Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy Read Free Book Online

already turned his attention to the next guest. It was of course possible that someone was waiting upstairs in his room or at his door, that they might have left some instructions as to where he should go and whom he should see, and that everything would be sorted out. He was about to make his way over to the lift when he noticed a fat volume lying on the counter, clearly a copy of the telephone directory. The clerk happened to be looking the other way. Budai himself was surprised later at his nerve stealing it in front of all those people. He must have decided – his very nervous system must have decided – that whatever the risk he had to have a list of names, that was why he had come down in the first place. It was as if his hands had a will of their own. He stuck the book under his arm as though it belonged to him and calmly walked away with it.
    But there was nothing waiting at his door, no notice on the handle, no sheet of paper lying on the threshold, nor in the crack, nor indeed anywhere, though he twice checked the number of the room just to make sure he was in the right place. Nor was there anyone inside, no note, not a scribbled message on the table or anywhere else, however hard he looked. He didn’t know how to account for it: maybe his request had not yet been dealt with, maybe they had not done anything yet. Was it possible that, if it came to it, he had to spend another night here? If that were so he would only get to the conference in Helsinki on the second day, and even then only to the afternoon session at the earliest! The thought made him so cross the blood rushed to his head: he was forced to dismiss the thought. The constant running about, on top of everything else, had exhausted him: his shirt was soaked in sweat and he desperately wanted a shower. But in order to do this he had, shamefully, to unpack again, to take the toiletries out of his hand luggage, as well as the washing powder he carried on such trips to give his underwear a quick rinse.
    Having refreshed himself a little he sat down comfortably at the writing table in his pyjamas and slippers and set to study the stolen directory. It had hard brown covers with several lighter coloured letters of various sizes embossed on it in three lines of unequal length in the usual unfamiliar script. The title page displayed twenty to twenty-five densely set words and groups of words with numbers beside them, undoubtedly the numbers of various public utilities. Straight after this followed some seven pages of unbroken text with hardly any spaces between the words, presumably the regulations regarding use of the telephone and postal service, then some diagrams, most likely showing the tariff for various kinds of call. The list of names ran to somewhere between eight hundred and a thousand large-format pages, each with five columns, in letters so small Budai had to strain his eyes to read them. As far as he could tell without any clue as to what the words meant, by means of the typography alone, the list was not alphabetical but sorted under different sub-headings, possibly of a commercial kind, an endless set of numbers, headings, text and numbers. But the curious thing was that the numbers – not only the ones at the front but those in the body of the book – were not of equal length: two, three or four figures, five, six, seven, even eight-figure numbers appeared one after the other, jumbled up, without any apparent system. He tried dialling a few of the numbers set in bold type, those presumably of public utilities, but with little success: there was no connection, the line did not respond or was engaged, the buzzing broken, and even when there was distinctly the sound of ringing, few of them picked up the phone, or, if they did, gabbled in the usual incomprehensible way however many languages he tried.
    There was no point in going on like this, he realised, so he turned his attention to the text. Although the history of writing was never his area of