David Szalay - All That Man Is

It is extremely stressful, he finds, to be in her presence outside the safely purposeful space of the gym. It was the same in the car, in Gábor’s Audi Q3, when she was there. Sometimes Gábor would go in somewhere and leave them in the car together — she in the front, Balázs in the back — and he would be so intensely aware of her presence, of the minuscule squeaks when she moved on the leather seat, or flipped down the sun visor to tweak an eyebrow in the vanity mirror, that, just to hold himself together, he had to fix his eyes on some object outside the darkened window and keep them there, unable to think about anything except how he had masturbated to her, twice, the previous night, which did not seem like a promising starting point for conversation. They never spoke. Sometimes they would be alone in the car for twenty minutes — Gábor was always away for at least twice as long as he said he would be — and they never spoke.

What she is like ‘as a person’ he has no idea. There is something princessy about her. She seems to look down on the staff in the gym — she isn’t friendly with them anyway. The women who work there hate her, and it is assumed that she is with Gábor, who is slightly shorter than her, for his money. She always listens to music while she works out, possibly to stop people trying to talk to her. Balázs has never seen her smile.

He was surprised to see what her mother was like, where she lived. He had expected something smarter, something in Buda maybe, a house with roses in front and a well-preserved fifty-year old offering them coffee, not that wreck of a woman living in that smoky hole of a flat. The time-browned tower block, the odours and voices of the stairwell, the neglected pot plants by the yellow window where the stairs turned — those things were all familiar to him. Most of the people he knew emanated from places like that, himself included. That she did, however, was a surprise.

He finishes the Heineken and says something about stepping outside for a cigarette. Gábor, waggling his fingers at the screen of his phone, says, ‘Yeah, okay. We’ll just be here.’ She does not even look up from her magazine.

—

He smokes on the observation terrace, from where, through a barrier of hardened glass, you can watch the planes taxiing to the end of the runway and taking off at intervals of a few minutes. Standing there and watching them through the feeble heat haze, the sound of the engines coming to him across several hundred metres of warm air, makes him think of the days he spent at Balad Air Base, with the rest of the Hungarian unit, waiting for the flight home. He now looks back on that year with something like nostalgia. He should have stayed in the army — it was safe there, and there were things to do. Since then he has just been treading water, waiting for something to happen…What was going to happen, though?

Gábor is standing there.

He lights a cigarette, a more expensive one than the Park Lanes Balázs smokes. ‘Sorry about the delay,’ he says.

In moulded plastic wrap-around shades, Balázs nods tolerantly.

Gábor seems nervous. It is as if he has something to say but isn’t sure how to say it.

Balázs has started to think that maybe he doesn’t have anything to say after all, when Gábor says, ‘I should tell you what we’ll be doing in London.’

There follow a few seconds during which they stare together at the scene in front of them — the open space of the airport in the sun, the smooth-skinned planes waiting in the shade near the terminal.

‘Emma,’ Gábor says, as if she were there and he were addressing her.

Balázs half-turns his head.

She isn’t there.

Gábor says, ‘Emma’s going to be doing some work in London.’

They watch as a narrow-bodied Lufthansa turboprop starts its takeoff. After a few hundred metres it leaps into the air with a steepness of ascent that is quite startling, as if it were being jerked into the sky on a string. They watch it dwindle to a point in the sky’s hazy dazzle, and then, at some indefinite moment, disappear.

Gábor says, ‘And your job…’ He finds a more satisfactory pronoun. ‘ Our job is to look after her. Okay?’

Balázs simply nods.

‘Okay,’ Gábor says, with finality, having performed what was obviously an embarrassing task. ‘Just thought I’d tell you.’ He drops his cigarette and extinguishes it under the toe of his trainer. ‘See you inside.’

Mimicking his employer, Balázs toes out his own cigarette. Then he lights another, and squints out at the shimmer standing on the tarmac.

—

The flight is uneventful. The plane is full, but Gábor has paid for priority boarding and they have seats together — Balázs squashed into the window seat, Gábor stretching his legs in the aisle, and Emma in the middle, listening to music and staring at the plastic seat-back a few inches from the tip of her nose.

Balázs concentrates on the window. There is nothing to see, except a section of wing and fierce light on the endless expanse of white fluffiness far below. You would fall straight through it, he thinks, solid as it looks. He isn’t sure, now, that he understood what Gábor meant when he said that Emma would be ‘doing some work’ in London. Had he even heard him properly? The light hurts his eyes and he half-lowers the plastic shutter. He folds his swollen hands in his lap and sits there, listening to the serrated whisper of her headphones, only just perceptible over the massive white noise of the labouring engines.

—

Zoli meets them at Luton airport in a long silver Mercedes.

Zoli is tall, and not unhandsome, and manages a moustache without looking silly. He has an air of slightly savage intelligence about him — he is in fact a doctor, a gynaecologist, though not currently practising. It is true that there is an unhealthy puffiness to his face, a swollenness, his eyes protruding more than is ideal, but Balázs does not notice these things until he sees them, intermittently, in the rear-view mirror — he is sitting in the back of the Mercedes with Emma, the lowered leather armrest emphatically separating them — as they make their way towards London.

They do so with single-minded speed, Zoli pushing the powerful car through holes in the traffic on the motorway. Holding onto the spring-hinged handle over the window, Balázs sees fleeting past a landscape somehow more thoroughly filled than any in his own country. It seems more orderly. It is very obviously more monied. It is early June and everything looks plump and fresh.

Gábor lights a cigarette. He is sitting in the front with Zoli, who immediately tells him to put it out.

Gábor apologises and presses it into the ashtray.

Still forcing the Mercedes forward, Zoli explains that he has borrowed it from a friend of his who has a luxury limousine hire service. He promised he wouldn’t smoke in it.

‘Sorry,’ Gábor says again. Then he says, ‘This is the new S-Class, yeah? Very nice.’

Zoli agrees vaguely.

He is in his early thirties, only a few years older than the others. Even so, Gábor is having trouble relating to him as an equal, something he normally manages quite easily with older and more important-seeming men. They had made some small talk as they drove out of the airport — though even that came to an abrupt end (Gábor was in the middle of saying something) when Zoli had to pay for the parking — and, as they head into London, Gábor’s usual effortless friendliness seems to have faltered. Whether that is because he is simply intimidated by Zoli, or for some other reason, Balázs does not know. Seeing them shake hands in the arrivals lounge the situation had seemed to him to be this — they had met before but did not know each other well. Zoli and Emma, on the other hand, seemed never to have met. Gábor introduced them, with a strange sort of formality, and Zoli was very friendly to her — a wide smile, a pair of kisses. To Balázs — obviously the minder, with his shit clothes and his muscles — he had offered only a peremptory handshake. Then he had hurried them to short-term parking. They were in a hurry because, as Zoli said, ‘There’s one tonight’ and what with the delay they were pressed for time, as they had first to go to the flat. Zoli, it seemed, had sorted out a flat for them to stay in while they were in London.