Matala (8 page)

I
COULD NOT SHAKE THE ODD
dual emotions of trepidation and fascination that had wracked me since the scene in the diner the night before. In the Santa Lucia Station, Sunday evening, Justine sat apart from us and seemed to have collapsed into herself. She hardly spoke and did not eat or accept my offer of a cup of tea. Darcy was left in charge of finding the right train this time. It was as if Justine had abnegated all her powers to this girl and had taken to regarding me only at arm's length, as she had when we were first together.

In the very beginning, it had taken me a couple of days to make the decision to leave with her, although she'd allowed for that possibility the first night. During that time she stayed in a faded hotel in downtown Roanoke alone—that is, without inviting me up. She hugged me at the front door a couple of times but did not allow me so much as a peck on the cheek. After we took off and were sharing rooms, I guess I thought a more complete relationship would just naturally happen. How could it not? But of all things, she behaved demurely. She changed only in the bathroom. She slept either fully clothed or in a flannel neck-to-ankle nightgown that looked as old as she was. And she wouldn't let us get drunk. After the first few days, I was coming to believe I'd taken on a den mother rather than a partner. I had no idea how to act toward her, how she wanted me to act, and whether things were to continue in this vein. Otherwise, she fascinated me. What she was teaching me was both thrilling and abhorrent, so it wasn't like I was bored or anything. But I was attracted to her. Smitten. Crazy.

So one night I got into her bed. I don't know what I expected: that she'd get angry, kick me out not only of the bed but of her life, or she'd melt at my hot nearness and we'd fall into each other. But she did nothing. She just moved over to make room for me and went to sleep. And that was how we woke up. I didn't bother the next night, but then the night after that, she got in with me. I tried to kiss her, and she just turned away without saying anything but letting me lie against her back.

A week or so passed like this, and then a strange thing happened one morning. We woke up together in the same bed, as chaste as we had been, and as I lay looking at the ceiling, she raised herself on one arm and looked at me. And from that angle, in that thin light, I saw myself. I saw my face in her face—as if there were something physical of me in her. And it scared me so badly that I recoiled.

“My God,” she said. “I know I look a fright in the morning, but I didn't mean to offend you.”

“No,” I said. “You look good.”

“Well, you're a gentleman. Somebody raised you right.”

“You do,” I said. “It's not that. It's…just weird.”

“Well, that's lovely then. I'll take weird over hideous.”

“Not you. Me. Us, I mean. It's like we're…alike.”

She looked away and said, “What do you mean?”

“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.

B
EFORE 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.

T
HEN 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.

S
OMETIME 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 guard 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.”