I wish I'd read this when I first lived abroad.
Metropole should be required reading for cultural exchange students.
Looking back on it later it could only have happened because Budai had gone through the wrong door in the confusion at the transit lounge and, having mistaken an exit sign, found himself on a plane bound elsewhere without the airport staff having noticed the change. After that it was impossible to say how far or for how long he had flown, for as soon as the engine purred into life he reclined his seat and fell asleep. He was quite exhausted, hardly having rested the last few days, working himself to a standstill, and apart from anything else there was the speech for the linguistic conference in Helsinki for which he had just now been preparing. He was woken only once during the flight when they brought him his meal, then he promptly fell asleep again, it might have been for ten minutes or for ten hours. He didn’t even have his wristwatch with him since he intended buying one out there and didn’t want to have to present two watches at customs back home, so he didn’t have the least clue how far he was from home. It was only later, once he was in town, that he discovered it wasn’t Helsinki and was shocked that he didn’t know where he actually was.
... Budai liked children and was generally touched by them but he had never seen so many all together and the sight confused and terrified him. He looked to escape, seeking an exit from the clinic. He was losing patience, wanting to see no more babies, worrying what would happen when the present batch grew up and joined the already teeming hordes in the streets.
... Then he gazed at the photograph of the author on the flap (...) and he still looked familiar. He wondered where he might have seen him, who he reminded him of, why he was drawn to him. (...) One evening he returned tired from his work at the market and caught sight of himself in the bathroom mirror just as he was
suppressing a yawn and it suddenly became obvious: the man in the photographs reminded him of himself.
... Filth and mess everywhere - had it been like this from the beginning or had he simply not noticed? When the wind blew, as it was doing now, it lifted and carried discraded wrappers and other rubbish with it.: a newsstand caught in the gust, a thousand newspapers were swirling about his feet. He noticed how many old people there seemed to be in town: lame, crippled, halt and half paralysed, they stumbled, lurched and staggered on sticks though the crowd that pressed against them and separated them. Waves of alien humanity regularly washed over them. Frail old grannies, sickly frightened little sparrows, struggled against the overwhelming crowd, dragging their helpless bodies along, trying to cross at traffic lights, trying to board and squeeze themselves onto buses, constantly being shoved aside, squashed and trodden on in the melee. What power maintained them? What strength enabled them to go on living here?
... It added up to little more than nothing: it was an equation without known quantities.
... The lights started coming on in blocks, each estate or major road in one go, all the tiny pieces slowly fitting together as an entire lit area rose out of the grey-blue. There was no end of it as far as the eye could see. In the far distance the rows and clusters of illumination melted into a single mass, its edges lost in glimmering fogs and milky galaxies like the stars in the Milky Way whose light comes to us from thousands or millions of light years... Budai had been a city dweller all his life, the city, for him, being the only possible place of work, routine and entertainment. He was constantly drawn to the great cities of the world: the metropolis! And while the proportions of this one horrified and imprisoned him, he could not deny its sheer enormous urban beauty. Looking down on it from such a height, he was almost in love with it.
