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Ferenc Karinthy

Metropole

Looking back on it later it could only have happened because Budai had gone through the wrong door in the confusion at the transit lounge and, having mistaken an exit sign, found himself on a plane bound elsewhere without the airport staff having noticed the change. After that it was impossible to say how far or for how long he had flown, for as soon as the engine purred into life he reclined his seat and fell asleep. He was quite exhausted, hardly having rested the last few days, working himself to a standstill, and apart from anything else there was the speech for the linguistic conference in Helsinki for which he had just now been preparing. He was woken only once during the flight when they brought him his meal, then he promptly fell asleep again, it might have been for ten minutes or for ten hours. He didn’t even have his wristwatch with him since he intended buying one out there and didn’t want to have to present two watches at customs back home, so he didn’t have the least clue how far he was from home. It was only later, once he was in town, that he discovered it wasn’t Helsinki and was shocked that he didn’t know where he actually was. The passengers had been put on board a bus at the airport. It was dark; a cold and windy evening, or perhaps it was already night and he was still half asleep. The bus stopped in various places and a lot of people got out. Budai had been in Helsinki before but now he sought in vain for familiar buildings or the seafront. At one of the stops everyone got off, including the driver, who gestured for him to do likewise.

He found himself at the glass doors of a hotel with great crowds of people pressing past him, quickly separating him from his fellow passengers, and it took him a good while to push through the crowd flowing both ways. The doorman, an enormous portly figure wearing a fur coat and a gold-braided cap, greeted him courteously and opened the swing door before him, but when Budai addressed him in Finnish he plainly did not understand and answered in an unknown language, ushering him into the lobby where the influx of new guests prevented further conversation.

There was a crowd gathered by the hotel reception as well so he had to join the queue and, by the time he found himself face to face with the grey-haired desk-clerk, a man in a dark-blue uniform, there was a large, noisy family — mother, father, three unruly children, plus a mass of luggage — all squashed up behind him, practically pushing him forward with barely disguised impatience. From this point on everything speeded up. He tried to address the receptionist in Finnish, then in English, French, German and Russian, all clearly to no avail since the man replied in a different unknown language. So he showed the man his passport and the desk-clerk took it from him, no doubt to jot down the details, handing him a copper-weighted key in return. Budai had slipped his dollar cheque, the daily stipend for trips abroad, into his passport, and the porter took that too, then consulted his pocket calculator, read off the result and quickly filled out a pre-stamped form which must have been a credit note in the local currency, or so Budai guessed from his rapid gabble. He tried protesting that he didn’t want to cash his cheque in now but no one understood him and since the loud and large family behind him were growing ever more impatient, waving documents, the children screaming, and since the desk-clerk was pointing to the neighbouring cash-desk, Budai gave up the struggle, let the family through and stepped over to the next window.