Stranger on a Train (2 page)

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—In fact there were two American journeys, not a single, neatly planned, satisfyingly structured circular trip. The second excursion around the edge of the States was an afterthought, conceived of as the plan for a book inscribed on the geography of North America, and circumscribed by the schedule of the Amtrak rail system. The first trip was impromptu. I was going to smooth the two journeys into one, for the sake of neatness, for the sake of describing a gratifying circle. But I don't think I will, after all. On the first, accidental journey I travelled, delightfully, as a stranger; with the second, planned trip my deliberate strangerness became both stranger and more familiar than I had intended. When the unexpected becomes entirely expected and known, and when the known becomes bizarre and spirit-draining, it's time to go home and wonder what you thought you were doing.

Another thing.
The plan for a book.
I am predominantly a writer of fiction. Research, which might include travelling, only comes about because of a need for detail required for the novel which essentially comes out of my head. I was once at a party where a novelist asked a journalist if he knew about the World Bank located in New York. The journalist replied that he did, and began to discuss the workings of the bank, its international role and effect. The novelist stopped him in mid-sentence.

‘No, I just want to know what colour the front door is.'

That is exactly what researching a novel is like. Some things you make up, others you can read about, but there are small crucial details that have to be accurate.

A travel book is something else, if it is non-fiction. Though I'm not at all clear what. I imagine a travel writer plans a trip in order to write about it. Why, I'm not exactly sure. A film would give the curious a much better idea of the terrain, so it must be something about the act of travelling itself, adventures, encounters along the way. Travel writers must assume that adventures and encounters will occur. They must put their faith in the inevitability of incident.

I'm not much of a traveller at all. I travel in order to keep still. I want to be in or move through empty spaces in circumstances where nothing much will happen. When I go on holiday, I want a vacant beach and an uncluttered horizon. The last time I was on such a beach, I was sitting in a taverna when the Poet, my companion, put his glass of beer down on the table in front of us.

‘Excuse me, that's my horizon,' I complained.

That is the trouble with travelling in company.

So going on a journey and writing a book about it is an odd thing for me to contemplate. The journey is in concept entirely uneventful, and so, therefore, is the prospective book.

‘Well,' I explain to my editor, ‘it will be a book about nothing happening.'

This book about nothing happening is the perfect book that I have in my head. The one I write towards but fail to reach whether what I'm writing is called fiction or non-fiction. My editor nods benevolently, going along with the notion, at least for my benefit. I would be perfectly happy to take these trips for their own sake, but I have to earn a living. I mean to say, that I am not a travel writer in any reasonable sense of the word. I do not feel compelled to bring the world to people, or meet interesting characters, or enlarge my circle of acquaintance. I just want to drift in the actual landscapes of my daydreams, and drifting, other than in the imagination, is expensive. So I concoct the idea of a book about my uneventful drifting. Eventfulness is not the mode of the fiction writer, or at any rate of my fiction writing – events just get in the way. So what a proper travel writer hopes for, I dread: incident. My ideal method of writing a travel book, I realise, would be to stay at home with the phone off the hook, the doorbell disconnected and the blinds drawn. I confess that I remain baffled that I should have put myself at such risk of incident. Baffled and very glad to be home with the blinds drawn.

As for America being the place I chose to trace my circle, well, it wasn't entirely fortuitous. As a child in fifties London, America was as distant a reality to me as ancient Egypt, yet present in my life in a way that those who had carved the remnants of mighty statuary I knew from my visits to the British Museum could never be. Distant is not quite the word. America was like the moon: its remoteness was irrelevant, what mattered was the light it bathed me in, its universal but private reach. The moon was the moon, and mine; familiar and personal, shining over me wherever I was, whenever I looked at it. America, too, was light. It beamed above my head from the cinema projection booth, particles dancing in its rays, ungraspable as a ghost, but resolving finally on the screen into gigantic images of a world I longed for, yet only half believed in. If I walked directly in front of the screen and got caught in its light, my very own shadow was projected up there with the bold and the beautiful, the lovers, the adventurers, the underworld, the mean streets, the main streets, the promising and punishing streets, the all-singing, all-dancing, all-laughing and crying world of what we then called the flicks. People in the audience shouted at me to duck down and get out of the way as if I hadn't realised what had happened, but I knew exactly what I was doing. I wanted to be in the way of all that.

J
OURNEY
O
NE

Magic Monotony

One thing follows another. I had just spent three weeks crossing the Atlantic Ocean on a cargo ship carrying 25 tonnes of potash from Hamburg to offload in Tampa, Florida, and then doubling back round the tip of Florida to take on kaolin miles up a wriggly inlet at Port Royal, near Savannah, Georgia. I watched or felt every yard of the 6000 or so miles we travelled at a stately average of fifteen miles an hour. My capacity for staring had developed beyond even my expectations. Conrad writes of ‘the magic monotony of existence between sky and water. Nothing is more enticing, disenchanting and enslaving than the life at sea.' I sat on a small deck, like a veranda, at the back of the ship, the
MV Christiane,
and watched the ocean like a vigilante as we passed over it, loath to miss a single wave or trick of the light retexturing the water, so that I had to drag my eyes down to the book on my lap, or force myself to go back to my cabin to work or sleep. Even at night, the rabble of stars demanded to be watched, and how could I ignore the effect of the fiercely shining moon, lighting up a brilliant pathway in the encircling blackness of the surrounding sea? Night-time on deck was special, like being awake in the early hours in a darkened hospital ward and seeing the night nurses sitting at dimly lit desks, or gliding silently about to check on sleeping patients. While I walked on deck, and the majority of the Croatian crew got their rest, one of the officers kept watch on the bridge, and an engineer attended to the gauges in the thudding depths of the ship's engine room. That someone is awake and keeping watch in a pool of light when night is at its blackest is very comforting.

After a very short time, when you are travelling so far at such a snail's pace, and with no urgent need (or in my case, any need at all) to get to where you are going, you become an aficionado of detail. I took on the task of witnessing the sea, as if someone, somewhere had to be constantly alert to its shifts and nuances, and here and now the job was mine. I kept an eye on the window when I brushed my teeth for fear of missing something. It was not a fear of missing dolphins leaping, or whales breaching, or a tornado five miles off withdrawing back into its cloud: though I did chance to see those events as I kept watch. It was a fear of missing all the nothing that was happening. The more ocean I watched, the more watching I needed to do, to make sure, perhaps, that it went on and on and that the horizon never got any closer. But simple witnessing is not easy, and I began to notice, with increasing irritation, my need to describe and define what I observed, when all I really wanted was for the sea simply to be the sea. I found myself constantly thinking of it in terms of something else, as if I were reading it for meaning, which was not what I thought I wanted to do at all. The sea was like shimmering mud, I heard myself think, glossy as lacquer, slate-grey, syrupy, heavy silk billowing in the breeze … it was like this, and then that. It's true that it did change all the time, but the most remarkable thing about it was that it was always and only like itself, though I couldn't manage to keep that thought firmly in my mind, which, being a human mind, was also like itself and probably couldn't help it.

I devoted myself to keeping track of the smallest changes in the sea, or the weather, or the progress of the incessant painting of the ship by the crew in the futile effort to impede the attack on its metal and wood by the salt, wind and water. Twice a day or more I examined the charts for the current longitude and latitude to check our progress and our exact whereabouts in the middle of the entirely featureless ocean. I wasn't bored, I was enthralled by the journeying, by the minutiae of the passage of miles and time. I watched our wake elongate behind us, like a snail's trace, disturbing the sea's own pattern into a visual account of where we had been in an environment that offered no other clue that we were making any progress at all. But always, in the distance behind the ship, the sea would close over the anomalous agitation, and return to its normal undifferentiated condition as far as the horizon. The frothy turbulence of the wake proved our movement, but the record of it was continually lost, rubbed out by the vast body of water that healed all the scars scored by whatever made its way through it.

There is never perfect solitude, I've learned.

‘Always you sit reading or looking at the sea, but you are not unhappy, not lonely,' said the third engineer, as if he were asking me a question.

None of the crew could understand why the few passengers they carried would volunteer for such an existence. They were all quite clear that they were seamen by necessity. There were no jobs in post-war Croatia. Captain Bruno Kustera was a great-bellied man, entirely at the mercy of gravity. Everything about him tended downward: his belly, his chin, his jowls and the corners of his eyes and mouth. He made ruefulness his own. ‘Pirate stories made me a sea captain,' he told me. ‘But now it's routine. Just back and forth across the Atlantic. But what to do, there is no well-paid work at home. Always I go back and forth looking for work somewhere else. I would like to work in shipping, but on land. No one loves the sea. Do you know anyone in shipping circles in London?'

I didn't. He shrugged.

‘You know, the Cold War was a wonderful thing. If you didn't like one, you could believe in the other. Now, it's all the same.'

He had been tending a pair of pigeons who came aboard for a well-earned rest, hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic. He made sure there was food and water for them on the bridge, and they lived quite contentedly up there for a couple of days, until a ship passing in the other direction, heading back to Europe, called time on their vacation and they left.

‘Why don't you get a cat?' I asked, when he shook his head sadly at the loss of the pigeons. ‘What about a ship's cat?'

His big eyes drooped. ‘No, it is difficult. An animal has to be owned by one man. And also at sea you always find someone crazy. That one would torture the cat.'

Towards the end of the trip we waited in a flat desert of sun-blasted water for the local pilot to come and tow us up a creek through the torrid desolation of an alligator-infested swamp to the improbably named Port Royal in South Carolina. Captain Bruno joined me at the rail. There was nothing in sight but the utterly still greenish water, no wind, and the only sound, with the ship's engines off, was a humming of the saturating heat. I had been marvelling silently that I had at last found myself truly up shit creek without a paddle.

‘This looks like the end of the universe,' I murmured.

He smiled with mock appreciation at the emptiness on every side of us, and launched into a sardonic hymn to his existence.

‘Our bosses, they are experts at finding wonderful places for us to go. I expect you never dared to dream in your life that you would come to Port Royal. Nor did I.
Port Royal'
– he put his fingers to his lips as if extolling an exquisite rare vintage – ‘these Americans. You will see what is there. Nothing. Nothing but the Last Chance Saloon. No, it is true. You will see it at the end of what they like to call the harbour. We are in a dream, or a nightmare. This is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Moranda. The lost land. You see, they have a very special kind of kaolin in Port Royal. We will take two holds back to Europe of Port Royal kaolin, and the six holds of the ordinary kind we loaded in Tampa. It is best not to get them mixed up. We are specialists in not getting our kaolin mixed up.'

‘You must be very proud,' I laughed.

‘Oh, very proud,' growled Captain Bruno, repeating it diminuendo as he turned and made his weighty sweat-soaked way back to the relative comfort of his cabin.

*   *   *

I had no trouble at all living with the melancholic irony of these men as I kept watch on the passing minutes and miles. They were, in spite of their dissatisfactions and landlubber dreams, real seamen, understanding and even appreciating the necessity for the tedium that meant they were making it safely to the next port. Freighters can be very old and are lost at sea, I was assured by a well-wisher before I left, at a rate of several a month. Apart from the officers, the crew dined together on a large wooden table on the lower deck at the back of the ship, joking, or being quiet, accepting the particular ways of each other, drinking moderately, because they knew their lives depended on working and living well together, and being alert. They cleaned and oiled the machinery, sanded and painted parts of the ship, replaced worn cables, and checked the emergency supplies on the lifeboats with attentive concentration. They worked because the work they were doing was essential. They spruced the ship, washed and ironed their clothes, scrubbed down the decks, kept everything stored and stashed, because orderliness was the only way to survive months at sea in a confined space with thirty or so other people. It was an education in institutional living. They fully understood the purpose of all this. The sea is dangerous; a ship full of potential for lethal accident. They took care of the ship and of each other. If there was a cat torturer among them, it was not obvious who it might be. Which, of course, doesn't mean there wasn't one.