David Szalay - All That Man Is

He is preceded in the queue by a woman in her mid-forties, probably, who is quite short and very fat. She has blonde hair, and an orange face — red under her eyes and along the top of her nose. He noticed her sitting at a table near him when he sat down — she is the sort of fat person it is hard to miss. What makes her harder to miss is that she is with another woman, younger than her and even fatter. This younger woman — her daughter perhaps — is actually fascinatingly huge. Bérnard tried not to stare.

After they have been standing in the microwave queue for a few minutes, listening to the whirr of the machine and taking a step forward every time it stops, the older woman says to him, in English, ‘It’s a disgrace, really, isn’t it?’

‘Mm,’ Bérnard agrees, surprised at being spoken to.

The woman is sweating freely — the dining room is very warm. ‘Every night the same,’ she says.

‘Really?’

‘Really,’ she says, and then it is her turn and she shoves her plate into the microwave.

Iveta. Ah, Iveta.

He first sees her the next morning, in Porkies.

He has had almost no sleep, is tipsy with fatigue. It was a nuit blanche , nearly. He wasn’t out late, it wasn’t that — he had a few lonely drinks on the lurid stretch, tried unsuccessfully to talk to some people, was humiliatingly stung in a hostess bar, and then, feeling quite depressed, made his way back to the Poseidon. At that point he was just looking forward to getting some sleep. And that’s when the problems started. Though the hotel seemed totally isolated, there was at least one place in the immediate vicinity which thudded with dance music till the grey of dawn. Within the hotel itself, doors slammed all night, and voices shouted and sang, and people fucked noisily on all sides.

Finally, just as natural light started to filter through the ineffectual curtains, everything went quiet.

Bérnard, sitting up, looked at his watch. It was nearly five, and he had not slept at all.

And then, from the vacant lot next door, where people would illegally park, they started towing the cars.

He must have fallen asleep somehow while they were still doing that, while the alarms were still being triggered, one after another — when he next sat up and looked at his watch it was ten past ten.

Which meant he had missed the hotel breakfast.

So he went out into the morning, which was already hot, to find something to eat, and ended up in Porkies.

Porkies, even at ten thirty a.m., is doing a steady trade. Many of the people there, queuing for their kebabs, are obviously on the final stop of a night out. Hoarsely, they talk to each other or, still damp from the foam disco, stare in the fresh sunlight near the front of the shop, where a machine is loudly extracting the juice from orange halves.

With his heavy kebab Bérnard finds a seat at the end of the counter, the last of the stools that are there.

Next to him, facing the brown-tinted mirror tiles and still in their party kit with plenty of flesh on show, is a line of young women, laughing noisily as they eat their kebabs, and speaking a language he is unable to place.

He gets talking to the one sitting next to him when he asks her to pass him the squeezable thing of sauce and then, taking it from her, says, ‘It was a nice night?’

‘Where are you from?’ he asks her next — the inevitable Protaras question.

She is Latvian, she says, she and her friends. Bérnard isn’t sure where Latvia is. One of those obscure Eastern European places, he supposes.

He informs her that he is French.

She is on the small side, with a slightly too-prominent forehead, and spongy blonde hair — a cheap chemical blonde, displaced by something mousier near the roots. Still, he likes her. He likes her little arms and shoulders, her childish hands holding the kebab. The tired points of glitter on her nose.

He introduces himself. ‘Bérnard,’ he says.

Iveta, she tells him her name is.

‘I like that name,’ he says. He smiles, and she smiles too, and he notes her nice straight white teeth.

‘You have very nice teeth,’ he says.

And then learns that her father is a dentist.

He says, mildly bragging, ‘I know a guy, his father is a dentist.’

She seems interested. ‘Yes?’

There is something effortless about this, as they sit there eating their kebabs. Effortlessly, almost inadvertently, he has detached her from the others. She has turned away from them, towards him.

‘You like Cyprus?’ he asks.

Eating, she nods.

This is her second time in Protaras, he discovers. ‘Maybe you can show me around,’ he suggests easily. ‘I don’t know it. It’s my first time here.’

And she just says, with a simplicity which makes him feel sure he is onto something here, ‘Okay.’

‘Where are you staying?’ he asks.

She mentions some youth hostel, and he feels proud of the fact that he is staying in a proper hotel — proud enough to say, as if it were a totally natural question, ‘What are you doing today?’

Her friends are starting to leave.

‘Sleeping!’

She says that with a laugh that unsettles him, makes him feel that maybe their whole interaction has been, for her, a sort of joke, something with no significance, something that will lead nowhere. And he wants her now. He wants her. She is wearing denim hot pants, he sees for the first time, and sandals with a slight heel.

‘What about later?’ he says, trying not to sound desperate. The sense of effortlessness has evaporated. It evaporated the moment she seemed happy to leave without any prospect of seeing him again.

Now, however, she lingers.

Her friends are leaving, and yet she is still there, lingering.

‘You want to meet later?’ she says, with some seriousness.

‘I want to see you again.’

She looks at him for a few moments. ‘We’ll be in Jesters tonight,’ she says. ‘You know Jesters?’

‘I heard of it,’ Bérnard says. ‘I never been there.’

‘Okay,’ she says, still with this serious look on her face. And she tells him, in unnecessary detail, and making sure he understands, how to find it.

‘Okay,’ he says, smiling easily again. ‘I’ll see you there. Okay?’

She nods, and hurries to join her friends, who are waiting near the door.

He watches them leave and then, squirting more sauce onto it, unhurriedly finishes his kebab.

His mood, of course, is totally transformed. He fucking loves this place now, Protaras. Walking down the street in the sun, everything looks different, everything pleases his eye. He wonders whether he’s in love, and then stops at the pharmacy next to McDonald’s for a ten-pack of Durex.

‘Hello, my friend,’ he says to the smiling man, who is on duty in the humid lobby of the Hotel Poseidon.

‘Good morning, sir. You slept well, sir?’

‘Very well,’ Bérnard says, without thinking. ‘Yesterday you said something, about another hotel, the swimming pool…?’

‘The Hotel Vangelis, yes, sir.’

‘Where is that?’

—

Bérnard, eventually finding the Hotel Vangelis, says he is staying at the Hotel Poseidon, pays ten euros, gets stamped on the hand with a smudged logo, and then follows a pointed finger down a passage smelling of pool chemicals to a locker room, and the sudden noise and dazzle of the aqua park.

In knee-length trunks, he swims. His skin is milky from the Lille winter. He does a few sedate laps of the serious swimmers’ pool, then queues with kids for a spin on the water slide. Next he tries the wave-machine pool, lifting and sinking in the water, in the chlorine sparkle, one wet head among many, all the time thinking of Iveta.