Stranger on a Train Read Free

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