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  A THOUSAND MILES FROM THE OCEAN

  AT KARACHI THEY were not allowed off the plane. She went and stood at the open back door. Everything outside was dust-coloured, and shimmered. Two men in khaki uniforms squatted on the tarmac in the shadow of the plane’s tail. They spoke quietly together, with eloquent gestures of the wrists and hands. Behind her, in the cool, the other passengers waited in silence.

  The Lufthansa DC10 flew on up the Persian Gulf. Some people were bored and struck up conversations with neighbouring strangers. The Australian beside her opened his briefcase and showed her a plastic album. It contained photographs of the neon lighting systems he sold. He turned the pages slowly, and told her in detail about each picture. I should never have come. I knew this before I got on the plane. Before I bought the ticket. ‘Now this one here,’ said the Australian under his moustache, ‘is a real goer.’ His shoes were pale grey slip-ons with a heel and a very small gold buckle. She found it necessary to keep her eyes off his shoes, which were new, so while she listened she watched another young man, a German, turn and kneel in his seat, lay his arms along the head-rest, and address the person behind him. He looked as if the words he spoke were made of soft, unresisting matter, as if he were chewing air. While she waited for the lavatory she stooped and peered out through a round, distorting window the size of a hubcap. Halfway between her window and the long straight coastline a little white plane, a sheik’s plane, spanked along smartly in the opposite direction. If I were on that plane I would be on my way home. I am going the wrong way.

  She woke in the hotel. Her watch said 8.30. It was light outside. She went to the window and saw people walking about. The jackhammer stopped. She picked up the phone.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘Is it day or night?’

  The receptionist laughed. ‘Night,’ he said.

  She hung up.

  In the Hauptbahnhof across the road she bought four oranges, and walked away with them hanging from her hand in a white plastic bag. I will be all right: I can buy. Ich kann kaufen. I should not be here. I can hardly pronounce his name. I am making a very expensive mistake.

  In her room she began to dial a number.

  On the way up the stairs he kept his hand on the back of her head. He laughed quietly, as if at a private joke.

  ‘I am so tired,’ he said. ‘I must rest for one hour.’

  ‘I’ll read,’ she said.

  He threw himself face down, straight-legged, fully dressed, on his bed. She wandered away to the white shelves in the hallway. There were hundreds and hundreds of books. The floor was of blond wood laid in a herringbone pattern. The walls were white. The brass doorknobs were polished. The windows were covered with unbleached calico curtains. She took down Dubliners and sat at the kitchen table. She sat still. She heard his breathing slow down.

  The coffee pot, the strainer, the bread knife still had price stickers on them. In the shelves there were no plates, but several small, odd objects: a green mug with yellow flowers and no handle, a white egg cup with a blue pattern. The kitchen windows opened on to a balcony which was stuffed with empty cardboard cartons stacked inside each other. Beyond the balcony, in someone else’s yard, stood a large and leafy tree.

  She sat at the table for an hour. Every now and then she turned a page. The sun, which had been shining, went behind a cloud. It did not appear to be any more one season than another.

  He came to the kitchen doorway. ‘I wish I could have gone to sleep,’ he said.

  ‘You were asleep,’ she said. ‘I heard you breathing.’

  Without looking at her he said rapidly, ‘I went very deep inside myself.’

  She stood up.

  ‘Do you want to see my bicycle?’ he said. ‘That is mine. Down there.’

  ‘The black one?’

  ‘Ja.’

  He stopped the car at a bend in the road. It seemed to be evening but the air was full of light. Flies hovered round the cows’ faces. These are the first living creatures, except pigeons and humans, I have seen since I left home.

  Frogs creaked. Darkness swam down. They walked. They walked into a wood. While they were passing through it, night came. The paths were wet. Dots of light flickered, went out, rekindled. Under the heavy trees a deer, hip-deep in grass, moved silently away.

  They came out of the wood and walked along a road. The road ran beside a body of water. The road was lined with huge trees that touched far overhead. Wind off the water hissed through the trees. Behind them stood high, closed villas with shuttered windows and decorated wooden balconies.

  ‘Beautiful. Beautiful,’ he said.

  Shutup. On the dark water a pleasure boat passed. Its rails were strung with fairy lights. Broken phrases of music bounced across the cold ripples. Couples danced with their whole fronts touching, out on the deck.

  ‘Is that…the ocean?’ she said.

  He looked at her, and laughed. ‘But we are a souzand miles from the ocean!’

  They walked by the lake.

  ‘Have you ever had a boat?’ she said.

  ‘A boat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A paddle boat, yes. My father used to take me out in his paddle boat.’

  ‘Do you mean a canoe?’ she said. ‘A kayak?’

  ‘Something. I hated it. Because my father was a very good…paddler. And he was trying to make me…’

  ‘Tough?’

  ‘Not tough. I was very small and I hated everything. I hated living with my family. I hated my brothers and sisters. He was only trying to make me like something. But I was so small, and sitting in front of this great, strong giant made me feel like a dwarf. And out on the sea—on the lake—he would say “Which way is Peking? Which way is New York?” And I would be so nervous that I couldn’t even think. I would guess. And he would say “No!” and hit me, bang, on the head with the paddle.’

  There was only one bed. It was narrow. It was his. He sat in the kitchen drinking with his friend. The friend said to her, ‘Two main things have changed in this country over the past twenty years. The upbringing of children has become less authoritarian. And there is less militarism.’ After midnight, while the two men talked to each other in the kitchen, she undressed and lay on the inside edge of the narrow mattress. At the hotel the sheet on my bed was firmly drawn, and the doona was folded like a wafer at the foot: I paid for comfort, and I got it. She slept till he came to bed, and then it was work all night to keep her back from touching his. Tomorrow I will feel better. Tomorrow I will be less the beaten dog. I will laugh, and be ordinary. His snoring was as loud as the jackhammer. The window was closed tight. Why did he sing to me, at the end of the summer on the other side of the world? Why did he hold me as I was falling asleep and sing me the song about the moon rising? I bled on the sheets and he laughed because the maid was angry. We stood on the cliff edge above an ocean of trees and he borrowed my nail clippers. As he clipped, the tiny sound expanded and rang in the clean air. ‘Pik, pik, pik,’ he said. Why did he make those phone calls? Why did he cry on the phone in the middle of the night?

  He grumbled all the time. He laughed, to pretend it was a joke, but grumbling was his way of talking. Everything was awful. His life was aw-ful.

  ‘I’m sorry to keep laughing,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you—no.’

  ‘What? What?’

  ‘I keep wanting to make useful suggestions. I know that’s annoying.’

  ‘No! No! Zey are good!’

  ‘Why don’t you have a massage every week?’

  ‘Who? But who?’

  ‘Why don’t you do less of the same work?’

  He laughed. ‘Zat would be a very bad compromise.’

  ‘You could live on less money, couldn’t you?’

  He looked distracted. ‘But I have to pay for zis apartment.’

  He went to work and the heavy door closed behind him. She tipped her coffee down the sink. The plughole was blocked by a frill of fried egg white.

  She washed herself. She looked
at the mirror and away again. She found the key and went down to the courtyard for the bike. An aproned woman on another balcony watched her unchain it, and did not respond to a hand raised in greeting.

  The sky was clouded. The seat was high and when she wobbled across an intersection a smoothly pedalling blonde called out, ‘Vorsicht!’ She stopped and bought a cake of soap and an exercise book with square-ruled pages. She laboured over a map and found her way to a gallery. She passed between its tremendous pillars. It is my duty to look at something. I must drag my ignorance round on my back like a wet coat. He will ask me what I have seen and I must answer. Is there something the matter with me? The paintings look as vulgar as swap-cards, the objects in them as if made of plaster. Grotte auf Malta 1806: waves like boiled cauliflower. A heaven full of tumbling pink flabby things. Here is the famous Tintoretto: Vulkan Uberrascht Venus und Mars. Venus has buds for breasts; a little dog hides under the table. ‘The Nazis,’ said a Frenchwoman behind her, ‘got hold of that Tintoretto and never gave it back.’ A small boy lay flat on his stomach on the floor, doing a pencil drawing of an ancient sculpture. His breathing was audible. His pencil made trenches in the paper. His father sat on a bench behind him, waiting and smiling.

  In the lavatory she found her pants were black with blood.

  The apartment was still empty. It was hard to guess the season or the time of day.

  In his apartment there was no broom. There was no iron.

  A narrow cupboard full of clothes: the belted raincoat, the Italian jumpers, the dozens of shirts still wrapped from the laundry, each one sporting its little cardboard bow-tie.

  A Beethoven violin sonata on the turntable.

  Under the bed, a copy of Don Quixote and a thermometer.

  Through the double-glazed windows passed no sound.

  Perhaps he has run away, left town, to get away from me and my unwelcome visit.

  On the kitchen wall, a sepia poster of a child, a little girl in romantic gipsy rags, whose glance expressed a precocious sexuality. I am in the wrong country, the wrong town. When I heard the empty hiss of the international call I should have put down the phone. In the middle of his night he took the pills that no longer worked. He cried on the phone. For me, though, it was bright day. I was on the day side of the planet where I had a garden, a house, creatures to care for. I should have hung up the phone. Man muss etwas machen, he said, gegen diese Traurigkeit: something has to be done about this sadness. Shutup, oh, shutup. Is that the ocean? But we are a souzand miles from the ocean!

  She walked closer to the furniture. She picked things up and examined them. She went into the cupboard again and pulled a jacket towards her face, then let it drop. That’s better. Already making progress.

  She went towards the window where his white desk stood. There was a little typewriter on it, and loose heaps of paper, books, envelopes. She twitched the curtain away from a framed picture it was hiding. It was a photo. She took it in her hand. It was herself. A small, dark face, an anxious look. And beneath the photo, under the glass, a torn scrap of paper, non-European paper with horizontal lines instead of squares. Her own handwriting said, I’m sorry you had to sleep in my blood, but everything else I’m happy about. She put it back on its hook, dropped the curtain over it, and began to go through the papers.

  The apartment was full of letters from women. Barbara, Brigit, Emanuele, Els. Dozens of them. On his work desk. On top of the fridge. In the bedroom. He left the women’s letters, single pages of them, scattered round the apartment like little land-mines to surprise himself: under a saucer, between the pages of a book. She read them. Their tone! Dry, clever, working hard at being amusing, at being light. Pathetic. A pathetic tone. Grown women, like herself. ‘Capri, c’est pas fini,’ wrote one on the back of a postcard. Si, c’est fini. I have spent thousands of dollars to come here and see myself on these pieces of paper. I am now a member of an honourable company.