War & War
Page 6
35.
The visa arrived but they were still sitting in the same way in the same place on the bench set out to accommodate those who were waiting, since the old woman had not yet turned up, and on being shown the visa the people at the desk had nothing to add concerning his chances of getting a ticket, telling him off instead, asking him what his problem was, what was he getting so uppity and impatient about, constantly jumping up and down like that instead of sitting down calmly and waiting to be called in his turn at the right time, because there were people out there who had been waiting for weeks, to which Korin naturally replied with an acquiescent nod, assuring the staff that he would stop being a nuisance to them, that from now on, having got the point, he would, he promised, no longer impose on them, and so saying, sat back down on the bench beside the stewardess and said nothing for the next few minutes, simply waited, clearly anxious in case his behavior had set the staff against him, which, he explained to the stewardess, would harm no one but him, then, suddenly, as if he had forgotten everything he had said earlier, he turned to her again and continued from where he had just now left off, informing her that nothing would please him more than spending the entire week here, in continual conversation with her, though he himself did not quite understand what the hell it was that inspired him to launch out on his monologue, a monologue, furthermore, that was exclusively about himself, for he had never done anything like this in his life, not once, Korin told the stewardess, gazing into her eyes, for it would have been inconceivable before, in fact if anything characterized him as he had been it was a reluctance to talk about himself, he’d not say a word to anyone on the subject, and if now he felt impelled, it was possibly because he was frightened that he might be attacked, fearing that they were on his trail, which was by no means a certainty, more a simple likelihood, in other words it must be this or some other related cause that made him launch out on this torrent of words, feeling that he had to tell all, the bit about the riverbank, about the psychotherapy, the hierarchy, the amnesia, about freedom and about the center of the world so that he, who had never previously been aware of having the least talent for it, might at last initiate someone else into the secret story of the last years, the last months, the last day, telling them what happened at the archive, in the caboose, on the railway bridge and on Almássy Square; telling, in other words, everything, or, to be more accurate, the essential parts, though telling only the truly essential parts was becoming steadily harder, and not only because the whole consisted of individual details, details of which there was a maddening surfeit, but also because—a most humdrum problem—it made his head ache, or to be more precise made the headache he already had exceed its usual intensity so that it was becoming quite unbearable, or rather, he corrected himself, not even so much his head as his neck, his shoulders and the base of his skull, just there, he pointed out to the stewardess, and when you took all these pains into consideration, the whole effect, when it put its mind to it, could become unbearable, and there was nothing he could do about these attacks for nothing would help, not massage, not turning his head this way and that, not moving his shoulders about, nothing, the only cure was sleep, sleep alone could shift it, the complete and utter mental relaxation, the loss of all self-consciousness, though that was precisely the problem, that he never could relax his self-consciousness, never free himself of the tension in his head, he had to hold it just as he was now doing, though, naturally, it led to the cramping of the muscles and strained the ligaments, so that eventually the constitution of his whole upper body was in open revolt, at which point he had no option, if the young lady would be so kind as to forgive him, but to lie down here on the bench, only for a minute of course, but lie down he must if only to relieve the strain on his muscles and ligaments, from the trapezius and the splenius, from the sub-occipital and the sternocleidomastodeus, for somehow the pressure had to be lifted or else the thing he had long feared would come to pass, that is to say his head would drop off, because that would surely happen, the whole caboodle would just collapse, and then there would be no New York, no nothing, said Korin, it would all be over before you could say Jack Robinson.
36.
The stewardess stood up to make room for Korin, who gradually, carefully, arranged himself full-length along the bench but no sooner had he closed his eyes than he had to snap them open again because the door to the street was suddenly thrown open and a whole crowd of people thrust themselves through it, or to put it more precisely, erupted into the office with such brutal force it seemed they wanted to smash everything in their way, impatient of the slightest objection, shouting harsh instructions left and right, fore and aft, to the effect that the person they were delivering, who was now shoved forward in a brilliantly glistening ebony-black wheelchair, and who was now advancing through the ranks of would-be ticket purchasers and employees, had a quite particular reason for bursting in like this and had an absolute right to run people down while no one had any cause or justification to question this privilege; in other words, albeit half a day late, and to Korin’s deepest disappointment but to the stewardess’s great relief, the old woman from Switzerland had finally arrived in her very own skin-and-bone, dried-out body, her face fallen in and scored over with a thousand wrinkles, her gray eyes tiny and lightless, her lips cracked, her ears decked out in an outsize set of gold earrings that dangled right down to her shoulders, her whole presence immediately, silently, declaring that it was with precisely this body, this face, these eyes, these lips and just these enormous earrings that she intended to determine what was going or not going to happen in the next few minutes; nor did she in fact say anything at all, and as to her entourage, it was clear that there was no communication of orders to them either, it being more a case of now a little this way, now a little faster, now a touch slower, while they kept their eyes firmly glued to her, hanging on to her the way the golden earrings did to her ears, until, with one gesture as minimal as the act of breathing she made it clear what she wanted, which way she wanted to go, which route they should take to which desk, a decision that neither the employees nor those waiting for tickets had any power to resist, for those behind the desks stopped working and the queues broke up, simultaneously bringing to an end the situation in which Korin, still cursed with his headache, and the stewardess found themselves, since Korin had, at the very least, after the first moment of terror, to sit up in order to convince himself that the deputation had not come for him, and the stewardess had to snap into action and announce that it was she whom MALÉV had, after the necessary formalities, together with the Helping Hands service, sent to conduct the elderly lady to her chosen, specially selected flight, where she would be her supporter and aide, to be in the strict sense of the word, her guide on the road to the Ferihegy airport.
37.
The meat-filled pancake à la Hortobágy was fine, the old lady’s translator conveyed to the nervous official, but the air—and here every member of the entourage allowed himself a smile—did not meet with Frau Hanzl’s approval, no, eure Luft, as the old lady repeated in her loud, cracked rather masculine voice, shaking her head in a disillusioned manner, ist einfach unqualifizierbar, versteht ihr?, unqualifizierbar! after which, having indicated that she wished the computer monitor to be turned in her direction, she jabbed her finger at one of the lines, from which point everything happened improbably fast: no more than a minute or two had elapsed before her entourage was in full possession of a ticket and the stewardess had been informed what her duties were to be regarding “the acutely sensitive Mrs. Hanzl who was in the habit of making all her own arrangements for travel,” and the shiny ebony-black wheelchair containing the acutely sensitive Mrs. Hanzl, was already turning and thundering across the hall toward the exit so that Korin, who was looking this way and that in panic, had barely time enough to dash over to the stewardess and condense into a single sentence everything she absolutely had to know, since, he stared at her in desperation, there was so much he had not had time to say, the m
ost important things in fact, having neglected to inform her of the very reason he had to get to New York and what he had to do there, indicating his coat sleeve and the manuscript of which he had not said a word so far though it was by far the most important aspect of the whole thing and the stewardess would understand nothing if she did not know that, for that manuscript—he grabbed her hand and tried to delay the gathering momentum of the procession—was the most extraordinary piece of writing that anyone had ever produced, but he could talk to the stewardess all he liked for she was no longer listening, having only time enough to smile and beg his forgiveness for having to get on now, in response to which Korin himself could do no more than run ahead, to prop the door open before the on-rushing wheelchair, and raise his voice above the din of the agitated procession of escorts to remark what a wonderful, unforgettable day it had been, and that the young stewardess lady should allow him to file away the two tiny dimples of her smile in his memory forever, to which she replied smiling, with precisely those two tiny dimples, that he was most welcome to file them away, whereupon she waved and disappeared behind the closing door, leaving Korin alone in the suddenly ear-splitting silence with only the eternal memory of those two little dimples to console him.
38.
For 119,000 Forints he could have a week in Iceland, one bored official told him, rattling the figures off; for 99,900 a week on the Nile, for 98,000 a week in Tenerife, for 75,900 five days in London, 69,000 for a week in Cyprus or Mallorca, 49,900 for a week on the Turkish Riviera, 39,900 for a week in Rhodes, 34,900 for the same in Corfu, 24,900 for Dubrovnik or Athens-Thessaloniki, 24,000 for a week at the Cloisters in Meteora, Jesolo was 22,900, Salou in Spain 19,900, or he could have eight days in Kraljevica for 18,200 Forints, and if none of those appealed to him, he told the customer standing at the desk, for he appeared to be dithering, then, the agent turned his head away and made a moue with his mouth, he was perfectly free to go elsewhere, and so saying he pressed a button on his computer, tipped his chair back and stared at the ceiling with an expression that clearly declared that he, for his part, had given out as much information as he felt bound to and was not going to give out one bit more.
39.
What ticket for what flight? Korin enquired at the desk later when they called him up to tell him the news, and started massaging his forehead the way people do when they want to summon up their lost concentration, cutting the operative short by asking: Tomorrow? What do you mean tomorrow?