Fantastic Metropolis

With considerable aplomb, he does not contemplate. He perambulates. Highwaymen here rob on the wrong side of the road.

In Calais, he takes a train direct for Paris.

Hannah fills up most of the compartment. She has no ticket, but he invents an excuse for her: a flintlock pistol, first class. Through the window, girls with foreign hair trample grapes.

Women’s brains are like trees, he muses, and men’s like lightning bolts. In the act of congress, the lightning strikes the tree. The tree is burned and the cloud is discharged. But one day it will be different…

In Paris, he takes a train direct for Hungary.

These are the first locomotives he has ever boarded. He once vowed to have nothing to do with the steam humbug, but this is France and the engines clatter with a different accent. He does not register this sort of railway as an enemy. He is lulled.

He wonders how he will start up as a bandit. How will he introduce himself to his potential friends and customers? Hungarian, he knows, is a baffling language; it resembles a sequence of gurglings and rumblings, exactly the same as the grammar of an empty stomach. Perhaps if he fixes an amplifying horn to his abdomen he will be understood. In Hungary, men smoke cheese rather than tobacco and sprinkle rust on their food. Shirts there have cuffs bigger than hounds.

The days pass, as many of them as happy memories in his life: four. Germany is a cold place; Austria reclines like a mistress who has struck her head and forgotten her lover. While he sleeps, his stomach practices Hungarian phrases. “Két pohár sört kérek!” Hannah learns faster than him; her belly is soon confident in the complex tongue. “Külon kívánunk fizetni.” Digestive acids converse at night.

The Hungarian border is lined with weeds. No-one has come to mow or trim the country for months. At each tiny station they race past, a neat guard stands to attention and salutes the train. On the hills above grey Tatabánya, a giant bronze statue peers down. In Budapest, Darktree comes across his first Gypsies—he admires their shirts but hates their hats. When he was a highwayman, fellow travellers often told him about curious folk like these; apparently Gypsies subsist on a diet of scrap metal. A terrible thing to live on junk food!

Soon he is east of the Danube and heading into the Great Plain. Not a slope steeper than a reclining sheep, the puszta is rife with horrible mirages— délibáb—and littered with abandoned quilts and bolsters, the part of a bride’s dowry not appreciated by every peasant husband. Crows make their nests in the colourful pillows.

In the very centre of the Hortobágy grasslands, a number of men are loitering on the tracks with guns.

“Look, Hannah! A group of spectators waving at us!”

All at once, the train squeals and slows down. Darktree is amazed. Does the driver know these people? If not, why stop for them? And anyway, is this not an inconvenient time to be greeting friends? It is mildly irritating; he is in a rush to meet up with bandits. How will he be able to find some if his mode of transport is forever stopping for ruffians armed with carbines? Gypsy habits, he decides; the men who jump onto the train certainly have the wide belts.

They roam the corridors, shouting at the passengers and tugging at their beards. For some reason, people keep handing them money. Darktree loses his patience with these quaint conventions. When the Gypsies reach his compartment, he stands and harangues them in careful English. Hannah punctuates his tirade with semi-colons from her smelly colon.

“Look here, my good men, I will not tolerate this delay. My search for bandits mustn’t be interrupted.”

The Gypsies ignore him and the largest member of the brood levels a pistol at his head. “Siessen!”

Darktree reaches into his bag for an explosive muffin. He struggles to light the fuse with a spare piece of flint. Before he can direct any sparks onto the cigarette paper, Hannah leans over and snatches the cake out of his grasp, swallowing it whole.

The burly ruffian runs his hands over Darktree and turns to Hannah. “Mi a neve ennek? Kérem, irja ezt le.”

Darktree protests. “Talk to me, not my horse.” They ignore him with shrugs. He knows he must find a way to communicate. Pulling the nautilus flute from his sleeve, he places the tapering end to his stomach. Out of the wide mouth, an alimentary phrase fills the carriage. The big ruffian puts his ear to the molluscan megaphone.

“Elmondaná lassabban! Nem értem!” he cries.

Darktree controls his undulating duodenum. He tries a joke, a silly tale picked up from a pair of decaying comedians in a sepulchral Variety Theatre in the West End. Uncertainly at first, but with swelling vigour, the Gypsies clutch their sides and laugh.

Darktree’s stomach tells another jest. The ruffians roll their eyes at each other, stretching faces in grimaces that indicate delight beyond simple guffaws. “Van valami olcsóbbt?” Obligingly, Darktree recounts the bawdy exploits of a nymphomaniac governess.

At last, when they can bear no more wit, they seize him and Hannah and drag them from the train. Darktree’s intestines object. “Fogdoss!” They knock the flute out of his hand and he is voiceless again. Unlike his stomach, his head is a muddled linguist.

He is searched and his bag of muffins is confiscated. The leader of the Gypsies sniffs the cakes with flared nostrils. Romany noses are more cunning than Anglo-Saxon ones, but no hairier.

Horse and man are marched off across the Great Plain. With a deeply sad whistle, the train moves on. Darktree encounters more mirages on the horizon: magistrates on springs leap across the landscape. Where do such images originate? Scipio, probably: the isle where he was marooned. Then in the distance, he spies a solitary tree.

The tree is made of corpses, entwined together. But this is as real as the puszta sun, which itself is as abrasive as paprika. And who could deny the corporality of paprika here? The spice, having blown loose from local mills, peppers the vista, making a liar’s autumn. He does not know this is the only tree between Tiszafüred and Hajdúszoboszló. Bandits who live in the open are like giants without height. For the sake of healthy outlawry, a woody base is essential.

The Hortobágy Plain was not always so bleak. During medieval times, it was thickly forested. In 1526, the first year of their invasion, the Turks began logging, to deny cover to Hajdúk rebels. Without vegetation, the land became swampy and pestilent, an abode of antisocial swineherds and bands of marauding betyár. Flood control measures turned the region into a vast pastureland, suitable for Magyar cowboys and wayside csárda. Spilt tokaj and pálinka threatens to re-saturate it. Darktree has reeled into the tradition in Italian boots.

He is cast before the tree. The corpses are nailed to the trunk in such profusion that not so much as a thumbnail of bark is apparent. When there is one tree and the favoured method of execution is crucifixion, a problem of space is bound to arise.

The leader of the Gypsies, who keeps referring to himself as János, stands still and holds out his arms. The message is clear: Darktree will also be crucified. The men chatter excitedly while János groans and lets his head fall to one side, just to clarify details. His pose bewilders a huge raven which is strutting nearby—is János a martyr to be pecked or a scarecrow to be avoided? Wait and watch.

Maintaining his posture, János growls orders to his followers. They circle Darktree with cutlasses and unsheathed stubble. Darktree’s fright smells of limes; he rushes to Hannah and hides under her. Although not a man in a conventional sense, crucifixion can still hurt. As the brigands bear down on him, he clutches Hannah’s fetlocks.

They lunge with blades. Darktree jumps out, hides behind Hannah and clutches her tail to steady himself.

His fear conveys itself to her. She emits a peal of rectal thunder. But this is not all—her earlier repast, the indigestible muffin, flies out at high velocity. It strikes the tree and rebounds, scoring a direct hit between the eyes of the leering János.

Ignited by the friction of its flight, the cake detonates. János’s head is blown from his shoulders, rolling along his outstretched arm. A juggler, his fingers catch it by the hair and send it back the same way. This time, it overshoots his neck and trundles along the other extended arm. Darktree watches in horrified fascination as János shuttles it back and forth, like a puppet in a Grand Guignol routine. Finally, he fumbles and drops it. Then he bends to retrieve it and clamps it determinedly on his gouting trunk. He puts hands on hips.

He has fixed the head the wrong way round. Darktree cannot see its expression as the ruffian chief crumbles to the ground, cranium rolling free a second time. The raven is enlightened.

There is a brief silence. Then frenzied cheers and Darktree is held aloft and announced as the new brigand leader. He is given a tour of the vicinity. It should look all the same, but it does not; now he is seeing it with the eyes of a bandit. The puszta suddenly seems full of variety. There is a tasteful simplicity in the flatness; he is attracted to it in the same way that a Turkish Sultan prefers a boy’s chest to a girl’s. An instantaneous Magyar, he loathes Turks and all their delights. The cries of his men masticate his former identity.