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.
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?
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.
II THAT INTOXICATING FEELING
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 CF6-8 °C2 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.
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.
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.