War & War (31 page)

29.

In the corner opposite the bed the TV was on, a brand-new, large-screen, remote-controlled, two-hundred-and-fifty channel SONY MODEL, with the sound turned down but the screen was alive, the images continually running on a loop, the charming smiling man and the woman, and as the diamond show moved toward its conclusion the set darkened then flickered into life again, back to the beginning once more, the screen fading then brightening so that the room too began to pulse and twitch with the neurotic light, while the interpreter lay fast asleep, his legs spread out, with the woman beside him, turned away from him toward the window, on her side and still wearing her blue terry cloth bathrobe, having kept it on because she was cold, the interpreter having dragged all the covers off her this first night, so that she remained wide awake, unable to sleep for the excitement, on her side, her knees drawn up to her stomach, her eyes open, hardly blinking, while using her right hand under the pillow to support her head and extending the other arm along her body, her fingers bent, clutching a small box, gripping it tightly and never letting go, gripping it in sheer joy, staring straight ahead in the neurotically pulsing blue light, looking straight ahead and hardly blinking.

1.

He did not look back once he set off but walked along the icy pavement toward the Washington Avenue stop, never glancing back over his shoulder, not, he explained later, because he had resolved not to but because everything now was truly behind him and nothing in front of him, only the icy sidewalk, and nothing inside him either except of course the four figures he was dragging with him toward Washington Avenue, that is to say Kasser and his companions; and that was all he remembered of that first hour after leaving the house on 159th Street, except the early dawn when it was still dark, with hardly anyone on the street, and the effort of slowly absorbing all the events of the previous night as he proceeded down the first two hundred yards or so along the ice, the way his savior, Mr. Sárváry, eventually fell silent after the great celebration and the countless toasts to their eternal friendship, the moment when he was free to return to his room, close the door and flop down on his bed and decide that he would take nothing with him, and, having decided that, closed his eyes; but sleep did not come, and later when the door quietly opened and there stood Mr. Sárváry’s young lady, Korin’s faithful listener through all those long weeks, who padded over to the bed quietly so as not to wake him, for he pretended to be deeply asleep, not wanting to have to say goodbye, since what could he say about where he was going, there was nothing to say, but the young lady hovered by his bed for a very long time, no doubt watching him, trying to tell whether he was really asleep or not, then, because he gave no sign that he was not, she squatted down beside the bed and very gently stroked his hands, just once, so lightly she was hardly touching him, his right hand that is, said Korin, showing the hand to his companion, the hand with the scar, and that was all, having done which she left as silently as she had come, and there was nothing to do after that but wait with as much patience as he could for night to be over, though that, alas, was very difficult, and he clearly remembered constantly checking the clock—quarter past three, half past three, a quarter of five—then he rose, dressed, washed his face, went to the toilet to do what he had to do there, and then a thought had suddenly occurred to him and he stood up on the seat to sneak a look at the sachets, the story being, he explained, that he had earlier discovered a hiding place behind one of the tiles that was full of little sachets containing a fine white powder and had immediately guessed what it might be, and that now he wanted to take another peek at them though he had no idea why, perhaps it was only curiosity, so he took down the tile again and found—not the packets but a vast amount of money, so much that he quickly put the tile back, and scurried into the apartment so as not to be seen by anyone on the lower floors, specifically by the person who had been depositing things in the toilet, so, having sneaked back, he closed the front door quietly behind him, folded the bedclothes in his room, piled them tidily on the chair he had positioned by the bed, looked round for the last time, saw that everything was precisely where it had been, the laptop, the dictionary, the manuscript, the notebook as well as little things like his few shirts and some underwear which would not need washing again, then left taking nothing with him only his coat and five hundred dollars; in other words there were no great tearful farewells, said Korin shrugging, and why should there be, why should he upset the young lady when it was certain that it would hurt her to see him leaving because they had got so used to each other, so no, it wasn’t a good idea, he said to himself; he’d go the way he came, then he stepped out into the street and really there was absolutely nothing in his head except Kasser and the other three, and the sad thing was he had nowhere to take them.

2.

He clicked on the file, titled it War and War, gave it a proper file name, saved it, checking first that the address was working, then pressed the last key, switched the machine off, closed it, and carefully put it down on the bed, and having done so was quickly out of the house, running down the sidewalk in a panic with no idea where he was going, but then stopped, turned and set off in the opposite direction, as fleet-footed as before and, being just as uncertain, stopping once more some two hundred yards down the road to massage his neck and swivel his head before looking first ahead and then behind him as if seeking someone he failed to find, for it was early and there was hardly anyone on the street, and those few he saw were far away, a couple of blocks off at least, around Washington Avenue, with only some homeless under a mound of garbage directly opposite him on the other side of the road and a very old blue Lincoln turning out of 159th Street getting into second or third gear and passing him on its way back—but where to go now, he wondered, at a complete loss, just standing there, and you could see that he knew the answer to the question but had forgotten it, so he fiddled with a paper handkerchief in a pocket of his coat, cleared his throat, and poked his toe at an empty pack of Orbitos lying on the hard snow, but since the paper had almost completely come to pieces, it was hard work shifting it: still, he persisted and eventually succeeded to the extent that the pack turned over, and while he was poking the thing, clearing his throat and fiddling with the paper handkerchief in his pocket, his eyes darting now this way, now that, it is possible that he remembered where he wanted to get to.

3.

Red 1 and Red 9 were equally fine for him since they both ran from Washington Avenue to Times Square where he would have to switch to the black line by means of which he could get to Grand Central and the green line that would take him to the Upper East Side, since he wanted to get there as soon as possible, Korin explained to his companion, having gleaned from his landlord the previous night that there was a Hungarian quarter in New York, for that was when he decided that he would buy the gun there, since, after all, not speaking English, he realized that he needed to be instructed in Hungarian, which was why his landlord’s mention of it in his monologue came at such a handy moment, for he didn’t feel he could ask him, having already bothered him so much, and as for others, well, he didn’t have the English and was therefore constrained to turn to a Hungarian to whom he could clearly explain his requirements and discover where the business might be arranged, for the language problem left him with no alternative, he immediately realized, but to find a Hungarian speaker, but once he found a seat opposite a large black woman on the Red 9 and began to examine the subway map above the woman’s head, he decided that he would make the journey between Times Square and Grand Central on foot, for it was not clear to him from the map what the black line connecting the two signified, and it was chance, the merest chance that decided things, not he himself, for he simply sat opposite the huge black woman and recognized that however long he studied the subway map he would not succeed in working out what the black line between the green and red routes actually meant, so it had to be on foot, he decided, and that’s how it turned out though he had no inkling what curious farewell gift the inscrutable will of fate had reserved for him on this, his last day, not the faintest idea, he repeated enthusiastically, but he had got thus far, he explained, everything on this last day worked out; he made smooth progress toward his ultimate goals, for it was as if something had taken him by the hand and was leading him there by the most direct route once he got off at Times Square, emerged from the subway and starting walking eastward, directly toward the tower he might almost say, immediately noticing that everything around him seemed to speed up, the whole world accelerating in extraordinary fashion as soon as he reached the street and made his way among the skyscrapers, pressing through dense crowds and gazing at the buildings, craning his neck, until it struck him that there was no point in seeking to discover a meaning in these buildings because however hard he tried he would not, said Korin, though it was a meaning he had been constantly aware of from the moment he first glimpsed the famous skyline of Manhattan from the window of his cab, a meaning of peculiar significance that he sought day after day each night about five
P.M.
after he had finished work and set out to walk the streets, particularly Broadway—trying in vain to give his thoughts some shape, first by meditating on the fact that the whole thing reminded him keenly of something, then by sensing that he had been here before, that he had seen this world-famous panorama, those breathtaking skyscrapers of Manhattan somewhere, but no, it was no good, the walks were all in vain, it was useless trying, he could not solve the puzzle, and, as he told himself this very dawn walking down toward the tower and the bustle of Times Square, he would have to leave without having found out, without having discovered or stumbled across the answer, without the least notion that in just a few minutes he would understand, said Korin, that in a few bare minutes he’d realize and achieve what he had set out to do, and that this would happen only a few minutes after setting off among the skyscrapers toward Grand Central Station.

4.

We pass things without any idea of what it is we have passed, and he didn’t know, said he, whether his companion knew the feeling, but that was exactly what happened to him, in the most literary sense, for he had no idea what it was as he passed it, and only a few steps later, once he had slowed down, did he vaguely suspect something, and then he had to stop, stop right there and stand stock still, at first without knowing quite what the sensation was related to, racking his brains to find out the cause, but then he turned to retrace his steps and as he spun round he found himself in front of a huge store, the one he had just passed, a store full of television sets, several racks high and some twenty meters long of nothing but TV sets, all turned on, all working, every one of them showing a different program; and all this, he felt, was trying to tell him something very important though it was far from easy discovering what it was or why these advertisements, film clips, blond curls and western boots, coral reefs, news channels, cartoon films, concert excerpts and aerial battles should have anything to say to him, and first he stood puzzling in front of the display, then tried walking up and down in front of it still mystified, until, suddenly, having taken a step closer and leaned over, in the second row from the bottom, roughly level with his eyes, he noticed an image, a medieval painting, which must have been, there was no doubt about it, the thing that had stopped him as he passed, though he still didn’t know why, so he leaned closer still and saw it was a work by Breughel, the one showing the building of the Tower of Babel, an image that, being a history graduate, he knew very well, the camera focusing on the detail where King Nimrod, stern, serious and very fearsome looking, arrives at the site, with his moonfaced chief adviser beside him escorted by a few guards and there are some stone carvers working in the dust in front of them, the film being probably some kind of documentary, said Korin, that at least being his impression, though, naturally enough, he could not hear the commentary through the thick glass of the window, only the racket of the street in which he stood, the sirens, the squealing of brakes and the blast of horns; and then the camera began to pull slowly away from the foreground and Nimrod, and to take in more and more of the picture until Korin stood facing the landscape and the enormous tower with its seven infernal levels, unfinished, abandoned and damned, straining toward the sky at the end of the world, and, ah now he understood! Babel! he declared aloud, ah if only everything was so simple: Babel and New York! for had he understood this he would not have had to traipse about the city all those long weeks seeking a solution to the mystery—and he continued staring at the picture, stopping by the window display until he noticed that a big adolescent boy in a leather jacket kept staring somewhat challengingly at him, when he felt compelled to move on, and doing so, step by step, he felt a sort of calm settling over him and he carried on toward Grand Central Station while the stores by either side of him began to open up, chiefly the smaller greengrocers and delicatessens at first, but a little bookstore too, the owner being in the act of rolling out a bookcase on castors and the case full of cut-price books before which Korin stopped, having plenty of time for he had never in his life felt so free, and looked through the brightly colored volumes as he always did on his five o’clock strolls whenever he passed such a store, picking out one book with a familiar picture on the cover, the title of the book being Ely Jacques Kahn, and, in smaller letters below it, the words New York Architect, with the 1931 foreword by Otto John Teegen, and masses of black-and-white photographs of big New York buildings, precisely the ones he had seen in the course of his walks, images of the same gaggle of New York skyscrapers—the
scraper-scape
, he muttered to himself, and the word
scraper-scape
began to ring in his ear—and then he turned over a few pages, not systematically page by page, but in a vague arbitrary fashion, jumping from the end of the book to the early pages, then from the early pages to the later ones, when, suddenly, on page 88 he came upon a photograph labeled “View from East River, 120 Wall Street Building, New York City” at which point, he said that afternoon in the Mocca restaurant, it was like being struck by lightning, and he went back to the beginning and leafed through the whole book properly, from “Insurance Building, 42-44 West Thirty-Ninth Street Building” through “Number Two Park Avenue Building,” “N.W Corner Sixth Avenue at Thirty-Seventh Street Building,” “International Telephone and Telegraph Building,” “Federation Building” and “S.E. Corner Broadway and Forty-First Street Building” right through to the end, when he checked the name on the front of the book once more, Ely Jacques Kahn, and again, Ely Jacques Kahn, then raised his eyes from the book jacket and sought the nearest such building in the direction of the Lower East Side and Lower Manhattan, and could not believe his eyes, he said, simply didn’t want to believe his eyes, for he immediately found it: there stood the building in the book, as well as others whose pictures he had just looked at, and though there was undoubtedly some relationship between them, there was
at the same time an even greater relatianship between them and the Tower of Babel as painted by Breughel
, and then he tried to find other such buildings, rushing down to the next intersection to see better, or rather to get a better view of Lower Manhattan, and discovered them immediately, and was so shaken by his discovery that, without thinking, he stepped off the sidewalk into the crosswalk and was almost knocked down, cars hooting at him while he continued to stare at Lower Manhattan even as he leapt back, mesmerized by the view, it having struck him that
New York was full of Towers of Babel
, good heavens, imagine it, he said the same afternoon in a state of high excitement, here he had been walking right amongst them for weeks on end, knowing that he should see the connection, but had failed to see it, but now that he had seen it, he announced with great ceremony, now that he had got it, it was clear to him that this most important and most sensitive city, the greatest city in the world, the center of the world, had deliberately been filled by someone with Towers of Babel, all with seven stories, he noted, his eyes screwed up, examining the distant panorama, and all seven stories stepped like ziggurats, a theme with which he was very well acquainted, he explained to his companion, having attended university some twenty years ago as a student of history, later a local historian, for they were dense with references to the towers of Mesopotamia, and not just the Babel of Breughel, but also to material from Koldewey too, the German amateur archeologist’s name being Robert Koldewey, as he recalled perfectly clearly even now, the man who excavated Babel and Esagila and discovered Etemenanki, partly uncovered it and even made a maquette of it, so it was no wonder that when he arrived at John Fitzgerald Kennedy Airport, got into the taxi and took a first look to see the famous panorama that something immediately rang a bell with him, it was just that he didn’t know what it was, couldn’t put a name to it, though it was there lurking in some corner of his aching brain, reluctant to appear, hiding away, he said, until today, and frankly he didn’t understand the way it all suddenly came together on this, his last day, but it was as if it had been all laid out before him and always had been, because ever since dawn he had this feeling that someone was taking him by the hand and leading him on, and that this book about Ely Jacques Kahn was, so to speak, thrust into his hands; for why on earth would he pick up this book rather than any other, and why should he have stopped precisely before that particular bookstore, why walk down that very street, why walk at all—oh, it was quite certain, Korin nodded smiling in the Mocca restaurant, that they were there with him, leading him, holding his hand.