It’s perfectly all right, you can walk beside me, the interpreter encouraged Korin who was continually hanging back next day as they proceeded down the street, through the subway and finally up the escalators on 47th Street; come along now, catch up, stop hanging back, here, walk beside me, it’s all right, but it was no use calling and gesturing, for Korin, involuntarily perhaps, kept falling ten or twenty paces behind, so in the end the interpreter gave up and thought to hell with him, as he recounted later, if he wants to trail behind then, very well, let him, after all it means damn anything to him where he chooses to walk, the essential point being, as he decided and made perfectly plain to Korin, that this was the last time they ventured out together, for frankly he had no time to spare, he was so busy, and he would help it this time, but that in the future Korin would have to stand on his own two feet, all by himself, right? he snapped, because it very much looked as if this was going in one ear and out of the other as far as Korin was concerned, lurking behind him like some retard, when he should at least listen, the interpreter barked furiously and pointlessly, for Korin was all ears and it was only that he had a hundred, no a hundred thousand other matters to attend to at the moment, this being the first time since his terrifying journey from the airport to The Sunshine Hotel that, thank God, he could look around in anything like normal fashion, the first time that he felt at all capable of comprehending events around him, even while being afraid, as he confessed next morning in the kitchen, afraid then and still afraid, without knowing what precisely it was that he should or should not be afraid of, what he should or should not look out for, and therefore, naturally, in a state of high alert at every step, right from the first, as he followed the interpreter, careful that he should not fall too far behind but at the same time careful not to hurry too much, careful to drop in his subway token at the machine precisely as required, fearing that the expression on his face, which might not be sufficiently indifferent, should call too much attention to him, in other words taking care to behave in an appropriate manner without knowing what an appropriate manner might be, which was why he was following Mr. Sárváry, in this exhausted condition, to a shop with the sign Photo above it on 47 th Street, so tired that he was barely capable of dragging himself along as they stepped in and had immediately to mount some stairs, which meant dragging himself up the stairs too, so that by this time he hardly knew where he was or what was happening as Mr. Sarváry, he told the woman, had a word with a Hasidic Jew behind a counter who replied something to the effect that they would have to wait, though there were very few other people in the shop, in fact only a single customer before them, but even so they waited at least twenty minutes before the Hasidic Jew came out from behind the counter, led them to a mass of computers and started to explain something of which he, Korin, as he said, naturally understood not a word, and only caught on when Mr. Sárváry informed him that they had found the best possible model for his purposes and asked him if he would like to create a
home page, when, seeing his clueless expression, he gestured in a hopeless comical manner, said Korin, and, thank heaven, decided the matter for himself, so that all that remained was for him to fork out the sum of twelve hundred and eighty-nine dollars, which he did, in return for which he received a small light package to carry home, and so they started back though Korin did not so much as dare to ask a question on the way, because he was keenly aware of the value of twelve hundred and eighty-nine dollars on the one hand and of the small light package on the other, and so they proceeded silently through the subway, changing trains once or twice, and so forth, making their way toward 159th Street in silence, without a word, and though a word is not much, it was probably the case that Mr. Sárváry was also exhausted by the traveling, for they continued thus in absolute silence, he and the interpreter, the latter sometimes casting a forbidding look at him whenever he felt that Korin was on the point of saying something, for he was determined not to endure another idiotic monologue, preferring silence, at least until they got home, when, the interpreter told him, he would explain how the thing worked and what he had to do, as indeed he did, explaining everything, turning the computer on and showing him which key to press and when to press it, though he was not prepared to do more than that, he said, demonstrating for the last time what each key was for and how he could get the necessary diacritics, then asked him not for the agreed two hundred as he had intended the previous night when he offered to help with the purchase, but for four hundred, straight out, as a loan, seeing the guy seemed to be made of money, not just the cash in his overcoat, he laughed to his partner, sitting with her at the table, saying, just imagine the overcoat, the money being all sewn into the lining like that and him having to poke his hand in and get it out of there so he could pay the store, imagine that, have you ever heard anything like it, as if it were some kind of purse, he roared with laughter, and the guy just peeled off the four hundred greenbacks, like that, which makes a round thousand, sweetheart, then he left him, continued the interpreter, but before leaving he told him, perfectly straight, Mr. Korin, pal, you won’t survive long round here like that, because if you don’t take that money out of your coat lining there are people out there who can smell the stuff, and it’s beginning to stink to high heaven, so the next time you stick your nose out of the door, someone or other will kill you for the sheer smell of it.23.