Sunrise with Seamonsters (21 page)

Most of the lunatics were gathered near the bed, watching the proceedings, scratching themselves and giggling at Peter. By comparison they were much healthier than Peter, more alert and attentive.

"They tied me up," said Peter, again in that low careless voice. "Is that fair? Is that right? No, man."

"Who tied you up?" asked Albert.

"Give me another candy bar."

"Hey, there's some cheese in the bag. Why don't you—"

"Hay is for horses." Peter raised his arms and punched the air. The blanket slipped down, and I could see his starved chest. "Oh, man, I can do it. I'm tough. Look, Muhammad Ali."

One lunatic heard. "Muhammad Ali iss boxer ... boxer iss goot."

"Sophie—Sophie, where are you, man?"

"Still have diarrhoea?" Albert asked gently.

"Coming out," said Peter. "Pouring out! Sophie Tucker!" He started to rave. The lunatics were delighted. The guard muttered something and smacked the truncheon against his palm. The lunatics ran out of the room.

"We'll get you to Canada, don't worry," said Albert.

"Afghanistan!" howled Peter. He saw us leaving. "Don't go!"

"I'll be back tomorrow," said Albert.

Peter rolled onto his side and pulled the blanket over his head.

In the outer corridor, the rest of the lunatics crouched against the wall, squatting on their heels. It was such a show of obedience I was certain they were beaten often and hard. They were waiting for their supper. We saw the cauldron of stew being carried up the stony path by two men.

Albert said, "Want to hear something funny? There's a swimming pool on the compound at 'Pindi. I had this party. Everyone jumps in with his clothes on. I decided to have another party, a pool party—everyone in bathing suits. Guess what? No one goes into the pool. Funny."

The Pathan Camp

The center of Kabul is not the bazaar, but the river. It is black and seems bottomless, but it is only one-foot deep. Some people drink from it, others shit beside it or do their washing in it. Bathers can be seen soaping themselves not far from where two buses have been driven into it to be washed. Garbage, sewage and dirt go in; drinking water comes out. The Afghans don't mind dying this way; it's no trouble. Near the bus depot on the south bank bearded Afghans crouch at the side of a cart, three abreast, their faces against metal binoculars. This is a peep show. For about a penny they watch 8mm movies of Indian dancers.

Further up the Kabul River, in the rocky outskirts of the city, I found a Pathan camp. It was large, perhaps thirty ragged white tents, many goats and donkeys and a number of camels. Cooking fires were smoldering and children were running between the tents. I was eager to snap a picture of the place, and had raised my camera, when a stone thudded a few feet away. An old woman had thrown it. She made a threatening gesture and picked up another stone. But she did not throw it. She turned and looked behind her.

A great commotion had started in the center of the camp. A camel had collapsed; it was lying in the dust, kicking its legs and trying to raise its head. The children gave up their game, the women left their cooking pots, men crept out of tents, and all of them ran in the direction of the camel. The old woman ran, too, but when she saw I was following, she stopped and threw her stone at me.

There were shouts. A tall robed figure, brandishing a knife, ran into the crowd. The crowd made way for him and stood some distance from the camel, giving him room and allowing him to see the man raise his knife over the neck of the struggling camel and bring it down hard, making three slashes in the camel's neck. It was as if he had punctured a large toy. Immediately, the camel's head dropped to the ground, his legs ceased to kick and blood poured out, covering a large triangle of ground and flowing five or six feet from the body, draining into the sand.

I went closer. The old woman screamed, and a half a dozen people ran towards her. They had knives and baskets. The old woman pointed at me,
but I did not pause. I sprinted away in the direction of the road, and when I felt I was safe I looked back. No one had chased me. The people with the knives surrounded the camel—the whole camp had descended on it—and they had already started cutting and skinning the poor beast.

The idea was that, after England had been crushed with German rockets and overrun by stormtroopers, Adolf Hitler would board his luxurious
Schlafwagen
in Paris and order the engineer to proceed to London. Then, with his mad staring eyes closed, and slumbering in his plush berth, he would make his triumphant entry into the conquered country, arriving at Victoria Station to find the surrendering British on their knees. It happened otherwise, but the plan was well-known: Hitler wanted to arrive in England on the Night Ferry via Dunkirk.

It is not surprising. The Night Ferry—a train, not a boat—is the best way from London to Paris, the cheapest luxury route, convenient, comfortable and great fun. It is preferred by ambassadors, royalty, heads of state and my whole family. The Queen of England used it for her state visit to Paris, and it has most recently been recommended by E. M. Frimbo, "the world's greatest railroad traveler", who says in
All Aboard,
"My favourite way of traveling between London and Paris is, need I say, the train known rather ambiguously as The Night Ferry." In one sense, it is the lazy man's route, moving from one great city to another in your pajamas. But it is dignified, too: you are hidden, you travel with your bed, and after dinner, while the train rolls through Kent, you can go to sleep and don't have to stir until the conductor rouses you. Snapping up the window shade you find you are yawning at Montmartre.

Since October, 1936, when it made its first trip, it has run almost continuously, interrupted only by the war. It leaves Victoria every night except Christmas Eve, on the dot of nine; it is very rarely canceled. Michael Barsley writes in his history of The Orient Express, "There is something solid and permanent and imperturbable about the Night Ferry." Solid in a British way, imperturbable in a French way: it is a combined effort—British Rail, French National Railways and the sonorously-named
Compagnie Internationale des Wagon-Lits et des Grands Express Européens.
"Bon soir," says the French conductor in London, "Evening, sir," says the waiter in the dining car as Clapham flashes past, and the train continues through the southeast corner of England. At Dover the sleeping cars are loaded on the ferry—there is
room for ten of them—and chained to the deck in its hollow interior; iron stanchions are put in place under the body of the carriage to prevent it from being derailed in a storm (there are tracks fixed to the deck like many parallel sidings). At Dunkirk the carriages are shunted off and recoupled, and, while the passengers sleep, the train is sped through the early morning darkness to Paris. What could be simpler?

Normally, the Night Ferry leaves from Victoria's Platform Two, an alley of polyglots, but I boarded at Platform Eight because the President of Tanzania was arriving on the Night Ferry the next morning at Platform Two. A special pavilion was being put up there so that the Queen could welcome this fervent socialist in the style to which he is accustomed. Immigration ("Is this your wife?") and Customs ("How much sterling are you taking out of the country?") are dealt with swiftly in a series of cubicles on the platform, and once on the train you hand your passport to the conductor, who will show it, on your behalf, to the French authorities at Dunkirk.

Railway travelers are not like other people. They are calm, and though they have lots of luggage, unburdened. They look wrinkle-proof and contented. The lady ahead of me in the line was reading a fashion magazine; next to her a porter wheeled her belongings—a huge trunk, a suitcase, a bulging bag and a hatbox. Leaving aside the question of whether anyone owns a hatbox any more, would any airline passenger risk bringing one onto a plane? And of course it would have cost the earth to fly that lady's trunk to Paris. There were others shuffling down the platform—businessmen with overnight bags and satchels crammed with figures, a conspicuous little patrol of hitch-hikers with rucksacks and lunchboxes, wintry-faced vacationers, and a sprinkling of adventurers, all sturdy and exportable.

I had bought a liter of Chablis at a liquor store near the station. My wife and I were settled in our compartment and had barely clinked glasses when the train was crossing the Thames and the lights on Albert Bridge a little way downriver gave a nice yellowy sparkle to my wine. A half hour later we were in the dining car, sipping Bourgogne Aligote with our meal, which was asparagus soup in Tonbridge, grilled halibut steak in Ashford and stilton and cream crackers in the outskirts of Folkestone. There is an unruffled club-like atmosphere in the dining car of the Night Ferry. The train makes no stops; you sit down and are served; there are no further intrusions, no late-comers, no one hurrying to get off. The businessmen leaf through their financial reports, the lady with the hatbox is alone with her novel and her sirloin. Diners reading: you never see that on a plane. When the coast approaches and dinner is over, everyone retires to his compartment to be transferred to the boat in peace, horizontally.

But it was a wild night. A gale had been blowing all day and the canvas on the parked freight cars nearby was flapping noisily. By the lights of Dover I could see the Channel heaving and gulping. It was after eleven by the time we were loaded. I had a nightcap on the ferry's Veranda Bar, and there met Mr Herz Konopny, a tiny white-haired man, who made precise gestures and drank a whisky as he told me how he had been born in Minsk, moved to Warsaw before the Russian Revolution and then settled in Paris where, in 1939, he joined the Foreign Legion. He fought in Tunisia in a regiment composed of Italians, Poles, Greeks and Spaniards; indeed, this was the reason he'd just been in London—it was the annual meeting of Jewish War Veterans. I asked him how he liked the Night Ferry. He said it was going to be a rough crossing. "When I was young I could sleep anywhere—even on the bare ground—but now that I'm old I don't get much sleep."

Mr Konopny's whisky glass was sliding back and forth on the table. I said goodnight and went below to my sleeping car. Already the ship had begun to pitch; the waves were hitting the hull and the chains that held the cars stationary were rattling eerily; the iron stanchions creaked, and all night—it was such an unusual feeling—my railway berth tipped up and down, eventually rocking me to sleep to the sound of clanking chains and the shuddering hesitation of the ship's droning screws.

It was light when I awoke, a misty day in the north of France, drenched fields, corridors of slender trees, some with nests in their arms, and one wicked giraffe that became, as we drew near, a farm implement—a loader probably—with a long curved neck peering into a furrow. Through Picardy and Oise and the killing fields of two world wars, we drank coffee. Then I joined Mr Konopny at the window. He gave me his business card and invited me to come to his tailor shop—"We'll have a drink." Just as the French office workers were crowding out of the Metro to start the day we pulled in at the Gare du Nord—too soon. But then, all great trains arrive too soon.

There are two sorts of people who like trains, and I am neither. The first is the railway buff, for whom trains are toys. With the mind of a child and the constitution of a night-watchman, he has been elderly in that pipe-stuffing British way since he started to smoke; he enjoys running his thumb along the coachwork and jotting down engine numbers on a greasy note-pad, and though he smiles bizarrely when the whistle blows, he doesn't climb aboard: he is going nowhere.

Put your feet up—get the bennyfit, say the second sort. Their knowledge of trains is non-technical. They like the space, the convenience; they like fuddling and fussing from carriage to carriage, juggling cheese rolls and pale ale, or just sitting, dozing, darning socks, doing the crossword and gloating out the window at the traffic jams: "Another level-crossing, Doris. Look at the silly buggers!" Barrister and criminal, publisher and printer, all crammed elbow to elbow in the compartment with
Wankers
spray-gunned on its walls. They are going to work, or home for the weekend, or to the coast for a bit of fun. They aren't travelers—in a sense nothing alien is human to them; they are non-drivers and Season Ticket-holders—they love chatting: in the area of small talk they are the world's true miniaturists. They have, each of them, a destination.

I know I am not a railway buff, and I prefer not to travel with a destination in mind. Mine is the purest form of travel, a combination of flight and suspended animation. I enjoy getting on trains; I loathe getting off. For instance, last summer in Massachusetts my brother told me a hurricane was on its way. Even the tiredest and most mooching West Indian hurricane, when it reaches New England, causes floods, broken windows, power failures and a kind of fricassee on the television screen. I helped my brother secure his stables, bought a biography of the writer of weird tales, H. P. Lovecraft, and boarded the train for New York. In New York I caught "The Lake Shore Limited" for Chicago and en route my book proved an invaluable conversation piece, since most of my fellow passengers took the title,
Lovecraft,
to be that of a sex manual. I spent an afternoon in Chicago and at bedtime, instead of looking for a hotel, took
"The Panama Limited" to New Orleans: dawn in Winona, breakfast—ai-yugs and gri-yuts—in Jackson, mid-morning in the swamps of Louisiana, a vision of the Jurassic Age. My one regret, when I arrived, was that "The Southern Crescent" (New Orleans-New York) was fully booked. For a terrible minute, in the station at New Orleans, I contemplated a trip to Laredo, Texas, and "The Aztec Eagle" to Mexico City. The Laredo train was waiting. I could imagine the temptations in Mexico City: "El Mexicali" to Nogales, a sleeper on "El Jarocho" to Veracruz, or the three-day journey on Number 49, via Palenque, to Merida and thence to Guatemala, Nicaragua and who-knows-what
ferrocarril
in Costa Rica? I resisted, and walked to the French Quarter, ate five dollars' worth of oysters and a few days later was on my way back home through the deep south—perhaps Alabama? it was very dark—and the steward was moving through the Lounge Car shouting, "Last call for dinner! If you don't come now you ain't going to get no dinner, and you ain't going to hear this no more!"