In a Strange Room: Three Journeys Paperback - 2010

Excerpt

ONE
THE FOLLOWER


It happens like this. He sets out in the afternoon on the track that has been shown to him and soon he leaves the little town behind. In an hour or so he is among low hills covered by olive trees and grey stones, from which there is a view out over a plain that gradually descends to the sea. He is intensely happy, which is possible for him when he is walking and alone.
 
As the road rises and falls there are moments when he can see far ahead and other moments when he can see nothing at all. He keeps looking out for other people, but the huge landscape seems to be completely deserted. The only sign of human beings is the occasional house, tiny and distant, and the fact of the road itself.
 
Then at some point, as he comes to the crest of a hill, he becomes aware of another figure far away. It could be male or female, it could be any age, it could be travelling in either direction, towards him or away. He watches until the road dips out of sight, and when he comes to the top of the next rise the figure is clearer, coming towards him. Now they are watching each other, while pretending they are not.
 
When they draw even they stop. The figure is a man about his own age, dressed entirely in black. Black pants and shirt, black boots. Even his rucksack is black. What the first man is wearing I don’t know, I forget.
 
They nod hello, they smile.
 
Where have you come from.
 
Mycenae. He points back over his shoulder. And you.
 
The man in black also points, vaguely, into the distance behind him. And where are you going to. He has an accent the first man cannot place, Scandinavian maybe, or German.
 
To the ruins.
 
I thought the ruins were that way.
 
Yes. Not those ruins, I’ve seen them.
 
There are other ruins.
 
Yes.
 
How far.
 
I think ten kilometres. That’s what I was told.
 
He nods. He has a sullen sort of beauty, with long silky hair that falls around his shoulders. He is smiling, though there is nothing to smile at. And where do you come from.
 
South Africa. And you.
 
I am from Germany. Where are you staying in Mycenae.
 
At the youth hostel.
 
There are a lot of people.
 
I’m the only one there. Are you staying.
 
He shakes his head, the long tresses lift and float. I am taking the train tonight. To Athens.
 
They have conducted this conversation with a curious formality, the width of the road between them, and yet there is something in the way they relate that is not quite intimate, but familiar. As if they have met somewhere before, long ago. But they have not.
 
Enjoy the ruins, the German man smiles. The South African says that he will. Then they part again with a nod and draw slowly away from each other on the narrow white road, looking back now and then, until they are two tiny and separate points again, rising and falling with the undulations of the land.
 
He gets to the ruins in the middle of the afternoon. I can’t even remember now what they are, the remains of some big but obscure building, there was a fence that had to be climbed, there was a fear of dogs but no dogs appeared, he stumbles around among rocks and pillars and ledges, he tries to imagine how it was but history resists imagining. He sits on the edge of a raised stone floor and stares out unseeingly into the hills around him and now he is thinking of things that happened in the past. Looking back at him through time, I remember him remembering, and I am more present in the scene than he was. But memory has its own distances, in part he is me entirely, in part he is a stranger I am watching.
 
By the time he comes to himself again, the sun is already low in the sky, the shadows of the mountains are stretched out across the plain. He walks back slowly in the blue coolness. The stars are seeding themselves in bright beds overhead, the earth is huge and old and black. It’s long past suppertime when he arrives at the edge of the little village and goes up the deserted main street, the shops and restaurants shuttered and barred, all the windows unlit, through the open front door of the hostel, up the stairs, through passages, past rooms filled with row after row of unoccupied bunk beds, all dark and cold, nobody visiting at this time of year, to the last and highest room, in the middle of the roof, a white cube fixed to a plane. He is very tired now, and hungry, and wants to sleep.
 
But inside the room the German is waiting. He is sitting on one of the beds, his hands between his knees, smiling.
 
Hello.
 
He goes in and closes the door behind him. What are you doing here.
 
I missed the train tonight. There is another one in the morning. I decided to wait until then. I asked him to put me in your room.
 
I see that.
 
You don’t mind.
 
I’m just surprised, I wasn’t expecting, no, I don’t mind.
 
He doesn’t mind, but he is also uneasy. He knows that the other man has delayed his journey not because of the train but because of him, because of the conversation they had in the road.
 
He sits down on his own bed. They smile at each other again.
 
How long are you here for.
 
I’m also going in the morning.
 
Are you going to Athens.
 
No. The other way. To Sparta.
 
So you’ve seen Mycenae already.
 
I’ve been here two days.
 
Ah.
 
There is a silence now in which neither of them moves.
 
I might stay another day. I’m not in a rush. I like this place.
 
The German considers. I thought I might also. I haven’t seen Mycenae.
 
You should see it.
 
So you are staying.
 
Yes.
 
Yes. Then I am staying also. For a day.
 
It feels as if they’ve agreed to something more than this practical arrangement, but what exactly isn’t clear. It is late and cold and the little room is raw and ugly in the fluorescent light. In a short while the South African gets into his sleeping bag. He is shy and though he would normally undress he doesn’t do so tonight. He takes off his shoes and his watch and his two copper bracelets and gets in and lies on his back. He can see the metal slats of the bunk above him and disconnected images from the day come back to him, the ruins, the road, the gnarled shapes of the olive trees.
 
The German also readies himself for bed. He lays out his sleeping bag on the bunk he’s sitting on. Of course his sleeping bag is black.
 
He unlaces his boots and takes them off, setting them side by side on the floor. Perhaps he too would normally undress but he doesn’t tonight, there is no way to know what he would normally do. He doesn’t wear a watch. In his black socks he goes to the door to switch off the light, then goes softly back to his bed and climbs in. He takes a few moments to settle.
 
The South African says something.
 
I can’t hear you.
 
What is your name.
 
Reiner. And you.
 
I’m Damon.
 
Damon. Good night.
 
Good night, Reiner.
 
Good night.

Media reviews

"Extraordinarily readable. . . . A very beautiful book for one thing, strikingly conceived and hauntingly written, a writer's novel par excellence. . . ."
— The Guardian

"A powerful three-part meditation on the relationship between travel, love and an off-kilter self."
— Financial Times

"It is the honesty that consolidates this thoughtful, intelligent, cohesively human book. Galgut, ever the wanderer, always the seeker, is here at his most deliberate, as intent on finding meaning as on asking questions."
— Irish Times

"Galgut has the talent to grow into one of South Africa's great literary voices."
— The Economist

"Galgut is a worthy heir to Gordimer and Coetzee."
— The Observer

"Like Ian McEwan, [Galgut] is a master of menace."
— Vancouver Sun

"A master of psychological tension."
— Globe and Mail