Charlinder's Walk

by Alyson Miers

  He knew enough history to say that Istanbul had once been called Constantinople, and before that, Byzantium. It was the first modern-era metropolis he'd seen on his journey that still held people. Or perhaps "still" was the wrong word to use; he could not say for sure that these were descendants of the city's pre-Plague inhabitants. The city had been transfigured by encroaching flora much like the Chinese and Indian cities he'd passed, while the citizens fit themselves in where they could. The feeling of a heartbeat in the ground was still present, though weaker than he remembered in other locations. The odd smell of decay was still noticeable, though also weaker. The sensation of being pushed out of the city was absent. Could it have been a psychological response to the oddness of city remains which he had now unlearned with the passage of time and more unpleasant experiences? Were the heartbeat and smell actually weaker here, or had he grown more accustomed and therefore noticed them less? Either way, the architecture of vines and trees holding up walls and rooftops persisted, and the birds and small mammals made themselves at home even more comfortably than the people. The result was that Istanbul had a makeshift, ill-fitting personality about it. Why this community of Turks chose to house themselves in such an awkwardly suited field of land was possibly explained by the passage they had arranged to connect the two sides of the city. There was only a narrow band of water separating one side from the other; Charlinder could have swum it if not for the paper in his bags. The local populace had a flexible rope-based bridge over this passage, much like the one he had taken over the ravine in Bangladesh, but wider and denser. The locals pointed out to Charlinder the miniature aquatic forest lacing over the water below the bridge. This, he realized, was what had become of the concrete bridge used for cars in the modern era. After he crossed the new bridge, he was on the continent called Europe.

  There was only a small territory of Turkey left after Istanbul, and passing that much was straightforward if not easy. Several days of westward marching put him in Greece.

  Greece, too, was comparatively easy to cross--at first. He'd learned by now that his map of the world was lacking. Greece soon turned out to be far more complicated than a piece of paper could ever show, and he couldn't say whether the geography or the people were the source of more confusion.

  He spent several weeks introducing himself to people who were determined to help him in any way they could, whether Charlinder requested that help or not. He alternated between sitting in donkey-driven carts among cargo while his host's neighbor drove them over mountains, and sitting in boats while being rowed around tangled masses of land. The array of village markings made no particular sense, in fact some people were so nonplussed by his map that they refused to mark their location at all. In no other country had that ever happened. The course he was taking felt much like his trip through the Indochina countries, except that in Asia, he had been allowed to decide his own direction. He eventually came to a house with a curious piece of paper hung on the wall behind a piece of glass. It showed an ink sketch of a very irregular shape, all loops and convoluted edges and jagged lines. Just as the teenage son of the hosting family saw him studying it, Charlinder realized it was a map showing the full complexity and topography of Greece and its borders. The surrounding islands were labeled with words made up of symbols that vaguely resembled Latin letters, but not enough that he could read them. The boy pointed out the countries bordering Greece and told him their names. He recognized Turkey but couldn't remember the others. The boy pointed to their location in the country and, of course, it showed that Charlinder was almost finished. Only a couple more days of northward marching and he would be in another country, with a simple north-south coastline. "Sure, now someone shows me what this country looks like," he muttered to himself. His young host, fortunately, appeared not to register his tone.

  After leaving that village, Charlinder weaved his way through the hills and stayed within line of sight of the shore while he made his way north. He walked for five days, mostly on blinding white, rocky and pebbly beaches, before he found the first human settlement in the new country. He walked into a fishing village of small stone houses progressing up a hillside, and the reception was more extreme than the one he'd received in that first village along the Mississippi.

  Children stopped in their tracks and stared at him. Adults dropped whatever work they were doing and turned to stare at him. People came out of their houses and joined the crowd that was rapidly forming and blocking Charlinder from passing. Most of them were not quite as pale as Anglo-descended North Americans, either, but they were not prepared for someone who looked like Charlinder. Some people called out to their friends, who came and joined the crowd in staring at him. One young man came up to Charlinder and started touching him. He tugged at Charlinder's hair, rubbed his face as though expecting something to come off, tugged his hair some more, all of which he tolerated until the young man looked down his shirt as if Charlinder was hiding something in the waistband of his trousers.

  "Excuse me; what are you doing?" he demanded, stepping back.

  An older woman asked Charlinder a brief question. "I'm sorry, I don't understand you," he answered. "Look, wait a moment," he began while taking out his world map, "I'll show you something."

  Before he could show his audience the usual routine, the woman who'd asked him the question called to a man in the crowd, who protested, but the woman insisted. After a quick argument, the man appeared at Charlinder's side and said something that he didn't understand, but recognized as a language he'd recently heard.

  "Sorry, I don't speak Greek, either."

  The Greek-speaking man yelled back at the woman, who seemed markedly relieved about something. Charlinder unfolded the map, and the crowd drew in so close that he couldn't move an inch in any direction. Everyone was peering over his shoulder, leaning over his arms, re-angling the map towards themselves; there was great curiosity over what he had to show them. He pointed out the trail of markings leading from the American east coast to northwestern Greece. Someone to his left said something that sounded like, "American." Ameri-KAHN, he said. Someone to Charlinder's right made a disagreeing noise, followed by, Afri-KAHN. America was apparently not reputed to be a place that included tall, skinny, brown-skinned young men with curly hair and Roman noses, but its location was well-known.

  After the crowd enjoyed an escalating but cheerful argument over his origins, the older woman who'd called out to the Greek-speaking man claimed Charlinder as her own and yanked him by one arm to her house. They put some tea and muffins in front of him and he let the family talk about him. His hostess kept referring to Charlinder to her son and daughter-in-law and grandchildren as Afri-kahn, but in any case she seemed to be very happy he was not Greek.

  His dreams that night showed him a house. It was the kind of dream in which he could not be sure whether he was actually sleeping or in an advanced state of fantasy. It was only a vision of a large, modern, stone-built white house with a sprawling garden in many colors. There were trees with blobs of orange and sprays of white amid seas of green. There were herbs and flowers growing in neat rectangles on one side of the house, vegetables on the other. Yet there were also spots of drab amongst the colors; though the entire property was blanketed in a profusion of sunlight, it was winter at the same time as summer. Chickens scratched in the dirt while small fluffy quadrupeds hopped around. There was nothing in the dream except the sight of this house, yet there was an intensity to this vision that had little to do with the size or structure of the dwelling or the brightness of the light. The vision carried a powerful sense of attraction: this was a place he needed to go. He felt nothing of where he would find this place, or what he would find when he got there, but the house would be an important part of his trip. Occasionally one of the children fidgeted and woke him up, but as soon as he dozed off, the house reappeared.

  As Charlinder continued up the coast, he went over a ridge to skip a narrow peninsula jutting into the Mediterranean, but he mostly stayed along
the shore. White pebbles turned to black sand. He passed an enclosure of water. The sand turned to beige, the land became lower and flatter, which made his northward march easier. He had only passed one city since the first village; a sizable concrete metropolis crumbled into a forest of pine and palm trees. This time the pulsating in the ground and the pushing-out sensation were present in full strength, though the air was so hot that the ambient scent of rampant plant life drowned out the aroma of decay. There was little other evidence of former civilization, only greenery and sea between compact fishing villages. Though he knew he was getting well into summer, he hadn't expected the heat to be this intense in Europe. He was fine as long as he kept moving; only when he stopped walking did he want to fall asleep, after which he would wake up in a haze of sweat and find the exposed side of his face burned from the sun.

  The theme of drawing a crowd every time he entered a village continued as a regular occurrence, but only for a very short time did he find it bothersome. Small children climbed on him like those of many other countries before them. He caught many people, in a wide range of ages, staring at him, and they didn't look away when caught. Some of his hosts even opened Charlinder's bags and showed his belongings to the whole family, who were perfectly enthralled to see what he was carrying around, no matter how mundane or unadorned. The curiosity never ceased to surprise him.

  Their generosity, too, was always immediately sincere, sometimes alarming. His hostesses sometimes burst into tears when Charlinder was ready to leave their homes, but they always loaded him down with as much food as he could possibly carry. One family, upon noticing the scraps of sheepskin he'd sewn into footwear, swept him straight to a neighbor who made shoes, in return for which nothing was asked of him. The most astounding occurrence in this coastal Balkan country, however, was after the remains of a pre-Plague highway--now a flat strip of gravel trapped under tall grasses and red poppies--veered to a stone's throw from the coast. He was prepared to skip over that particular village, but someone spotted him. A man buttonholed Charlinder on the road and asked him a question of which he recognized the last word.

  "Italy? Yes, I'm trying to get there," he answered, wondering how on Earth this person knew to associate him with Italy.

  The man brought him home and soon introduced him to what must have been at least half the village. Somehow, these people had found out already that someone by Charlinder's description was on his way and that he intended to go to Italy. Either he was taking a deceptively inefficient route, or his previous hosts were clever travelers, because he hadn't seen anyone pass him in his walk between villages. Perhaps they'd gone by water? In any case, the reason why Charlinder's destination was of interest to these people was a mystery until the next morning.

  His host took him outside after breakfast and led him up the beach to where several other men were preparing a sea craft of sorts. Charlinder joined them on a raft of logs tied together with ropes. Harnessed to each of two sides was a large crate of wax-sealed wood filled with something pleasantly fragrant under its lid. Trailing behind was a smaller raft bearing a heifer calf with her feet tied together, lying on her side and looking as bewildered as Charlinder felt. He could see the ghost of a city several miles up the coast; lone walls were covered in vegetation while heaps of rubble surrounded the trunks of pine trees. The raftsmen paddled away from the shore, and the village gradually faded away to a nondescript line of muted pastels on a background of beige and green.

  They spent several hours on that raft between the unfettered blinding sun and the damp breezes from the surrounding tranquil, turquoise-blue water. The Balkan coast disappeared entirely and eventually the Italian coast came into focus. As they drew nearer, Charlinder observed several more men standing on a barnacle-dotted wooden pier, watching their raft come in.

  "Ee-tah-lee!" announced his host as two of his fellows passed the calf into a waiting Italian's arms. Meanwhile the raftsmen were now speaking with their counterpart traders in a new language, and introducing Charlinder as "Africano," while the Italians were noticeably intrigued that these guys had anything as strange as him with them.

  Charlinder said his goodbyes. The Balkaners made protesting noises, encouraging him to make time for proper introductions, but as they were busy trading goods, the Italians told them to let him go.

  He saw the white house again that night. He wanted to ask his bodiless friend what the place was, but there was no sign of Charlinder's presence or voice in the dream, and there was no Paleolan woman's voice to answer.

  The only notion of direction he had now was to head north and slightly west. How long he would keep in this direction, he could only speculate. He turned inland, and from there it only became more strange.

  He knew from Eileen’s writings on the subject that Italian was a much closer linguistic relative to English than were Greek, Turkish, Russian and especially Chinese, and he could understand just enough of the Italians’ speech to make him incredibly confused.

  The first few weeks were fine. He kept mostly north and went far enough west that neither coast would be too far away. He presented himself to the locals as usual and they, having received some inter-continental immigration in the past, did not find him nearly as fascinating as did their neighbors across the Adriatic. There was always at least one family in a village that was happy to receive a guest, he helped by splitting wood and once by repairing a loom, but his hosts didn’t ask to see what was in his bags. It was about as normal as anything he had seen in the past two years until he passed the remains of a town called Perugia.

  That was when the people who received him at their tables began to find him very interesting. They didn’t much try to talk to him so much as become extremely engaged in conversations about him. It wasn’t difficult to tell when they were talking about him, as they did a lot of communicating with their hands and weren’t shy about gesticulating towards him when they argued. He picked up a phrase that always came up when they argued about him: la mamma. It sounded similar to the English "mama" but it only ever came up long after he was introduced to any mothers who lived in the house. When the time came for him to leave each of these families, whoever it was who first brought up "la mamma" took him outside and pointed him in a particular direction. He continued north and slightly west according to their instructions, and it mostly felt good to have a sense of somewhere else he needed to be.

  While he was relieved not to be going in circles, he was nowhere near articulate enough to know whether his hosts had any sense of why he was on the road. In one ill-advised interaction, he succeeded in communicating through pantomime to his hosts the idea of getting sick and dying. Since they found this play-acting very funny, he supposed they must not have mistaken it for a warning that he was sick and dying, but how would he convey the idea of "in the past"? How could he act out the concept of "beginning" or "origin"? How, indeed, would he ask the question of "how"?

  Furthermore, even if his hosts could answer his question, how would he be able to interpret the information with so little knowledge of their language? Perhaps they could give him a name, or show him on the map where he needed to end up. If they had a more complex answer, how would he understand it? How much time would he waste searching for something that was lost on his pitiful monolingual ears?

  Far from becoming the triumphant fulfillment of his aspirations of the last two and a half years, Charlinder found that his walk through Italy put him in an increasingly nervous and unsteady state of mind. Perhaps he was picking up the people's residual trauma from being the homeland of the Plague. Perhaps he simply wasn't getting enough to eat. Or perhaps it was the experience of having already marched through over a dozen other countries that gave him a creeping realization that "northern Italy" was a very large area for one clueless person to walk around. It had once included several major cities, and he didn't know where to look. Was the white house even in or near any of those cities, or was it hidden in the depths of a forgotten countryside?

  Then
he began to ask himself: did the white house even mean anything aside from a malfunction of his travel-roasted brain? Was there any reason to think that any of the locals, assuming he would ever be able to communicate what he needed, knew any more than he did? What exactly was the thing he was looking for? Was it a library? A university? A laboratory? Or was it a private home where someone had documented something of significance? What exactly was his destination, and how was he supposed to know? Would he even recognize it when he saw it?

  The next day he wondered: just what kind of information might he find? Would it be a set of photographs taken through a microscope? Would it be a chart that analyzed the makeup of the virus? Was it a study that traced the disease back to its first victim? Was it...he couldn't think of what else would have been done, because he hadn't lived in that era. Had the information even survived that long? Could he expect to find it intact and usable after over 120 years? How could he even expect that such information had ever existed in the first place? The Plague appeared to have killed all the scientists charged with studying it, and before they could make any breakthroughs.