Metropole Read online

  Ferenc Karinthy

  Metropole

  Translated from Hungarian by

  George Szirtes

  TELEGRAM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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