Metropole Page 5

  ‘Taxi! Taxi ... taxi? ’

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

  ‘Kiripudu labadaparatchara ... patarashara ...’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Duhmuche bruedimruechuere! Kluett!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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