Neither Here Nor There Read Free Page A

with small farms where geese and chickens loitered along roadsides that seldom saw a passing car.
    Every hour or two I would wander into some drowsing village where two old men in berets would be sitting outside a café with glasses of Bols and would silently watch me approach and pass, responding to my cheery ‘Bonjour!’ with the tiniest of nods, and in the evenings when I had found a room in a small hotel and went to the local café to read a book and drink beer I would get those same tiny nods again from a dozen people, which I in my enthusiasm took as a sign of respect and acceptance. I believe I may even have failed to notice them edging away when, emboldened by seven or eight glasses of Jupiler pils or the memorably named Donkle Beer, I would lean towards one of them and say in a quiet but friendly voice, ‘Je m’appelle Guillaume. J’habite Des Moines.’

    And so the summer went. I wandered for four months across the continent, through Britain and Ireland, through Scandinavia, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Italy, lost in a private astonishment. It was as happy a summer as I have ever spent. I enjoyed it so much that I came home, tipped the contents of my rucksack into an incinerator, and returned the next summer with a high-school acquaintance named Stephen Katz, which I quickly realized was a serious mistake.
    Katz was the sort of person who would lie in a darkened hotel room while you were trying to sleep and talk for hours in graphic, sometimes luridly perverted, detail about what he would like to do to various high-school nymphettes, given his druthers and some of theirs, or announce his farts by saying, ‘Here comes a good one. You ready?’ and then grade them for volume, duration and odorosity, as he called it. The best thing that could be said about travelling abroad with Katz was that it spared the rest of America from having to spend the summer with him.
    He soon became background noise, a person across the table who greeted each new plate of food with ‘What is this shit?’, a hyperactive stranger who talked about boners all the time and unaccountably accompanied me wherever I went, and after a while I more or less tuned him out and spent a summer that was almost as enjoyable, and in a sense as solitary, as the one before.
    Since that time, I had spent almost the whole of my adulthood, fifteen of the last seventeen years, living in England, on the fringe of this glorious continent, and seen almost none of it. A four-day visit to Copenhagen, three trips to Brussels, a brief swing through the Netherlands – this was all I had to show for my fifteen years as a European. It was time to put things right.
    I decided at the outset to start at the North Cape, the northernmost point of the European mainland, and to make my way south to Istanbul, taking in along the way as many of the places Katz and I had visited as I could manage. My intention had been to begin the trip in the spring, but just before Christmas I made a phone call to the University of Tromsø, the northernmost university in the world and hotbed of Northern Lights research, to find out when the best time would be to see this celestial light show. The phone line was so bad that I could barely hear the kindly professor I spoke to – he appeared to be talking to me from the midst of a roaring blizzard; I imagined a door banging open and swirling snow blowing into his frail and lonely hut somewhere out in the wilds – but I did catch enough to gather that the only reliable time to come was now, in the depths of winter, before the sun rose again in late January. This was a very good year for Northern Lights, as it happened – something to do with intense solar activity – but you needed a clear sky to see them, and in northern Norway this could never be guaranteed.
    ‘You should plan to come for at least a month,’ he shouted at me.
    ‘A month?’ I said with genuine alarm.
    ‘At least.’
    A month. A month in the coldest, darkest,