Part 2 (1/2)
He borrows a tent from a friend. Reiner insists that they put it up in the garden outside the flat. It takes a long time, the poles and pegs are like a strange new alphabet they have to learn. Everything must be borrowed or bought, gas-stove and cylinders water-filter torch knives and forks plastic plates a basic medicine-kit, he has never travelled in this way before, the strangeness of everything scares him, but it thrills him too, the thought of casting away his normal life is like freedom, the way it was when they met each other in Greece. And maybe that is the true reason for this journey, by shedding all the ballast of familiar life they are each trying to recapture a sensation of weightlessness they remember but perhaps never lived, in memory more than anywhere else travelling is like free-fall, or flight.
At some time in those last two weeks the question of money comes up. There are practical questions to be considered, such as how they will pay for themselves along the way. Reiner says that he has Canadian dollars that he wants to use up and so it's best if he is in charge of money. But what about me, I say.
You can pay me back later.
So I should write down what I spend.
Reiner nods and shrugs, money is trivial, it is not important.
Now everything is prepared. He finds himself saying goodbye to people with an edge of uneasiness, as if he might not be coming back. In every departure, deep down and tiny, like a black seed, there is the fear of death.
They take a train into the city. At the station they get onto a bus and ride through the night. It's difficult to sleep and they keep jolting awake to see the metallic grey landscape sliding past outside. They arrive in Bloemfontein at first light on a Sunday and walk through the deserted streets till they find a taxi-rank from where they can get a minibus taxi to the Lesotho border. They have to wait for hours until the taxi is full. Reiner sits on the back seat, his rucksack on his knees and his head on his rucksack, earplugs wedged into his ears.
I wander around and come back, then wander again. A large part of travelling consists purely in waiting, with all the attendant ennui and depression. Memories come back of other places he has waited in, departure halls of airports, bus-stations, lonely kerbsides in the heat, and in all of them there is an identical strain of melancholy summed up in a few transitory details. A paper bag blowing in the wind. The mark of a dirty shoe on a tile. The irregular sputter of a fluorescent bulb. From this particular place he will retain the vision of a cracked brick wall growing hotter and hotter in the sun.
When they leave it is already afternoon. The drive isn't far, a little over an hour, and they pa.s.s through a flat country of farmland, dirt roads going off on either side. They are the focus of unspoken curiosity in the crowded vehicle. Reiner is palpably unhappy at this enforced proximity to people, he has the air of someone holding his breath.
At the other end they get out into queues waiting to go through customs, the uniforms and dark gla.s.ses and barricades and discoloured rooms the elements of all border crossings. They pa.s.s through and over a long bridge across a river and are stamped through again on the other side. Now they have crossed a line on a map and are inside another country, in which the potentialities of fate are different from the ones they've left behind.
Where they go and what they do from here is unknown, he had some idea that they would simply set out, the road unrolling before them, but what they are confronted with instead is a sprawling border city, hotels and casinos on both sides of a dirty thoroughfare, crowds milling idly on the pavements, and it is already late in the day. They consult and decide that they will take a room for the night. Tomorrow they will abandon rooms for good. One hotel is as bad as another, they settle for the first one on the left, they are given a room high up over the street.
To pa.s.s the time they go walking around this city, Maseru. They go up and down the main street, they look at shops, they go to a supermarket and buy some food. Between them there is an excitement made partly from fear, they are committed to a situation of which the outcome is unknown, travel and love have this much in common. He doesn't love Reiner but their companions.h.i.+p does have the shape of a dark pa.s.sion in it.
When they get back to the hotel they walk around there too. They go down the back steps into the garden. There is a wooden shed in the corner. A sign on the door says sauna. Inside is a woman of about fifty, something in her eyes is worn-out and finished, she is feverishly pleased to see them. Come in, come in, have a sauna. The sauna is tepid with no steam, the walls are just the wooden walls of the shed. No, no, we were just looking, maybe later. No, come now, have a ma.s.sage, I give you a good ma.s.sage. She is actually holding onto our arms.
When we get outside he says to Reiner, she was selling herself.
Reiner says nothing, but something in his expression is an answer nevertheless. He is silent and brooding all the way through supper in the dining room and upstairs again in the room. It's still early, but the rest of the evening stretches pointlessly away.
I think I will go out, Reiner says.
Where to.
Maybe I will have a sauna.
He goes out and I stand at the window for a long time, thinking. The lights of the city spread in every direction, but a deep darkness rings them round. He waits for Reiner to come back, but he doesn't come and doesn't come, and eventually he goes to bed.
When he wakes again it's morning and Reiner is on the other bed with only the cover over him. The cloth has fallen down and he isn't wearing anything underneath. The German is always delicate and fastidious about covering his body, and this careless abandonment feels like an announcement of some kind. The long brown back narrows down to the place where the b.u.t.tocks divide, where paler skin makes fur and shadow stand out in relief, now Reiner turns, there is the briefest flash of an erection before his sleeping hand pulls up the cover, I get up in a turmoil of longing and revulsion, did he really do that last night.
Yes, he says.
You went back and slept with that woman.
Yes. He is smiling again, a thin supercilious smile, this is later in the day, he is sitting on the edge of the bed with a towel around his waist. Some part of Reiner is perpetually balanced on a high rocky crag, looking down on the moral confusion of the plain. When I was in Canada I started sleeping with wh.o.r.es.
Why.
I have a lot of tension. s.e.x helps me to get rid of tension.
This isn't an answer to the question but he doesn't ask again, it's obvious that he is perturbed and somehow this has made him weak, he nods and changes the subject but in his mind he cannot let go of the lined exhausted face of the woman in the sauna, the way she held onto our arms.
They dress and pack up and go. Only now are they truly departing, all the rest has been preparation. With the rucksacks on their backs they walk, the height and nature of the surrounding buildings change, but the city continues and continues. They are heading towards a high ridge at the eastern edge, hours go by but they seem to get no closer, it begins to appear that they will spend their second night here too.
But then they are on the long dirt road that climbs the ridge and slowly the tin roofs and gardens drop away till they are ascending the final slope with brown rocks and scrub on either side. When they reach the top they pause for one last look back into the simmering miasmic pot from which they've climbed and then go on. There is another ridge behind the first and now they are in a different place.
Mountains go on and on, the world of right angles and rigid lines has been subsumed into one of undulations and dips, graphs that chart moods in striations of colour, browns deepening into shades of blue that almost blur into the sky. It is late afternoon. But hot. Objects at the roadside, a tree, a broken plough, wax and wane in the fuming air. At first the landscape is empty, untilled and unworked, but over the next rise, or perhaps the next, there are fields, maybe tiny human figures toiling, a hut or a house in the distance. They stop and rest in a shady spot, it is incredible to him, perhaps to both of them, that they are here, what was an unconsidered line in a letter months ago has come to pa.s.s.
They walk and walk, all the motion latent in the vast curves of the earth somehow contracted into the dynamics of this movement, one leg swinging past the other, each foot planted and uprooted in turn, the whole surface of the world has been trodden down just like this over time. The rucksack is heavy, the belt cuts into his hips and shoulders, his toes and heels are chafing in his boots, his mouth is dry, all the loose and disconnected thoughts of his brain cohere around the will and impulse to go on. Alone he would not. Alone he would sit down and not move again, or alone he would not be here at all, but he is here and this fact in itself makes him subservient to the other, who pulls him along in his wake as if on thin threads of power.
They do not talk. There is, yes, an occasional conversation, but about practical things, where will we sleep, should we have a rest, otherwise they walk, sometimes next to each other, sometimes apart, but always alone. It's strange that all this s.p.a.ce, unconfined by artificial limits as it spills to the horizon, should throw you back so completely into yourself, but it does, I don't know when I was last so intensely concentrated into a single point, see me walking on that dust road with my face washed clean of all the usual emotions, the strains and strivings to link up with the world. Maybe deep meditation makes you feel that way. And maybe that is what Reiner means when he says that night that walking has a rhythm that takes you over.
What do you mean.
If you walk and walk for long enough, the rhythm takes over.
There is a vagueness to the way he says this that makes you want to leave the topic there, this is often the case with Reiner, he offers a thought that's interesting or profound and perhaps not his own, and on the other side of it you sense a blankness that he can't fill up, there are no further thoughts to follow on. He waits in silence for you to speak. Sometimes you do, but not tonight, I am too tired, they are sitting side by side in a small cave, an overhang in the rock.
It is almost dark. This is hours and hours after they left the city, he would have liked to stop long ago but Reiner wanted to continue, only after the sun has set does he finally concede that it's time to pitch the tent, but now there is nowhere that looks hospitable, there are fields on one side and a bare ridge on the other, this is too exposed, it feels wrong, let's just go over the ridge and take a look. And there by chance they find the cave, Reiner has the calm triumphant look of someone who knew all the time, what his look implies is that he is attuned to the rhythms of the universe, the rhythms of walking no different to those of living, go bravely to extremes and everything will be provided. See, no need to put up the tent. I am less enthusiastic, are we really going to do this, sleep out in the open like a pair of tramps, he is spoiled and soft, he lacks the fatalism of his hard companion, and shepherds have shat in little piles around the cave. But as it gets darker and the world contracts to the size of the tiny overhang, it is more pleasant to be here, in the circle of firelight they've made with their hands.
In front of the cave the earth drops away into a vast valley, in the light the hugeness of this s.p.a.ce was frightening but now it has become consoling, far far below are the tiny isolated fires of herdsmen, the distant sound of cowbells carries up in quavering echoes, when they have boiled water and eaten a sense of well-being descends, all the rifts and ruptures of the world knitted up and healed, hours of sleep ahead.
He spreads his sleeping bag and lies down on one side, staring out into the dark. After a moment Reiner comes over and crouches down behind him. They say nothing, the silence thickens into tension and then Reiner says, in one of your letters.
Yes.
You said you were looking forward to seeing me again.
Yes.
What did you mean by that.
He doesn't know what he meant by that but he knows what Reiner means by this. He can't help it, but all day on the road his mind has conjured images it doesn't want, he keeps seeing that woman from last night, filled to the brim with such febrile desperation, he sees Reiner on top of her, bending her into plastic poses with his brown hands. What Reiner wants now would be no different than with the woman, a ritual performed without tenderness or warmth or sensual pleasure.
But the truth is also that there is an answering impulse of subservience in him, part of him wants to give in, I see shadows thrown up in grappling contortions on the roof of the cave.
I don't know what I meant.
You don't know what you meant.
I was looking forward to seeing you.
Nothing else.
Not that I can think of.
Reiner nods slowly. Neither of them is quite the person that by mutual agreement they have been till now, the rules will be different from tonight. He can smell the smoky sweat of the other man, or perhaps it is his own, not a bad smell, and then Reiner gets up and moves away to the far side of the cave to settle himself. They don't speak again. The fire slowly subsides, the shadows fade, the sound of bells continues in the air.