Stranger on a Train Read Free Page A

that healed all the scars scored by whatever made its way through it.
    There is never perfect solitude, I’ve learned.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜You must be very proud,’ I laughed.
    â€˜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