War & War (8 page)

37.

The meat-filled pancake
à la Hortobágy
was fine, the old lady’s translator conveyed to the nervous official, but the air—and here every member of the entourage allowed himself a smile—did not meet with Frau Hanzl’s approval, no,
eure Luft
, as the old lady repeated in her loud, cracked rather masculine voice, shaking her head in a disillusioned manner,
ist einfach unqualifizierbar, versteht ihr?, unqualifizierbar!
after which, having indicated that she wished the computer monitor to be turned in her direction, she jabbed her finger at one of the lines, from which point everything happened improbably fast: no more than a minute or two had elapsed before her entourage was in full possession of a ticket and the stewardess had been informed what her duties were to be regarding “the acutely sensitive Mrs. Hanzl who was in the habit of making all her own arrangements for travel,” and the shiny ebony-black wheelchair containing the acutely sensitive Mrs. Hanzl, was already turning and thundering across the hall toward the exit so that Korin, who was looking this way and that in panic, had barely time enough to dash over to the stewardess and condense into a single sentence everything she absolutely had to know, since, he stared at her in desperation, there was so much he had not had time to say, the most important things in fact, having neglected to inform her of the very reason he had to get to New York and what he had to do there, indicating his coat sleeve and the manuscript of which he had not said a word so far though it was by far the most important aspect of the whole thing and the stewardess would understand nothing if she did not know that, for that manuscript—he grabbed her hand and tried to delay the gathering momentum of the procession—was the most extraordinary piece of writing that anyone had ever produced, but he could talk to the stewardess all he liked for she was no longer listening, having only time enough to smile and beg his forgiveness for having to get on now, in response to which Korin himself could do no more than run ahead, to prop the door open before the on-rushing wheelchair, and raise his voice above the din of the agitated procession of escorts to remark what a wonderful, unforgettable day it had been, and that the young stewardess lady should allow him to file away the two tiny dimples of her smile in his memory forever, to which she replied smiling, with precisely those two tiny dimples, that he was most welcome to file them away, whereupon she waved and disappeared behind the closing door, leaving Korin alone in the suddenly ear-splitting silence with only the eternal memory of those two little dimples to console him.

38.

For 119,000
Forints
he could have a week in Iceland, one bored official told him, rattling the figures off; for 99,900 a week on the Nile, for 98,000 a week in Tenerife, for 75,900 five days in London, 69,000 for a week in Cyprus or Mallorca, 49,900 for a week on the Turkish Riviera, 39,900 for a week in Rhodes, 34,900 for the same in Corfu, 24,900 for Dubrovnik or Athens-Thessaloniki, 24,000 for a week at the Cloisters in Meteora, Jesolo was 22,900, Salou in Spain 19,900, or he could have eight days in Kraljevica for 18,200 Forints, and if none of those appealed to him, he told the customer standing at the desk, for he appeared to be dithering, then, the agent turned his head away and made a moue with his mouth, he was perfectly free to go elsewhere, and so saying he pressed a button on his computer, tipped his chair back and stared at the ceiling with an expression that clearly declared that he, for his part, had given out as much information as he felt bound to and was not going to give out one bit more.

39.

What ticket for what flight?
Korin enquired at the desk later when they called him up to tell him the news, and started massaging his forehead the way people do when they want to summon up their lost concentration, cutting the operative short by asking:
Tomorrow? What do
you
mean tomorrow?

40.

There were four of them altogether, three female adults aged between fifty and sixty, and a girl who looked about eighteen but was certainly no more than twelve years old, each of them arriving with a steel bucket full of cleaning apparatus and carrying a half-sized industrial mop in her left hand: four buckets, four mops and four sets of gray cleaners’ lab-coats, ensuring their clear identification and function and explaining why they were now ready and waiting for something, squinting upward at everyone else, fixed in this inferior position keeping their eyes peeled for a sign from their supervisor who stood in the doorway of a glass cubicle, and when the sign eventually came they were set to go about their business, carefully at first, with a number of uncertain preparatory gestures, then, as the last of the officials and employees disappeared through the door, and the shutters at the front clattered down, switching to full speed with the mops and buckets, the four of them in their uniforms, two in front, two remaining on the street side, wringing out the cloths wound around the mops then dipping them into water again, the mops dripping, two on one side, two on the other, the cleaners taking long extended strides, solemnly, without a word, so that the only sound audible was of the four improvised mops sliding quickly across the fake-marble slabs of the floor, and then, as they reached the center and passed each other, one or two slight smacking sounds, then that sliding noise across the floor again, to the end of the room, then a dipping and wringing and back again, as wordless as before, until the girl reached into the pocket of her coat to turn on a small transistor, turning up the volume, so from that moment they moved in a dense, echoing, monotonous aspic of sound, like machines, with mops in their hands, their empty whey-colored eyes fixed on their damp mops.

1.

On November 1997, in the staff conference room of Terminal 2, Ferihegy Airport, having gone over all the standard procedures with the crew and acquainted them with the expected weather conditions, the passenger numbers, as well as the nature and status of the cargo, the captain summed up by telling them that he expected a smooth, trouble-free journey, and so Flight MA 090—a Boeing 767 equipped with two CF6-80C2 engines offering a maximum operating distance of 12,700 kilometers, fuel capacity of 91,368 liters, wingspan of 47.57 meters and capable of carrying a load of 175.5 tons, including 127 tourist-class and 12 luxury-class passengers—taxied down the runway and, having reached the average takeoff speed of 280 km/hour, rose above the ground at 11:56 precisely, attaining its full cruising height of 9,800 meters near the city of Graz by 12:24, at which point, the north-northwesterly headwind not exceeding the usual thresholds, it aligned itself along the Stuttgart-Brussels-Belfast axis that would lead it out over the Atlantic Ocean, where it adapted itself to the given coordinates, so that within 4 hours 20 minutes it arrived at the South Greenland checkpoint, and being four minutes short of an hour from its destination, began its descent, at first by 800 meters, then, having received its instructions from the Newfoundland center, dropping gradually and smoothly from a height of 4,200 meters, by now under the command of New York and district Air Control, according to the given timetable, arriving on the terra firma of the New World at Gate L36 of John F. Kennedy Airport at precisely 15:25 hours local time.

2.

Oh yes, yes
, Korin nodded enthusiastically at the black immigration officer, then, the question being repeated time and again with ever greater irritation, when it had become quite pointless referring to his documents, and it was useless nodding and saying yes and yes over and over again, he spread his arms, shook his head and said in Hungarian:
Nekem te hiábo beszélsz, én nem értek ebböl egy órva szót sem,
in other words,
Its no use you talking to me, I don’t understand a single word you’re saying,
adding, usefully, in English,
No understand.

3.

The room into which they led him down a long narrow corridor reminded him of nothing so much as the kind of closed boxcar in which they used to carry corn, the walls being lined with gray steel, not a window anywhere and the doors capable of being opened only from outside, which was why it was like suddenly being dumped in an empty boxcar, Korin explained later, because there were two things, he said, that suggested such a boxcar: an unmistakable smell and the way the floor was gently vibrating, which, once they closed the door on him and left him alone, really did make him feel as though he had found himself in a stinking freight car, an American one, but a freight car all the same, for as soon as he stepped in, he explained, he could smell the corn and feel the floor vibrating under him, the corn smell quite unmistakable since he had plenty of opportunity to experience it on his way to Budapest, and the vibration, likewise, he was convinced, was not a trick of the senses brought on by the flickering of the neon light, for there was nothing incidental or uncertain about it, it was a decided tingling he felt in the soles of his feet, and what’s more, when he accidentally touched the wall he could feel that it too was vibrating, and you may imagine, he added, how a man feels under such circumstances, as he indeed did feel, since he understood precisely nothing of what was going on or what they wanted of him, what it was they were asking of him, and what on earth this whole thing was about, and so he took out the notebook in which he had jotted the most important words while still on the aircraft, because he didn’t like the idea of using the phrase book, the one in his pocket, feeling it wouldn’t help him when he got into conversation with someone, being too formal, too inconvenient, too slow with all those pages you had to flick through, looking words up, and in any case he found with this particular phrase book that he tended to flick past the place he wanted, or that those specific pages of the selected letter were somehow stuck together so whole sections flicked by in one go, and when he deliberately tried to slow the movement of the pages for fear of going past them, his anxiety and solicitude made him so nervous that he flicked past the page anyway, which meant that he had to start all over again, fiddling impatiently, holding the phrase book in a different kind of grip, searching through page by individual page, the entire process, in other words, resulting in a dramatic slowing down, that being the reason he took to the notebook, writing out the likely most important words, finding a system that would facilitate their recovery, speeding up the leafing-through process, and had indeed discovered such a system and had prepared everything on the long journey, though of course had to take it out again, and most pressingly now, if he wanted to get out of these dire straits; he had to take it out to find an English sentence that would help him make up something, to find an excuse, so it shouldn’t spoil that intoxicating feeling, the delight he felt surging in him, for here he was, he had succeeded, succeeded in the face of what he might have described as impossible odds, and for this reason, if for no other, he had to find a comprehensible phrase which would make it clear to the authorities why he was there and what he wanted, moreover a phrase that referred exclusively to the future, for he had decided, and was determined, to speak of nothing but the future, as he had told himself, and later explained, having resolved to keep quiet about anything that might have dampened his spirits and soured this intoxicating feeling, though he would never, under any circumstances, he to himself about the fact that there was indeed something sad about it, something that hurt him when he got off the plane and attempted to look back in the direction of Hungary, hurt because Hungary was invisible from here, for apart from the sense of arriving in a place where no pursuer could reach him and the fact that he, this tiny dot in the universe, an insignificant archivist from the depths of a dusty office two hundred and twenty kilometers from Budapest, was actually standing here, in A-me-ri-ca! and that he could now look forward to putting his Great Plan into immediate operation—because all these things were genuine occasions for the delight he felt as he descended the steps of the aircraft along with all the other passengers—and yet, while the others were rushing onto the bus he gazed back across the concrete runway in the booming wind and sighed that never again would he cut his ties with such an overwhelmingly glad sense of arrival, never again would there be a past, never again Hungary, in fact he said it out loud when the stewardess ushered him onto the bus with the rest and he looked back for a last time to where Hungary should have been, the Hungary that was now lost forever.

4.

There’s nothing wrong with the guy, the airport security official entrusted with the interrogation of Central European immigrants reported to his superior, it’s just that he arrived without any baggage, not even a scrap of hand-luggage, just a coat, in the lining of which he himself had very probably, as indeed he confirms through the interpreter, sewn a strange document and an envelope containing some money, and since he had nothing else, no backpack, not even a plastic bag, no nothing, it constituted a problem—go on, Andrew, his superior nodded—because it’s possible that he might have had baggage that had disappeared, but, if so, where was it, that’s why they decided to interrogate him, and the guys did interrogate him, absolutely, thoroughly, according to the rule book, with a Hungarian interpreter present, but they found nothing suspicious, the guy was, for all intents and purposes, clean, and it looked as though he was telling the truth about the baggage, that he really had traveled without any, so, as far as he was concerned, the security man said, he could be allowed through, and yes, he had cash, quite a lot of it in fact, but Eastern Europeans weren’t expected to carry credit cards, and his visa and passport were in order, besides which he was able to show them a business card with the name of a hotel in New York City, where he intended on staying, a fact they would check within twenty-four hours, at which point the matter would be closed because in his personal opinion—go on, Andrew, his superior encouraged him—that would be enough, the guy was just some innocent, perfectly ordinary, crackpot scientist who can sew what he likes where he likes, and if he wanted to stitch his asshole together—the security guard flashed his blindingly white teeth—that was up to him, they should leave him alone, in other words his recommendation would be to wish him a nice day and let him through—OK, that’s one problem less then, his boss assented—as a result of which, within half an hour, Korin was free again, though clearly not entirely conscious of the process that had led him thus far, his mind having been otherwise preoccupied, especially toward the end of the interview when he noticed how the interpreter had begun to pay close attention to what he was saying, a line of argument he was keen to pursue to its conclusion, the burden of which was that, perhaps, later, if he succeeded in doing what he set out to do, even the United States of America would have cause to be proud of him, because this country was precisely the place where his Great Plan became a reality, but no, the interpreter stopped him in his tracks, slowly running his hands through his snow-white hair which was parted in the middle and sticking to his scalp, to say, however nice a guy he was, Korin should understand that there wasn’t time to go into that now, to which Korin replied that, naturally, he completely understood, and he would not detain him any longer, and would only add, one, that it was a matter for him of something perfectly wonderful concerning his place in the scheme of things, in other words the reason he had flown here constituted less of a danger, if he might so express it, than did the flight of a butterfly above the city, that is to say, he explained, from the city’s point of view; and two, he said, he would like to be permitted to offer a word of thanks, if no more, to the kind interpreter on whose assistance he had been forced to rely in the moment of his predicament, and that he would hold him up no longer, and that all he wanted was to thank him, to thank him once more, or, as they say here, Korin consulted his notebook,
thanks, many thanks, mister.