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(In another thread, 180 requested more writing excerpts. I'm ferociously protective of the fiction I write, but you don't want to read endless non-fiction about product design and architecture, so here goes.
(This is from a novel I am presently writing, my second. I'm about one-third of the way through. It is set in a non-existent Eastern European capital which is imagined as an amalgam of several cities I have visited - chiefly Budapest and Bucharest. The narrator is British and has been asked by an old university friend to look after his flat while he is in Los Angeles getting a divorce. On his second day in the city, the narrator decides to go sightseeing. This is the opening of that segment.)
Such was the indistinction of this country that I had been unable to find a guidebook for it in the Gatwick branch of Border’s, but did manage to track down a Lonely Planet that included this scrap of pointless autonomy as an afterthought and dealt with everything of interest in the capital and beyond in just 40 pages.
Walking from the flat towards the Old Market - the city’s ceremonial centrepiece - I began to feel that 40 pages was rather generous. The city may well have been of Roman foundation with an illustrious Medieval heyday, but the vast majority of this heritage had been ripped down in the middle and late 19th century to make way for endless mock-gothic and baroque buildings of such lumpen construction and poor repair that they all resembled Miss Havisham’s wedding cake with an added layer of truly antique soot. The Second World War and the Eastern Bloc had also made their luckless debits and credits. I passed by the National Museum’s Acropolis-with-gigantism façade, saving it for later, and pushed on into the Old Market.
In London, I was never alarmed by crowds, instead feeling that they were my milieu, the pressing discourse of humanity, the language of the Tube, the very soul of the city. Here, they were different; perhaps my nervousness was a product of not knowing the language (the phrasebook in my pocket now felt like a lead weight) or possibly of being such an obvious tourist. “The bustle of the market is a charming cultural counterpoint to the grandeur of its surroundings”, Lonely Planet informed. However, it seemed that the enthusiasm of the commerce conducted at the market was a charming cultural counterpoint to the utter worthlessness of the goods on offer. Meagre spreads of limp, filthy root vegetables were spread out next to mounds of Tupperware that seemed to have already seen one or more decades of heavy use; obsolete, tatty paperbacks jostled with worthless candelabras covered in peeling gold paint.
Unbothered by this absence of any clearly desirable merchandise, the market square was filled by what seemed to be the city’s whole population. Never before have I truly understood the full significance of the word “heaving” in relation to masses of humanity, but the market was heaving; one’s direction of travel was utterly limited by crowd consensus so that whole quarters were closed off by contrary flows of traffic, and often your course was entirely away from the intended direction, dictated only by a new shudder of peristalsis in the folds and crevices the stalls left for their wretched consumers. Godlike above all this, the first-floor windows of what I believed was once the state department store had been given over to titanic posters for a Western cosmetics firm, and the six-foot-high faces of the most beautiful screen actresses and models gazed down with beatific smugness upon the teeming newly free. The new, free men and women of Europe were as far from this ideal as they had been from the ruddy-faced perfection in the propaganda of the old state. I swear I never once saw a woman under the age of 60 - a charitable estimate - and they were all hunched and aggressive of demeanour with eyes that gleamed, as I saw it, with some unspecified, unneeded, unmotivated malice towards me in ways that I couldn’t even begin to quantify.
If only I had something to buy, I considered, some purpose to be moving around, then perhaps I wouldn’t be so keenly aware of this sense of being, very literally, a foreign body. But what did I need? What could I possibly want from this place? Nothing occurred; and as I struggled towards the other side of the market the idea that I was simply there to take in the scene began to feel as absurd a notion to me as perhaps it did to the crones.
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