In a Strange Room

by Damon Galgut

  You can pay me back later.

  So I should write down what I spend.

  Reiner nods and shrugs, money is trivial, it is not important.

  Now everything is prepared. He finds himself saying goodbye to people with an edge of uneasiness, as if he might not be coming back. In every departure, deep down and tiny, like a black seed, there is the fear of death.

  They take a train into the city. At the station they get onto a bus and ride through the night. It’s difficult to sleep and they keep jolting awake to see the metallic grey landscape sliding past outside. They arrive in Bloemfontein at first light on a Sunday and walk through the deserted streets till they find a taxi-rank from where they can get a minibus taxi to the Lesotho border. They have to wait for hours until the taxi is full. Reiner sits on the back seat, his rucksack on his knees and his head on his rucksack, earplugs wedged into his ears.

  I wander around and come back, then wander again. A large part of travelling consists purely in waiting, with all the attendant ennui and depression. Memories come back of other places he has waited in, departure halls of airports, bus-stations, lonely kerbsides in the heat, and in all of them there is an identical strain of melancholy summed up in a few transitory details. A paper bag blowing in the wind. The mark of a dirty shoe on a tile. The irregular sputter of a fluorescent bulb. From this particular place he will retain the vision of a cracked brick wall growing hotter and hotter in the sun.

  When they leave it is already afternoon. The drive isn’t far, a little over an hour, and they pass through a flat country of farmland, dirt roads going off on either side. They are the focus of unspoken curiosity in the crowded vehicle. Reiner is palpably unhappy at this enforced proximity to people, he has the air of someone holding his breath.

  At the other end they get out into queues waiting to go through customs, the uniforms and dark glasses and barricades and discoloured rooms the elements of all border crossings. They pass through and over a long bridge across a river and are stamped through again on the other side. Now they have crossed a line on a map and are inside another country, in which the potentialities of fate are different from the ones they’ve left behind.

  Where they go and what they do from here is unknown, he had some idea that they would simply set out, the road unrolling before them, but what they are confronted with instead is a sprawling border city, hotels and casinos on both sides of a dirty thoroughfare, crowds milling idly on the pavements, and it is already late in the day. They consult and decide that they will take a room for the night. Tomorrow they will abandon rooms for good. One hotel is as bad as another, they settle for the first one on the left, they are given a room high up over the street.

  To pass the time they go walking around this city, Maseru. They go up and down the main street, they look at shops, they go to a supermarket and buy some food. Between them there is an excitement made partly from fear, they are committed to a situation of which the outcome is unknown, travel and love have this much in common. He doesn’t love Reiner but their companionship does have the shape of a dark passion in it.

  When they get back to the hotel they walk around there too. They go down the back steps into the garden. There is a wooden shed in the corner. A sign on the door says sauna. Inside is a woman of about fifty, something in her eyes is worn-out and finished, she is feverishly pleased to see them. Come in, come in, have a sauna. The sauna is tepid with no steam, the walls are just the wooden walls of the shed. No, no, we were just looking, maybe later. No, come now, have a massage, I give you a good massage. She is actually holding onto our arms.

  When we get outside he says to Reiner, she was selling herself.

  Reiner says nothing, but something in his expression is an answer nevertheless. He is silent and brooding all the way through supper in the dining room and upstairs again in the room. It’s still early, but the rest of the evening stretches pointlessly away.

  I think I will go out, Reiner says.

  Where to.

  Maybe I will have a sauna.

  He goes out and I stand at the window for a long time, thinking. The lights of the city spread in every direction, but a deep darkness rings them round. He waits for Reiner to come back, but he doesn’t come and doesn’t come, and eventually he goes to bed.

  When he wakes again it’s morning and Reiner is on the other bed with only the cover over him. The cloth has fallen down and he isn’t wearing anything underneath. The German is always delicate and fastidious about covering his body, and this careless abandonment feels like an announcement of some kind. The long brown back narrows down to the place where the buttocks divide, where paler skin makes fur and shadow stand out in relief, now Reiner turns, there is the briefest flash of an erection before his sleeping hand pulls up the cover, I get up in a turmoil of longing and revulsion, did he really do that last night.

  Yes, he says.

  You went back and slept with that woman.

  Yes. He is smiling again, a thin supercilious smile, this is later in the day, he is sitting on the edge of the bed with a towel around his waist. Some part of Reiner is perpetually balanced on a high rocky crag, looking down on the moral confusion of the plain. When I was in Canada I started sleeping with whores.

  Why.

  I have a lot of tension. Sex helps me to get rid of tension.

  This isn’t an answer to the question but he doesn’t ask again, it’s obvious that he is perturbed and somehow this has made him weak, he nods and changes the subject but in his mind he cannot let go of the lined exhausted face of the woman in the sauna, the way she held onto our arms.

  They dress and pack up and go. Only now are they truly departing, all the rest has been preparation. With the rucksacks on their backs they walk, the height and nature of the surrounding buildings change, but the city continues and continues. They are heading towards a high ridge at the eastern edge, hours go by but they seem to get no closer, it begins to appear that they will spend their second night here too.

  But then they are on the long dirt road that climbs the ridge and slowly the tin roofs and gardens drop away till they are ascending the final slope with brown rocks and scrub on either side. When they reach the top they pause for one last look back into the simmering miasmic pot from which they’ve climbed and then go on. There is another ridge behind the first and now they are in a different place.

  Mountains go on and on, the world of right angles and rigid lines has been subsumed into one of undulations and dips, graphs that chart moods in striations of colour, browns deepening into shades of blue that almost blur into the sky. It is late afternoon. But hot. Objects at the roadside, a tree, a broken plough, wax and wane in the fuming air. At first the landscape is empty, untilled and unworked, but over the next rise, or perhaps the next, there are fields, maybe tiny human figures toiling, a hut or a house in the distance. They stop and rest in a shady spot, it is incredible to him, perhaps to both of them, that they are here, what was an unconsidered line in a letter months ago has come to pass.

  They walk and walk, all the motion latent in the vast curves of the earth somehow contracted into the dynamics of this movement, one leg swinging past the other, each foot planted and uprooted in turn, the whole surface of the world has been trodden down just like this over time. The rucksack is heavy, the belt cuts into his hips and shoulders, his toes and heels are chafing in his boots, his mouth is dry, all the loose and disconnected thoughts of his brain cohere around the will and impulse to go on. Alone he would not. Alone he would sit down and not move again, or alone he would not be here at all, but he is here and this fact in itself makes him subservient to the other, who pulls him along in his wake as if on thin threads of power.

  They do not talk. There is, yes, an occasional conversation, but about practical things, where will we sleep, should we have a rest, otherwise they walk, sometimes next to each other, sometimes apart, but always alone. It’s strange that all this space, unconfined by artificial limits as it spills to the horizon,
should throw you back so completely into yourself, but it does, I don’t know when I was last so intensely concentrated into a single point, see me walking on that dust road with my face washed clean of all the usual emotions, the strains and strivings to link up with the world. Maybe deep meditation makes you feel that way. And maybe that is what Reiner means when he says that night that walking has a rhythm that takes you over.

  What do you mean.

  If you walk and walk for long enough, the rhythm takes over.

  There is a vagueness to the way he says this that makes you want to leave the topic there, this is often the case with Reiner, he offers a thought that’s interesting or profound and perhaps not his own, and on the other side of it you sense a blankness that he can’t fill up, there are no further thoughts to follow on. He waits in silence for you to speak. Sometimes you do, but not tonight, I am too tired, they are sitting side by side in a small cave, an overhang in the rock. It is almost dark. This is hours and hours after they left the city, he would have liked to stop long ago but Reiner wanted to continue, only after the sun has set does he finally concede that it’s time to pitch the tent, but now there is nowhere that looks hospitable, there are fields on one side and a bare ridge on the other, this is too exposed, it feels wrong, let’s just go over the ridge and take a look. And there by chance they find the cave, Reiner has the calm triumphant look of someone who knew all the time, what his look implies is that he is attuned to the rhythms of the universe, the rhythms of walking no different to those of living, go bravely to extremes and everything will be provided. See, no need to put up the tent. I am less enthusiastic, are we really going to do this, sleep out in the open like a pair of tramps, he is spoiled and soft, he lacks the fatalism of his hard companion, and shepherds have shat in little piles around the cave. But as it gets darker and the world contracts to the size of the tiny overhang, it is more pleasant to be here, in the circle of firelight they’ve made with their hands.

  In front of the cave the earth drops away into a vast valley, in the light the hugeness of this space was frightening but now it has become consoling, far far below are the tiny isolated fires of herdsmen, the distant sound of cowbells carries up in quavering echoes, when they have boiled water and eaten a sense of well-being descends, all the rifts and ruptures of the world knitted up and healed, hours of sleep ahead.

  He spreads his sleeping bag and lies down on one side, staring out into the dark. After a moment Reiner comes over and crouches down behind him. They say nothing, the silence thickens into tension and then Reiner says, in one of your letters.

  Yes.

  You said you were looking forward to seeing me again.

  Yes.

  What did you mean by that.

  He doesn’t know what he meant by that but he knows what Reiner means by this. He can’t help it, but all day on the road his mind has conjured images it doesn’t want, he keeps seeing that woman from last night, filled to the brim with such febrile desperation, he sees Reiner on top of her, bending her into plastic poses with his brown hands. What Reiner wants now would be no different than with the woman, a ritual performed without tenderness or warmth or sensual pleasure.

  But the truth is also that there is an answering impulse of subservience in him, part of him wants to give in, I see shadows thrown up in grappling contortions on the roof of the cave.

  I don’t know what I meant.

  You don’t know what you meant.

  I was looking forward to seeing you.

  Nothing else.

  Not that I can think of.

  Reiner nods slowly. Neither of them is quite the person that by mutual agreement they have been till now, the rules will be different from tonight. He can smell the smoky sweat of the other man, or perhaps it is his own, not a bad smell, and then Reiner gets up and moves away to the far side of the cave to settle himself. They don’t speak again. The fire slowly subsides, the shadows fade, the sound of bells continues in the air.

  They leave again before it’s light, the road still blue and indistinct. The sore places from yesterday ache with fresh intensity, but after half an hour of walking the pain has become dispersed and general. He hurts pleasantly all over. The sun comes up and on every side the mountains rise up out of the dark.

  They are walking in a big circle that will end in a place close to the city again, from where they will begin a second and larger circle ending in almost the same place, from where they will begin a third. In this way they will traverse the country in three growing loops, the last of which will take them into the highest mountains of the Drakensberg, far off in the east. By then they hope to be fit and strong, more used to the hardships of this kind of travel, though he has his doubts. It is Reiner who has planned their journey this way, marking it out in coloured ink on his map.

  They stop at a little roadside shop to buy food for the day. The tiny room is full of tins and boxes and packets, pasta and sweets and vegetables and soap. The packs are heavy and it seems sensible to get light things, some rolls maybe, some rice. But Reiner stalks around the dim interior of the shop, selecting heavy items from the shelves, he chooses tins, a bag of potatoes, bars of chocolate.

  But why.

  I feel like it.

  Chocolate.

  I like chocolate. I read an article about a man who lived for a year on chocolate and water.

  It isn’t possible.

  Reiner looks at him, smirking, of course it’s possible. In the days to come he will break off little pieces of chocolate and eat delicately, savouring some essence in it that will nourish him beyond the laws of biology. For Reiner the complexities and contradictions of the world are a distraction, and the truth is always stark and simple, a rule that must be followed rigidly if all the confusion is to be overcome, it is possible, he believes, to survive on will-power and chocolate, and every time he offers any to his companion that little smirk returns to Reiner’s face.

  The money that pays for this food, as well as for everything else, is Reiner’s. In Maseru he changed some of his Canadian dollars into rands, he carries the money in a pouch around his waist, and this is what they’re living on now. Although I note down each item diligently in a little notebook, and will repay every cent at the end of the trip, what becomes clear even now, on the second day of this journey, is that Reiner will decide what they may or may not have along the way.

  So they take the tins and potatoes and chocolate, they distribute them evenly, but their weight feels disproportionately heavy when they set out again, he feels pulled down by a strong resentment, he walks more slowly than before. By noon the sun is intensely hot, both of them are pouring sweat. They are near some ugly modern buildings, a little village of some kind, there is an old ruined church. I think we should stop and rest for a bit, Reiner says.

  Over the top of the ridge on the right there is a steep drop, halfway down is a cave larger than the one they slept in last night, Reiner wants to climb to it. But it’s a long way down. So what. So we have to climb back up again. So what. There is another moment of unspoken conflict, the sardonic mockery in the dark eyes of the one man wins over the reluctance of the weaker man, they pick their way down between boulders and aloes, loose pebbles scattering under their feet. When they come to the cave his anger cools in the shade of the stone, the calm vista of the valley that unrolls at their feet. It’s beautiful here. Yes. What he means by that one syllable of agreement is that he is right again.

  They throw themselves down on the rock. He falls asleep and when he wakes hours have gone by and it is starting to storm. The sky is black and blue with cloud, ladders of lightning drop down, thunder shakes the stone. When the rain comes it is almost solid, a door closing off the world. They sit under the ceiling of rock, water pouring down, with cool scents leaking up out of the ground. It is like last night, now that he is rested and refreshed, now that the heat has gone, the rawness of his extreme emotions is also soothed, he can almost love this strange place he finds himself in, and his stran
ge companion too.

  I think, Reiner says, we should travel every day like this. We should get up early and walk and then stop in the middle of the day. Then we go again.

  Yes, he says.

  At this moment he is in full agreement with Reiner, he doesn’t know how he could have been angry with him, against the stormy sky his solemn face is beautiful.

  When the storm clears the light comes through and they go out into a world rinsed clean and dripping with colour. These afternoon storms happen almost every day, the heat will build in intensity till it finally breaks, afterwards there is always this feeling of regeneration, in the landscape but also between themselves.

  They are truly on the road now. Until they spent their first night in the open this whole trip was still a mad idea, one they could abandon at any time, but somehow they have passed a point and gone from one world into another. In the old world they had their usual life, with its habits and friends, its places and choices, but now all that has been left behind. In this new life they have only each other and the selection of objects that they carry on their backs. Everything else, even the people they stop and speak to at the roadside, is passing by.

  In this curious union, this bizarre marriage, a new set of habits must spring up to keep them alive. There are tasks that must be seen to, the most basic, the most necessary, that on certain days can be luminous with almost religious significance, and on others can feel like the most tedious of chores. The tent, for example, must be put up and taken down. Two or three times a day a meal must be prepared, then the pots and pans must afterwards be cleaned. In the beginning, for the first few days, these jobs are shared equally between them. They help each other lay out the poles and insert them through the limp canvas, cast around together for stones to knock the pegs into the ground. Or they trade, why don’t you put up the tent, I’ll make the supper. Okay, I’ll help you wash up later. And although they are wary of each other, and the little moments of conflict do recur, there is a symmetry and balance to the running of things, they could continue like this for some time.