Despite his exhaustion, he knew that he would not sleep; usually, he would be fortunate to gain three hours of rest. It was at night that he saw the emaciated faces reflected back at him as if from the hundreds of thousands of compact discs he had set loose upon the world. What took you so long to return? That would be the first question they asked. They will speak to him in Czech and Polish and Hebrew and Romany and Hungarian, languages he understood fluently in the twilight of semiconsciousness, but in which he could never answer. His first language was that of notation, of music, but none of his compositions to date appeased the faces as they did the many satisfied customers and concertgoers worldwide.
He stood with an inaudible groan and wandered through the suite turning down all of the heaters. The sitting room offered a view of the monolithic building opposite the hotel and of the traffic below on the Szent István körút. It was only midafternoon, yet it already grew dark. There was much to do. A yellow tram glided past, down the center of the road, toward the river. Overall-clad workmen on ladders struggled to hang flags from the lampposts in anticipation of the holiday. They were difficult to attach in the harsh wind, which Harkályi could not feel from the comfort of his room. The men argued and laughed. They passed around a plastic cola bottle half-full of pale wine. A knock came at the door and he took the forints from the table, folded the bill in his palm. A young porter stood next to an elaborate, brass handcart. “Harkályi Lajos?”
“Igen.” Yes.
“Beszél magyarul?”
“Well, no. I am afraid that I do not.”
He stepped aside and the porter wheeled the squeaking trolley into the room. It contained just one suitcase and one hanging suit bag. The porter looked at him. He was twenty or twenty-five years old and attired in the formal finery of the hotel trade, the tailed coat smelling of car exhaust and cigarette smoke. The porter stared for a moment. “You are the composer,” he said.
“Yes.”
“My girlfriend, she has your CD.”
“Oh. Well, please give her my regards.” He considered withholding the money.
“She doesn’t listen to it very much because it makes her cry.”
How was he to respond? The hotel clothes didn’t fit the boy especially well, and he had neglected to shave for several days; his teeth were not very well cared for. “Thank you,” Harkályi said, and handed him the forints, which the porter, without acknowledgment, slipped into a pocket of his untailored red pants. He then deposited the suitcase onto the room’s luggage rack and hung the suit bag inside the armoire. Harkályi remained standing at the door, holding it open. The hallway was empty, free of people and hideously carpeted. He opened the door wider, but the porter did not retreat right away.
“I am Miklós,” the boy said. “Press the concierge button on your telephone if you need anything. Ask for Miklós.” He lifted his round hat a centimeter above his head for an instant and pulled the cart behind himself, back into the hallway.
“I will do just that very thing, Miklós — thank you.”
“Anything at all,” he said. “I—” But Harkályi closed the door.
He started to unpack. It would be a short stay, less than forty-eight hours, so he had not brought much. In his suitcase, on top, he found a foreign, white document from the United States authorities alerting him to the fact that they had randomly searched his bag for purposes of national security. His clothes and belongings appeared unmolested, however, and he placed them in neat piles into drawers. He had carried with him a second, nicer pair of shoes and, for Magda, some chocolates and an advance copy of his newest recording, his Concerto for Violin as performed by a technically flawless and altogether unmusical young star and the Cleveland Orchestra.
He had left his briefcase in the bedroom. From it he drew his leather shaving kit and a small, mostly round stone. It was the size of a baby’s fist and tears and years of wear had buffed it smooth; it had traveled with him for longer than he wanted to remember. He planned to leave it in Hungary, where it was given to him. He put it on the bedside table, taking care that it did not scratch the glass surface.
He needed a nap, but sleep would not take him. Too weary to yet venture outside, he stared for hours, utterly motionless, at the carnage transmitted to the suite’s television set. It was like an open sewer line spilling onto the carpet. He had seen it all already, yet the circularity of history did not bring him comfort. When he felt the grumbling of his stomach, Harkályi slipped back into his more comfortable shoes, his overcoat, and his hat and gloves. He carried the stone in an outer pocket of his jacket. Opening his billfold, he confirmed the presence of his key card and stepped out into the hallway, pulling the door tight behind him.
There were others waiting for the elevator, a woman and two children. They spoke low German, a familiar dialect of his first language. They were going downstairs, to the pastry shop, for cakes. “Cukrászda”—that was one of those words, one of the few he remembered from childhood, for which there was no exact or effective English equivalent. “Ideges” was another. When the elevator arrived, the older of the girls demanded the privilege of pressing the L button while the other got to press CLOSE. They squealed and wiggled like two already-overfed Teutonic hogs. In the metallic reflection of the doors, the four of them looked like a family, a grandfather taking the children out for pizza and ice cream, but the elevator stopped and the image was split in half, down the middle, as a suited businessman entered. He inspected the lighted buttons and, satisfied, hummed a melody that Harkályi to his horror recognized as his own, the main theme of his Symphony No. 4. The piece that made him famous, and wealthy. He made a mental note to take the stairs in the future.
2.
The temperature and fetid air — diesel exhaust, grease, burned meat — attacked him, an all-powerful and immovable force that he knew would shadow him for the next two days. It was already late, and even colder than he had anticipated, colder than his memory allowed, and he worried that his overcoat alone would not keep him warm. A heavier sweater hung in the closet upstairs, but he did not dare risk returning to the room and becoming further waylaid by the same indecision that had kept him away for so many years. He had been cold before; it would not kill him.
Harkályi enjoyed walking, exploring by foot every city he visited, though doing so had become more difficult of late. In the previous decade he visited every medium and large city in Europe, Asia, and North America, forsaking only Budapest, the city from which he had disappeared as a child. Tonight, however, he must first find a restaurant. He had purchased an expensive guidebook, but knew better than to trust the culinary advice contained therein. He had in his travels learned that the book’s audience was considerably younger than himself, and he preferred not to subject his ears to the auditory torture of what passed for music in those establishments. As in every city, the trick to finding a suitable place for a meal would involve a willingness to traverse the side streets, to ignore the glossy maps.
The workmen were long gone, presumably to a warm pub. Hungarian flags now flew from all of the lampposts along the ring road, though the wind threatened to shred them into swatches of red, white, and green. People rushed beneath them unaware of all that they possessed by virtue of their belonging here; they pushed past him, smoking cigarettes and speaking over each other, quite noisily, in a language he did not know to his satisfaction. The traffic was marvelous in its density, consistent with that of Berlin or London or Rome, yet seemingly even more aggressive than in those places, competitive. He passed a hair salon that was affixed to the hotel, a bookshop, a butcher with ugly brown sausages hanging in long rows, a steamy pizzeria, a shoe store, another shoe store, a few places the purposes of which he could not determine, closed and darkened. The window of a music shop contained a small display of operatic compact discs. Recordings of Kodály and Erkel and Verdi and Puccini were arranged in a small ziggurat of plastic. Some of his own releases were interspersed throughout. Then it caught his attention: a glossy publicity photograph of himself hung in the window attached to two clear strings that resembled fishing line. It was an advertisement for the concert tomorrow, which, he had been led to believe, had sold out months earlier. They had pasted his photo, crookedly, onto a large sheet of cardboard. In it he was dressed almost exactly as he was now: black overcoat, charcoal-gray turtleneck. His hair in the photo was longer, however, Einsteinian. The image embarrassed him, and he moved along before he could be seen gazing upon his own reflection.