Metropole (13 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?