‘What is it about these places?’ asked Christa, unable to tear her eyes away from the landscape. ‘Why are people so drawn to empty, passionless things? To bland architecture and blind convention?’
‘Oh, let them be. Vacuity can be really restorative.’
‘You mean not always taking things so seriously, seeing things as so significant and intentional? Well, maybe.’
‘I mean just let them lead more pointillistic lives.’
Her gaze took stock of the landscape. All through the morning and into the afternoon, her constant refrains were: What am I seeing, what am I hearing, what was that moving here? But by the time dusk fell, she was asking: ‘What moves me, what am I missing, what is distant and irretrievable?’
She was a farsighted person; anything that was still distant, or far in the past, she could see pin-sharp. But anything that was close at hand, in her immediate vicinity, she was unable to make out with any clarity, and so she wrapped it up in stereotypes. Her rhetoric was passionate where anticipation or parting were concerned, in other words, for things that weren’t yet an actuality and those that were no longer present. What were we to do? Initially, we travelled toward one another in order to animate the closeness that we’d felt at a distance with our physical presence, but gradually the suspicion grew that all we’d ultimately find was an empty space. Sure, we travelled full of longing, but in the end we were embarrassed, because now there was a body sitting where once there’d only been a spectre.
The first night, we chose a room in a guesthouse already in the foothills of the Pyrenees; it had the tiled floor of a monk’s cell and was cold and clean, with no running water, sagging mattresses and felt-like synthetic blankets on the bed, covered in cigarette-burn holes and the residue of moth powder.
In the evening, we entered the lounge through a curtain made of brightly coloured plastic strips. Behind it, as if to order, the men were already sitting playing cards: frozen images in which time refused to move on, and even the strangers who came into this space all assumed the same expression.
The next morning we bought tickets for Tangier, Morocco. In our train seats, face to face, we were always far more engrossed in the passing countryside than we were in each other. Quite right, too; rather than expecting too much of one another, it was better that our gazes should lose themselves silently among mixed woodland, abandoned signal boxes, rusty carriages, and blooming agaves and spiraeas. Second-class waiting rooms flashed by, along with grain silos, garages and nurseries, and occasionally I’d glance across into Christa’s face, as she sat lost in thought, and found it diaphanous and attractive.
The creeping ghettoization of the provinces was also clearly on show in these parts. There they were, all corralled together: the council houses and the guest-worker estates, where people dreamt of the shop windows of far-off pedestrian zones; and alongside these housing developments, all the usual Import– Export businesses, wholesale vegetable warehouses and builders merchants’ yards. Between them, like the figures on a revolving mobile, the faces of desperate people kept popping up – the barely employable, the burger-flippers. Their faces looked like empty prams; every now and then, a face would appear that had tried to give itself some individuality by latching on to international sunglasses fashion.
On one occasion, Christa lifted her head up from reading Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines and I caught my breath:
‘I’d really like to say something tender to you now.’
Her gaze, still immersed in what she was reading, flitted over the landscape: ‘Tell me later.’
Later, that is fifty kilometres further south, she took off her Walkman for a moment, shook her head, looked at me with deep vertical creases puckering together above the bridge of her nose and said disapprovingly: ‘Sometimes I find Mozart a bit too ornamental!’
Then her eyes were glued to the page once more.
‘A bit like The Songlines, then?’ I asked.
Not looking up from her book, she replied:
‘You’re talking rubbish!’
The next night, we slept in a Spanish dive just outside a village in the middle of nowhere. The windows gave on to the railway embankment, and you could look out at the vault of heaven, coloured blue and midnight blue, with shades of blue-black and dusky blue, with the contours of a line of hills visible on the horizon. Rummaging around between her legs under her nightdress, Christa used a towelling glove to wash her pubes in the small hand basin in our room.
Outside, the streetlights were starting to come on, as swallows kept surfing between the houses right up to nightfall, and a single mosquito drifted through the open window. In the distance, car headlights came snaking down a mountain track, as if returning home from a world far beyond that only knew metalled roads. Opposite, a woman was sweeping her balcony and beating a doormat, while in a nearby flat a girl who’d just taken a bath was stepping into her trousers and shaking her hair dry in front of the mirror. Then someone shouted sharply at a dog barking outside. The noise of the far-off car was now just a faint hum.
We turned the sign on the door to ‘Do Not Disturb’, and instantly felt more snug and intimate. And so we were, as we climbed into our beds, into the aroma of fresh country laundry washed in unfamiliar detergent. I groped for Christa’s right hand and found it, and planted my lips on her shoulder; she let it happen. Outwardly we were a couple, inwardly we were a convenient arrangement. The following day, I called the situation a ‘dalliance’.
‘Loving you must be wonderful,’ I said senselessly.
‘You’re very fond of love, aren’t you?’ she replied. ‘I really believe you. But you’d like it even better if it didn’t have to consist of emotions.’
This was original, but too complicated for the present situation.
‘Why can’t we at least love one another more pointillistically?’ I repeated. But she punished me for this with a glowering look. It was the wrong moment for such debates, especially as we were on our way to the station at the time where we would learn that the next train wasn’t due to leave until the afternoon. So we strolled round the neighbourhood. I remember a large market and a small black-bronze monument to a local hero. Now and then, Spanish peasant women would lure us over to their pyramids of honey jars and we duly showed theatrical awe like small children in a department store. The women market traders told us that Don Quixote had once passed through this region.
Finally, we ended up playing pinball for a couple of hours in a frowsty dump behind the station. Next to us, a man was standing in front of his own personal gaming machine and gazing intently at the flashing box like he was awaiting some token of love. The expression on his face suggested he expected the machine to declare that it had his best interests at heart, and that he didn’t want to believe that, in rejecting him, all it was doing was flirting with him and teasing him. He evidently thought that it would ultimately give itself to him and cough up everything, finally yielding to the one it had been waiting for all along. Meantime, our pinball machine responded:
‘See the clown perform his amazing tricks,’ and we shot the ball through the ‘Spinning Wheel’ and waited to hear the little fanfare announcing that we’d got a free ball.
Still at a loss how to kill time, we left the little town and wandered out into the fields beyond, a landscape not unlike that of the place where I’d grown up in the Voreifel. When you travel, you don’t just journey to another place, but also under another sky. Images of home fade only gradually. You can travel for years, yet they still never fade away entirely. Travelling only proves the indestructibility of home, albeit of the home you’ve lost.
Two tractors were parked on the side of the road, the brickworks chimney was smoking, and a pair of chickens flew past with extended necks; I craned my own neck towards Christa, but she said:
‘I’m not kissing you in countryside like this.’
In the afternoon, once we’d found a compartment to ourselves, she immediately clamped her headphones over her ears once
more and buried herself in her book. After an hour, she looked up, stared out the window for a spell, and then announced dreamily:
‘There must be an incredible number of walnut trees in this country!’
I doubled up with laughter at this, and she snapped:
‘You get more intolerable by the day!’
Sometimes, in my thoughts, I returned to the starting point of this journey, in Tokyo, when everything had still been just a promise and the railway noises, the summer air rushing in pregnant with the scent of blossom, and the fading of the lights in the evening had all just been a faint aromatic eddy. Now I felt more like a traveller who doesn’t want to travel anymore but who instead just wants to turn to stone. For him, the main thing is feeling his feet on the ground, just in order to feel some connection to this foreign place. He wants to turn around on his own axis and feel what’s surrounding him: something specifically alien, distant, the impossibility of instantly being on familiar territory. This, then, would be the traveller who moves in order to come to rest. He constantly touches upon circumstances that make life difficult for him. In low-grade hotels, he stares at the ceiling, hemmed in by the street noise and by the music from the next-door room. His travelling shifts the demarcation line to what is unbearable.
I looked at Christa, with her pretty legs in a light blue summer skirt and her matching light blue, stern eyes, which avoided looking at mine, and in which I could, with increasing clarity, detect disappointment, and not just with me.
She loves telling me what she dreamt last night or some other night earlier in her life. She gives me a blow-by-blow account, with a pedantic love of detail; indeed, she even corrects herself. Yet most of her dreams show a distinct lack of fantasy, except for one, in which a cobra (‘no, my mistake, it was a python!’) had squeezed her to death and Helmut Blüm (‘yes, he really was called that!’) just let it happen:
‘What do you think of that?’
In the middle of the Iberian Peninsula we interrupted our journey, because a little red-brick town that our train pulled into looked just so alluring. But its streets were silent, and the inhabitants plodded along cobbled alleyways, dragging long shadows behind them. So, we visited the local church and gazed in awe at the blossoming orchid-like stigmata of Christ the Lord, which drew the faithful into their meditation. The wound had a deep glow, and the agate strata of the blood-red paint grew darker the deeper they went into the gash, like in a horror film.
On the town’s squares, we witnessed popular recreation spread itself out evenly over playgrounds, a football pitch and a small patch of land with fairground rides. Christa viewed this spreading jollity indulgently and formulated one of those sentences that begin with ‘Spain is …’
Later, we wilfully chose the best restaurant in the town and ordered sparkling wine, to boot.
‘I assume the date’s been added to the price here,’ she whispered and picked her way, her eyes on tiptoes, through the menu. She’ll order cautiously. She doesn’t like this feeling, this uncomfortable feeling, that she might have been able to eat more cheaply. That’s why she likes to call expensive indulgences ‘unnecessary’. But that’s the point: if they weren’t precisely that, they wouldn’t be indulgences, would they?
Scanning the menu, from dish to dish, Christa considers whether food with this or that name is worthy of her attention. Yes, she decides, she does feel like that kind of food after all, if only to have had the experience of eating it. But the waiter regretfully informs her:
‘Sorry, that’s off today.’
Her facial features betray a sudden slump in enthusiasm. Suddenly, the dish that she wanted is precious to her. She doesn’t even look up, she gets a grip on her expression, but takes a long time to make up her mind.
‘How about this?’
She points at the menu.
‘Ah, I’m so sorry, madam …’
‘So, what have you got, then?’
‘Everything else is on, except for the duck …’
The laugh she emits is meant to indicate amused tolerance, intended to convey an aura of ‘We’re not too bothered,’ but ends up sounding contemptuous. The waiter doesn’t just voice his deep regret, he looks inconsolable too.
‘No matter,’ she says, ‘no problem.’
The customer service part of her is wounded. She’s a good consumer and knows what she’s entitled to. She accepts the suggested dish as though it were an unwanted child.
When the dessert arrives, for decorative purposes, the half pineapple next to the pile of sorbets has been left unpeeled.
‘There are enough waiters standing around here twiddling their thumbs,’ Christa says in German, her eyebrows raised as far as they will go, ‘you’d have thought one of them could have peeled the pineapple.’
Back in our room, the first thing she does is pull the curtains. Sometimes churlishness and the desire for privacy go hand in hand. From her Walkman, which she’s now taken to wearing even in bed, her music blares out at me, delightfully sad.
Sometimes, we get off the train just for a few hours and saunter through one of those transitional regions, a threshold town. The squares in these places are full of the insane and the eccentric, selling lottery tickets or discussing politics. These are the real hubs of genuine local life, but here too they are peopled only by the malcontents, the garrulous, the disturbed and the dogmatists.
Way up high above the houses, drying washing flaps on a wire line, directing the shadows it casts on the ground below. The wind gusts around the silver birches, and blue, green and red window-frames swagger; the scent of winter wafts through the high summer as if snow was already dormant in the summer clouds. The grass in the old-fashioned meadows smells like it’s been cut, without having been so. The wood stands there gawping stiffly. The clouds have left a smear like a semen stain on the sky, and the paint flutters down in swirling flakes from the veranda. It’s beautiful.
One time, I stopped in front of a statue of the Madonna, which was standing in a niche on a house façade like someone waiting at a bus stop. Her breasts were those of a young mother, and the prominent set of her pelvis under her dress seemed somehow suggestive. I called this rustic saint on her pedestal ‘womanly’. Christa called me ‘sexist’ for saying that, and I said I hadn’t heard that in a long time, and she said the label still fitted me all the same, and I said it didn’t fit remotely, and she said it did too, and that was just her personal opinion. I replied: Oh yes, her oh-so-personal opinion, and that from a member of a family where the mother dragged Bob Dylan into her marriage? She lapsed into an embarrassed silence.
The engine of the passing lorry blared out like a chorus of trumpets. The sky was wearing jumble sale clothes, and the air now had the coolness of groundwater. Our next train pulled in, and once again we had the compartment to ourselves.
‘The more I get to know you, the more difficult you become,’ said Christa.
I countered with a phrase from the playground: ‘Thanks for the compliment; coming right back at you unused …’
That enraged her even more. In protest, I read aloud a newspaper article from start to finish about 1,130 women in the USA who’d just gained the world record in mass breast-feeding.
‘It’s a mystery to me how you can stand your own company even for a whole day …’ she remarked.
The first substitute for individuality is arrogance. If you’re exposed to it for a long period, you quickly get claustrophobic among all those stereotypical associations and trains of thought and unshakeable judgements in matters of taste. You then react in the heat of the moment.
‘… and you can’t manage to go a hundred metres without secretly competing with every sight we come across.’ I said.
Sometimes when I’m on my own or when I’m longing to be in the arms of a woman who’s no longer young but who’s familiar, I suddenly catch sight of a married couple like that, who have been together for, say, ten or twenty years, and their expressions aren’t just cold or sober, but devoid o
f any interest whatsoever. But I’m not repelled by that; on the contrary, I want to have a wife like that, too, who’d look at me in that bossy, incorrigible way; I long for that air-conditioned hell of marriage, that spring-gun mechanism painstakingly constructed over years – anything but my solitary confinement.
‘If you must know, this is my reality – a man who listens to my dreams in the morning, who I can share a house with, build a garden with, and enjoy a prospect with. And you haven’t got a clue about that.’
‘I know so few people’s reality,’ I said lamely.
To punish me, she read out the entire menu for the buffet car. I picked up an old French newspaper, read the headline: ‘Fine Weather Over the Sahara’ and under the heading ‘A Shallow Grave,’ an article about a dictator who’d refused to have an entry in ‘Who’s Who?’
That evening, we made love silently in a Spanish family guesthouse, in a spirit of tolerance and reconciliation, with each of us thinking something else. During our lovemaking her face changed from a countenance into a mug, and back again, and her thrashing legs couldn’t keep still for excitement. I found this remarkable. We both entered into the strangeness of her life, in order to remain just that: estranged, and everything that we might do together would only foster that strangeness, and not any affection for one another.
At breakfast, Christa said:
‘Tangier, the ne plus ultra!’
Ne plus ultra. ‘Nothing beyond this’ ran the inscription supposedly carved on the Pillars of Hercules by the hero himself. According to legend, one of the two pillars was located on the Rock of Gibraltar and the other on the mountain of Jebel Musa in Morocco. Other sources cite Monte Hacho in the Spanish exclave of Ceuta on the North African coast as the site of the second pillar. But that’s not important. The key thing is that the Ancient Greeks believed that Hercules had placed his two pillars at these straits to mark one of the ends of the earth.
The Ends of the Earth Page 3