On the other hand he was certainly in a far better position than someone having to reconstruct a dead language. Such a scholar would have only remnant texts to work with and would therefore be forced to rely on indirect, circuitous, speculative and fruitless experimental methods. Budai was confronted with a living language, that symphony of a million voices available in street, square, hotel and metro: he simply had to pay close enough attention and distinguish between specific strains and tones and score them later. Thinking this, he put the newspaper and other printed matter aside, for the moment at least, and decided to keep his ears open.
He could after all learn the language from any of the city’s inhabitants, slowly picking out words, absorbing the rules of grammar and so on, if only someone were willing to spend enough time with him. But courtesy and helpfulness seemed to be in short supply in a population that was constantly rushing and jostling: he needed someone to whom he could explain what he wanted, someone who just once paid attention to his attempts at deaf-and-dumb mime. That was what no one had time for. No one seemed capable of such human contact. Although there was one, just possibly, one…
He began by writing down the first ten numbers, hurrying out to the lift, finding Pepé, having her take him up to the top floor, then holding out the sheet of paper while pointing to the 1. It wasn’t clear what the girl replied and he was sure she hadn’t understood him or what he wanted, because she laughed, lit a cigarette and shrugged her shoulder saying something like:
‘Tuulli ulumúlu alaulp tleplé…’
That couldn’t be the name of a number. Budai did not let it rest there. He raised his thumb then showed her a one-unit banknote and waited. Bébé gave a shorter answer this time, a one-syllable answer.
‘Dütt!’
He went on to 2, 3, 4 and so on, noting down each answer phonetically. He had got as far as ten when the lift buzzer sounded. There must have been a lot of people down there. Just to be certain he pointed to the 1 again but this time the girl gave quite a different answer.
‘Shümülükada.’
This confused him. Did this word mean 1 or was it the word she gave before? The buzzer sounded ever more impatiently. The girl stubbed out her cigarette and gestured to show she was sorry but had to go. He tried to persuade her by means of gestures that it was a matter of urgency. Please come back if you can, I will wait here for you, he meant to say. She hesitated a moment. Budai must have looked so desperate it must have communicated itself to her across the chasm between their languages. Edede nodded solemnly and gave a flick of her blonde eyelashes to signal that it was all right, she understood.
It was half an hour before the lift door hummed open again and the girl reappeared. Budai went over the same numbers but was not satisfied with the answers. Only two or three of them sounded as they did before. True, it was hard to pinpoint the names of the numbers in Tete’s speech because she usually answered not with one word but with others that might mean something like good, that’s fine, yes, so there you are, I understand, just a moment, I’ve already said that or any other sentence-filling phrasal gesture of the conversational kind. Maybe there were several words for the same number, just as in certain languages the figure 0 can be indicated by nil, zero, nought or even love?
After this he kept going out to the lift waiting for Gyegyegye to turn up — even after repeated enquiries he had not managed to work out her precise name — so that they might continue their language classes. The girl had to work, of course, conveying a never-ending stream of passengers up or down, and someone no doubt would be keeping eyes on her to make sure she was doing it properly. Because of this they could only spend brief periods of time on the top floor and even then the lift was constantly being called in a way that got on Budai’s nerves. Sometimes he got back on the lift with her, having no alternative but to ride up and down in the eternally emptying and filling compartment as if he too were an arriving or departing guest. She would be fully occupied operating the lift, even having the odd telephone conversation with someone, possibly receiving instructions, so it was only occasionally that she could let him know with a flick of her eyes that she knew he was there and hadn’t forgotten him… The single fan in the lift did little to solve the problem of ventilation. It was one of the reasons he could hardly wait to get back to the eighteenth floor again, desperate to get a breath of fresh air and discover this or that snippet of information from the girl.
Strangely enough, not for a moment did she question the role Budai had allotted her. Indeed she was clearly ready and willing to act as his language tutor as though this were her responsibility, something she was positively aching to do. As soon as they got to the top floor she lit a cigarette, blew out the smoke and stood ready to help, prepared to answer any question he might have, though it would not have been a simple task for her either, trying to make sense of his scribbles and gestures. Surely she must be wondering what this guest was wanting with his impenetrable foreign words and phrases, what it was he was really after. Maybe she felt it was up to her to look after him, that she alone was capable of helping — or was it some other instinct that drove her?
However he tried Budai could not work out the precise terms of her employment or whether she had a fixed routine. There were times he could not find her when his life seemed empty, barren and pointless: it frightened him to think how vague his own place in the world was. He made no effort to experiment with other people, thinking it would only confuse him now and cast into doubt the tiny amount he thought he might have learned. And after all Dédé’s kindness and patience it would have felt a little like infidelity.
He didn’t flatter himself that he could stop the first person in the street and simply ask them to teach him the language: he already knew that was out of the question. There were a lot of drunks out there, especially after dark, not only in the street but in the metro, as well as in the hotel lobby: men and women, reeling about, singing, shouting, arguing, swearing and fighting — not much point asking them. It was chiefly the evenings he feared when his hotel room felt like a prison. If only he had something to read in whatever language as long as he understood it!
He couldn’t really spend all his time trying to solve the obscure wherewithal of texts of which he did not recognise a single letter. He lacked the determination, he lacked the detachment: he feared going mad. In any case, to go out was to risk missing the girclass="underline" there were times when she worked both mornings and nights. But he couldn’t just sit around in his room doing nothing: he was constantly restless, anxious to carry on researching and sniffing out the truth, to come and go, fearing that if he simply stood still no one would look for him.
So he spent most of his time in the lobby keeping track of the movements of the lift. The vast hall was always full, even at night, people sitting in armchairs, dozing or teetering sleepily to and fro. The queue at reception was always long with ever more guests carrying ever more luggage. What was strange was that he had only seen luggage enter the hoteclass="underline" nothing seemed to leave it. Guests must be departing all the time, their luggage must be somewhere. Perhaps if he were to investigate that… Might the luggage be carried out through another door? And where would that door be? Surely it could not be that people arrived here never to leave?