The visa arrived but they were still sitting in the same way in the same place on the bench set out to accommodate those who were waiting, since the old woman had not yet turned up, and on being shown the visa the people at the desk had nothing to add concerning his chances of getting a ticket, telling him off instead, asking him what his problem was, what was he getting so uppity and impatient about, constantly jumping up and down like that instead of sitting down calmly and waiting to be called in his turn at the right time, because there were people out there who had been waiting for weeks, to which Korin naturally replied with an acquiescent nod, assuring the staff that he would stop being a nuisance to them, that from now on, having got the point, he would, he promised, no longer impose on them, and so saying, sat back down on the bench beside the stewardess and said nothing for the next few minutes, simply waited, clearly anxious in case his behavior had set the staff against him, which, he explained to the stewardess, would harm no one but him, then, suddenly, as if he had forgotten everything he had said earlier, he turned to her again and continued from where he had just now left off, informing her that nothing would please him more than spending the entire week here, in continual conversation with her, though he himself did not quite understand what the hell it was that inspired him to launch out on his monologue, a monologue, furthermore, that was exclusively about himself, for he had never done anything like this in his life, not once, Korin told the stewardess, gazing into her eyes, for it would have been inconceivable before, in fact if anything characterized him as he had been it was a reluctance to talk about himself, he’d not say a word to anyone on the subject, and if now he felt impelled, it was possibly because he was frightened that he might be attacked, fearing that they were on his trail, which was by no means a certainty, more a simple likelihood, in other words it must be this or some other related cause that made him launch out on this torrent of words, feeling that he had to tell all, the bit about the riverbank, about the psychotherapy, the hierarchy, the amnesia, about freedom and about the center of the world so that he, who had never previously been aware of having the least talent for it, might at last initiate someone else into the secret story of the last years, the last months, the last day, telling them what happened at the archive, in the caboose, on the railway bridge and on Almássy Square; telling, in other words, everything, or, to be more accurate, the essential parts, though telling only the truly essential parts was becoming steadily harder, and not only because the whole consisted of individual details, details of which there was a maddening surfeit, but also because — a most humdrum problem — it made his head ache, or to be more precise made the headache he already had exceed its usual intensity so that it was becoming quite unbearable, or rather, he corrected himself, not even so much his head as his neck, his shoulders and the base of his skull, just there, he pointed out to the stewardess, and when you took all these pains into consideration, the whole effect, when it put its mind to it, could become unbearable, and there was nothing he could do about these attacks for nothing would help, not massage, not turning his head this way and that, not moving his shoulders about, nothing, the only cure was sleep, sleep alone could shift it, the complete and utter mental relaxation, the loss of all self-consciousness, though that was precisely the problem, that he never could relax his self-consciousness, never free himself of the tension in his head, he had to hold it just as he was now doing, though, naturally, it led to the cramping of the muscles and strained the ligaments, so that eventually the constitution of his whole upper body was in open revolt, at which point he had no option, if the young lady would be so kind as to forgive him, but to lie down here on the bench, only for a minute of course, but lie down he must if only to relieve the strain on his muscles and ligaments, from the trapezius and the splenius, from the sub-occipital and the sternocleidomastodeus, for somehow the pressure had to be lifted or else the thing he had long feared would come to pass, that is to say his head would drop off, because that would surely happen, the whole caboodle would just collapse, and then there would be no New York, no nothing, said Korin, it would all be over before you could say Jack Robinson.
35.