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 delicious 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.
The action at this point became more concentrated: the players were actually standing in ranks. Suddenly one of them sprang from the rank with the ball in his hands and scrambled up the wire fence, presumably with the intention of leaving the field. As soon as they spotted this the others threw themselves on him and, though he had his left leg over the fence already, they got hold of the right and started pulling him back. The crowd roared making a fearful noise. The fugitive fought in vain to free himself but there were too many below him unwilling to let him go and in the end they succeeded in dragging him back, so in the end he just lay on the grass, the ball having bounced away and the rest left him in peace, not bothering with him. Then a tall black player in striped kit broke away on the far side, right where the fence was at its highest and, being remarkably nimble, looked as though he was going to escape. Everyone rushed to tackle him, including the man who had just failed the lower fence, racing after the dark figure, and they only just managed to grab him so that however he kicked and hung there eventually he too was brought back down. The crowd was going wild, now encouraging, now threatening, though it was far from clear to Budai which of them was supporting whom. Whenever somebody tried to escape from the pitch there were shouts of support for him, though once the others were in pursuit, grabbing and tugging at him, the crowd seemed to transfer its sympathies to the pursuers, roaring them on with furious, bloodthirsty vehemence.