Laszlo Krasznahorkai - War & War

Korin entered the last of the corridors, saw the arrivals hall in the distance, and as soon as he had seen it, or so he recalled in the course of a conversation later, he knew at once that he had taken the right route, the right route throughout, and that’s it, as he said to himself, thank God, he had left the warren behind and could walk a little faster now, feeling a degree more liberated and less anxious with each step, steadily regaining his good spirits, that intoxicating feeling, setting about the last few hundred meters in this state of mind, until, about a third of the way down, as he was approaching the hall with its light, noise and promise of security, he suddenly spotted a figure among the oncoming crowd, a short, rather scrawny young man of about twenty or twenty-two years of age, more a boy really, in checkered trousers, with a strangely dancing sort of walk, who seemed to have taken particular notice of him, who having got within ten paces of Korin suddenly looked at him full in the face and smiled, his face brightening at the sight, showing the kind of surprise and delight one feels when one unexpectedly comes across an acquaintance one hadn’t seen for a long time, his arms spread wide in greeting, accelerating toward him, in response to which Korin too, as he said, began to smile uncertainly, with an enquiring expression, while, in his case, slowing down, waiting for the point of meeting, but when the moment arrived and they came up level with each other, something quite unbelievable happened as far as Korin was concerned, something because of which, his view of the world immediately darkened, something that made him double up and squat down on the ground, because the blow affected him precisely in the solar plexus, yes, that was exactly what happened, said Korin, the boy, probably out of sheer devilment, on the spur of the moment, had chosen some arbitrary victim from among the new arrivals, had raised his eyebrows and approached him in an apparently friendly manner, then smacked him in the solar plexus, without saying anything, without a word, without conviviality, without any sign of recognition, without any of the warmth you might expect when meeting an old acquaintance, and simply fetched him a blow, but a big one, as the Trinidadian boy told the bartender in his local bar, just like that, biff , he demonstrated with a violent movement, properly fucking the guy over in the pit of his belly, with such power, said the Trinidadian boy to the bartender, that the guy clutched his stomach, doubled up, and without a sound, not a peep, but he was flat out on the floor, as if lightning had struck him, said the Trinidadian flashing his decaying teeth, like he was a piece of shit dropped from a cow’s ass, you understand, he asked the bartender, just one biff and the guy didn’t say so much as moo, but collapsed, just like that, and by the time the guy looked up, he himself had disappeared into the crowd, like the earth had instantly swallowed him, vanished, as though he had never been, while Korin just stared, dumbstruck, slowly being scraped off the ground, blinking this way and that, utterly astonished, seeking explanation in the eyes of the two or three people that had hoisted him up by the arms, but they gave no explanation, nor did anyone else as he went on his way, and it clearly did not seem to have meant anything to anyone, since they were wholly unaware of his presence, or where he had been, or that he had appeared one-third of the way down the corridor leading to the arrivals hall of JFK airport.

It was still hurting when he reached the diamonds, and when he stepped into the hall with a painful expression etched into his face he entirely failed to notice either the diamonds or the seething crowds as he approached them, nor did the presence of the diamonds have anything to do with the hand with which he covered his stomach, for the pain was such that he was quite incapable of removing it from that spot, the pain affecting his stomach, his ribs, his kidneys and his liver, but still more his sense of injustice at the wickedness and sheer unexpectedness of the assault on his person, and that was a pain that infected every cell of his being, which was why the one idea in his mind was to get out of there as quickly as possible, looking neither left nor right, just moving in a straight line, onward and onward, not even noticing when the significance of the hand on his stomach changed from being a physical comfort and protection to an emblem of general, unconditional uncertainty in the face of dangers facing him, dangers that singled him out, but in any case, as he explained a few days later in a Chinese restaurant, that’s how it happened, his hand just assumed this position, and when he eventually succeeded in fighting his way through the packed chaos of the hall, and arrived, if not in the fresh air, at least under some concrete arcade, he was still using his left hand to ward off anyone in his vicinity, trying to communicate to everyone near to him the fact that he was extremely frightened and that in this state of fear he was prepared for any eventuality, that no one should approach him, and in the meantime he walked up and down, seeking a bus stop before he realized that while the place abounded in bus stops there was in fact not a single bus in sight, and so, fearing that he might be condemned to stay there forever, he crossed over to the taxi stand and joined a long queue at the head of which was a commissionaire of some sort, a big man dressed like a doorman at some hotel, and this was a very wise thing to have done, as he said later, throwing his lot in with the queue opposite the concrete arcade, because this meant he was no longer lurching this way and that in an ever more advanced state of helplessness, for having got so far he had arrived at a point in the vast institution of the airport where he no longer had to explain who he was and what he wanted, since everything could be decided in his own good time, and so he waited his turn in the queue, slowly shuffling forward to the big commissionaire, the natural end point of his despairing, yet fortunate decision, because it was all likely to be smooth going from here once he showed him the slip of paper he had received from the stewardess in Budapest, with the name of a cheap, often tried and trusted hotel on it, after examining which the commissionaire nodded and told him the cost would be twenty-five dollars, and without any further ado sat him in a huge yellow cab, and there they were moving past street cleaners, having already rushed down the lanes of the highway that led to Manhattan, Korin still holding his stomach, his hand clenched into a fist, unwilling to move it from there, prepared to defend himself and beat off the next attack just in case the space between himself and the driver should suddenly be barred off and someone throw a bomb in through the cab window at the next red light, or in case the driver himself should lean back, the driver who at first glance he took to be Pakistani, Afghan, Iranian, Bengali or Bangladeshi, and grabbing a great blunderbuss cry, Your Money — Korin nervously consulted the phrase book — Or Your Life!

The traffic made him dizzy, said Korin in the Chinese restaurant, and he was in constant fear of assault at every road and traffic sign that flashed before him and remained in his mind as if engraved there — Southern State Parkway, Grand Central Expressway, Jackie Robinson Parkway, Atlantic Avenue, and Long Island, Jamaica Bay, Queens, Bronx and Brooklyn — because as they journeyed further and further into the heart of town, he said, it was not the unimaginable, hysterically pounding, mortally dangerous totality of the whole as exemplified by the Brooklyn Bridge, say, or by the skyscrapers downtown that he had read about and the effect of which he had anticipated from the information given in his heavily thumbed travel guides, but odd small details, the apparently insignificant parts of the whole, that struck him, the first subway grille next to a sidewalk from which the steam was perpetually pouring, the first, swaying, wide-bodied old Cadillac they passed by the gas station and the first enormous shiny steel fire truck, and something beyond that, that silenced something in him, or, something that, if he might put it that way, burned its way into his mind without burning it quite through, for what happened, he continued, was that as the taxi swept on without a sound, as if they were slicing through butter, while he was still holding his left hand in the defensive position, looking out of the window, now left and now right, he suddenly felt, and felt most intensely, that he should be seeing something that he wasn’t seeing, that he should be comprehending something he was not comprehending, that there was, from time to time, right in front of his eyes, something he should be seeing, something blindingly obvious, but that he did not know what it was, knowing only that without seeing it he had no hope of understanding the place he had arrived at, and that as long as he failed to understand it he could only keep repeating a phrase he had been repeating to himself all afternoon and evening, something to the effect of Dear God, this really is the center of the world and that he, there could no longer be any doubt about it, had arrived there, at the center of the world; but he got no further with this thought and they turned from Canal Street onto the Bowery and soon enough braked to a halt outside the Suites Hotel, that being their destination, said Korin, and that’s how it had been ever since, he added, meaning that he still hadn’t a clue what it was he should be seeing in that vast city, though he knew full well that whatever it was, was right there before him, that he was actually passing through it, moving through it, as indeed he had been when he paid $25 to the silent driver and got out in front of the hotel, when the taxi started back again, and he was left gazing, simply gazing at its two receding red lights until it turned at the crossroads and set off in the direction of the Bowery, toward the heart of Chinatown.