He had to walk rather a long way. The searchlight may have plunged everything around him into pitch-darkness, but Köves noticed that weed-overgrown soil alternated under his feet with further stretches of runway. These, however, seemed to be narrower, perhaps unsuited for jumbo jets of the kind on which Köves had arrived; perhaps, mused Köves, the runway for the latter had been constructed not long ago, which would explain why it had been laid farther off than these stretches. Or could it be perhaps — he pondered further — that the people here didn’t want foreign travellers to see everything clearly straight away?
The pencil of light was then suddenly extinguished: evidently he had reached his goal. for Köves now found himself in front of a lighted-up entrance and a person. To be more accurate, the silhouette of a human form, standing several steps higher than him, because the lighting at the entrance was again angled in such a way that Köves was unable to see anything for the glare of light. At least it was at last a person, and the sole reason Köves did not hail him is because in the heat of the moment he could not think of the language in which to wish him a good evening.
Assistance was soon at hand, though:
“Just arrived, have we?” the person inquired of him. The question sounded more like a friendly greeting, and the hint of an overtone that was hard to decipher — malicious glee of some kind, perhaps — Köves may well have just imagined.
“Just now,” he replied.
“Well I never!” said the man, and again with an overtone that — no doubt because he was unable to see the face addressing him — set Köves puzzling afresh. He was unable to decide if what he was picking out was derision, or even some sort of concealed threat, or just a plain assertion. That uncertainty is what may have triggered him into elaborating, though no one had asked him:
“I have come to see my friend,” he said. “Only I didn’t let him know in advance, so I could surprise him …”
“What sort of friend?” the man asked. “Sziklai he’s called … He later changed that to Stone … He’s now known as Sassone, the world-famous writer of comedies and screenplays,” Köves explained. Then, feeling the solid ground of facts beneath his feet: “You must have heard of him!” he added, much more firmly than before.
“You know very well that we cannot know of a writer by that name here,” came the reply.
“No?…” Köves queried, and since there was no response, he remarked: “I can’t say I did know, but I’ll bear that in mind.” He stood there in silence for a short while, the yellowish light pouring out of the entrance lengthening his shadow in an odd manner, displaying the suitcase dangling from his hand as an unshapely lump that was part of his body. Then, a good deal more quietly than before, so that after some introductory chat they might strike a more confidential tone, he asked, “Where am I?”
“At home,” came the answer. It was now the man’s turn to pause a little. Köves caught sight of the slight puff of condensation from his breath in the now-cooling spring night air — at last indisputable corroboration of the person’s physical reality — as the man again spoke. This time he asked Köves with unmistakable amiability, almost a measure of sympathy:
“Do you wish to turn back?”
“How would I do that?” Köves asked.
The man stretched out an arm in a gesture of solicitation, as if he were making Köves a wordless offer. Köves turned round: a row of tiny portholes twinkled almost indiscernibly in the distance. It might perhaps have been the plane in which he had arrived. He was suddenly beset by a rush of homesickness for the guaranteed safety of its passenger compartment, the warmth of its air-conditioned atmosphere, its comfortable seats, its cosmopolitan passenger list, its smiling air hostesses, the unfussy, pull-down-table rituals of the meals, indeed even his bored and close-mouthed English neighbour, who always knew from where it was departing and at where it was arriving.
“No,” he said, turning back toward the man. “I think there’d be no point in doing that. Now that I’m here,” he added.
“As you please,” the man said. “We are not forcing you to do anything.”
“Yes,” Köves acknowledged. “It would be hard for me to prove the opposite.” He pondered a moment. “And yet you are forcing me,” he resumed. “Just like the beam of light that was sent to meet me.”
“You didn’t have to follow it,” the man instantly retorted.
“Of course,” Köves said, “of course. I could have stayed out under a raw sky until day breaks or I freeze”—though there was perhaps a touch of rhetorical exaggeration in that, seeing as was spring.
He caught a swiftly suppressed burst of laughter from above him.
“Come on, then,” the man eventually said. “Let’s get the formalities over with.” He stepped aside, and Köves was at last able to get under way and climb the few steps.
Certain preliminaries
He stepped into an empty, lighted hall; only now did Köves see how deceptive the evening had been outside, for here inside he did not find the lighting anything like as bright; to the contrary, it struck him more as gloomy, even gap-toothed here and there, and all in all fairly dingy. The hall itself was large, but in comparison with the arrivals halls of international airports — as witness the deserted desks, empty cashiers’ windows, and all the other installations over which he cast but a cursory glance — it was provincially small-scale. Köves was now at last able to take a look at the man with whom he had been speaking up to now: in truth, he saw little more than a uniform. The man himself struck him as matching it so well and being so inseparable from it that Köves almost had the impression — obviously a false impression, of course, no doubt prompted by his tiredness — that this uniform had existed from time immemorial and would exist for evermore, and that at all times it moulded its transient wearers to itself. The uniform moreover seemed familiar to him, though without his recognizing it. “It’s not military,” he mused, “nor the police. Nor is it …” he caught himself in a thought that suddenly broke free, to which he could not have put a definite name. At all events, he therefore decided that he was dealing with a customs officer: when it came down to it, nothing — nothing so far, at least — contradicted that.
Meanwhile the man asked Köves to follow him. He showed Köves into a room which opened straight off the halclass="underline" all it was furnished with was a long table, behind which stood three chairs. The customs man, as Köves now called him to himself, immediately went around the table and took a seat facing Köves. Though it might have been an observation of no significance, it struck Köves that he did not occupy the middle chair that was naturally enough on offer, but one of those on either side. Köves had to hand over his papers and to place his suitcase on the table.
“Please be so good as to go outside, and take a seat,” the customs man then said. “We shall call you when we need you.”
So, Köves sought a nearby seat for himself; it was an armchair, though its uncushioned, fold-up wooden seat did not hold out hope of too much comfort. From this position he was able to see the entire hall, but while he had been in the office, something had changed out there — most likely in the lightning, it occurred to Köves: it was now darker, in the meantime some of the light bulbs had been switched off; maybe they were getting ready to shut down. Indicative of that was that in the far corners of the hall cleaning staff, with leisurely, listless movements, had swung into operation; a man in a cap and blue coat towed a vacuum cleaner along on the immensely long, worn-out, colourless strip of carpeting, but it was a machine of an antiquated kind that Köves had not seen around for a long time: its wheezy humming filling the whole hall with a monotonous drone. Now that nothing bothered him, or maybe because he was already getting used to it, the hall somehow seemed familiar to Köves. He was assailed by a sensation — absurd, of course — that he had passed that way once before, a sensation caused, perhaps, by all the fake natural stone — on the walls, the floors, every conceivable place — and the distinctive lines of the counters and other furnishings: the mark of a certain taste, one might almost say style, which in mid-century could still be considered modern, but which so easily became outmoded with the passage of fifteen or twenty years. Only this, and then the feeling of exhaustion which was again getting the better of him, could have produced the strange illusion that what he was seeing he had already seen once before, and what was happening had already happened to him once before.