It looked more promising to study the inscriptions on coins: coins, as far as he could remember — and indeed according to his experience of other countries — usually contained only the numeral, the unit of currency and the name of the state that had minted them. He jingled his change: there were 50s, 20s and 10s. The writing on all of them however was circular, on the perimeter, without any gaps, the end, wherever it was, leading back to the beginning. Given this, he not only failed to discover the name of the currency but even where he should start reading the various characters.
He wasn’t going to get anywhere like this: it was like going around blindfolded, seeing nothing… Should he set about writing down such individual letters as he could discern in the various inscriptions? And what good would that do? It was pointless, he hadn’t enough material to work on, not a single solid piece of information on which he could build a case or develop a view, nothing to go on at all. He needed a dictionary, or some bilingual piece of text, some brochure or other.
He should look for a bookshop then, which is what he did, searching the town until he found one. True, he had a feeling that he had seen one in the course of his earlier explorations, in the quarter behind the building site with the skyscraper — which he found had reached the sixty-ninth floor. The streets were narrow there and the traffic was dense even by local standards, people packed together, the crush before certain shops almost life-threatening. He might have stumbled into the end-of-season sales. He had left home in mid-February and sales were generally held at the end of winter there too. All round him salesmen were crying their wares even out on the pavement, offering suits, knitwear and underwear at a clearly reduced price: shoppers rushed them, surrounded them in tight impermeable groups, the merchandise passing from hand to hand, in and out of boxes and cases as people bargained for them, everything mixed up and confused. The shops too were full to bursting point. Some had pulled down their shutters so as to keep more from entering but there was a scramble even in front of these, people shouting at those inside, clinging to the ironwork, some managing to push the shutters up and forcing their way in, ever more waves of them, pressing through, ever denser, ever more crushed. Here were vast numbers of shoes, carpet slippers and stockings on offer along with many other items. A blind sweet-vendor was repeating his trade cry in a high, falsetto, sing-song.
Things were no different at the bookshop. Hordes were picking over towers of books, some searching the piles on the floor, some at the tables, some taking books off stands and discarding them just anywhere, throwing up great clouds of dust while others clambered up steps to examine the top shelves. It was such a chaotic state of affairs that Budai couldn’t work out which among them was the vendor. Jammed as he was in the crowd he tried in vain to address various customers, even bellowing in their ears but there was so much extraneous noise no one took any notice of him. People were either reading or browsing. It was only after he had spent a considerable time casting his eye about that he spotted a fat, liverish-looking man with a fleshy nose in the depths of the shop. The man wore a soft leather coat and drew attention to himself by being particularly loud and aggressive: he was busily putting books out, wrapping them and tying them up with string while at the same time vigorously bargaining, now taking books from the pile, now adding to it. He might just as easily have been selling potatoes or tomatoes. There was certainly no great opportunity here to explain anything or make a request, not even to point to something for however he tried to get close to the liverish man and make him understand what he wanted there were always others swarming around him, all talking at once. Whatever Budai had to say was lost in the hubbub.
So he too started searching the stands hoping to come across a dictionary or at least a bilingual publication such as a travel guide, anything in a language he might recognise so that he could hold it open and explain to the owner that it was in fact a dictionary he wanted. But however many books he took down they were all in the same runic writing. Most of them were old antiquarian copies in various shapes with various bindings, often ragged and squashed, but there were also some almost new books with uncut pages. He tried to determine the direction of the text in these, left to right or vice versa, as he suspected had been the case with the newspaper. Simply leafing through the books like this offered no clue either way though there were some that seemed to have two title pages, one at the front and one at the back, or perhaps it was the main title page at one end and the half-title at the other.
Here too there were reductions in price, the numbers written on the inside of the back cover being ruled out with ink and smaller figures inserted. But even so the prices looked frighteningly high compared to the cash he had in his pocket. The lowest were priced 3 or 4, the rest at 10, 15 and 25, which was more than he had altogether. He carried on browsing for over an hour flicking through a great variety of books. There were volumes of verse, things that looked like novels, small press publications, popular books in cloth and paper bound editions, technical and scientific material printed on shiny paper about what was likely to be an extraordinary range of fields, not to mention diploma works on chemistry and mathematics complete with diagrams and footnotes, the textual parts of which might have been worth studying in greater detail were he not so abysmally ignorant of their subjects. There were also periodicals of uncertain content, complete runs of them, bound catalogues with serial numbers and endless notes and figures indicating who knows what; folios of drawings and caricatures of people he did not recognise, some with indecipherable signatures and even a few lines of verse; theatre and concert programmes; magazines about this or that wholly unfamiliar actress photographed in various costumes; then children’s books, story books — if that is what they were — and maybe a few school text-books too, and much else… But he did not come across a single book written in another language, not even in part. For want of anything more helpful he would have taken a handbook of grammar but he found not one among the many thousands on thousands of books on sale.
All this was depressing enough and exhausting too with all the pushing, shoving and noise, though everything would immediately have been all right if he could have explained his need for a dictionary. The crush was such that he failed to make any sort of contact with the dealer who was surrounded by an impatient crowd of customers. He tried communicating with him but simply could not get his attention. Having had enough of this farce and judging any further attempt to be pointless he finally chose a book for himself. He had just enough time to catch the dealer’s eye, show him the book and pay him the money.
The book seemed to be a collection of short stories, that at least was what the typography suggested, that and the amount of dialogue in the text. Here, however, unlike in the other books, the writing ran unambiguously from left to right and top to bottom as he could tell by the titles of the stories and the way the beginnings and ends were presented. The book was not particularly thick and the price was relatively low too, a mere 3.50. The cover showed an exotic landscape in green and blue pastel colours: a bay, palm trees, a hillside with a crowd of white villas, roof rising above roof in the background. It might have been the deep blue water and the wide horizon that first attracted him. The flap carried a photograph, presumably of the author, a man of about forty or so in a polo-neck jumper, his face round, his hair cut short, his body relaxed, apparently unposed. He was standing in front of a slatted fence, his eyes narrowing, his expression tired or slightly bored, with a slightly mocking smile playing about his lips as if he were in the act of suppressing a yawn. Everything about the image looked familiar but he couldn’t remember where he had seen it. In any case, his look, his pose, his general appearance was clearly that of a contemporary writer, Budai felt, which might have been another reason he had noticed the book. He wouldn’t, after all, get far with an old work using archaic language or with one written in high poetic manner, nor with anything technical, scientific, jargon-laden, specialist, didactic or abstract. What he needed was something written in contemporary colloquial language, the sort of language spoken on the street, which he would have to learn word by word. The most likely books, in fact the only books properly fit for the purpose, would be short stories or something like them.