That’s the kind of person I am, said Korin, and spread his arms wide, having arrived at a crowded place and spotted a young couple, yet immediately conscious of the impossibility of telling them who he was, and of the general lack of interest likely to be evinced by anyone else in the matter, simply adding: Yau wauldn’t happen ta knaw a place where … where I might spend the night?
The music, the venue, the crowds, or rather, that mass of young faces; the dim light, the volume of noise, the wreaths of rolling smoke; the young couple he had addressed and the way they helped him when he, like them, was being frisked at the cash-desk, the way they led him in and explained where things were while constantly reassuring him that, of course, they could solve his problem, the best solution being to enter and remain in the Almássy, where there was likely to be a real hard-core gig, with Balaton as the main band featuring Mihály Víg, and he needn’t worry because it would be the kind of gig that would go on till dawn; and then it struck him, the extraordinarily dense crowd of people, the stench and, by the end, all those dazed, empty, sad eyes everywhere, in other words what with everything happening so suddenly and all at once, said Korin the next day at the MALÉV office, after those long days of solitude followed by the hour of terror when he was attacked on the railway bridge, he suddenly felt utterly exhausted and had barely spent a minute in there before his head ached and he felt dizzy, unable to adjust to anything, his eyes being accustomed to neither the dim light nor the smoke, his ears, after all the mad panic he had been through, unable to cope with the peculiar, quite unbearable racket, and, heaven knows, at first he was incapable even of movement — as he recounted next day — among this “crush of desperate pleasure seekers,” being hemmed in, rooted to the spot, then gradually swept one way then the other by close groups of perspiring dancers, eventually fighting his way through to the wall where he managed to insert himself between two silent huddles who happened to be hanging about there; and there, and only there at last could he try to come to terms with the noise level by adopting some kind of defensive posture against it and against all the misfortunes that had so unexpectedly befallen him, to begin to collect himself and assemble his thoughts, for, having reached this point of security, however infernally crowded and chaotic it was, his capacity for thinking had simply been shot to pieces, shot utterly to pieces, and the more he tried to concentrate the more his thoughts fell apart, so he would have far preferred to abandon the idea of thinking altogether and lie down in a corner, but that was out of the question, though that, on the whole, was his last coherent thought in a long time, the last decision he was capable of making while he continued standing there, gazing first at the band while one thought after another disintegrated before rising to the surface, then at the mass of people, then at the band again, attempting, without success, to catch something of the words of the rapid succession of songs, hearing only the odd phrase, such as “it’s all over” and “everything’s finished,” responding chiefly to the ice-cold melancholy of the music that immediately communicated itself to him despite the sheer volume of noise, and he gazed at the three performers, at the green-haired drummer who stood at the back thrashing his drums while solemnly staring straight ahead, at the blond bass-guitarist beside him lazily rocking his body to the rhythm of the music and the singer, a man of roughly the same age as Korin himself, with his microphone at the front whose severe expression suggested terminal exhaustion and the desire to talk of nothing but terminal exhaustion, who occasionally directed his severe expression at the seething mass below him, as if he would happily have climbed off the stage and disappeared forever but remained there and continued singing, and, to tell the truth, Korin explained, there was something in this ruthless melancholy that incapacitated him, drugged him, defeated him, that tightened his throat, so that frankly, those first two or three hours of the hard-core gig at the Central club in Almássy Square simply offered him no refuge at all.