Laszlo Krasznahorkai - War & War

Rivington Street was where he was and down to the right and to the east was Chrystie Street, with a long windy park at the end, but if he went down and turned left it led to the Bowery, he noted after days of sleeping and nights of watching, uncertain how long he had been there, but on the day, whichever day it was, when he finally ventured out through the doors of the Suites Hotel, because, whatever day it was, he simply couldn’t stay in any longer, he couldn’t keep saying to himself not today but tomorrow, or the day after, but had to emerge and brave the streets if for no other reason than that he had eaten all the biscuits and his stomach ached from hunger, in other words because he had to eat something, and then, having done so, find a new place, immediately , Korin emphasized in the firmest of terms, immediately since paying forty dollars a day made it impossible for him to stay there more than a few days, and he had already stayed those few days as a consequence of which the amount he had permitted himself was exhausted, and while this liberality, he told himself, might have been excused in the light of his early shock, he could not imagine it being prolonged, for four times ten made four hundred dollars for ten days, and three times four hundred, that made one thousand two hundred dollars a month, which is a lot even to think about, said Korin, so definitely no, I don’t have an infinite amount of money, and so he went out but in order to be sure of knowing his way back he twice walked the distance between Chrystie Street and the Bowery, then stepping out into the desultory Bowery traffic and marking out the first useful-looking shop on the far side, nor was he wrong in marking it out, or rather there was nothing wrong with the marking-out, only with his nerve, for he lost his nerve as soon as he was about to enter the shop because it struck him that he had no idea what to say, that he didn’t even know the words for “I am hungry,” that he couldn’t say a single word of English because he had left the phrase book upstairs in the hotel, or so he discovered when he felt in his pocket, and this left him helpless, without the merest notion of what to say however he racked his brains, and so he walked up and down a while considering what to do, then made a snap decision, dashed into the shop, and in his despair picked up the first edible item he recognized among the boxes, which happened to be two big bunches of bananas, then, wearing the same desperate expression as that with which he had barged in, he paid the frightened shopkeeper and was out again in a flash, rushing off, cramming one banana after another into his mouth at which point he noticed something about two blocks up on the other side, a big red-brick building with an enormous sign on the front, and though he couldn’t in all honesty say that the sight of it solved everything, or so he explained later, it did at least make him realize that he should pull himself together, so he stopped there on the sidewalk, the bananas still in his hands, talking to himself, wondering whether this behavior was really worthy of him, for was he not a hopeless nincompoop, an utter fool, to be behaving like this, with such utter lack of dignity, he muttered, muttering “calm down,” standing in the Bowery, holding his head while clutching a bunch of bananas in his hands; was he not in danger of losing the last vestiges of his dignity, when the whole point was that everything would be all right, everything would be just fine, he repeated, if he succeeded in retaining it.

The Sunshine Hotel lay approximately as far up as the point where Prince Street opens on to the Bowery, and where, a little further on, you come to Stanton Street, and there stands the great red-brick building with its huge sign bearing the single word SAVE, picked out in letters of burning scarlet, which is what struck Korin’s eye at that considerable distance, and was the sight that calmed him down, for having dashed out of the shop gobbling a banana, it seemed some benevolent hand had addressed the sign directly to him, he added, though by the time he got to it and read it properly he might easily have been disappointed, since the word written there was not SAVE but SALE, and the store below was simply some kind of car-showroom/auto-rental business — and disappointed he might indeed have been if he had not noticed something less likely to disappoint him, a smaller sign on the left of the building reading The Sunshine Hotel 25 dollars, that was all, no other information such as where The Sunshine Hotel was actually to be found; but the figure quoted and, as with SAVE, the attractiveness of the word, Sunshine, which he found easy enough to translate, exerted a further calming influence and roused his curiosity, since what was it he had decided to look for a little while ago if not some such thing, an immediate change of accommodation, and at a sum of twenty-five dollars, Korin calculated, well, twenty-five, that’s thirty times twenty, which makes six hundred, together with thirty times five, that adds up to seven hundred and fifty dollars a month, which was not bad at all, and certainly much better than paying one thousand two hundred for Rivington Street, and thinking this he immediately began looking for the entrance but the only building next to the big red-brick one was a filthy, decaying, six-story house without any signs or notices at all, only a brown door in the wall, where it was worth enquiring, he decided, for, surely, he could pronounce the words Sunshine Hotel, could he not, and he would, would he not, make some kind of sense of the answer, so he opened the door and found himself descending a steep set of stairs which led nowhere but to an iron-barred door, at which point, he explained, he might well have turned back with a bad feeling about the whole place, had he not heard the sound of human speech beyond the door, hearing which he decided to rattle the bars, and did so, and saw too late that there was in fact a bell available, and actually heard someone cursing the rattling of the bars, at least it sounded like cursing, said Korin, and indeed there, on the far side of the bars, was an enormous, rough-looking, shaven-headed man who took a good close look at Korin, then, without saying anything, returned whence he came, but already Korin heard a buzzing noise and there was no more time to think but he had to step through the opening barred door into a narrow hallway with more iron bars guarding a window and a small office behind it, and a small vent through which he had to speak when someone pointed at him, all he could do being to repeat the words “Sunshine Hotel” to which came the answer, “Yeah, Sunshine Hotel” indicating the other set of iron bars, at which Korin had hardly taken a glance than he started back, for he only saw the people there for the fraction of a second and did not dare catch their eyes again, they looked so terrifying, but the personage beyond the glass and metal grille somewhat suspiciously asked him, “Sunshine Hotel?” to which Korin had no idea what to answer, for should he say, Yes, that was what he was looking for, and add, yes but no thanks, and as he later recalled, he couldn’t remember what the hell he said then, not having the faintest idea what to answer to the question, but what was sure was that a few seconds later he was outside in the street again, putting as much distance between him and the place as he could, as quickly as he could, all the while thinking that he should immediately ask someone for help, a voice inside him urging him on, keeping step with his own pace, telling him to hurry back to Suites Hotel in Rivington Street, seeing only those shady figures and their grinning faces, until he reached the hotel doors, hearing nothing but that buzzing and the cold sharp snap of the lock over and over again, while being pursued all the way from The Sunshine Hotel to Suites Hotel by some terrible indefinable rank smell that had first assailed his nose in there, as if to ensure that there should be, at least, one thing that morning that, if he might so express it, he asked his fellow diners at the table of the Chinese restaurant, he would never forget regarding the moment he first entered the fearsome precincts of New York.