Matala

by Craig Holden

  “I don’t mean, you know, emotionally or how we act. I mean how we look. Who we are. Like you’re me. Or I’m you.”

  “You are what’s weird.”

  “Well, that may be, but what’s between us is weird, too. Isn’t it?”

  “What is between us?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I was hoping you’d tell me.”

  It wasn’t long after this that she began to reduce the restriction on our drinking too much. And one night we did shots of Cuervo with lime slices in a decent hotel bar in Kansas City, paid for on the expense account of a lonely dental supplies salesman from Tulsa whom she’d shamelessly led on. (I was her little brother in these scenarios.) After we’d separated the guy from a wad of his cash and ditched him, and had fallen into our room, she informed me that I was a bad, bad boy and that it was all her doing, and she felt sorry for that. Then she laughed. I grabbed her suddenly and kissed her on the mouth. She struggled to refuse me, but I had her in a good grip and just forced it, something I had never done to a woman before. When I let her go, she slapped me on the side of the head so hard that my ear rang into the next day. And that, you might think, would’ve been that.

  But I could see in her face that something had changed. Or been released. She had always seemed a particularly animated creature to me, alive in the way most people could never be. But now it was as if someone had discovered she was electric and had plugged her in.

  I leaned in to kiss her again, but she pulled away and said, “Take your clothes off.”

  I looked at her a moment and said, “Wow. That was quick. Maybe we could—”

  She grabbed my hair and pulled my head back until I fell onto one of the beds, and said into my ringing ear, “I said take your fucking clothes off.”

  And that’s when it really began between us.

  Although the subject of her initial disinclination toward anything physical would come up in the weeks and months that followed, and I asked repeatedly, she never revealed the reasons behind it. Except to say that she was actually a very traditional lady and didn’t just go around leaping into the sack with any boy she happened to meet on the road.

  BEFORE WE WERE TO BOARD the train, Darcy and I left Justine with the packs to find the restrooms. I returned first. Justine was squatting on the floor beside her pack, which was next to the new red nylon one Darcy had bought that morning before ditching her set of Vuittons. When I sat down, she said, “You have to listen to me.” She spoke quietly. “You can’t know me.”

  “What?”

  “On the train. Act like you don’t know me.”

  “For how long?”

  “Until I say otherwise.” She unzipped one of the exterior compartments on her pack, removed the pill bottle I’d last seen on her bed in the hostel, and handed it to me.

  “It’s up to you whether to risk carrying it over. I cannot. It’ll probably be fine, but if it’s not, you’re in deep shit. If you’re not comfortable with that, throw it away.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “You stay with her. Do you understand?”

  “No.”

  “At all costs you stay with that girl. Whatever happens.”

  “Justine—”

  “From now on if you see me, you’re blank. Like you’ve never seen me before. Her, too. She has to act that way. Both of you. You explain it to her. And don’t lose each other. And keep the packs in sight of at least one of you at all times. This is not a safe train. That’s not too complicated for you, is it?”

  “No. But why?”

  “Just listen to me. Please. I’ll be around,” she said. “You may see me, but you don’t know me. You can’t—until I say. It’s very important.”

  Masses of people flowed around us, backpackers and business travelers and couples. I said, “All right.”

  “If you get a window seat, there’ll be a space between the seat and the outside wall. It’ll be tight, but you can jam that bottle down in it, so if you get searched, it’s not on you. If someone finds it, you know nothing about it. It was already there.”

  “By the seat.”

  “Yes. Then just make sure you don’t change seats.”

  “Justine, I’m sorry. I don’t know what you think is going on or whatever. I know you’re mad.”

  “That’s not what we’re talking about. That’s for later. Right now you have to listen to what I’m telling you and follow it exactly. If this gets fucked up, we’re done—and I don’t just mean with each other.”

  She put a fingertip to her mouth, kissed it, and reached up and touched my lips. Then she lifted her pack, slid it on, and walked toward the platform where our train waited.

  THEN THERE WAS NO PLACE, only movement. The train would not arrive in Athens until Tuesday, a forty-hour ride, and other than small, smelly toilets, it had nothing in the way of amenities. There were just people—people jammed into the traveling compartments and along the hallways and even in the vestibules between the cars. Darcy called it a third world refugee train, and I knew it was certainly the closest thing to one she’d ever experienced. But she laughed when she said it, and I could see the rush in her eyes. I wondered if she was aware of how much Justine would have hated that. I didn’t have a clue anymore what Darcy was aware of. She was a cipher, that’s all. But I could almost hear Justine hissing, “No one has a right to be thrilled by something this utterly shitty.”

  The compartment held eight seats, four facing four. I had one on the window, and Darcy sat beside me, her feet on the edge of the seat, pressed against the back of her thighs, her arms around her knees, chin resting on top of them. She watched. I don’t think she moved from that position until we hit the last stop in Italy, at the edge of the Yugoslav border.

  Then someone said, “Regardez!”

  Darcy leaned toward me and said, “Watch out,” and at that moment, as if her saying it had somehow announced that the siege was allowed to begin, the door to our compartment slammed open and people from the hallway pressed in—refugee people, as Darcy called them. One slid open the window, and Western goods began to fly into the compartment from the platform outside. It was as if some magical capitalist lateral storm had begun to blow: designer jeans, bottles of Champagne and Italian wines, plastic-encased toys from Mattel and Hasbro, wallets, running shoes, dress shoes, women’s leather boots, raincoats, winter coats, leather jackets, tins of cookies, tins of dried fruits, boxes of teas, packages of underwear. All of these flowed into the compartment and were flowing into all the compartments along the whole train. It was the big smuggle. Accomplices bought the stuff in the West and transported it to the East, bypassing the censors and taxmen and culture ministries. In this way the proletariat had its fun and the free market worked, and there was nothing to be done about it.

  Darcy screamed, “My God! It’s fabulous.”

  The goods piled around our ankles. She picked up a bottle of wine to examine it, but someone snarled and snatched it away.

  “You better be careful,” I said.

  “This is so wild.”

  “Do they always do this?”

  She shouted in French across to the man who had warned us. He said something and nodded.

  And then it ended as it had begun—suddenly. The window snapped closed, the goods vanished as though they’d never existed, the compartment emptied of all but the eight of us seated there, and the train—as if its sole reason for pausing on the Italian side was to allow this taking on of merchandise, this polluting of the East—started again and crept forward to the border.

  SOMETIME AFTER MIDNIGHT, WHEN WE had all finally managed to begin to sleep, the door to the compartment opened, and someone reached in and switched on the overhead light. I snapped awake, squinting, and started to say, “Hey!” Then I saw that it was a man in a snuff-brown wool uniform. He looked at me.

  “American?” the man said. “Canada? Brit?”

  I shielded my eyes against the light and tried to make out the man’s face. He was a guar
d or an officer of some kind. The others were waking up now.

  “American, Canada, Brit?” the man said.

  Darcy raised her hand like a good schoolgirl and said, “American.”

  “Come.”

  “Me, too,” I said, although I had considered saying nothing in hope that the man would leave. I felt what was coming in my stomach.

  The man nodded and crooked his finger.

  The others in the car watched us. No one else said anything. I looked back at our bags and then at the others in the car, silently imploring them to let no one touch them, Justine’s admonition playing in my head. As we left, another guard reached inside and shut off the light.

  We were directed toward the far vestibule where most of the other passengers who had gathered wore the official over-heated-refugee-train American student travel outfit of T-shirt and Adidases or Nikes. The refugees who had jammed the hallways and vestibules were gone. We were filed off into the night, from which I could see other guards through the windows. We were pointed across an adjacent track toward a small lighted building, a kind of shed or garage.

  “What is it?” Darcy asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  We were fairly far north and somewhat above sea level. My breath, the breath of all of us, curdled into dense clouds.

  “They should have told us to get coats or something,” Darcy said.

  “I doubt they know any English,” said a woman waiting behind us, “besides ‘American, Canada, Brit.’”

  “Do you know what this is about?”

  The woman shook her head.

  “Pass-a-port,” one of the guards shouted. “Pass-a-port!”

  “So I was wrong,” the woman said.

  The guards were circulating now, yelling out, “Pass-a-port!” and collecting them.

  “They can’t do that,” the woman said. “They’re not allowed to confiscate an American passport. It’s like in the Geneva convention or something.”

  “Well,” I said, “are you going to tell them no?”

  “Judas priest,” the woman said.

  One of the guards took our passports and left us there in the dark and the cold. Up ahead we could see that the first group was inside the shed now, standing at some sort of counter.

  “This is really crazy,” the woman said.

  “It’s like here we are,” Darcy said, “behind the Iron Curtain. No passport, no coat, no luggage, no nothing in the middle of the night. If they wanted to totally screw us, they could do it.”

  “That’s right,” the woman said. “Who’s to stop them?”

  “It’s not exactly the Iron Curtain. It’s Yugoslavia.”

  “Close enough,” the woman said.

  “Wow,” Darcy said. “Look at the moon.”

  It was full and huge, and it illuminated us. It was the only light, in fact, in the emptiness between the train and the guard’s shed.

  “At least there’s that,” I said. “The same old moon.”

  Darcy and I pressed together. She hugged my arm to her chest, and as we crept forward, I felt her trembling. Then a shout came from inside the shed. One of the guards was yelling something in whatever language they spoke there. Another one shouted something back, and then one of them came out. He was leading a passenger by the arm. It took a beat for me to realize that it was Justine.

  Darcy looked at me but did not say anything. I had told her what Justine said, and Darcy seemed to accept it without question, as if it were a normal thing to have happen on a night train heading into Yugoslavia.

  The guard walked Justine back along the line of shivering Americans, Canadians, and Brits. Two other guards, looking very important, followed. It was a procession, a parade, perhaps meant as a demonstration: This is what you get in the late General Tito’s Yugoslavia if you do not behave.

  In the moonlight I could see her face plainly as they led her past, but it revealed nothing, and she did not so much as glance at me. They led her to the train, which the three of them boarded with her.

  “Oh, shit,” I said to myself, though apparently not silently because Darcy said, “Stop it.” Then she said, “You know what to do.”

  She sounded like Justine at that moment, and I looked at her, half expecting her to be Justine, half not believing that I was here with this woman, a different woman, a woman I had just met, and that Justine, with whom I had lived and slept and cried and made love for two years, was being interrogated by storm troopers, and maybe she would be gone then. Maybe this was how it happened, the big things, the huge shifts and changes—just like that. You got on a train, and when you got off a couple days later, your life was different.

  After a few minutes, Justine and the three guards emerged from the train, one of the guards carrying her pack. They led her back past the line and into the shed.

  Darcy would not meet my eyes. She was refusing me even the exchange of a knowing glance. She was cold inside, I thought, as cold as Justine could be. Maybe that was a truth about all women, that they could be as hard and chilly as they needed. I hadn’t known too many women, and none nearly as well as I knew Justine, but that was the impression I’d gotten.

  I looked back toward the train and let myself sink into the coldness until it became warmth. Darcy had moved in front of me, with her back against me, so I could smell her hair and her skin, and was able to lose myself in that. Soon we were at the shed door. It was simply a makeshift processing center where they matched your passport to your face and mangled your name, and you nodded and agreed with them. They stamped a forty-eight-hour transport visa in your passport that allowed you to travel through the country but not to get off the train.

  When we got up to the counter, we could see into a back room where Justine’s pack had been gutted and its contents laid out all over the floor. The three guards who had taken her into custody had been joined by two others, one a woman, the other in a darker uniform that I guessed marked him as a superior of some kind. Justine sat on a straight chair, hands pressed between her knees, staring at nothing. Her sweater had been removed, and her blouse was unbuttoned to her belly and opened so that her breasts were visible. She made no effort to hide them. The man who had led her away was talking excitedly to the others, and they back to him, all of it sounding like yelling.

  “Do you understand anything?” I asked Darcy.

  She shook her head.

  Now the superior officer was holding up a flashlight with one hand and pointing with the other toward something farther back in the shed. He was speaking to the female guard, and she in turn said something to Justine and motioned for her to get up. Now Justine looked up at me. She held the gaze, and I held it, too, so that we had a moment together. I wanted to cry out to them to leave her alone, to not take her into the back room with the flashlight, please not to, she had done nothing, she carried nothing. Then she rose to her feet and went back with the woman guard.

  She had known, I realized. She had anticipated everything.

  “Okay,” said the guard behind the counter and handed me my passport. “You go.”

  WE WERE BACK IN THE warm darkened compartment, Darcy holding tightly on to me and resting her head against my arm, for over an hour before the train finally began to move again. I was certain the delay was because of Justine. I wondered if she was on board. Only after we began to move and I felt down alongside the seat for the plastic bottle of pills, which was still there, did I doze.

  Sometime before dawn, while Darcy was sleeping, I extricated myself from her grasp and found the small penlight I kept in an outside pocket of my pack. I opened the pack, shined the light in, and moved things around. I found nothing missing and nothing other than what I’d packed. Then I opened Darcy’s pack, which was next to mine on the steel rack. It had two large zippered pockets on the face of it and several long ones along the side, but I opened the main compartment. Tucked into an inside pocket and secured beneath a couple pairs of socks I found a narrow package, a box wrapped neatly in plain brown pa
per and heavily sealed with clear packing tape so that there was no possibility of opening it enough to have a peek inside. It was the package Maurice had delivered to us at the restaurant. I had seen it the previous morning when Justine was repacking. I asked her what it was or what she thought it was, but she’d merely shrugged.

  Now, whatever it was, Darcy was the one transporting it. As always, Justine had known exactly what she was doing. She’d continued to use this girl, who was now an unwitting, unknowing mule in the service of Maurice’s operation.

  IN THE RUSH OF LEAVING and in the face of Darcy’s coming with us, of her altering her life and ours, I had not thought enough about laying in supplies. Plus I had assumed, although Justine had intimated otherwise, that we could get something on the train. But there was nothing to be had, and those who had thought ahead tended to hoard. The two bottles of wine and the bread that Darcy and I had brought were gone by the end of the first night, and the effect of the wine was to make us thirstier than we would have been otherwise. So by Monday afternoon, as we passed into the heart of what was still a discrete political entity, we had stopped remarking on the primitive countryside or the bits of our respective pasts that we’d started to whisper to each other or the unexpected pleasure we felt in simply being there together, because we had begun to die of thirst. We were not on the verge of death—probably we’d have made it to Athens with no lasting ill effects—but we were dehydrated enough that it changed the way we acted, altered how we felt, and began to frighten us. I had even decided, although I had not grown quite desperate enough to act on it, to find Justine if she was still on the train and break my vow to ignore her and ask her how to solve the problem of water—because surely she would know.

  But before that happened, we arrived at the station in Belgrade. We were dozing on each other, a light sticky uncomfortable sleep, the sleep of escape and boredom and desperation, when the slowing of the train awakened me. I looked out from my slumped-down vantage and saw the overhead wires of a city and then the scaffolding over the platform of the depot. I was not roused to sit up and look outside until one of the other passengers stood, lowered the central window of the compartment, and leaned out. People in the hallway were hanging out the windows, too, and there seemed to be some excitement about it. I sat up further. Lines of people, local Belgradians become temporary vendors, had massed along the platform and were holding up wrapped sandwiches and cans of Coca-Cola. The other passenger, an Italian man, was waving a thousand-lira note and shouting something that sounded fairly desperate.