“Are you touring?” the Doctor asks, and the man smiles. There is a certain satisfaction in asking the right question.
“I am,” says the man, as though he is saying, Finally. The Doctor sees in his eyes that the floodgates have opened and there is no closing them. “The roads are changing the world, my friend. If the whistle of the train engine is awakening us from slumber, then the road is a giant, wondrous hammer to the head!”
“That sounds painful.”
“For instance, the wonderful roads to Engstlenalp.”
“I have no doubt.” The Doctor knows nothing about the roads to Engstlenalp, but he has done his conversational duty and he does not feel obliged to ask.
“I’ve packed two sandwiches. Always travel prepared,” the man says. He offers the Doctor two thick slices of bread in between which is nestled a slab of mysterious meat.
The Doctor, though somewhat afraid of the mysterious meat, is ravenous. “Thank you.” In his rush to get out the door after his late night, he didn’t pack much food for the train ride, which, with his new traveling companion, threatens to last forever. The mystery meat sandwich turns out to be delicious despite, or maybe because of, its mysteriousness.
The man takes the Doctor’s appreciation of the sandwich as permission to regale him with his travels — there is a great deal more than the wrestling match not to be missed in Engstlenalp. The baths at Lamalou, the chateau on Lake Geneva, the opera house in Budapest. He is only getting started. After a while his voice is no longer a great rush bursting forth from a broken dam but a constant, steady stream swallowed by the rattle and sway of the train rumbling through the Doctor’s feet and shins, his calves and the base of his spine, up each vertebra, into his lungs, his heart, his head.
Nestled in his pocket, his father’s watch ticks its own rhythm into the Doctor’s nesting palm. “There is time enough,” his father said after the great Léotard whirred by. The Doctor cried that night because there was no longer anything coming up over the horizon and around the corner into town. The moment had passed. His father returned from a long day of work at the dry goods store to find his son weeping into his mother’s lap. “There is time enough,” he said, though he never did say for what. “Here,” and, reaching into his pocket, he pulled out his pocket watch. “Take it. So you can see how much time there is left.” Its tick, tick, ticking, was meant to be a comfort and a reminder.
But there hadn’t been enough time.
It was ignorance that caused his mother to die from fever all those years ago, her bedroom filling with unimaginable heat. He hated that his father didn’t understand the heat rising off her or how to cool it, and he hated himself for hating his father. Even when his father thrashed in the same hot bed a year later, there was lingering hatred in the boy as the smallpox blisters became sheets of their own, pulling the outer layers of skin from his father until he was no longer his father but any body unraveling.
“. .And, of course, there is the funicular in Lyon not to be missed. .”
The world grows dark as the train hurtles along the iron tracks, continuing on its way north, and soon a gibbous moon illuminates the darkening world, casting shadows in the trees, dappling the lakes. The Doctor’s knees ache from sitting too long, but he is afraid to move for fear it will excite his traveling companion. Still, he cannot help but shift a little.
The red-cheeked man startles awake and continues, “And the vineyards of. .”
The train pulls in and out of stations, puffing and shhhhing. In between, the trees of the forests blur together. The Doctor’s restlessness is stripped away with his fatigue, and there is the cold root of it. He doesn’t want to be one of those for whom more trees will be cleared in the cemetery too soon.
“. . And I’ve forgotten the Baths of Urhasch. .”
The light of the moon fills the compartment; it fills the Doctor until he feels he will burst.
Chapter 2
To keep from being afraid, Albert sometimes says to himself, Fascinating! Or, Magnificent! Or, Yet another escapade! Even when he is lost, he is not lost. No one fine day he found himself in a public square. No it seems or it appears or not able to say how he got here. He is, he is, he is. He is here: walking somewhere on the road to Poitiers and Longjumeau, Champigny and Meaux, Provins and Vitry-le-François, Châlons-sur-Marne, Chaumont, Vesoul, Mâcon.
Years pass differently on the road. When Albert discovers himself walking, not knowing how he got there, through Budweis and Prague and Leipzig and Berlin, he is thirteen, selling umbrellas for the salesman in La Teste. He is seventeen, spending those first nights newly orphaned in the rotten hollow of a fallen tree, and then eighteen, nineteen, then twenty. He is all of those Alberts. He is himself and himself and himself again.
“. . The biggest year for the construction of hotels in Switzerland. .” At a nearby table in a tavern at the foot of the Cantabrian Mountains a man makes casual conversation, and “Berne” whispers its way into Albert’s head. Berne, Berne, Berne, the word as delicious as a cake, and soon he discovers himself, not knowing how he got there, in Berne. For no reason at all, he discovers himself walking through Tournai, through Ostend, through Bruges, through Ghent, through Liège, through Nuremberg, through Stuttgart, and Mulhouse. His blood circulates astonishment to the tips of his fingers and his long nose, throughout his large head and his absurdly large ears (he knows: They are absurd), through the curves of his shapely calves as he walks through Delft and Amsterdam and Zwolle.
When Albert walks, people treat him like a prince; they are that kind. Even the men who put him in prison have been gentle. Your papers? He is always without papers. “Smell me,” he says, holding out a sleeve to a gendarme who arrests him, his face braced for the worst. “I am not a vagrant.” Surely, Albert thinks, a man as clean as he cannot be considered a vagrant. A man with a mustache as meticulously combed and trimmed as his, a vagrant? He is always very clean. Cleanliness is not easy when there is dust and, after it rains, mud to contend with. Even in fields of corn, of cotton, of olives, in the fields filled with sheep, cattle, and hogs (not all of them friendly), he manages. On the road, there are lakes and ponds and rivers. He has resorted to large puddles of rainwater, but he is always clean.
The gentleman at the French consul in Düsseldorf gives him five marks; the consul in Budapest gives him a fourth-class ticket to Vienna; the one in Leipzig gives him seven florins and a lodging ticket; the French ambassador in Prague takes up a collection and buys him a pair of shoes. Yet another escapade and yet another escapade and yet another escapade! The mayor of somewhere else entirely puts his arm around Albert’s shoulder and says, “Now go home to Bordeaux. There’s nothing better than returning home.” But to Albert, kicking a fallen apple through the tall grass of another cemetery of toppled, crowded gravestones, home is never more home than when he is leaving, and he is always leaving, tugged like a balloon into the air.
There are those, like the man in charge of the mud baths in Dax, who don’t believe Albert has a home even when he tells them again and again he is not a vagrant. Though he might be gone days or weeks or months, though the small cottage he once shared with his father is ramshackle, though its windows rattle in the wind off the harbor, though the bedclothes are tattered, though a mysterious mold grows in the kitchen, though the mice who dance in the pots are raising children in the stove, it is still his home. Once when he discovered himself there, his father’s old friend the lamplighter offered to help. He tied Albert to his bed with rope. “To keep you safe,” the lamplighter said, tightening the ropes around Albert’s wrists and his ankles with hands that smelled permanently of gas. “He would have wanted me to keep you safe,” the lamplighter said, and he began to cry. “I know,” Albert said. There was something comforting and familiar about the way the ropes held him, but then he woke up somewhere else into some other day, not knowing how he got there, the stray thread on his trousers and his chafed wrists the only sign of the heavy rope. He was not angry or surprised. There was no holding him. There was no keeping him safe.