The man came in while the train was just starting to move again. He greeted me hastily, matched the number on his ticket with that of the berth and, after he had found that they tallied, apologized for his intrusion. He was a portly, bulging European, wearing a dark-blue suit, quite inappropriate to the climate, and a fine hat. His luggage consisted of a black leather overnight bag. He sat down, pulled a white handkerchief out of his pocket and, with a smile on his face, proceeded to clean his glasses. He had an affable, almost apologetic air. “Are you going to Madras too?” he asked, and added, without waiting for an answer, “This train is highly reliable. We’ll be there at seven o’clock in the morning.”
He spoke good English, with a German accent, but he didn’t look like a German. Dutch, I thought to myself, for no particular reason, or Swiss. He looked like a businessman, around sixty years of age, perhaps a bit older. “Madras is the capital of Dravidian India,” he went on. “If you’ve never been there you’ll see extraordinary things.” He spoke in the detached, casual manner of someone well-acquainted with the country, and I prepared myself for a string of platitudes. I thought it a good idea to tell him that we could still go to the dining-car, where the probable banality of his conversation would be interrupted by the silent manipulations of knife and fork demanded by good table manners.
As we walked through the corridor I introduced myself, apologizing for not having done so before. “Oh, introductions have become useless formalities,” he said with his affable air. And, slightly inclining his head, he added: “My name’s Peter.”
On the subject of dinner he revealed himself to be an expert. He advised me against the vegetable chops which, out of sheer curiosity, I was considering, “because the vegetables have to be very varied and carefully worked over,” he said, “and that’s not likely to be the case aboard a train.” Timidly I proposed some other dishes, purely random selections, all of which he disapproved. Finally I agreed to take the lamb tandoori, which he had chosen for himself, “because the lamb is a noble, sacrificial animal, and Indians have a feeling for the ritual quality of food.”
We talked at length about Dravidian civilization, that is, he talked, and I confined myself to a few typically ignorant questions and an occasional feeble objection. He described, with a wealth of details, the cliff reliefs of Kancheepuram, and the architecture of the Shore Temple; he spoke of unknown, archaic cults extraneous to Hindu pantheism, of the significance of colours and castes and funeral rites. Hesitantly I brought up my own lore: the legend of the martyrdom of Saint Thomas at Madras, the French presence at Pondicherry, the European penetration of the coasts of Tamil, the unsuccessful attempt of the Portuguese to found another Goa in the same area and their wars with the local potentates. He rounded out my notions and corrected my inexactness in regard to indigenous dynasties, spelling out names, places, dates and events. He spoke with competence and assurance; his vast erudition seemed to mark him as an expert, perhaps a university professor or, in any case, a serious scholar. I put the question to him, frankly and with a certain ingenuousness, sure that he would make an affirmative answer. He smiled, with a certain false modesty, and shook his head. “I’m only an amateur,” he said. “I’ve a passion that fate has spurred me to cultivate.”
There was a note of distress in his voice, I thought, expressive of regret or sorrow. His eyes glistened, and his smooth face seemed paler under the lights of the dining-car. His hands were delicate and his gestures weary. His whole bearing had something incomplete and indefinable about it, a sort of hidden sickliness or shame.
We returned to our compartment and went on talking, but his liveliness had subsided and our conversation was punctuated by long silences. While we were getting ready for bed I asked him, for no specific reason, why he was travelling by train instead of by plane. I thought that, at his age, it would have been easier and more comfortable to take a plane rather than undergo so long a journey. I expected that his answer would be a confession of fear of air travel, shared by people who have not been accustomed to it from an early age.
He looked at me with perplexity, as if such a thing had never occurred to him. Then, suddenly, his face lit up and he said: “By plane you have a fast and comfortable trip, but you miss out on the real India. With long-distance trains you risk arriving as much as a day late, but if you hit the right one you’ll be just as comfortable and arrive on time. And on a train there’s always the pleasure of a conversation that you’d never have in the air.”
Unable to hold myself back, I murmured, “India, A Travel Survival Kit.”
“What’s that?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I was thinking of a book.” And I added, boldly, “You’ve never been to Madras.”
He looked at me ingenuously. “You can know a place without ever having been there.” He took off his jacket and shoes, put his overnight bag under the pillow, pulled the curtain of his berth, and said goodnight.
I should have liked to say that he, too, had taken the train because he cherished a slender hope and preferred to cradle and savour it rather than consume it in the short space of a plane flight. I was sure of it. But, of course, I said nothing. I turned off the overhead light, leaving the blue night-lamp lit, pulled my curtain and said only goodnight.
We were awakened by someone’s turning on the ceiling light and speaking in a loud voice. Just outside our window there was a wooden structure, lit by a dim lamp and bearing an incomprehensible sign. The train conductor was accompanied by a dark-skinned policeman with a suspicious air. “We’re in Tamil Nadu,” said the conductor, smiling; “this is a mere formality.” The policeman held out his hand: “Your papers, please.”
He looked distractedly at my passport and quickly shut it, but lingered longer over my companion’s. While he was examining it I noticed that it came from Israel. “Mr… Shi… mail?” he asked, pronouncing the name with difficulty.
“Schlemihl,” the Israeli corrected him. “Peter Schlemihl.”
The policeman gave us back our passports, nodded coolly and put out the light. The train was running again through the Indian night and the blue night-lamp created a dreamlike atmosphere. For a long time we were silent, then I said: “You can’t have a name like that. There’s only one Peter Schlemihl, the shadowless man, he’s a creation of Chamisso, as you know very well. You could pass it off on an Indian policeman, of course…”
He did not reply for a minute. Then he asked, “Do you like Thomas Mann?”
“Not all of him,” I answered.
“What, then?”
“The stories. Some of the short novels. Tonio Kroger, Death in Venice.”
“I wonder if you know the preface to Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl” he said. “An admirable piece of writing.”
Again there was silence between us. I thought he might have fallen asleep. But no, he couldn’t have. He was waiting for me to speak, and I did.
“W T hat are you doing in Madras?”
He did not answer at once, but coughed slightly. “I’m going to see a statue,” he murmured.
“A long trip just to see a statue.”
He did not reply, but blew his nose several times in succession. “I want to tell you a little story,” he said at last. “I want to tell you a little story.” He was speaking softly, and his voice was dulled by the curtain. “Many years ago, in Germany, I ran across a man, a doctor, whose job it was to give me a physical examination! He sat behind a desk and I stood, naked, before him. Behind me there was a line of other naked men waiting to be examined. When we were taken to that place we were told that we were useful to the cause of German science. Beside the doctor there were two armed guards, and a nurse who was filling out cards. The doctor asked us very precise questions about the functioning of our male organs; the nurse made some measurements which she then wrote down. The line was moving fast because the doctor was in a hurry. When my turn was over, instead of moving on to the next room where we were to go, I lingered for a few seconds to look at a statuette on the doctor’s desk which had caught my attention. It represented an oriental deity, one I had never seen, a dancing figure with the arms and legs harmoniously diverging within a circle. In the circle there were not many empty spaces, only a few openings waiting to be closed by the imagination of the viewer. The doctor became aware of my fascination and smiled. He had a tight-lipped, mocking mouth. ‘This statue,’ he said, ‘represents the vital circle into which all waste matter must enter in order to attain that superior form of life which is beauty. I hope that in the biological cycle envisaged by the philosophy which conceived of this statue you may attain, in another life, a place higher than the one you occupy in this one.’”