained his traditional oriental imperturbability, paying him no attention at all, showing no sign of understanding either him or the need for a dentist.

The next time he glanced at the meter he was horrified to see that it had just leapt past the figure of 8 and would soon be at 8.40, then 8.80 and so on though the car had made hardly any progress. The engine was merely ticking over. Within a few minutes the meter had crept up to 10 which was more money than he had in his pocket, and who knows how many extras there would be to add. His anxiety and fury were so intense now and his toothache so agonising that he had begun to regard the cab as his prison, a cell jammed between legions of cars, and regretted ever having got in. Things had come to such a pass that he would have beaten his way out with his fists if he could. He would happily have instructed the driver to smash at full speed into the truck in front of them: let there be wrecks and explosions, let there be anything, but let things change.

The more sober part of his judgement was in favour of escape. What would happen if he could not pay the fare? Would there be an outcry? Would the police be called? In his current condition both these options seemed perfectly dreadful, but what else was there?… What else? The next moment, just as the driver put the car in gear again and they were rolling gradually forwards, Budai pushed the door open and leapt out. He stumbled over the kerb but was otherwise unhurt. He turned back for a split second to see the driver’s Chinese eyes but the next time he looked the taxi had disappeared in the traffic. He too was looking to vanish into the crowd.

He hadn’t been in this area before though they can’t have got far from the hotel. The first man he stopped to show he had a toothache immediately grasped the problem and pointed to a nearby multi-storey yellow building. It looked to be a hospital, a clinic or some other medical institution, stately with wings and extensions and a crowd of people streaming both ways through its arched portal. There was an ambulance-like vehicle, a closed white car with siren blaring, turning out of the gateway… Might it be that his Chinese-looking driver had brought him to the right place after all? And now the poor chap — the only man willing to help him — had to pay the fare out of his own pocket…

Everyone here understood his gestures and he was quickly directed to the dentistry department. As he expected, there were vast numbers waiting in the surgery corridors, not just standing and sitting on benches, but squatting on the stone floor, some even lying down on it, many with bandages or sticking plaster on their faces and cotton wool dangling from their mouths. It was slow progress, mind-numbingly slow, people probably being called in the order in which they had arrived. Nevertheless, the order of their going was constantly subject to dispute with squabbles breaking out here and there. There were at least thirty people before Budai at the door he had decided to wait at. But he had no choice and was lucky he had found his way here at all.

It was a long long wait. He was perspiring with pain and time had lost all meaning when at last it came to his turn. Suddenly everything speeded up. As soon as he stepped into the surgery he was surrounded by men and women in white coats and he no sooner pointed to the bad tooth before he was pressed into a chair. One man held his head back, another sprinkled some cold sweet-flavoured liquid onto his gums and a fourth man, a large bulky figure wearing white gym shoes like a wrestler, was already applying a pair of glittering pliers to his mouth. There followed one skull-shattering arrow of pain, one loud crack and the man held up the bloody tooth before dumping it into a dish beside the chair. Someone handed Budai half a glass of water with which he rinsed his mouth then spat out what was left.

They went on to ask him something that might have been his name and he gave it to them together with his home address, though whether they understood this when he wrote it down he could not tell. He had no idea what they were going to do with the information. Nor did he have to pay, or at least no one indicated that he should. The next patient was already there behind him and as soon as he rose from the chair the other occupied it, the new man’s place being immediately taken up by someone else. On the way out he decided to take a different route but was so relieved to be rid of his pain that he got lost. He wandered along criss-crossing corridors, down stairs, meeting dense crowds everywhere, the air thick with hospital smells. There were ever new corridors, twisting and turning erratically, now cutting across an open courtyard under glass. The building seemed to be comprised of various parts of different periods, one added after another. Eventually he arrived in a spacious circular hall.

It must have been the maternity department. There were hundreds and hundreds of little cots in rows with babies wrapped in white swaddling bands. The newly born, like the rest of the city’s inhabitants, represented the whole gamut of races with every type of physiognomy, from the palest white to the darkest black. They filled not only this hall but the next and the one after that too, baby after baby, white, black, brown, yellow, all the way down the corridor as well, in cots that did not fit into the main halls. There were a few multiple cots, two or three in some wards, designed for twins perhaps or simply babies for whom there was no room elsewhere. And there were more extensions just as packed with infants, and still more after those as if there could be no end of them, and all the while nurses in white gowns were pushing trolleys with yet more babies, those who presumably had just been delivered in surgery, in groups of ten or twenty, all red and furiously bawling after their entry into the world… Budai liked children and was generally touched by them but he had never seen so many all together and the sight confused and terrified him. He looked to escape, seeking an exit from the clinic. He was losing patience, wanting to see no more babies, worrying what would happen when the present batch grew up and joined the already teeming hordes in the streets.

Arriving back at the hotel, he found Bebébe in the lift. She immediately noticed his swollen face and looked at him as if to say he should not get out but continue up to the eighteenth floor. Once up there Budai tried to convey to her that he had had a tooth pulled and even opened his mouth to show her where. In examining it Vevede had to come so close that her blonde hair tickled his chin and he could feel the girl’s skin and breath; later he tried to recall whether it mattered who started stroking whose face first, who kissed who, and whether it was she who first offered up her face and lips. Budai’s mouth was still swollen and numb with the anaesthetic or perhaps it was his cut gum that was in the way. In any case he felt awkward and lumpen, hardly capable of sensation, and he might have been a little dizzy too since all this passed in a kind of fog. Meanwhile the lift buzzer started ringing so they had to go down and once it started to crowd up everything that had passed upstairs seemed distant and unreal.

But this did nothing to solve his financial problem. He had to find work, anything, to earn some money. But how and where would he find work? Who could direct him to an employer? After all, he had failed to elicit much simpler information from local people. Ironically, the longer he stayed here the less he found himself able to ask people things. There was nothing he could do about that, however often he had vowed to change: reticence and withdrawal were necessary forms of self-preservation in the face of so many failures and disappointments. He was becoming ever more confused and detached in his dealings with others, ever less willing to accost people in the street or anywhere else and when he did try to make contact he became almost speechless. It was as if he was frozen. Maybe that is how it had to be. Maybe that was the only way his personality, his constitution could deal with the situation.

Then he remembered that first Sunday when he passed the market and somebody shouted at him as if inviting him to work. It was the driver of the truck who wanted help unloading vegetables, so he found the cheapest items among his clothes, the more worn of his two pairs of shoes, those that had been practically walked to pieces on his various excursions, and the pullover that he had carried in his briefcase. He put them on and set out.

It took him some time to find the open market. He got out at the same underground station as before but had twice crossed the enormous square before realising that, this being a weekday, there were no stalls or booths, no folding tables set out with goods, that the square had in fact been swept clean and that in the centre stood a statue of a wounded soldier wielding a rifle. Might it have been a war memorial? The outdoor market, it seemed, was only here on Sundays or other public holidays. On the other hand, the covered market-hall at the far end with its glazed and barred stalls was busier than ever. A great army of customers poured in through the front while the big ramp at the side was busy with cranes, conveyor belts and people loading and unloading goods. There were casual labourers everywhere swarming around trucks that were parked nose to tail, ragged figures carrying bales, ice and boxes into the building.

It was easy mingling with them. They seemed to be working in improvised gangs on this or that load. All you had to do was to watch where the next laden truck arrived, get over there, offer your back and someone would immediately give you a sack to carry. His sack seemed likely to contain potatoes or onions, nothing particularly heavy. He followed the others inside with it and threw it onto a great pile of sacks like the rest, then returned for another sack. No-one asked him for any ID or other paperwork and, having addressed one or two questions to him that he couldn’t answer, they assumed he couldn’t speak the language and took hardly any more notice of him. There was not much for them to say in any case: his task was obvious and needed no explaining. Nor did the other temporary porters bother with him, being busy with their own affairs. Quite possibly they were strangers to each other too.

Budai was not scared of physical work. When he was a student on a grant he would occasionally take such jobs when short of money, doing all-night stints at Les Halles in Paris or at Covent Garden in London. His constitution was still strong and healthy and he found himself enjoying the effort and exercise. The only thing he didn’t like was the sacks making his hands and pullover dirty. It took roughly an hour and a half to finish unloading the consignment at which point the driver paid them by pressing a single piece of lowest denomination paper money into their palms. Later he was set to carrying sides of pork, frozen goods, icy and damp to the touch, his back cold, his palms greasy and sweaty. Then it was passing the load from a truck, handing down cages of fat angora rabbits, the kind he had seen in the hotel room whose door he had opened. He earned altogether eight notes in the day plus a little change. He felt a pleasant tiredness and a certain pride too that here he was, making a living with his two bare hands. But at the same time he could hardly wait to get back to the hotel bathroom and a nice hot shower.

From then on each time he went to the market, whatever time of day, he almost always found some work of this kind. No-one ever asked him who he was. When he worked in the evening or at night he noticed that those who had packed up did not go far but entered the liquor store next door. Others simply lay down where they were among the bales, sleeping on empty sacks or in one of the larger crates in some quiet corner. They must have been tramps and homeless people, their clothes filthy and neglected, their whole appearance uncared for. This was the company he was now reduced to.

One time, heading home on the metro, he was just descending the long escalators with the host of those arriving streaming past him on the way up when he suddenly spotted a man holding a Hungarian magazine. It was no mistake! There he was holding a copy of Szinházi Élet, an old theatre and stage weekly, its title clearly legible. Even the actress on the front looked faintly familiar: she was in a striped swimsuit standing on the steps of the Hullámfürdő, the pool with the artificial wave machine; the actress blonde, slender, raising her free left hand high into the air. This was such an unexpected shock that he had no sooner registered it than the man holding it, an elderly, grey, bespectacled figure in a worn green overcoat, had already passed him and was now behind him. He didn’t know what to do, had no idea what to say, but shouted out as loud as he could in Hungarian:

‘Kérem szépen… izé, maga, ott!’ (Excuse me!… I beg your pardon, er, you there!)

But the escalator was so loud, so squeaky and grinding, the whole place so full of commuters, the hall so echoey that the man in the overcoat couldn’t have heard him. Terrified that he would lose him, Budai screamed out once more:

‘Halló, ide nézzen.’ (Hello! Look this way!)

The man addressed turned round, his expression astonished, as if hearing a voice from another world. He reached uncertainly towards him in the distance perhaps only to convince himself that it was no illusion:

‘Hát uraságod is…?’ (And you, dear sir, are you also…?)

The rest was lost in the surrounding noise and faded in the increasing distance between them. Budai tried to turn round and follow him but the escalators were moving rather fast and were packed with people, a number of them actually rushing downwards, hurrying for trains: there was no chance — not the space or the time — of him reaching the man in the overcoat. Desperately he cried to the ever-retreating patch of green in the crowd.

‘Várjon meg a…’ (Wait for me at…)

But where the best place to wait in the metro actually was he could not think. He should at least have asked for the man’s address before they swept past each other, or he could have given his. True, he didn’t know the name of his hotel, nor even the street where it happened to be. In the meantime the stranger had completely disappeared in the metro traffic.

Budai was not content to let it rest there and tried to think what he would do in the other man’s place, where he would wait for someone who had called out to him like that. The nearest spot was the top of the escalators, the point where they stepped off. It was just that it was no easy task getting there from where he was, on the wrong side, because once at the bottom a metal barrier prevented him from getting over to the parallel stairs leading up and he was forced by railings down winding corridors, past intersections and down even more winding corridors before he could reverse his steps. But having found his way by devious twists and turns to the bottom of the escalators, he was no longer sure whether these were the same. At the top, once he got there, another set of escalators led further up and then another so it was difficult to decide which was the very top. He scanned the heaving throng for the man in the green overcoat but he could not find him. He couldn’t stop anywhere, of course, for the moment he slowed the crowd swept him on again.

But what if the other man was seeking him in exactly the same way, using the same logic, at the bottom of the stairs? He struggled back down again to the underground line he had taken before, where he had first spotted the man. That was the very spot where he should have leapt across or crawled across the two steep thick rubber handrails that divided them, only he hadn’t thought of it at the time. And now he didn’t find him there though he explored various draughty loud platforms. Might it be that his quarry had taken the opposite course and was waiting at the metro exit out in the street. But which exit? There were at least eight or even ten here. He continued weaving, moving between a whole series of points in the underground labyrinth but all to no avail: the single figure he was seeking among the hordes in one or other tunnel was nowhere to be found.

He was so excited he didn’t think to consider whether the meeting was a good or bad sign, but even though he hadn’t succeeded in talking to the man or establishing some kind of contact, in view of his utter isolation it was encouraging to know that he was not alone in a world of strangers. They might bump into each other again or he might meet another compatriot or at least a foreigner like himself. Next time he’d be lucky and would finally discover everything he had failed to discover so far.

On the other hand, once he got to analysing this strange brief encounter he found that there were certain disquieting aspects of the situation. The very fact that the stranger was holding a copy of Szinházi Élet for instance. The magazine had ceased publication over thirty years ago as he recalled. The old man couldn’t have been living here that long, could he? And if so, had he settled here? Or had he found himself abandoned in the city much as he himself had been? How did he get here? By what means? What form of transport? And if he had brought the magazine along as reading matter, why that very number? And had he held on to it since then? That might have accounted for the look of amazement and incredulity on his face when he turned round on hearing Budai shout after him. It would have been like hearing an echo of his own voice. And the fact that he addressed Budai as uraságod, an old, unfashionable tag, hardly ever used nowadays! And what did he mean by the wonder implied by the question Hát uraságod is…? Did he mean that the pair of them comprised a single category? Was it simply an allusion to the fact that they were both Hungarian, or, the worst thought of all, was it a sign that, like him, the old man had been vainly trying to leave the place, only in his case for over thirty years?

He spent days tortured by the thought of a missed opportunity, blaming himself, going over the events, wondering what else he might have done. And like a criminal returning to the scene of the crime, he kept going back to the metro station, hanging about for hours in case the man in the green overcoat came by again, that is if it was his customary route. This time, just this one time, let him catch his eye. And though he did not meet him again it bred a suspicion that somewhere in the eternal crowd filling the streets and the metro there might be someone else who might understand him, maybe more than one — but how would they know each other?

Working at the halls and undertaking his regular watch on the specific metro station soon gave his day some structure. Usually he ate at the self-service buffet before then walking home. On the way back he would walk past the skyscraper in construction, to which eight storeys had been added since his arrival, the builders having got to the seventy-second. How high was it planned to be? Once in the hotel he looked for Pepepé and if she was on duty they would get together; if not he’d just go to his room depressed since it was there he felt most desolate and the time passed most slowly.

The room was always punctiliously cleaned, the bed nicely made up, the towels and tablecloth regularly changed. He had no idea who carried out these duties or when because he never saw anyone. When he stayed in — even for days at a time — they did not call. One morning, out of sheer curiosity, he pretended he was leaving but took care to hide round the corner and watch the comings and goings but he saw nothing all morning. Another time when he only popped out for some fifteen minutes he returned to find his room had been tidied.

What he chiefly missed was reading, the sight of familiar words. At home he spent half his life or more in libraries among books, occasionally as much as eighteen hours in a day and he was not prepared to break the habit and give up. Out of sheer desperation he took out the volume of short stories he had bought at the second-hand book market. He leafed through it again without understanding a word, contemplating the title page with its picture of the harbour and that deep blue sea, its palms and the little white houses twinkling on the hillside. Then he gazed at the photograph of the author on the flap, that full-faced figure in his pullover with his crew-cut hair and his faintly mocking expression and he still looked familiar. He wondered where he might have seen him, who he reminded him of, why he was drawn to him. Was it the ironic look? That lazy watchfulness in his eye? One evening he returned tired from his work at the market and caught sight of himself in the bathroom mirror just as he was suppressing a yawn and it suddenly became obvious: the man in the photographs reminded him of himself. Maybe that is why he found him sympathetic, why he had picked his book out among so many others. Was it that he found his own face attractive?

And time and again the same most terrible of questions returned to torture him. What about his family at home? Time would not have stood still for them either. Were they well and in good health? Were they alive at all? And if so what did they make of the extraordinary fact that they had heard nothing from him or about him for close on three weeks? It was pointless trying not to think of it, his entire nervous system was full of such thoughts. If only he could send a message to them, however short, simply to say that he was alive even though he had no idea in what part of the world…

He hadn’t seen a post office anywhere but they clearly had to exist. Maybe he had passed them by without spotting them. Nor did he see any post boxes, not in the hotel lobby or in the street nearby. He tried looking for postcards and stamps at the stalls in the hotel lobby but there was nothing on display and from the shopgirls’ speech and gestures he surmised that they either hadn’t understood him or that the articles he required were to be found elsewhere. But where?

He tried taking a plain piece of paper, folding it into the shape of a letter and addressing it to his wife though the mere writing of the letter upset him. His emotions ran away with him. He tried to ignore them and took the trial letter down to the reception desk and gave it to the clerk on duty. But the man just turned it round and round in his hand and stared at it, clearly not recognising the Latin script. Or perhaps he had no idea at all what to do with it. Maybe it was not part of his duties. He certainly did not want to be left with it because he pushed it back across the counter with a few short polite words. Thinking the lack of a stamp might be the problem, Budai took out some money and tinkling it in his palm, offered it to him, asking him to take what was necessary, then putting a few coins down in front of the clerk with a questioning look as if to ask whether that was enough. The man — an older, respectable looking chap — must have misunderstood him, taking it for a bribe of some sort for he snapped out a few sharp words and swept the coins away before turning away from him altogether and attending to the next in the queue.

Nevertheless Budai did not give up on the idea. Surely it would still be worth writing a letter. He could just leave it on the counter at reception when someone else was on duty, along with more than enough money to cover the cost of postage then quickly disappear before it could be returned. If there were the remotest chance of the letter reaching his wife the post office at home would be able to work out where he was and when he wrote it from the stamp or the franking, but he kept delaying the task even while he was weighing up his chances for neither his mind nor hand was up to it. Maybe he simply couldn’t find the right first words that would enable him to tell her what had happened to him. However he put it, he was incapable of summing it all up.

So he turned his attention back to the telephone in his room. He dialled at random wherever his fingers happened to land and rang unknown acquaintances he had rung before. It wouldn’t matter now if they presented him with a bill this coming Friday, he couldn’t pay anyway. When somebody picked up the phone at the other hand he shouted down the line, the same words each time, for hours on end, forcing himself to be patient: he kept repeating the name of his home town and his home phone number as well as the six numbers he could at last manage in the local language. He did so in the hope that at some point he would hit on the exchange where long-distance calls were connected. Or if not precisely that perhaps he might come across some other utility that would be able to transfer his call if only he kept repeating the number often enough or obstinately enough. But however much he shouted all he got by way of answer was the muttering and harrumphing of various men, women and children, nothing at all to indicate that anyone had understood. He spent the whole evening doing this until, seized by a sudden helpless fury, he smashed down the receiver and, sweating profusely, cursed his fate and beat the wall with his fists so the neighbours knocked back. What insanely ill luck had landed him here? Why him? Why should fate have chosen him for this? Why, why, why, why?

Having calmed down a little he stared — how many times had he done this? — at the oil painting above the table, that winter landscape with its snow-laden fir trees and those delicate fawns bounding away into the distance. He knew every detail by now to the point of boredom but it was his only reminder of nature, the world beyond the town that was holding him prisoner. That was if that world existed anywhere beyond his imagination.

He still hadn’t discovered from Bebé what her shifts were, where she went after work, what her telephone number was, where she lived, where she might be found and so forth. Although the girl was remarkably adept at picking up some things, she seemed to have no idea when it came to questions like this. Either that or she was pretending not to understand. Nor was he any more successful when he attempted to observe her entering or leaving the building or indeed at seeing her anywhere in the building apart from in the lift.

He did, however, know her well enough to try to ask her to take him to a railway station or an airport. But when the opportunity presented itself — on the eighteenth floor again — and Budai attempted to suggest this, even drawing the relevant means of transport Etete showed no inclination to help him but grew sad and tearful. Why should it upset her so much that he wanted to go away? He tried to console her by stroking her but thanks to his clumsiness the movement came out all wrong and he found himself like an idiot clutching her elbow, not knowing what to do with it. The linguistic chasm between them was too wide however much they both wanted to cross it. And now the lift was being called again. There was never enough time: they never had a moment to themselves.

The same night, just when he had bathed and was preparing to go to bed, the light in the room went out. He took a peek out into the corridor and then through the window: there was darkness everywhere. Not even the streetlights were on. All he could see was car headlights streaming through the black air. There must have been a major fault at the power station, something that affected the whole district because there was no light to be seen, not even in the distance. It didn’t particularly worry him. He did what he had to do. He was accustomed to the layout of the room and felt his way to bed. He had nothing to read anyway so, though he was not a bit sleepy, he crawled in and made himself comfortable.

There was a faint knocking at his door. He stopped to listen in case he was mistaken but then somebody carefully opened the door. He must have forgotten to turn the key when he checked the corridor. Whoever it was stepped in, quietly closed the door and stopped, breathing quietly. It was only now that Budai realised he had actually been expecting this, that this might have been why he had unconsciously left the door unlocked, why he felt so awake and alive despite a day of hard work. Even if he hadn’t thought it through, some part of his brain must have been aware that if there was no electricity anywhere the lift wouldn’t be working either… Simply to confirm then, and before the other had a chance to speak, he whispered:

‘Bebebe?’

The girl answered with an embarrassed giggle showing that she too felt a little confused. She corrected his pronunciation:

‘Djedje…’

Or it might have been Dede or Tyetyetye or Tete or even Tchetche because he still couldn’t quite tell what it was supposed to be. The girl did not come further into the room but continued standing by the door. It was of course perfectly understandable that she should feel awkward having entered at all. Budai had enough sensitivity to recognise this despite his own confused feelings. He got out of bed and made his way over to her in the dark. He was wearing his only pair of pyjamas, the ones he kept washing, but it was dark now and they couldn’t see each other. He bumped into her as he felt his way forward, his hand just happening to land on her breast. He quickly snatched it away, terrified that she would think him too forward. but at the same time a hot flush ran through him. It was as if the heat of Pepe’s body had transmitted itself through her bra. Her breast was firm and pert as a girl’s. It was as if he could feel her heart beating in it.

They found themselves by the bed. Where else was there to go in this tiny single hotel room, after all? She lit a cigarette and sat down beside him, her face illuminated for a moment and all the stranger for that, her hair brushed differently, neatly smoothed down. She was turned away from him, not looking at him. Suddenly she snapped the lighter shut. Maybe she thought the dark more appropriate. From that time on it was only the red glow of the cigarette that brightened as she drew on it, her outline barely visible in the glimmer. The room was slowly filling with smoke.

But the girl can’t have smoked her cigarette right down to the end. She fumbled a little and ran into the bathroom in her stockings. He could hear her moving in there as she found the tap then came the bubbling stream of water. In the meantime he locked the outside door and got back into bed.

Edede smelled of fresh soap and cologne as she got in beside him, her skin cold from the water, her whole body slightly shivering. Budai tried to warm her, grasping her frozen feet between his thighs and embracing her shoulders. Then he did all that a man should do in the circumstances, all his instincts and experience guided him to do. Veve did not resist or argue but only slowly relaxed and then not entirely. She clearly took pleasure in the act but it was as if for her too it was more important to give pleasure than to receive it. Budai was, however, the sort of person who required the full participation of the other and took little pleasure in solitary satisfaction. And he did finish a little soon. Having spent so much time alone he couldn’t contain himself.

He felt a touch ashamed as he lay beside her in the darkness. The girl broke the silence asking something as she propped herself up on her elbows and, strangely enough, he guessed immediately what she was saying: she was asking him if he did not mind her smoking. She drew the covers over herself before lighting up: she was still embarrassed by her nakedness.

And then she began speaking again, quietly, with periods of silence, timid and halting, stopping every so often to tap the ashes from her cigarette into the ashtray that Budai fetched for her from the table. Her speech became more confident as she went on. She was telling him some extended story that she might long have been wanting to tell him, something about herself or her circumstances, though she, if anyone, must have known how little he understood of her language. She became ever more animated and emotional, ever more broken, though she retained the gentle refinement of her normal voice. No sooner had she finished her cigarette than she took out a new one and lit it: whatever she was talking about must have been of a highly personal nature. Might she be talking about some specific person? But who could it be who so upset her and why did she choose to tell him now? Might it have been her husband?

Budai sought out Epepe’s hands in the darkness, first the left, then the right, tapping at her long fingers to see whether she wore a wedding ring. There was nothing there of course. He would have noticed it in the lift if she had one. She too must have guessed what he was thinking because she flicked her lighter on and reached into the handbag she had left on the bedside table. There was the ring.

Now he too asked for a light and in so far as it allowed he examined the ring, turning it this way and that. It looked to be made of gold in the usual round shape though there was no inscription inside it. The outside was engraved with thin blue lines, which was unusual for a wedding ring though it might have been one for all that. He thought he might have seen rings like this as fashionable accessories. But if that was what it really was why did she carry it about in her handbag?

Or could it be that this was the chief clue to interpreting her strange behaviour, the reason why she was so patient and willing to answer all his difficult questions, that is, apart from those that pertained to herself, meaning where she lived and her family circumstances? It might be a bad marriage that she now resented. Maybe she wanted a divorce. Was that why she did not wear the ring on her finger?

He tried to bear all this in mind as she was speaking now and, sure enough, the words suddenly seemed clearer. He could almost follow her speech, the rough drift of it anyway, the rest of it — the details — probably being pretty commonplace… It was all coming out now: her life at home, how unbearable it was, how crowded the place with relatives, dependants, uncles and aunts, not to mention the two children from the husband’s first marriage. Then the co-tenants and sub-tenants, and the invalids of whom one could never be free, those helpless sickly widows and widowers, the screaming neurotics, the filthy and intolerable drunkards, the women with their shady occupations as well as all their kids too, all of them crammed together in a tiny flat. The eternal noise, the fuss, the bickering and the chaos with not a moment’s rest — but then where to go, where else was there? The block was already full to overflowing just like every other block, there being no better flats available, only those at prices no one could afford or through some exceptional personal contact, and even if it were possible to move away, what would happen to all those invalids and old people? No marriage could survive such diabolical circumstances. Few did. Then he starts drinking, seeking consolation in liquor. He becomes ever more impossible; soon the relationship goes cold, they hardly spend any time together and are separated in all but name. She too looks to escape because even working in this madhouse, in that narrow, ugly, airless lift, is better than being at home. That is why she does not wear her wedding ring, it is why she has never wanted to talk about herself. Even now she feels guilty for betraying her husband. Nevertheless, she would like to explain to Budai what she is doing in his room because she would not want him to think of her as some loose woman of easy virtue, which she most certainly is not. But she just had to tell someone eventually. That is, if that was what she was saying and not something completely different.

She had practically filled the room with smoke by now but was clearly feeling a little calmer for having unburdened herself. But when she reached for another cigarette on the bedside table she upset the glass of water he had left there. She made a grab for it but the sudden movement resulted in her rolling off the bed and when Budai had to try to pull her back up they both ended up off the bed. The water was dripping on their necks. Bebe burst into a fit of giggles so infectious that he started laughing, the unstoppable laughter bursting from them. Soon they were both on top of each other, utterly breathless. Neither of them could stop for if one quietened down the other would start laughing again, setting them both off once more. They were tittering and rolling around so much, that having got into bed the girl almost fell out again, and what with one thing and another, desire overcame them.

There used to be an amusing booth at the funfair in Budai’s local park with a title something like Get Her Out of Bed! A fat, bosomy lady in a lacy nightgown lay between huge duvets and pillows. The player was given a rag ball and if he succeeded in hitting a certain target the bed tipped loudly over and the fat lady rolled off and turned a somersault to the great delight of the audience. Having once thought of this, he couldn’t forget it now. It was such a funny memory it made him feel much better about things. So of course he wanted to share it with Vedede too and almost despite himself began to tell her all about it. She cuddled up to him and listened, nodding and chuckling, making little noises of encouragement, and ended up laughing with him as loudly and as wholeheartedly as if she had understood every word.

Naturally encouraged, he started to explain how he had got here, how and why he had boarded the flight, how he had lost his luggage, how they took away his passport and all the rest. He added other things too, as and when they came to him, in no particular order: how he had had himself taken down to the police station, what he saw from the top of the big church, how he had narrowly missed a fellow Hungarian on the escalator. Then about things at home, about his dog, how clever the old dachshund was, how it would look for old paths in the snow so you could only see his nose and the tip of his tail in all that white like two dark moving dots. How he used to ski in the mountains of the Mátra or the Tátra, and how he preferred the less-explored routes, the gentle winding slopes of the mild, serpentine woodland paths where the silence was so dense, how it was all green and white and soft with fresh deer tracks in the snow. And how, when he reached the edge of the precipice, the depths would draw and suck him in with the ecstasy of leaping, the temptation of allowing himself to fall, skis and all, the intoxication of weightlessness, the loss of self-awareness in the drop…

She heard him through in sympathetic silence, drawing closer to him on the bed. Suddenly Budai stopped and raised his head.

‘You understand?’ he asked.

‘You understand,’ she answered.

‘You understand?’

‘You understand.’

‘No you don’t, you don’t understand!’

‘You understand,’ she repeated.

‘You’re lying, you don’t understand!’ he snapped back in growing irritation.

‘You understand.’

‘How could you understand? Why do you pretend you understand, when you don’t?’

‘Understand,’ Debebe obstinately insisted.

Budai seized her shoulders with a sudden fury and shook her, accusing her:

‘You haven’t understood a single word!’

‘Understand.’

‘Liar!’

‘Understand.’

‘Do you hear me?’

Shocked by his own violence, he felt his mind clouding over: he slapped Pepep on the jaw. But still she carried on muttering the same words.

‘Understand. Understand.’

He no longer knew what he was doing. He lost control. He tugged at her, pushed her, hit her, wherever he could, on her face, her neck, the back of her head, her breast. She did not defend herself, only raised her arms to shield her eyes and wept quietly in the darkness, barely audible. Her passivity only made him more furious. He thrashed about wildly, grabbed her hair, beat her with his fists again and again like a madman in utter confusion, forgetting everything and thinking only: she must pay for this, she must pay…

Then he suddenly collapsed, exhausted, panting, his heart loudly beating, utterly lost. He embraced her, pressed her, kissed her hands and pleaded shamefully, entreating her:

‘Forgive me! I am a fool! Don’t be angry, forgive me, I am not myself. I am a fool, a fool…’

Tchetchetche’s eyes were still full of tears, her face burning from the blows. Budai would have given anything to comfort her: he covered her with his body, stroked her, kissed her time and time again, kissed every part of her body, knelt down beside the bed laying his head in her lap, whispering in a choked voice, mumbling endearments. The woman’s skin was on fire, her hands dry and hot, as she reached down to him, stroked his hair, ran her fingers through it and drew him up towards her.

Ebebe gave herself to him completely this time: she was tender and attentive and did things for him she clearly never did for her husband. Now she could rise with him to a full climax. It was not so much the moment of pleasure that was important but that they were at one with each other, that there was nothing that was not them, time and space having melted away, leaving them the last people on earth. There were moments at the height of passion when Budai was tempted to ask whether everything that had happened to him so far was the price that had to be paid for this, and even if it was the price, whether it was not worth it?

And then, as if by way of epilogue, the lights came on, both the wall-fitting and the bedside table lamp. After such long darkness the light cut into their eyes: the woman blinked, turned away and leapt from the bed. Well, of course, if the electricity was back on the lift would be working again and she had to attend to it. She quickly dressed, lighting another cigarette as she did so. Budai continued to lie there, his hungry eyes following her every movement, watching as she drew on her underclothes and fixed the suspenders to her stocking-tops. By now he was so much in love with her that he could only stare transfixed, fearful yet happy in the recognition that he could not possibly live if he lost her.

He would have liked to give her something, at least to offer some token but there was nothing in the room except a little low-quality cold meat and the heel of a dry loaf on the windowsill. Pepet refused them, quickly adjusted her hair, applied some hasty lipstick, smoothed her blue uniform and was off. Using a mixture of words and signs, they arranged that she would come again tomorrow night at the same time. Then she was gone, having left her cigarette still glowing on the ashtray, the room thick with smoke, though Budai did not open the window, not then, nor later.

When he woke in the morning his first thought was to calculate the hours to their evening rendezvous. Wanting to make decent preparations this time, he ran down to the shops. He had some money since he had worked quite long hours at the market so he spent the entire morning queuing up in groceries. He bought cheese, cold meats and fish, boiled eggs, salad, fresh bread, butter and some sweet pastries, adding to this, since he had neither tea nor coffee to offer, two bottles of that ubiquitous sweetish alcoholic drink.

By the time he returned his room had been cleaned, tidied and aired. Even the bedding was changed. In other words it was Friday again. Another week had passed, the third since his arrival, though to him, naturally, it seemed much longer. Would there be another bill in his box at reception, a reminder that he hadn’t paid the last one? He still had a lot of time on his hands. It had been late, almost midnight, when Bebe had knocked at his door, though that was merely a guess since he had no clock. He was so impatient he found no rest anywhere, certainly not in his room, so he set out again with the excuse of looking for some kind of present to give her.

He did not once see her in the lift. Was she off-duty today? Or was she working a later shift? Or was she free for the day and coming in later only to see him? Nor was there anything in box 921 downstairs, though maybe there would be in the afternoon… He set out to explore the so-far unfamiliar streets behind the hotel. He racked his brains — what kind of present he should buy: a bracelet, a necklace, some other ornament? A cigarette box, a lighter? It should, in any case, be something that she would always carry around with her.

He was surprised to discover an ice-rink not too far away. It was relatively small, a few metres below the level of the surrounding square so that one could look down on it, and indeed there were many people gathered at the rails. The rink was full of skaters, chiefly older people as it happened: the fat and the lanky, ladies of a certain age together with bald, paunchy gentlemen, gliding and turning, messing about on the ice in time to the slow music. It was strange and haunting the way they took each other’s arms, the way they were enjoying themselves, some even dancing in the dense crowd. Budai stopped to gaze. He listened to the music, mesmerised by the ebb and flow below him and by the delicately swaying old people. Soon he too began to sway to the rhythm of the slow waltz.

He realised he had missed a golden opportunity last night. Now he had both time and opportunity to communicate with somebody and to ask them to guide him to… where? To a railway station? An airport? An embassy? No matter, anywhere would do as long as it led to some familiar territory. He knew it would not have been tactful to discuss this with Etete, especially not then, recalling how she had reacted when he first began to sound her out there on the eighteenth floor, and how it was soon after that she had come into his room. Tonight though, one way or another, he had to explain it to her and overcome her objections as tenderly as he could. He simply could not delay it any further.

The really strange thing was that the person most likely to be able to help him should be the one who most tied him to the place. He felt rather confused about it in fact: did he want to leave now or did he not? He tried to think it through but was too excited and expectant. His mind was out of kilter. Maybe he should ask Dede to accompany him to the appropriate place, that being the most important thing. Having been there once, he would know the way back and then he would have more time to think and plan his departure.

Suddenly he felt anxious; maybe he misunderstood, maybe she had arrived earlier and had been looking for him. So he hurried back to the hotel, thinking he would probably be able to buy some present there at the lobby stores. First though he had to check his room which meant standing in the queue again to pick up his key.

But when he got to the desk and handed over the slip of paper with 921 on it as usual the clerk looked round then spread his palms to indicate his key was not there. And indeed his box was empty, no key was hanging on the hook. This had never happened before. Could they have hung it elsewhere by mistake? Or was the chambermaid using it to get into his room? But they had never done this before and in any case the room had already been cleaned. He had to investigate. He pushed the slip of paper back over the counter. The clerk was an elderly grey-haired man in a dark uniform who looked familiar though he had seen so many clerks here they were a little mixed up in his memory. Or could this be the man he had come across that very first time when the airport bus dropped him at the hotel? Whatever the truth, of that he treated Budai in a somewhat offhand way now, shaking his head and muttering, clearly indicating that he could not help him. When Budai persisted he brought out a large official book, leafed through it, showed him a page and pointed — fat lot of use it was him pointing like that — to something, then slammed the book shut and immediately turned to the next guest in line who had been observing Budai’s attempts while shuffling his feet and tapping his fingers with undisguised annoyance.

Understanding nothing but sensing the worst, Budai took the lift to the ninth floor, hurried down the corridors and stopped at his room. The door was shut but when he carefully put his ear to it he thought he could hear someone moving about inside. Having waited a little while, unsure what to do and unable to think of anything better, he knocked and opened the door a little. A middle-aged woman in a headscarf appeared in the gap, took a peek out then immediately closed the door behind her. He checked the room number to make sure he was in front of number 921. It seemed they had given his room to someone else. Others had moved in. So it was for them the sheets had been changed that morning.

That immediately gave him something else to worry about. What had they done with his belongings, with those minimal items of clothing he had brought with him, with that single case he had been carrying when he arrived? He knocked again but this time no one answered. Someone turned the key inside the room. He was not content to let this go but started shouting, beating the door with his fists and kicking it until they opened it again. This time a thin, blotchy-skinned man in shirtsleeves and braces appeared in the crack, glaring furiously, shouting in a high feminine voice and would have slammed the door shut again had Budai not stuck his foot there and pushed his way in.

It was the smell that hit him first, a piercing, steaming, oppressive, living smell. Then the number of people in the tiny room; besides those already mentioned, a little old woman muttering or perhaps praying in the corner, some children, four, five or even six of them — you couldn’t tell precisely in the half-light because the blinds were pulled quite far down — more people lying on the bed with a pram beside them, and others on mattresses on the floor, not to forget a child carry-basket on the table. To top things off, two cats were slipping here and there among the lot, leaping onto the windowsill, on and off chairs, on top of the wardrobe, terrifyingly large, dirty feral-looking tabbies, their shabby coats uncared for. And not only these but angora rabbits too of the kind he had seen in another room, in cages and baskets. The rabbits must have been one of the chief contributors to the combined stench. It was incredible that a hotel should tolerate this kind of thing. The room itself has been rearranged so it looked nothing like the one he had been staying in: the sofa was up against another wall, the lampshade had been removed, there was a playpen in the middle of the room, underwear was drying on the backs of the chairs. The floor was littered with personal belongings, blankets, packages, feeding bottles and chamber pots.

All the while he was observing this, the room’s new residents kept up a continuous chatter, arguing and aiming remarks at him, trying to push him out of the room. He was still looking to locate some of his personal possessions but to no avail. He could see nothing of his: no clothes, no pyjamas, not his case, nor his notes on the writing desk. He glanced into the bathroom too, but the few minor items he had brought from home had disappeared to be replaced by two clothes-lines with freshly-washed nappies and rubber pants. After that he allowed himself to be shoved outside: even the children were crying and pushing at him. He could never return here. Not that he had any desire to do so and in any case it would be embarrassing to disturb or eject a family as obviously poor and needy as this. Nor would the hotel have put them in here just so that they should throw them out again to suit Budai.

Well, yes, but where would he stay? He set out to find Epepe again in case she might be working one of the lifts but to his despair she was nowhere to be found. He returned to the ground floor, struggled through the crowded hall and stood in the queue for reception to explain his predicament, pointing to the keys and asking that he be given another room. The clerk must have been bored to death of his endless demands, having to deal with this one troublesome customer all the time and paid him little heed, looking over his shoulder to the next in line. It was pointless going on. He was simply ignored.

So he tried further on at the desk with its variously labelled counters but had no more luck here since the women who worked behind the counters could not understand him and refused even to listen to him, quickly turning away. Next he returned to reception and, having waited in the queue once more, the wait exhausting for both his body and his nervous system, he tried to communicate the fact that if he was no longer desired as a customer they should at least return his belongings to him so that he might seek somewhere else. And his passport too, naturally, since without it, no one else would accommodate him. To his surprise the desk-clerk seemed to realise something for he asked for the slip of paper and took out a fat dossier. He searched in it, then waved two stapled documents, put them down in front of him and addressed him like a teacher, as if to say he had already explained that.

‘Tuluplubru klött apalapa gróz paratléba… Klött, klött, klött…!’

Listening to this Budai could make out the expression klött, which he had earlier established to be a mode of address. And gróz, if he was not mistaken, was their word for the number 2… He studied the two sheets of paper. The top one seemed familiar and he quickly came to the conclusion that it was a carbon copy of his last hotel bill, the one he had received last Friday, the one he had not yet settled. Next to it was a similar form with a similar rubric complete with notes, differing only in its bottom-line figure which was a little less than the other one — presumably the bill for this week.

The speech he had just heard must therefore have meant something like: First you must settle the two outstanding bills, yes you, you!… In other words: We are keeping your belongings and passport as surety, you can have them back once you have paid up. That was if he was guessing correctly and the clerk was not saying something altogether different.

Budai did not have enough money, of course, not nearly enough; after all his morning shopping he only had a little change left. He realised that the arranged meeting with Devebe would not take place now. What bothered him most was that she would be knocking at the door of 921, all set for their rendezvous, only to confront the new occupants of the room. What a shock it would be. And there wasn’t even a way of leaving a message for her. This, above all, was unbearable, maddening, agonising. The blood rushed to his head: it was like a cloud hovering over him. The storm was inside him. He wanted to hit out, to break things, to murder someone. He no longer cared about anything. Quite beside himself now, he stamped and groaned and screamed in his mother tongue: no matter if no one else understood him, he could not contain his despair.

‘Scandalous!… Absolutely scandalous! Crooks and bastards the lot of you… filthy swine, bastards!’

He was making a proper scene, causing an affray. A curious crowd gathered round and surrounded him. Then the fat doorman in fur collar, gold braid and peaked cap appeared — he must have been called over — grabbed him by the arm and started dragging him through the throng in the lobby, determined to throw him out. Budai was not yet in control of himself, his whole body was shaking, quite incapable of resistance. When they reached the door the doorman opened it and indicated that he should scram. When Budai did not move he gave him a rough shove and might even have kicked him on the backside. In any case Budai found himself out in the street.

Feeling dizzy, he swayed all over the pavement without knowing what he was doing and it was a good while before he thought to pull himself together. His hat had rolled away but he found it. His coat was open. He had lost two buttons and the shoulder was frayed. He hadn’t the least idea what to do. He drifted with the flow of the crowd and eventually found himself by the ice-rink he had discovered that afternoon. It was dusk already, the streetlamps were coming on, the skaters were weaving circles in the harsh light to equally harsh music. Later he arrived at the skyscraper in construction and felt obliged to count the floors again. There were seventy-five now, three more than before.

Filth and mess everywhere — had it been like this from the beginning or had he simply not noticed? When the wind blew, as it was doing now, it lifted and carried the discarded wrappers and other rubbish with it; a newsstand was caught in the gust, a thousand newspapers were swirling about his feet. He noticed how many old people there seemed to be in town: lame, crippled, halt and half-paralysed, they stumbled, lurched and staggered on sticks through the crowd that pressed against them and separated them. Waves of alien humanity regularly washed over them. Frail old grannies, sickly frightened little sparrows, struggled against the overwhelming crowd, dragging their helpless bodies along, trying to cross at traffic lights, trying to board and squeeze themselves on to buses, constantly being shoved aside, squashed and trodden on in the mêlée. What power maintained them? What strength enabled them to go on living here? Why did they not move into the outer suburbs, into a more amenable environment, to some estate? Then there were the crazies, those who wriggled and babbled, who talked and muttered to themselves, the furious who screamed and roamed the streets uttering terrible cries, madmen who rushed about with knives threatening people who cleared a way for them. Then the mumbling beggars thrusting tins in front of passers-by, the moaning, the insane, the paralysed, the skeletal, the subnormal crawling on all fours — all of them full of the desire to live, all pressed together, each of them brushing past another, covering every inch of pavement like a flood, blocking the traffic, their myriad lives impatient to possess and mob the world.

It occurred to Budai that he might have been evicted on account of Bebe! That it wasn’t the unpaid bill, no, that was a misunderstanding, it was their relationship that had been discovered, the fact that the woman had been with him. And this puritan attitude would not have been based on any formally ethical or religious code or because relations between guest and staff were forbidden. There must be a deeper reason, namely that sexual contact might result in a child, a new being, thereby adding to the already overcrowded population. Maybe that is what they were accusing him of! It might be one of the most serious crimes against society: the wilful exacerbation of a demographic crisis.

It was growing darker: there were lights in the sky, white, red, lilac and green. Some glowed steadily, other spun or alternated or swayed or sparkled; some seemed to swim slowly away, others to appear suddenly out of the darkness only to disappear again as mysteriously. What were they? Stars? Aircraft? Signals on towers or on tops of skyscrapers to prevent aircraft crashing into them? Were they rockets? Spaceships? But he didn’t feel like speculating about such things now, it was his appointment in the evening that mattered most, for the hour was approaching when he was due to meet Petebe. He hurried back to the hotel.

But the doorman who had till now greeted him so courteously, opening the swing door for him, now stood in front of him as soon as he saw him, his fat, wide body blocking the way. He wasn’t a mere dummy after all it seemed, nor a robot as Budai had earlier suspected: the man recognised him, remembered his face and the incident that afternoon. And he stood before him now utterly immobile, with as expressionless a face as before, his stupid little eyes blinking. This time though his arm was raised in rejection instead of invitation.

Budai did not go away but merely moved a little to the side. Where should he have gone after all? However humiliating the behaviour of this ridiculous lump of lard might be, there was no choice for him, no other option but to try his luck here. His plan was to wait for an opportunity to sneak in when a larger group arrived and the doorman would salute them with a touch of his peaked cap. Budai carefully sauntered up to one such and joined it as though he were of the company. But the doorman was alert to that: he let everyone through but when Budai tried to enter he quickly stepped forward and blocked him with his enormous belly. It was no use: however he schemed and plotted the doorman was too alert. At his third or fourth attempt Budai went at it with such determination that the pair of them came right up against each other and were struggling in the doorway, each trying to shove the other out of the way. Budai was no weakling and thought he could handle a mound of blubber like the doorman but the latter proved to have much more stamina than he thought, and in any case he had propped himself against the doorframe which gave him an advantage. In the end they reached a stalemate and the two of them stood there, back to square one, neither of them having gained an inch. This effectively meant defeat for Budai since it was he who had wanted to advance. Now he had to retreat.

But wasn’t there a side entrance to the hotel? There might be. It was possible that Tyetye entered through a door reserved for staff. He set off to find something of the sort, turning the next corner to take a tour of the building for surveillance purposes. Surely he would come across it. Yes, but it so happened that the hotel was stuck in the middle of a group of other buildings of various sizes, the roads behind it winding either side so the side streets led him away from his intended route or towards a road-up sign that forbade entrance. After a while he realised he was lost and had no idea whether he was still in the area of the hotel as he had planned or somewhere else altogether.

Then he found himself in front of the ice-rink once more, the third time that day. They were just closing it, or rather were aspiring to close it but the skaters would not leave. However those in charge shepherded them towards the stairs, however they pushed and tried to corral them with the wide brushes they used to clean the ice, the crowd swarmed back in, surging between and around them, squeezing or sneaking in somehow, crowing in triumph as they did so, covering the ice once more so the whole process had to start from scratch.

This was quite entertaining and Budai would have been happy to watch it for a while but suddenly anxiety seized him: what if, right now, while he was wasting his time here, Dede was arriving at the main entrance? He was hungry too, not having eaten anything since the morning. What had happened to the packages of food he had left on the windowsill of his room? He had forgotten those when he pushed his way in and now he felt deeply annoyed about it. Could the big family have consumed it all? Or had those ugly cats scoffed the lot?

If he went into the self-service buffet now or bought something in a shop that would mean standing in a queue again and he feared missing her. So he refrained and worked his way back in the direction from which he had come to the main entrance of the hotel. He arrived at the precise moment that the usual priestly delegation was emerging from a big black car. The doorman swept his hat off with ostentatious reverence, greeting them and bowing low as the bearded, purple-vested, gold-chained ancients entered. Budai tried mingling with them, hoping the fat nincompoop would be too absorbed in the task to notice him. But the man still spotted him, grabbed him and pushed him out: he was not to be fooled.

Was the doorman never off duty? Though now that he took a careful look at him he was not at all sure that he was the same man he had seen earlier. But even if it was someone else, he resembled the first one so closely, not only in his uniform of fur-collared coat, flat peaked cap and gold braid, but in the dull blinking of his tiny eyes, the way he squinted. There was the same puffed up, characterless, empty, buffoonish, primitive expression on his face as on the last.

A long time passed, it might have been hours, hours when nothing changed except the weather. It started raining. Budai took shelter in the awnings before the entrance. The doorman did not mind this and seemed to pay him no attention at all, but Ebede failed to appear. There was no sign of her. Was there any hope of her turning up at all now? If his guess had been correct and it was the relationship between them that had led to his eviction, his partner-in-crime was also likely to have to face the consequences! Being his lover, she might have been dismissed or disciplined in some other way. Was it possible that he would still be waiting for her this time next year?

He was almost dying of hunger by now as well as being faint with exhaustion after the stresses of the day. After all that walking he still had no clue what to do. He leaned against the wall for support. But there must be something — he roused himself — something he had not yet tried! What was it? Maybe he could distract the doorman the way children used to by pointing to something behind him or by throwing some object so that he turned away and momentarily became defenceless. But what distraction could he devise for this vast heap of lard? Lesser distractions would be useless: there was no point in throwing a pebble or a screwed-up piece of paper at him, he was too suspicious to be taken in by that…He had to make a sacrifice, to take chances, he had learned that much. There was a price to be paid for everything in this town.

With a bitter sigh he dipped into his pockets and fished out a fistful of change, and when there was relative quiet in the street and no one was passing the hotel he threw the change on the ground in front of the doorman. It was done with an easy sweep of his arm and executed from a certain distance. He didn’t have much. The coins hit the road with a sharp chink and did not roll away in various directions. He had calculated correctly. The fat pig’s ears pricked up, he bent down and looked around curiously to see what it was. Budai had planned to use just this moment to sidle in behind him and to disappear quickly into the building.

He had all but reached the swing doors and seemed to be practically inside when a large group pressed forward from the hall towards the exit — the same door being used for both entrance and exit, a rather eccentric and incongruous feature in a hotel as busy as this. There were a lot of them, tall slender youths, some Africans among them, all in bright pink track-suits, laughing, gesticulating, chattering incomprehensibly, larking about. They looked to be sportsmen of the kind he had seen in the enormous stadium. They were packed together in a solid mass so he was unable to work his way between them, and by the time they were all outside, some twenty or twenty-five of them, the stout Cerberus was back on guard, as alert a watchdog as before.

Desperately disappointed, Budai set out to collect up the coins so he might try again but the doorman put his enormous foot down over most of them so he could recover only the lesser amount. He thought the doorman was joking but it was useless pushing at his foot or trying to shift it, useless making noises to suggest he should raise it, the man did nothing of the sort. Budai turned all his fury on the nincompoop and kicked him on the ankle as hard as he could. The doorman blew a loud whistle. Budai ran away.

Only on the next corner, once he had recovered his breath, did he reflect on why he had been so frightened. No doubt the sound of the whistle had reminded him of his adventure with the police and he had no wish to get mixed up with them again. And it was likely that, having attacked him, that idiot of a doorman would in fact have been whistling for the police. Whatever else happened now at least he had the satisfaction of having given the idiot a good kick and taken it out on him… He felt terribly sleepy and could hardly stand up, and as for his hunger it was worse than ever. The trouble was he did not see any way of getting back into the hotel tonight. Even if he did get back in, he couldn’t move into his room and they would not give him another one where he could lie down. That much was clear from the doorman’s behaviour. He’d end up cruising the corridors or sitting in the lobby.

His usual bistro was open and he quickly ate his way through a few sandwiches. And now? What should he do? Where should he go? So far he had at least enjoyed a degree of comfort, a tolerable bolthole where he could lay his head, hide, bathe, rest and gather his thoughts. But what was he to do without any of his possessions, with most of his remaining money under the doorman’s heel? Where could he stay? Should he, by some chance, stumble across another hotel — though he had no idea just then where he might find one — he would not be allowed in without his passport and other documents. And Gyegye? How would he find Egyegye again?

It was still raining. Little by little his hat, coat and shoes were being drenched through. Being near the metro entrance he instinctively slip-slopped his way towards it to seek shelter. It was the route he took when he was working as a casual labourer at the market. Down on the platform he took the usual train out of habit, too weak and numb to think of anything else.

As he already knew, work at the market continued right through the night, the ramp at the side entrance always being busy. But he did not come here to work now but to find somewhere to lay his head, any crude approximation to a bed where he could lie down and stay dry. In this respect he was just like the tramps he had seen earlier who, after work or a few drinks, always found a corner to curl up in. Pretty soon he found himself quite a comfortable nook at the back, near the end of the ramp where there was less bustle than elsewhere, a place full of empty crates piled into towers behind which a man might sleep without being noticed. There were a few old sacks on the concrete floor. The space must have been used as a refuge by others before him. Wet through as he was, he lay down and covered himself with his damp coat that smelled of the rain, made a crude pillow of sacks and, overcoming his inbred disgust of anything unhygienic, turned over and fell into a deep exhausted sleep.

He woke feeling hot, dizzy and shivering, not fully awake, in fact less than half awake. It was dark. Rays of lamplight filtered in from outside, as did the sounds of porters, the vibration of truck engines and the squeaking of the conveyor belt. Was this the same night or the one after? He had a fever, there was no doubt about it. He must have got chilled through in the rain, hanging about for hours like that in front of the hotel. Maybe it was flu. Cold shivers ran through him. He might even have contracted pneumonia.

He hadn’t been as low as this since leaving home. He felt utterly bereft, lost without a doctor or medicine: in his present condition he couldn’t even think of stumbling down to the clinic where the dentist had pulled his tooth. Not even a dog would take notice of him in this god-forsaken hole. No dogs were sniffing around him. Nor was he interested in anyone else. All he wanted to do was what mere animals did, to hide and be left alone with his troubles. He sank into himself and stayed there, his mind wandering at the rock bottom of his consciousness. The sickness numbed his body and spirit: he tossed and turned in his own heat, his own perspiration.

He was in a twilight condition with very few needs and, in so far as he had any will left at all, it was to reduce his needs still further since there was no way of requiting them. There was no food but then he had no desire to eat. A cup of tea might have been nice for his dry throat and to mask the bad taste in his mouth but what to buy it with? Best not to think about it; other matters were still less pleasant to think of though they were desperately urgent. A few days ago he had discovered a filthy latrine at the back of the market, though some people, it seemed, preferred to conduct their business by the wall. That was something he had to attend to. But first he had to raise his body and get over there, tasks that seemed to be beyond him now. Nevertheless, he was determined not to soil the spot he currently occupied. He could not imagine doing so, not while he had a spark of consciousness left at any rate.

It took considerable effort to get to his feet: for a full quarter of an hour he kept encouraging himself to get up but postponed the moment because the task seemed so difficult. After a number of failed attempts he got as far as sitting up but felt so dizzy that he immediately collapsed again and lost consciousness for a while, drowning in a dark red mist. Once he came to his senses he tried again, obstinate, cursing, He would not resign himself to failure. If he gave up the attempt, he insisted to himself, he might as well throw it all in.

So he kept trying, struggling and cursing his helplessness until finally he succeeded in standing on his feet. Surely with such determination he had to succeed. He took one step at a time, his hand on the wall, feeling his way like a blind man, fighting for each yard with brief intermittent losses of consciousness at which point he had to grasp something not to fall. He was forced to stop from time to time, resting on a bale or a crate for a few minutes before continuing. The short journey there and back took over an hour and at the end of it Budai was utterly exhausted. By the time he dropped on his mean improvised bed again he had no reserves left.

He tossed and turned in the confused hinterland between wake and sleep, the two blurred, sometimes all but inseparable. One time it seemed he was seeing rats. It was as if they were running over his legs though he felt no fear of them. Afterwards he could not tell whether it had really happened — as it well might in a place like this — or if he imagined it. He tended to dream a lot in any case and even more now that he was feverish. The dreams were usually about finding someone, someone with whom he could talk. It was a different person each time, a different occasion under different circumstances. The figure tended to appear in the metro, but the man in the green overcoat, his fellow Hungarian, turned up in other situations too. In one dream he was struggling with the fat doorman, in another he was sliding awkwardly between a group of skaters, occasionally falling over. He dreamt he was on an aeroplane, on a train, on a ship, even on a horse though he had never ridden one before. They were galloping down a damp sandy field, the soft soil behind them clearly showing the horse’s hoof prints.

Images of his more recent experiences got mixed up with memories of home. Even if they were looking for him they would not find him here. He had neither accommodation nor address now. He was a homeless vagabond like the others: who could possibly know where he was?… That was the one thing that could still bring tears to his eyes. It was what others would think of as his disappearance, the way he just vanished off the map. He wept quietly to himself on his bed of sacks behind the crates. All this might just be bearable if he had no ties, no family, no workplace, no friends, no dog. Or wife. He missed his wife most. She was the most powerful and deepest loss. They had lived together so long and so intimately, she was so much part of his own being, that the pain she must be feeling at home was his pain too. He would, if he could, have taken a scalpel to his own heart and cut her out of it.

No, he must not feel sorry for himself. He knew that even in his confused state, even as he was tossing and turning in his fever. Self-pity would not get him anywhere. There was no one else to pity him here. Self-pity would only be a burden, a handicap… His thoughts eventually did what they were bound to and ran to a natural conclusion, to the possibility that underlay every thought. There was hardly anything he needed to do in his current situation. He had simply to let go, to allow the thin thread of hope that had so far sustained him to slip from his hand and he would sink, or rather fall headlong, into a happy oblivion: that was, after all, for the time being anyway, the easiest course.

But he delayed it, put the thought away, refusing to let it preoccupy him. He could give up any time he chose. That was probably the chief reason he resisted: there was no urgency about giving up. The thought of escape, of flight, remained even if only as an idea, not a concrete plan. Despite his helplessness, despite his sick and muddled mental state, there continued to burn in him the small flame of defiance, an indescribable and indeed hopeless fury at his predicament. It was the fury that would not allow him to surrender and end up a loser. Simply grinding his teeth and cursing even at the worst hours of a crisis was evidence of struggle. Some particle of his consciousness would always resist the power of vacuous darkness. It was a kind of obduracy, rogue’s honour, an irrational, perhaps even ridiculous holding fast. It was a fellow-feeling with oneself when there is nobody else to turn to.

Pepe started to appear in his dreams. He came upon her in various situations always with an associated feeling of anxiety and guilt. He couldn’t forgive himself for having hit her. He kept returning to the event: was that why she did not turn up again? Might she have felt too angry afterwards? Whatever the answer it was not something he could reconcile himself to. He had to make up for it, to provide some recompense for her, to explain and let her feel he regretted it. That was another reason he had to get well as soon as possible: he had to go back to the hotel and find Bebebe. He could not live without having put things right and he certainly could not leave without doing so.

He no longer had any idea how long he had been mouldering there in that miserable corner. His sense of time was gone: night and day ran into each other. The next time he woke and painfully teetered out to the latrine he saw that the market hall was empty inside, the various stands and booths locked up, shuttered, bolted, fixed with iron bars, though there were still workers at the side entrance operating loud machines and cranes. It must be Sunday again as it had been the first time he had come here. It was on Friday that he had been ejected from the hotel so he must have spent two nights here.

He was feeling a little better, his temperature must have dropped too. He was too weak to leave his shelter yet. His recovery was too slow. He needed two or three more days. His appetite had returned though he could find nothing to eat apart from a few partly rotting apples that must have rolled from their baskets. He tried to eat the whole, albeit with a certain disgust, but it was better than nothing.

After all this time he felt so dirty he wanted a good wash. He swayed about looking for water until at last he discovered a tap at the far end of the ramp. There was a long queue for that too with jugs, bottles, even buckets. He joined them while wondering who they were: stallholders, customers or casual labourers like himself? Already there were others behind him so he had no time to do anything except to drink from cupped hands. No sooner had he rinsed his mouth than he was shoved out of the way by those following, the sheer weight of them pushing him on.

He thought it best to return late in the evening once the stalls were locked up, when only the side and rear stores were being replenished, while the empty crates and bundles were taken away — a process that went on right through the night. There were far fewer people waiting for water now, just four or five tottering drunks, and he was soon alone and undisturbed at the tap. The water ran less freely now and he had no soap but it still felt good on his hands, face and neck. He put his head under the cold water to cool his overheated brow and splashed and rinsed his hair. He would have liked to wash below too but what was the point if he was only to put on the same dirty underpants soaked through with perspiration? There was no point in even starting.

Eventually he did get better and since he had to eat and to live he set about finding work again. Fortunately there was always a need for porters so it was up to him now, depending on his strength and mood, how much he took on and when. When it was food they were carrying he could grab the odd fistful, much as the others were doing since it all went unchecked. There were carrots, onions, fruit, raw vegetables and sometimes crackling or the odd stick of sausage when the storeman was looking the other way. And if he needed something else he could buy it right here with the money he was earning.

His life had changed enormously, of course, compared to what it had been before and now that he was no longer sick, it was not only more difficult to resign himself to, it was all but unbearable. The few belongings he had brought from home had remained in the hotel along with the little intended presents. His first task was to procure some soap, a toothbrush and some toothpaste, articles he could buy in the market hall, though the toothpaste tasted sweet like everything else here. He didn’t buy a shaving kit partly because it was expensive and partly because buying one would have proved too complicated, involving separate items such as razor, razor blade, shaving brush, shaving foam or cream and so on. Why shave in any case? For whom? He hadn’t been to a barber since he first landed in town and though he really didn’t give it much thought now his chin was stubbly and hairy, his hair was an uncombed mess and the nails on his fingers and toes had grown long and hard. Having no sewing kit, his general appearance had become steadily less respectable: he had lost buttons, his shoelaces were broken, his suit had rips and holes in it and everything was dirty. They were the clothes he both slept and worked in. On one occasion, having wandered a little further away from the market hall than usual, he saw his reflection in a shop mirror and hardly recognised the bearded, ragged tramp staring back at him. It was his eyes especially that frightened him, the dark, jaded, hunted-and-confused look of primitive man in the thin, worn, sallow face…

He missed the change of underwear most. There was nothing clean to put on. Even if he had possessed a change of clothes where would he be able to wash the set he had taken off, where could he have dried it or, indeed, simply kept it? Clothes were scandalously expensive here as he had noted in the window of the department store he found in the outer suburb on the day he had wasted his time trying to find a cinema. He simply didn’t have the money: he would have had to slave away for ages before scraping enough together. He would have to postpone the idea. Until then he could do no more than imagine a new being for himself, one that was distinct from his clothes, from his skin too if that were possible — indeed from his entire neglected body.

As he grew more feral so his homesickness grew less insistent. He had practically stopped keeping track of how long he had been here. Did they still remember him at home? Had they given him up for lost, written him off, perhaps even forgotten him? The home he had left behind, his old life, was fading away. All that remained of it was the desire to get away, far away from here. It no longer mattered where, in what direction, simply away, away, away.

Once he felt a little better he took a metro back to the hotel. He was pretty sure they wouldn’t let him back in and he was right. The fat uniformed doorman barred his way again, raising his arm to indicate no entry, but why after all should he admit such a suspicious-looking figure who might be a beggar or something even worse? Or was it just that he remembered their last encounter when the fellow had ejected him from the hotel and did everything to stop him going back in?… Budai felt weaker now, less able to stand up for himself and, after three or four half-hearted attempts, simply stopped trying. The doorman stood at the ready, automatically blocking the entrance each time Budai reappeared. The man was clucking something from beneath his fat fleshy nose as if he were talking to him. Budai leaned closer to try to catch what he was saying and make sense of it. It sounded a little like:

‘Parataschara… Kiripi laba parasera… parataschara…’

The man was repeating the same phrases he had used before when Budai asked him about a taxi, a phrase Budai had later concluded was a form of greeting. Might he have been wrong? For it wasn’t very likely that the doorman would be uttering such things while getting him to clear off. Or could it be that the phrase had another meaning too depending on the occasion, that it meant both you are welcome and to hell with you, the way the Latin adjective altus could mean both deep and high, and sacer both blessed and cursed, in other words, precisely opposite things?

As he stared at the hotel from the street it seemed to him a lost paradise from which he had been banished. He regarded it with the most intense nostalgia but was almost incapable of conjuring up any part of it or even imagining that he once had his own room, his own made-up bed, his own writing table, bathroom, basin and shower. And that Edede was there each day… Was she still riding the lift up and down, pushing the buttons? If the authorities had discovered their relationship, as he feared they had, and it was regarded as a capital crime, it would be the same for her as for him; their vengeance would seek her out too and it was pointless looking for her. On the other hand, he admitted to himself, he would be ashamed to be seen by her in his current state.

His capacity for action had drained away, his mind was dry and barren and he had little appetite left for renewing his battle of wits with that lump of lard. He hung around the entrance for a while longer but nothing changed, no new stratagem or scheme occurred to him. For a few moments he wasn’t even sure whether he wanted to enter at all. Some time later, without having made a decision as such, he set off back towards the metro station. The skyscraper on the building had grown another two floors since he last passed that way: it had reached floor seventy-seven.

He was familiar by now with the faces of some of the market labourers though he had no desire to make their acquaintance. Since there was a fairly rapid turnover of workers there were always new faces at the loading area and it was noticeable how many of them were coloured, more here than elsewhere. Those who, like him, had no accommodation tended to seek out any available place in the market come dusk, on bales, on heaps of coal or next to the wall, generally drunk. Every so often a policeman would stroll over the ramp, moving on those he spotted, though no-one discovered Budai’s hiding place. Once the policemen had gone those he had disturbed returned to their places and lay down again.

Having finished work Budai too took to the bar in the next street. He made a firm decision to get used to it. It was part of his current way of life, after all, much more so than a clean shirt. Where was he to wash a shirt? His lack of resources also had him choosing between clean underwear and getting drunk, and it was in perfectly sober mood, after considerable thought, that he opted for the latter. His situation would have been simply intolerable without alcohol.

The bar was normally solid with customers and served no more that two or three different kinds of drink. He was unable to discern a significant difference between even these: they all approximated to the syrupy-sickly liquid you could buy anywhere and which, in his estimation, was pretty high in alcohol content. The dirty, stuffy, loud, smoke-filled room was patronised mostly by market employees, casual porters and the like, lowlifes and underworld types as well as a few tired, sluttish women of dubious appearance. The patrons would lean on the bar for hours on end, glass in hand, engaged in long debates that, Budai suspected, were conducted in mutually incomprehensible languages, so that, like all drunks, they simply held forth notwithstanding. Occasionally the conversation would grow heated and suddenly an argument would break out, reaching a pitch of fury that sometimes resulted in a fight. When this happened the barman, a powerfully built, bald black man in a green apron, would usher the troublemakers out through the door or sometimes physically throw them out.

Budai was kept amused by little things there. It was how he filled his time. He drank until his money ran out or until he felt woozy and had lost all sensation to the point of collapse but still had just enough alertness left to stumble back to his shelter where he was overcome by sleep. He would wake next morning with a bad headache, a foul taste in his mouth and a burning sensation in his stomach but that wouldn’t stop him returning the next evening.

His nerves though were being worn to tatters. He was constantly tense, charged with a nervous electric energy. Passing this or that figure in the street, it didn’t matter who, it would only take an irritating gesture or an annoying face and he would suddenly be overcome by a terrible blind fury. The sober part of his mind would know the fury to be perfectly unreasonable but he still could not resist: everything went dark and he cursed and swore at the person. He would imagine hitting or kicking him and using his face as a punch-bag. Once he was gazing at a good-looking slender creole boy dressed in a slightly over-elegant fashion with a bracelet and a chain around his neck. He was chewing gum to judge by the rhythmic movements of his jaw. The sight of his blazer, of his delicate fingers absent-mindedly plucking at his lips, filled him with such indignation he wanted to smash his fist into the boy’s face and beat him to death and would have done so had he not feared the consequences. For days after that he felt ill just recalling the moment.

It was the old, the ailing, the feeble that particularly irritated him. It was wrong and unfair as he well knew but he couldn’t help himself. On one occasion he found someone had taken his spot behind the crates. It was a puny, graceless figure who was asleep there. The fellow’s hair was grey, his face had fallen in, he was hardly bigger than a child. His blue canvas trousers had patches on them. Budai was seized with a terrible anger. The blood rushed to his head and he dragged the tiny unresisting figure to his feet and tossed him aside… Later, in a fit of conscience, he looked for him everywhere, hoping to earn some forgiveness by buying him a drink but there was no trace of him. Like so many others that he had met in the city, he simply disappeared.

Wherever he wandered in town — and now he was deliberately crossing roads against the lights — he strewed rubbish, trod over floral borders and generally sought to break as many rules as he could. He had convinced himself that such rules had nothing to do with him, that he did not belong here, that he was simply a foreigner, an alien. If someone pushed him in the crowd, as often happened, of course, he craftily kicked the person back, or hit him with his fists, or if he lacked the opportunity to do that immediately, kept following the guilty party until he caught up with him and was able to exact full revenge by beating, slapping, punching and tearing at him. When he passed an empty telephone box he would enter, tear off the receiver and crush it under his heel. He would kick over the rubbish bins people had put out in front of their houses and enjoy seeing the rubbish spill out. He would throw stones at windows at night and smash streetlights.

But he never stopped making excursions, exploring ever new directions from the market. He had not yet given up the hope of spotting a railway station, a post office, a bank, an airline or tourist office, or of bumping into another of his compatriots like the man in the overcoat carrying a copy of Szinházi Élet, or indeed anyone else with whom he might make himself understood in one of the many languages he was capable of speaking… Sometimes he felt he was so close to realising this dream, found the prospect of it so real, he would not have been surprised to meet someone round the next corner. At other times though, he felt he had lost all hope and was resigned to spending a year, two years, or even five or ten years here if only he were assured that he would find his way home at the end of it. He needed something to wait for, something to measure, a reason for counting the days, weeks and months.

Or was there to be no return from here? Was this to be the end of the road, his ultima Thule, the place he had to reach sometime whichever way he turned, whether in Helsinki or some other place, the place where everyone wound up?

Spring crept on day by day. In the morning as he opened his eyes a sharp, oblique clot of light would explode all over his little nook. He had been so used to seeing the city in bad weather, under dense cloud, that at first he thought the source of light must be electric and it was only slowly, with a fluttering of the heart, that he realised it was the warm rays of the sun.

There was a strange stirring in the air. There were always a few stray dogs rambling about the market hall but now they were running about, restless, barking, whimpering, howling, romping together in packs. A gentle light spilled across the ramp. The loading stopped for a break. He could hear music in the distance: drums, cymbals, trumpets.

He set out in its direction, drawn by the hullabaloo and soon enough reached the wide street he had come across on a previous scouting mission. There was an even larger crowd here than usual, onlookers gawping from both pavements while a procession of infinite rolling length covered the roadway.

The procession included children, school-age pupils, girls and boys in wind-cheaters and other brightly coloured uniforms, carrying batons, twirling yellow-white-black plumes of feathers, some in coherent masses, some all mixed up. Some groups proceeded by dancing, others on roller-skates, still others threw balls in the air or kept them bouncing. Some held balloons. There were flags, signs, banners too, all in the local, incomprehensible script. And images, representations whose significance Budai found it impossible to grasp; heraldic devices, symbols composed of various elements, caricatures, bulls and foxes with human heads, birds, an ape brandishing a fly-swat, an old woman who seemed to be dropping from a tree, a fat figure with the ice cracking beneath him, a baby with a wrinkled face shorn of its hair. Who were they? Who were the people being mocked? Then came the drummers, a band of girls in sparkling silver costumes, every one of them with a drum, and then the horn players, a bunch of metro conductors in dark uniform. An entire marching band of firemen clattered by, lads in red helmets with the red fire engine following them at a stately pace, the engine fully manned, the ladder extended.