He was on that train all night and all day and all night and half the next day, so he came to know the Chinese cook, who'd pretend to charge him two hundred dollars instead of two for a couple of sodas; he'd tell the cook that the check was in the mail and then they'd both laugh; he got a crush on the black waitress, who always smiled and spoke softly and gently when she served his eggs and bacon (she put in extra toast); and his memories spilled ahead like the reflections of sedge-bundles in the ponds.
The river itself was calm, salt-blue in the twilight except for the rich brown shadows that hugged the far side under the trees. He remembered how the Nile, less modest than wide, became greenish-brown where deep, greenish-blue where shallow. Wide wet sandbars were hued like burned corn. The ship passed a yellow sand-hill crowned with tombs like anthills; and a long-necked ibis lurked among the oleanders on Lord Kitchener's island, which was an undulating green tree-strip. The tomb is the future. Perhaps that is why some people are not happy at the turning of the year. By chance he'd attended one Chinese New Year in Opium City. Across the border he'd seen the richly colored Hell Banknotes which the Chinese burned for their ancestors, so he expected fire, which there was, but where lay the joy of the future's dreams? Above that monotonous guitar song in a minor key, a strong raspy soldier-voice was singing to wordless people who danced strangely around a smoky sparky bonfire. — Mainly soldiers from the front, an old veteran said. This festival to make them happy. — Their dark uniforms were thick with sadness as they danced round and round in the cold and foggy darkness. Occasionally they did sing; he even heard all voices raised. Clouds of breath rose like smoke above the arc lights in the black sky. The voices chanted and then were silent. — Strange to admit that this occasion had no more sap than a dead branch, whereas a cave he'd once entered in Tasmania had been almost vivacious with inhuman strangeness from its very mouth where ferny darkness shattered the light into a billion bedraggled strings of limestone like carrots, fat leaves, spearheads; deeper in, bleached cave-spiders surveyed him from walls textured and webbed; there was a peace to this place without sadness, a patient transformation of water into rock which knew little of life and so could not be tortured by it; its history was written only in candle-white stalactites growing down to a pond. It had a sky, possessed its still white constellation of glowworms in the blackness. In that cave there was only eternity to fear. Hell is anything which continues long enough. He remembered a sunken bubble of a Jerusalem teahouse whose domed ceiling was whitewashed and arched, and as he sat in a cushioned niche drinking mulled cider against the chill a young Jew came to him and drew a picture of a dove. The Jew wished him shalom, which means peace, love, happiness, freedom, and all dreams coming true. He said that the young dove he had drawn wished only to live. The Jew's sweetness uplifted him. He was not in hell. But in another niche a man with glowing eyes, filled with the same pride and tenderness, expressed that spirit with words that sought to persuade, compel, dominate. His victim, a young Jewish-American girl, cringed miserably before him. He leaned toward her and said: Do you really like this country? Do you think the mentality and spirituality of this country fit you? — I don't know, replied the girl as bravely as she could. I'm here to find out. — You see, I know a guy, the man said. He came to open a business here. But, you know, he was not happy. This kind of thing disturbs me. That's why I must ask you. — There was no levity in this man, only a merciless sincerity. The girl struggled to speak, but he silenced her with a wave of his hand and told her: I think what you have already seen, that is enough. You must not wait any longer to make up your mind. — The poor girl was weeping. He would not let her alone. He said: To be a Jew in Israel, you must have some deep roots; you must be ready to get married and live the life. Elsewhere, you are only a Jew. Here it is different. If you're asking me, your place as a Jew is here. — There was an impressive quality to the man which only made his speechifying more unpleasant. And yet it was not meant as bullying at all. Another day he who travelled and watched arrived at the Western Wall, where two checkpoint police in blue knife-proof vests met him in a happy spirit. One of the pair said: Why don't you go in the army? The army's very good . . . —and put his hand on his shoulder. The physical contact felt warm and loving. The policeman was proud of who he was. He wanted to help Israel; he also wanted to give this stranger before him a place in the world. His wish was heartfelt and had to be respected. Beneath palms and white towers he saw a sticker: EVERY YESHIVA SHOULD JOIN ISRAEL'S ARMY. EVERY JEWISH STUDENT SHOULD JOIN A YESHIVA. He ascended the Citadel wall, peered through the slits once used to pour boiling oil down on besiegers; went out and down the narrow street lined with handwoven scarves and tablecloths, rugs, leather purses and belts, fringed bedspreads, mounds of coriander, and, passing a coffee shop which was bright with caged birds he found himself at the edge of the Jewish zone. Green-garbed soldiers with Uzis stood tense and ready. He passed through a doorway and came out into the Arab side where two men in blue windbreakers that said POLICE were forcing couples to disengage hands; and he decided to visit the Aqsa mosque. He took off his shoes. Two Jewish soldiers were sitting on the wide flagstones, guarding rows of soldier-boots. — I'd like to kill all the dirty stinking Arabs, one said. — He entered the mosque, loving the blue tiles inscribed with Qur'anic verses. Some Jewish extremists had planted a bomb underneath but it hadn't gone off. Inside was the same still hollowed-out beauty as in the Tasmanian cave. Calligraphed Arabic letters rose like swords. There were silver flowers and disks on the ceiling, and the pillars were marbled like halvah. He saw some Qur'ans on a shelf at the rear; people were borrowing them like hymnals. He went to look at one, and a man screamed: Not allowed! and all the other people in that mosque regarded him with hatred. He went outside and was trying to understand the Dome of the Rock with his eyes when the hour for Muslim prayer arrived and an Arab yelled at him: Okay, the show is over! Get out! — And so he returned to the Jewish side, where two soldiers in green parkas stood beside a metal detector. An Arab passed through the metal detector and it did not go off. The soldiers called him back and frisked him roughly. An Orthodox Jew with long sidelocks set off the metal detector and the soldiers smiled and waved him through. Then it was his turn. The metal detector was silent. They didn't frisk him but they searched his bag. Not looking back, he walked down the arched tunnel, toward the flag with the blue stripes and the blue star . . . YOU ARE PRESENTLY IN THE AREA OF THE WESTERN WALL. YOU ARE KINDLY REQUESTED TO FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS OF THE GUARDS AND TO SAFEGUARD THE SANCTITY OF THE HOLY SITE. THE FOLLOWING ARE PROHIBITED ... A soldier with a machine-gun strolled slowly across the worn white stones. — The train continued to move slowly as it came into a swollen blood vessel of track, then shadowed a long wall of boxcars overhung by whitish-yellow lights on poles.
Then the train was vibrating across a flatness of dark brownish-greenish grass under a dark slate sky with power towers making tall black skeletons of interlocking triangles and a radio tower flashing like lightning far away under the night's thunderhead. He wandered through sleep that was like the soft wet grass between birch trees.
In the morning he saw that it had rained, and waking quickly he remembered Madagascar right away with the umbrellas unfurling well before six in Antananarivo, rising like mushrooms on cobblestones still wet with rain; the green tree above the sand like an immense lung whose alveoli were spreading green trunks, the women carrying their brooms bristles upward, handles upright like flagstaff's in the hollows of their arms: these brought morning to the dirt street walled with low brick houses. He loved someone there whom he would never marry. She knew that. He had never lied to her. But she waited, and wrote him letters, which he kept in the same drawer as the letters of his first love and all the other loves, and slowly the letters became overaccommodating, desperate, and then bitter, and it was his fault, even though whatever pain his first love had caused him was not her fault; which apparent contradiction demonstrated the failure of classical theories. What physicists call blac
kbodies, namely, hollow heated solids from which radiation passes out through a tiny hole, the rest of the solid being entirely black, prove through their spectra that energy is released in discrete quanta instead of in a continuous stream. He could see himself and the Malagasy woman as facing blackbodies (although her body alone was black), each radiating need and sullen resentment and lust and hope and love and all the other wavelengths in the spectrum, glowing only through their tiny sexual orifices which connected directly with their souls; but the steadiness of hysterical light was only an illusion; they were really and sincerely pulsing very quickly as they locked lips and children leaned out and ran while fresh meat began to go rancid in sizzling brick windows; and he was the one who had the orgasm of responsibility; he was the one to be blamed. He decided never to go back there and then he felt lonely so he went back there. She stroked his sunwarmed shoulders. She said: Je constate tous mes erreurs en te disant que tu n'étais pas gentil et tous nos petites disputes, je—je—je t'aimais trop et je t'aime encore plus, voila pourquoi j'ai faite comme cela ... — and he said: Please don't talk like that, honey; 1 myself love you so much. — She said: When I think about you, I cry alone in my house. (A barefoot man in rags came walking past the hot green place where women were washing their clothes in the brown river. He balanced a long narrow cardboard box on his head. He held his hat in his hand. Why was he so familiar, like Madame Bovary's blind beggar? Had it been when the train was pulling out of Bangkok that he'd seen a man sleeping on concrete with his knees up beside a greenish canal in which so many trees reflected themselves as they groped down between blue continents of reflected sky? That man and the one in Antananarivo were brothers who would never meet. But if that were true, were rich men also brothers? And whom was he himself the brother to? Again from the Vatican he remembered snowy double curves of ceiling embellished by golden circles of crowns and angels; from these spheres crossed elaborate wreaths between whose legs lived paintings of rampant lions, monuments, beautiful and terrifying processions, and the ceiling's Saharas of whiteness which separated these entities swarmed with angels. These maps and diagrams were intended to demonstrate to him his relatedness to other beings in this world. Somewhere the two beggars were affixed like stars, still with the same sunken eyes of hunger and sadness, but the Celestial Painter had dressed them in royal purple and their hair glistened and the line between them had been painted in gold. Was there somewhere that those men could truly partake of the existence of angels? He couldn't believe it.) In Madagascar he wanted to explain himself and couldn't. He tried to please her and couldn't. She led him beneath the trees whose heads were as pale and lacy as carrot-tops; and together they journeyed across red and purple earths. — You no same before! she kept saying sorrowfully. Oh, your character not so good now! — And she turned away from him and played Malagasy solitaire, sweating in the hot tobacco breeze. She'd gained a little weight. Her breasts now reminded him of those clusters of green bananas that hang off the trees like grenades. They were now mostly silent together, those two, she playing cards, he slapping his mosquito bites and gazing at the rain that fell upon the street. He watched the bright white sky, the weird pale green trees spreading in the square, the dirty kids laughing, showing white teeth. He kept thinking: What's the use? — He tried to compliment her; one night he pointed to a calendar girl and said that she herself was that beautiful and more so. She thanked him spiritlessly. (Before, when he honey-talked her she'd smile, set down her rum bottle, and give him a big wet kiss, saying: Merci, mon amour . . .) Two days later, unable to digest the insult after all, she began screaming at him in rage. It turned out that he'd said the worst thing. The calendar girl was of another race, hence ugly. — But me no want problem with you, so just smile, speak thank you! she shouted. Oh, you no good! — It was like the time in Afghanistan during the war when Suleiman was sick. His medicine was in his packsack which was locked away; and Suleiman was too poor to have medicine of his own, of course. Gholam Sayed kept saying: Suleiman is ill, Suleiman is ill. — But Poor Man had the key and Poor Man was asleep. Old Elias, the malik of the village, had warned him never to wake Poor Man. Without Poor Man the Russians would get them, so his concentration must never be molested. — Who else has the key, then? he asked Elias, knowing that someone did but forgetting the name. — No answer, either because Elias didn't understand or else because by asking he was breaking some commandment unknown to him. Suleiman lay feverish. He asked Suleiman if he wanted him to wake up Poor Man. Suleiman lowered his head and whispered no. So they all sat there staring at one another in the hot red dust; and then Gholam Sayed said again, more accusingly: Suleiman is sick! — If you care for him get the key, he replied, angry now. Then I can open my pack and get a pill for him. — The oratorical effect of this speech was somewhat lost, as he had to consult his Pushtu-English dictionary for every second word. (He would have preferred to be as reclusive as a crow dodging under a bridge.) — Gholam Sayed said nothing. — I don't know how to find the key without waking Poor Man, he added, or would have, but the dictionary didn't have the words find, locate or discover. He couldn't think what other words to look for. He had never been good at crossword puzzles. (The dictionary was really a disappointment.) He managed to say: It's difficult for me. I am a foreigner. It's not difficult for you. You are a mujahid. — Then suddenly Gholam Sayed announced: Suleiman is not sick. — He says he's sick, so he's sick, the traveller insisted. Help him. Or show me how to help him. — It's Ramazan, said Gholam Sayed. Muslim no eat. No drink. — If a man is sick, the traveller replied, then no Ramazan. — At this, Gholam Sayed pointed to Suleiman and said something disparaging. The traveller didn't understand. Then he pointed to the traveller, indicated breasts on him, pointed to Suleiman and said: He want . . . and made his culture's equivalent of a representative gesture which suggested that Gholam Sayed, at least, squatted when he did it. They were all Muslim missionaries so maybe they didn't need the missionary position. Whether or not Suleiman had designs on him, the traveller didn't really care. Walking up the unnerving cliffsides, Suleiman had held his arm. He'd picked fruit for him, held his hand in friendship when they walked. Suleiman had helped him. Suleiman was sick and he was not helping Suleiman. — He said he's sick, so he's sick, he cried. Help Suleiman! — It's Ramazan, returned the implacable Gholam Sayed. Muslim no eat, no drink. — The traveller went to look for the other man with the key but didn't see him, so he came back, and Suleiman was moaning with fever and Gholam Sayed was standing there grinning. — He gave Gholam Sayed a push. (Gholam Sayed had pushed him many times on the journey across the border. Once he'd been weak with dysentery and Gholam Sayed had shoved a machine-gun butt into the small of his back.) — Help Suleiman, he said. — He is no sick, said Gholam Sayed. — You are a liar, he said. — It's Ramazan, Gholam Sayed replied. — You are no Muslim if you will not help your brother, the traveller said, fearing these words even as they came out. Those were the kind of words that made people kill. — I am Muslim, said Gholam Sayed simply, grandly, contemptuously. Suleiman is Muslim. You are no Muslim.
And yet love and friendship were not always skulls with no minds. There had been that wife so gentle and sunny in Key West (no matter that she hesitated to meet him again). There had been the one in Bangkok. As for the others, could there be any whose recollection he'd ever fail to praise? Their tears and reproaches, silences, farewells, laughter and whispered words were marked on the atlas pages like nations. The ones who'd loved him still and the ones who'd sent him away, he loved them all so much that it stopped his breath. Proud of them, grateful he was, to each from the very first who'd flashed her young head, telling him no and not yet and not anymore while she ran her fingers through her long blonde hair, whose absence she now concealed with wigs, to the last one, the quiet one, the one they'd exultantly warned him was mysterious. She was the one who told him that anytime he wanted to die she would help him by strangling or stabbing as he preferred, after which she'd bury him in a hole. She was very practical a
nd had killed before. She had dark hair which she sometimes braided; and he loved to take a braid in his hand, lean down and kiss it. Her pale oval face had a delicious odor. Her big hand would reach for his own and lift it to her lips. Then she'd kiss and lick and suck the back of his hand. He could feel her hot wet tongue on his skin. Sometimes they came together mouth to mouth and her tongue would go inside him and she'd hold him tight and stroke his hair. They held hands for hours. He had fallen in love and told her so. She said she loved him. She said: I'm sorry I'm such a shitty lover. — That was because she wouldn't fuck him anymore. Fuck was the word she used. She'd taught her little son and daughter to say fuck and dick and cunt. On her ancient car, whose transmission was senile, whose first gear was dead, whose front passenger seat consisted of the floor, on which her lesbian friends sometimes coupled— on this car of hers, which she loved, were painted a devil and a woman transacting cunnilingus. An old hippie walked by and muttered: Wow, it's flashback time! — The mysterious woman liked girls, and would sometimes bring him to strip bars, saying: That one's really horrible! or: That girl is so beautiful I want to eat her cunt! Look at her pretty cunt! Do you want to fuck her, too? — Sure, he always said. I'd do her. — And he drank his beer. The girl on stage stuck her rear out at them, bent over and studied them upside down from between her legs. He took the hand of the woman he loved, the big warm hand, and said: If you could do just one thing to her, what would it be? — I'd snuggle her and give her a long, long orgasm, she replied. — Later it was too sad to view clearly those pictures of the past as he sat in another hot dry hotel room gazing out at a long blue blade of mountain holding up fog and rain. But the first chilly night in their tiny hotel room in Billings when he'd kissed her lips for the first time and taken her big breasts in his hands right through the sweater, he'd known that she had borne him out of everywhere somewhere nowhere, all the way to the capital city of the central continent; the atlas opened. As they made love she gently ran her fingernails over him (your skin marks so easily! she said in wonder); and she fucked him again, whispering that she wanted him to put one of his pistols in her mouth, which he didn't do, and in the morning they took each other again and then she went into the shower and he could not help following her any more than if she had been a taxidermist holding him by a loop of wire through his eye sockets; he was soaping her off when she said: I don't want to fuck anymore. — OK, he said. Are you sore? — No. — He hadn't understood. All day he continued in his joyous ignorance, kissing her mouth, holding both of her hands. She always kissed back, and his penis was firm and ready like his heart. Even though she'd kept her lips closed that last time in bed, he skated along, thinking himself well-shod when all he wore were his assumptions. So together they unlocked the door of the hotel room in Bozeman and she said: Didn't you hear me? I wanted two beds. — He looked at her in amazement. It was a pity that he couldn't later see his own face at that moment, because it must have looked so comically befuddled. — You don't want to screw me anymore? he said finally. — No. — Why? — I just don't feel it. — OK, he said. I'll sleep on the floor. — But she didn't want him to sleep on the floor. She said she'd go talk to the clerk and get two rooms. He asked her not to, please. He would much rather sleep on the floor than face still another humiliation, although he well knew that he ought not to be affected by any opinion of the clerk's; he was weak and shy just then. Then she said he could sleep in the double bed, but he didn't want to. Perhaps he appeared contrary, although he wasn't. Neither is Aadorf (47.30 N, 8.54 E) the same as Aadorp (52.22 N, 6.37 E). She said she couldn't bear to have him sleep on the floor. So he lay just under the bedspread with his face turned away, limbs tensed, alertness stiffly resident in every muscle and tendon as if he were one of those animatrons at Las Vegas (It was taken directly out of the movie and recreated, said the tour guide; it was spectacular to watch them put it up; in one day they'd have an entire part done!); and his soul correspondingly stiffened into vile green spurious crystal spires of anxiety like tourmaline because there was nothing that his clenched body could do or grasp or fight. He heard her sleeping peacefully. She lolled naked on the sheet, and the sight of that body which he had known and thought to know again and could now not touch inflamed him with rage and grief. After three or four of those caged hours he double-dosed himself with sleeping pills. She continued very gentle and open and cheerful. At night when he was sleepy she'd squeeze his hand and whisper: You're so pretty! and although each morning he awoke aching with loneliness and sorrow, her gentle darling ways always won him over anew because throughout the day she was beside him holding his hand. He felt so happy with her! He loved her so very much! One autumn's midnight they were driving from Idaho to Montana in a storm whose white rays of snow sped towards them in an explosion like silent fireworks; lines rushed outward from a central perspective point which eluded them and drew them on as they ascended the pass, snow deeper and deeper on the road and they had no chains. — This is crazy! she laughed. It's so, so beautiful! Thank you for bringing me with you. — And for hours of dark snowy rivers she squeezed his hand and he would have kissed her but it was not about that. He'd cooked elk and venison for her that night and she had said that it was delicious and he had asked her if they would be lovers again and she'd said: I'm not sure. — She said: Sometimes I look at you and I really want you. Other times I don't. — Her eyes shone when she looked at him, and she smiled and said that she loved him. He threw his amis around her. She said that she couldn't decide anything, that she was sorry, that maybe he should just hit her over the head and take her. He listened and actually considered it, but for him that game was too fearful to play. What if he started and couldn't stop? Rape and murder and suicide shone hypothetically before him, grimly equidistant beacons of love indicated on the atlas page by scarlet pentagrams. He told her he didn't think he could do that. She said she didn't think he could, either. Slowly and thoroughly she licked his hand. The snow-trails were like shooting stars. They reached the summit and began to come down into Montana where a snowplow whined feebly up the mountain, with snow thick ahead of it and new snow behind. He felt so close to her. In pioneer days it must have been that way and more, a man and a woman travelling on together, helping one another, needing each other, not knowing whether they'd make it. These days there seemed no penalty for not being sure. The atlas opened; easy pages lay ahead. When they came into Missoula an hour later he told her to pick the motel and then said as always: One room or two? and she smiled tenderly and said: Two, and he smiled back and rushed out of the car before she could see him crying. It was absurd. — It'd be a lot cheaper for you if you just got one room with two beds, said the night manager. — I think I'll take two rooms, he said. — He brought her her key as she sat there in the car with the motor on and he said goodnight and ran to his own door several rooms down, but as he set down his pack to pull the key out of his pocket he saw her standing there beside him in the cold darkness smiling and his heart flowered until she said again: Goodnight, and she took his head in her hands and kissed him. — Goodnight, he said. — Then he went inside, flung himself down on his bed, and wept. Did it count that he only wept for five minutes? Anyway, why snivel at all? She did love him. Others loved him. If he wanted sex or just a woman to hold in his arms all night there would be an escort service. There'd been a night when he'd asked her: One room or two? and she'd cried: I don't know! so of course he got them one and she undressed and said she felt sleepy and said she just really didn't want to very much now and said: You can jack off or whatever the fuck you want! and added gently: I'm sorry ... so he'd waited until she made her darling sleeping sounds, hearing which he rolled stealthily toward her until his knee grazed her buttock and that touch alone was able to keep him happy all night. In the morning she rolled into his arms and began sighing and deeply kissing him and they'd made love. That was the last time they slept in the same room. But on the last night of their journey, they went to see a movie about a boy who ran away from home, and the boy
was so happily leaving everything behind on that early summer morning of green forests that he who watched was uplifted (throughout that film, which she'd chosen, she held his hand); so he no longer ached or wondered or sorrowed but just kissed her goodnight in the parking lot of their latest motel as she shivered in her leather jacket and he said to her: Darling, I love you so much. — And he strode quickly and happily to his room without looking back.
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