The line begins to move, the ferry swallowing up people and cars, no one protesting, like a herd of calves. A group of French people on motorbikes pulls up, five of them, and they’re the last on, disappearing with the same submissiveness into the jaws of the Poseidon.
Kunicki waits until the doors shut with that mechanical groan. The man selling tickets slams down his window and steps outside to smoke a cigarette. Both men are witnesses to the ferry’s sudden fuss and distancing from the shore.
He says he’s looking for a woman and a child, takes her passport out and sticks it in his face.
The ticket seller squints down at the picture in the passport. He says something in Croatian along the lines of: ‘The police already asked us about her. Nobody saw her here.’ He takes a drag off his cigarette and adds, ‘It’s not a big island, we’d remember.’
Suddenly he claps Kunicki on the shoulder as though they were old pals.
‘Coffee?’ and he nods at the little café that’s just opened by the port.
Sure, coffee. Why not?
Kunicki sits at the little table, and in a moment the ticket seller comes up again with a double espresso. They drink in silence.
‘Don’t worry,’ says the ticket seller. ‘There’s no way to lose somebody here.’ He says something more and holds his hands out, fingers splayed, palm furrowed with thick lines, as Kunicki slowly translates his Croatian into Polish: ‘We all stand out like sore thumbs,’ or something like it.
The ticket seller brings Kunicki a roll with a cutlet and some lettuce. He walks off, leaving Kunicki alone with his unfinished coffee. Once he’s gone, a short sob escapes Kunicki; it’s like a big bite of bread, and he swallows it. It tastes like nothing.
The image of the sore thumb lingers in his mind. To whom do we stand out? Who is it that’s supposed to be looking at them, at this island in the sea, following the threads of paved roads from port to port, at the couple of thousand people, locals and tourists, melting in the heat, staying in motion? Satellite images flash through his mind – they say you can make out the writing on a matchbox with them. Is that possible? Then you must also be able to tell from up there that he’s beginning to go bald. The great cool sky filled with the movable eyes of restless satellites.
He goes back to the car via the small cemetery near the church. All the graves face the sea, like in an amphitheatre, so the dead observe the slow, repetitive rhythm of the port. Perhaps the white ferry cheers them, perhaps they even take it for an archangel escorting souls in that passage through the air.
Kunicki notices a few names that crop up again and again. The people here must be like the local cats, keeping to themselves, circulating among a couple of families and rarely leaving that circle. He only stops once – he sees a small gravestone with just two rows of letters:
Zorka 9 II 21 – 17 II 54
Srečan 29 I 54 – 17 VII 54
For a moment he searches these dates for an algebraic order, they look like a cipher. A mother and a son. A tragedy captured in dates, written out in stages. A relay.
And here is the end of the city already. He is tired, the heat has reached its zenith, and now sweat floods his eyes. As he climbs back up into the heart of the island in the car, he sees how the sharp sun transforms it into the most inhospitable place on earth. The heat ticks like a time bomb.
At the police station he is offered beer, as though the officers hope to hide their helplessness beneath that white foam. ‘No one’s seen them,’ says a massive man, politely turning the fan in Kunicki’s direction.
‘What do we do now?’ Kunicki asks, standing in the doorway.
‘You ought to get some rest,’ says the officer.
But Kunicki remains at the station and eavesdrops on all their phone calls, on all the crackling of their walkie-talkies, so full of hidden meanings, until finally Branko comes for him and takes him to lunch. They barely speak. Then he asks to be dropped off at the hotel, he’s weak and lies down in bed fully dressed. He smells his own sweat, the hideous scent of fear.
He lies there on his back, in his clothes, among the things dumped out of her purse. His eyes attentively probe their constellations, positionings, the directions they point in, the shapes they make. It could all be an omen. There’s a letter to him, in regard to his wife and child, but above all in regard to him. He doesn’t recognize the writing, doesn’t recognize these symbols – it was not a human hand that wrote them, of that he is certain. Their connection to him is obvious, the very fact that he is looking at them important, the fact that he sees them a great mystery: the mystery that he can look, and see – the mystery that he exists.
EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE
Whenever I set off on any sort of journey I fall off the radar. No one knows where I am. At the point I departed from? Or at the point I’m headed to? Can there be an in-between? Am I like that lost day when you fly east, and that regained night that comes from going west? Am I subject to that much-lauded law of quantum physics that states that a particle may exist in two places at once? Or to a different law that hasn’t been demonstrated and that we haven’t even thought of yet that says that you can doubly not exist in the same place?
I think there are a lot of people like me. Who aren’t around, who’ve disappeared. They show up all of a sudden in the arrivals terminal and start to exist when the immigrations officers stamp their passport, or when the polite receptionist at whatever hotel hands over their key. By now they must have become aware of their own instability and dependence upon places, times of day, on language or on a city and its atmosphere. Fluidity, mobility, illusoriness – these are precisely the qualities that make us civilized. Barbarians don’t travel. They simply go to destinations or conduct raids.
This opinion is shared by the woman offering me herbal tea from a thermos while we both wait for the bus from the train station to the airport; her hands are hennaed in a complex design made less legible by each passing day. Once we’re on the bus, she sets out her theory of time. She says that sedentary peoples, farmers, prefer the pleasures of circular time, in which every object and event must return to its own beginning, curl back up into an embryo and repeat the process of maturation and death. But nomads and merchants, as they set off on journeys, had to think up a different type of time for themselves, one that would better respond to the needs of their travels. That time is linear time, more practical because it was able to measure progress toward a goal or destination, rises in percentages. Every moment is unique; no moment can ever be repeated. This idea favours risk-taking, living life to the fullest, seizing the day. And yet the innovation is a profoundly bitter one: when change over time is irreversible, loss and mourning become daily things. This is why you’ll never hear them utter words like ‘futile’ or ‘empty’.
‘Futile effort, empty account,’ laughs the woman, placing her painted hand on her head. She says the only way to survive in that sort of extended, linear time is to keep your distance, a kind of dance that consists in approaching and retreating, one step forward, one step back, one step to the left, one to the right – easy enough steps to remember. And the bigger the world gets, the more distance you can dance out this way, immigrating out across seven seas, two languages, an entire faith.