In a Strange Room Read Free

trembling.
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    In the morning they are formal and correct with each other again. They pack their bags. Would you like my address, Reiner says, maybe you will come to Germany one day. He writes it into the little book himself, the tight letters precisely inscribed, then asks, could I have your address too. I don’t have an address, I don’t have a place, but I’ll give you the name of a friend, this he writes down for the other man, then the exchange is complete. They walk together along the main street out of town, down the long slope to the railway station. Their trains are leaving minutes apart, going in different directions. The railway station is a single room and a concrete platform at the edge of the endless green plain, they are the only passengers waiting, a single official behind a dirty window sells them tickets and then comes out himself when the first train appears, to blow his whistle. The South African gets on and goes to the window. Goodbye, he says, I’m glad I met you.
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    Me too.
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    Listen.
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    Yes.
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    Why do you always wear black.
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    The German smiles. Because I like it, he says.
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    The train starts to move.
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    I will see you again, Reiner says and raises a hand, and then he is disappearing slowly into distance, the solid landscape turning liquid as it pours.

 
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    H e goes to Sparta, he goes to Pylos. A few days after he leaves Mycenae he is passing through a public square in a town when he sees images of bombs and burning on a television in a café. He goes closer. What is this, he asks some of the people sitting watching. One of them who can speak English tells him that it’s war in the Gulf. Everybody has been waiting and waiting for it, now it’s happening, it’s happening in two places, at another point on the planet and at the same time on the television set.
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    He watches, but what he sees isn’t real to him. Too much travelling and placelessness have put him outside everything, so that history happens elsewhere, it has nothing to do with him. He is only passing through. Maybe horror is felt more easily from home. This is both a redemption and an affliction, he doesn’t carry any abstract moral burdens, but their absence is represented for him by the succession of flyblown and featureless rooms he sleeps in, night after night, always changing but somehow always the same room.
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    The truth is that he is not a traveller by nature, it is a state that has been forced on him by circumstance. He spends most of his time on the move in acute anxiety, which makes everything heightened and vivid. Life becomes a series of tiny threatening details, he feels no connection with anything around him, he’s constantly afraid of dying. As a result he is hardly ever happy in the place where he is, something in him is already moving forward to the next place, and yet he is also never going towards something, but always away, away. This is a defect in his nature that travel has turned into a condition.
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    Twenty years before this, for different reasons, something similar had come over his grandfather. Rooted and sedentary for most of his long life, when his wife died something inside the old man broke irrevocably and he took to the road. He travelled all around the world, to the most distant and unlikely places, fuelled not by wonder or curiosity but grief. Postcards and letters with peculiar stamps and markings arrived in the post-box at home. Sometimes he would phone and his voice would come up, it sounded, from the bottom of the sea, hoarse with the longing to be back again. But he didn’t come back. Only much later, when he was very old and exhausted, did he finally return for good, living out his last years in a flat in the back garden behind the house. He wandered around between the flowerbeds, wearing pyjamas at midday, his hair wild and unwashed. By then his mind was going. He couldn’t remember where