12
When the phone rang he snatched up the receiver, certain it would be his contact giving him a time and a place to hand over the bag, but it was the automated wake-up service informing him that it was 8.30 a.m. He lay back on the pillows. He was in a large clean bed in a large clean room. Muted colours, everything new. A large window with a net curtain looked over the narrow street. There was very little noise. Filtered sunlight fell on the glass-topped table.
For another half-hour he drowsed, then dragged off the sheets and went through to the bathroom, opening the complimentary bottles of shower gel, shampoo, conditioner, and standing under the shower with his face turned up to the jet. He had, he reckoned, stayed in over two hundred different hotels in the last twenty years, sometimes for pleasure, but mostly on work trips, ‘business’ (as if he had a business!). Places where he waited for an interview, for a discussion with a producer, a call from home. Rented space where the life of the last tenant was often still apparent in a trace of tobacco smoke or a hair laced around the plug chain. Sometimes much grosser evidence. In a hotel in London he had once found a splash of blood on a bathroom tile, and in a good hotel in Dublin – recommended – an unflushable human turd.
At the Hotel Opera on Révay utca, breakfast was included in the price of the room and served in a restaurant on the ground floor. On his way past the front desk, László raised a hand in greeting to the waist-coated receptionist with whom he had left the black bag the previous evening, though not before he had looked inside it in his room, disappointed to discover that whatever was in there had been thoroughly wrapped: an outer skin of waxed brown paper and beneath it what felt like a thick layer of plastic sheeting. He had been tempted to make a small incision, just big enough to see the stuff itself, but kneeling beside the bag with his nail scissors he had lost his nerve, afraid that his trespass would be discovered and somehow punished. He had the receipt for the bag in his wallet: a slip of green paper like a ticket for clothes at the dry-cleaner’s.
The restaurant was doing a brisk trade. A lot of German was being spoken, some English, some Japanese. When he asked for a table the waitress seemed slightly surprised to be dealing with a Hungarian. She found him a quiet place next to a pair of fine-boned, grey-haired ladies, whom László immediately decided were artistic spinsters heading off for a day at the National Gallery, where they would take an informed interest in winged altar pieces. They bid him a cheery ‘Grüss Gott!'. He nodded to them and smiled, and crossed to the buffet to make his selection for breakfast. Salami, mangoes, little French cheeses wrapped in foil. Sugary cakes. High-fibre cereals. Hard-boiled eggs. Odd how unappetizing it was, heaped together like this, the catering manager’s vision of plenty.
He drank two cups of coffee (too weak), ate half a grapefruit (not bad), and returned to his room, where he brushed and flossed his teeth. He had been booked in for three nights, with an option to extend, though please God it would all be over before then. There was nothing to do now but wait, and he hated waiting. He lay back on the bed, massaging his chest and thinking of the hundred and one things that might go wrong. Then he buttoned his shirt, put on his blue Nino Danieli jacket, checked himself in the mirror, scowled, and fled into the streets.
Emil was right, of course: the place had not changed much in six years. There was more traffic, more of the brand names one would expect in Paris or New York. More bars and casinos and sex clubs (their neon boasts – ‘Beautiful Nude Girls Inside!’ – almost erased by the glare of the sun). More tourists too, gangs of them with floppy hats and brightly coloured knapsacks, peering at buildings, staring at menus, vying with each other, it seemed, to be most like a tourist. But on the broad pavements of Andrássy ut the young women still walked arm in arm with just the right degree of sexual boldness, and in the gloom of the street corners the men still smoked and gossiped like amiable shades in the vestibule of Dante’s Inferno. The same air of indulgent melancholy, the wry humour. It was still Budapest.
He called at the Writer’s Bookshop on Liszt Ferenc ter, drank an espresso at the cafe there, then turned towards the river, passed the new Bank Centre on Anany János ut with its slabbed marble hide, walked through Szabadsag ter, and came out on to Steindl Imre utca, where immediately he felt some barometric shift in the atmosphere, as if the density of the known, the familiar, the ingrained, had subtly increased. Behind the new coats of paint and the rows of German and American cars (not the latest models, of course, and it was not hard to find old Skodas and Trabants), this was the old neighbourhood where the past of fifty years ago loomed like a tinted print under tissue paper. And it was here, in ’91, that a voice had called out his name and he had turned to see the face of his old school-friend, Sándor Dobi – Sándor the questioner! – and though that face had grown slack with time, darker, less nervously resolute, there had been no hesitation in László’s response. They had embraced, and over lunch become as drunk as students, stumbling over their stories. Sándor had spent twenty years in America – the construction industry, then a small restaurant business – and had two daughters in Minneapolis, and two ex-wives with whom he was still on excellent terms. ‘Fine times,’ he said, as they broached a fresh bottle of Palika. ‘But my dear Laci, in the end you have to come home. Nowhere in the world will fill your heart like the place you first saw the light.’
Was Sándor still alive? He had confessed to prostate trouble (‘a year ago, my friend, I thought “prostate” was something you went to a lawyer for!’). Had he meant cancer? How many of them were there now, scattered like ashes over the widths of the Earth? Lives such as theirs had not been conducive to longevity.
At the end of the street he crossed a line from shadow into broad sunlight. Ahead of him were the Buda hills, Fishermen’s Bastion, Matthias church, and away to the right, almost out of sight, the river split at the prow of Margarits island and poured its tons under the wings of the bridge. Cruise boats, the sleek and the frankly chaotic, were moored by both banks, and advertised trips to Visegrád or Esztergom, some of them promising lavish dinners, and even erotic shows, as if witnessing a Russian or Romanian teenager wiggle her hips to a tape of gypsy violins were the acme of old Hungarian romance.
On Szechenyi Rakpart, the apartment building had been given a new livery of pale green paint, though the effect was spoiled somewhat by a graffiti artist who had sprayed an illegible protest in red swirls along one side of the building. László approached the heavy double doors and read the names beside the bells: Binder, Serfleck, Kosztka, Dr Konig. In ’91 there had been at least one name he thought he knew, but not now, though he could not quite rid himself of the sense that if he looked again, rubbed his eyes and stared, he would find ‘LAZAR’, and push the worn button and go up to the old apartment and see his father listening to the sport on the radio, his mother rolling the pulp of dumplings between her palms, János combing hairballs from Toto the dog; and Aunt Gabi – the majestically breasted Gabi – complaining of how the veins in her legs were wide as bootlaces, and András, listen, András, don’t you have some kind of cream for it? Aren’t you supposed to be a doctor?
In the midst of his daydream the door was opened, and from the dark of the hallway two Persephones emerged with their shopping baskets. They eyed him suspiciously – this pale, dapper little man – then crossed the road to catch the number 2 tram, which was arriving with a tap-tapping of the overhead wires, like a giant yellow grasshopper rubbing its steel legs together. The door swung shut and he turned away. He needed somewhere cool to sit, somewhere that didn’t press upon him with the past, and retracing his steps he found a restaurant in the square south of the Basilica, with wooden booths and cotton tablecloths and not a tourist in sight. He took a table by the window and ordered his old favourite – goose livers in sour cream with mashed potatoes and onion – and while he waited he flicked through an edition of the previous day’s Hirlap, trying to take an interest in the antics of the government, though it was the same game of musical chairs he had grown so weary of everywhere. In the middle pages, however, two items caught his attention. The first was a short article about the Balkans, warning of a coming storm in Kosovo, where Serb abuses had become more outrageous. Milšsević, argued the journalist, survived by the manufacture of crises, and was in need of another war. Any war, even a disastrous one, would serve him better than a peace in which his enemies would have time to organize. There was a photograph of the militia leader, ‘Arkan’, in beret and black fatigues, machine-pistol over his shoulder, chin jutting, a real people’s hero. Looking at him, László found that the voices of doubt in his head were momentarily stilled. Arkan made questions of right and wrong, for and against, seem simple: one was instinctively opposed to such a man – no special virtue was required – and if the money in the bag hurried this gangster on the road to hell then so much the better. It was an end that justified a great deal.