David Szalay - All That Man Is

They spend some time stuck in traffic, the flow of the motorway silting up as it enters the metropolis. They are slowed by traffic lights. (The air conditioning is on — outside the tinted windows London, what they are able to see of it, swelters.) Then there are smaller thoroughfares, a more local look to things. There are neighbourhoods, parks, high streets, overflowing pubs. Smudged impressions of urban life on an early summer evening. All that goes on for much longer than Balázs imagined it would.

Finally they arrive. The flat is on a quiet street with a few trees in it. Small two-storey houses, all exactly the same. They wait with their luggage and Duty Free while Zoli opens the front door of one of them, swearing to himself as he struggles with the unfamiliar keys. They walk up some narrow stairs to the upper floor, where there is another struggle with the keys, and then they go in. One bedroom, white and sparsely furnished. For Balázs, the sofa in the living room, which overlooks the quiet road. On the other side of the landing, lurking mustily, is a windowless bathroom, into which Emma disappears with her washbag as soon as they arrive.

The men wait in the living room, Gábor on the sofa, Zoli pacing slowly and taking in the view from the uncurtained window, and Balázs just standing there staring at the old lion-coloured carpet and its mass of cigarette burns and other blemishes. Gábor wonders out loud where they might get something to eat. Zoli offers only an uninterested shrug. He says he doesn’t know the area well — he lives in another part of London. Turning to the window again, he says the high street is nearby — there will be something there.

‘D’you mind popping out,’ Gábor says to Balázs, ‘and getting some kebabs or something?’

Balázs looks up from the carpet. ‘Okay.’

‘Do you want something?’ Gábor says.

The question is addressed to Zoli. He is still staring out the window and doesn’t answer.

‘Zoli?’ Gábor says, tentatively. ‘D’you want something?’

‘No,’ he says, without turning.

‘Okay. So, yeah, just get some kebabs,’ Gábor says.

Balázs nods. Then he asks, ‘How many should I get?’

‘I don’t know. I’ll have one. Do you want one?’

‘Uh…Yeah.’

‘And Emma might want one. Four?’ Gábor suggests.

—

The stairs are almost too narrow for his shoulders, he almost has to make his way down sideways. The downstairs hall is dark, despite the frosted square pane in the front door, which opens as he nears the foot of the stairs and admits a youngish woman in a charcoal trouser suit. She leaves the door open for him. Otherwise they ignore each other.

It is very warm and light out in the street, a nice soft evening light that flatters the parked Merc. He lights a Park Lane, and then sets off through the little mazy streets of pinched, identical houses in the direction Zoli had indicated. It takes him twenty minutes to find the high street, and when he does there seems to be nowhere selling specifically kebabs. He walks up and down, sweating now in the summer evening, his orange T-shirt stuck to his skin. He notices a Polish supermarket, and the number of non-white people in the street. Then he phones Gábor. ‘Is chicken okay?’ he says.

Gábor doesn’t seem to understand the question. ‘What?’

‘Chicken,’ Balázs says emphatically. ‘Is it okay?’

‘Chicken?’

‘Yeah.’ He is standing outside a fried chicken place. The street lights have just flickered on, greenish. There is a faint smell of putrefaction. ‘There’s this fried chicken place…’ he says.

‘Yeah, that’s fine,’ Gábor tells him. Then, ‘I mean — does it look okay?’

Balázs looks at the place. ‘Yeah, it looks okay.’

‘Yeah, fine,’ Gábor says. ‘And don’t be too long. We’ve got to leave at ten.’

Balázs slips his phone into the hip pocket of his jeans and steps into the pitiless light. There is a small queue. While he waits he studies the menu — some backlit plastic panels — and when it is his turn, orders without mishap. (His English is quite fluent; he learned it in Iraq — it was the only way they could communicate with the Polish soldiers they were stationed with, and of course with whatever Americans they happened to meet.) He has trouble, though, finding his way back to the flat and has to phone Gábor again for help. Then they sit in the living room, he and Gábor, on the low sofa, eating with their hands from the flimsy grease-stained boxes. The overhead light is on in its torn paper shade and the stagnant air is full of loitering smoke and the smell of their meal, in the hurried eating of which Balázs is so involved that he does not notice Emma’s presence until Zoli speaks.

Then he lifts his head.

His mouth is full and his fingers are shiny with the grease of the chicken pieces. She is standing in the doorway.

‘Wow,’ Zoli had said.

And now, as if speaking Balázs’s thoughts, he says it again.

‘ Wow .’

—

Later, sitting in the pearly Merc, he finds an after-image of how she had looked, standing in the doorway, still singed into his vision as he stares out of the window at other things. The London night is as glossy as the page of a magazine. Nobody speaks now as the smoothly moving Merc takes them into the heart of the city, where the money is.

It is awkward, especially that first night. In the driver’s seat, Gábor seems morose — he spends a lot of time with his head lolling on the leather headrest, staring out through the windscreen at the plutocratic side street in which they are parked, or studying the Tibetan inscription tattooed on the inside of his left forearm. Unusually for him, he hardly says a word for hours at a time. The hotel is a few minutes’ walk away, on the avenue known as Park Lane — after which Balázs’s inexpensive cigarettes, he has now learned, are named.

When they arrived, Zoli made a phone call. A few minutes later they were joined by a young woman, also Hungarian, who was introduced as Juli and who, it seemed, worked at the hotel. Then she, Zoli and Emma set off, and Gábor told Balázs that the two of them would be waiting there, in the parked Merc, until Emma returned.

It is a pretty miserable night they spend there, mostly in a silence exacerbated by the tepid stillness of the weather.

There are instances of listless conversation, such as when Gábor asks Balázs whether this is his first time in London. Balázs says it is, and Gábor suggests that he might like to do some sightseeing. When Balázs, showing polite interest, asks what he should see, Gábor seems at a loss for a few moments, then mentions Madame Tussauds. ‘They have waxworks of famous people,’ he says. ‘You know.’ He tries to think of one, a famous person. ‘Messi,’ he says finally. ‘Whatever. Emma wants to see it. Anyway, it’s something for you to do, if you want.’

‘Okay, yeah,’ Balázs says, nodding thoughtfully.

They then lapse into a long silence, except for Gábor’s index finger tapping the upholstered steering wheel, a sound like slow dripping, slowly filling a dark sink of preoccupation from which Balázs’s next question, asked some time later, seems mysteriously to flow.

He asks Gábor how he knows Zoli.

‘Zoli?’ Gábor seems surprised that it is something Balázs would have any interest in. ‘Uh,’ he says, as if he has actually forgotten. ‘Friend of a friend. You know.’ There is another longish pause and then, perhaps finding that it is something he wants to talk about after all, Gábor goes on. ‘I met him last time I was here, in London. He suggested we set something up.’

—

She taps on the misted window just after five in the morning. It is light and quite cold. Not much is said as Gábor, waking, unlocks the door and she gets in. Nor while he fiddles with the satnav. Then he switches on the engine, sets the de-mister noisily to work on the windows, and they pull out into the empty street.