To the Ends of the Earth

Mrs. Jack said, “He got out at a station. He didn’t tell me where. He had left his luggage on the train. Then the train pulled out. He had inquired when the next train was, and they told him the time—five o’clock. Only a few hours, he thought. But he had got mixed up. He thought they meant P.M. and they actually meant A.M.—five the next morning. He had a very bad night, and the next day he went to—where was it? Venice? Yes, he collected his luggage”—the paper bags I had left with the controllore—“and eventually got to Istanbul.”

So he had made it!

I told Mrs. Jack who I was and how I had met Mr. Duffill.

She said, “Oh, yes, I read your book! My neighbor’s son is an avid reader. He told us about it. He said, ‘I think you should see this—I think this is our Mr. Duffill.’ And then everyone in Barrow read it.”

I was eager to know whether Mr. Duffill himself had read it.

“I wanted him to see it,” Mrs. Jack said. “I put a copy aside. But when he came over, he wasn’t too good. He didn’t see it. The next time he came over I forgot about the book. That was the last time, really. He had his stroke and just deteriorated. And he died. So he never saw it—”

Thank God for that, I thought.

What an interesting man that stranger had been! He had seemed frail, elderly, a little crazy and suspicious on the Orient Express. Typical, I had thought. But now I knew how unusual he had been—brave, kind, secretive, resourceful, solitary, brilliant. He had slept and snored in the upper berth of my compartment. I had not known him at all, but the more I found out about him, the more I missed him. It would have been a privilege to know him personally, and yet even in friendship he would never have confirmed what I strongly suspected—that he had almost certainly been a spy.

Looking out the Window at Yugoslavia

THERE WERE WOMEN, BUT THEY WERE OLD, SHAWLED against the sun and yoked to green watering cans in trampled cornfields. The landscape was low and uneven, barely supporting in its dust a few farm animals, maybe five motionless cows, and a herdsman leaning on a stick watching them starve in the same way the scarecrows—two plastic bags on a bony crosspiece—watched the devastated fields of cabbages and peppers. And beyond the rows of blue cabbage, a pink pig butted the splintery fence of his small pen and a cow lay under goalposts of saplings in an unused football field. Red peppers, as crimson and pointed as clusters of poinsettias, dried in the sun outside farm cottages in districts where farming consisted of men stumbling after oxen dragging wooden plows and harrows, or occasionally wobbling on bicycles loaded with hay bales. Herdsmen were not simply herdsmen; they were sentries, guarding little flocks from marauders: four cows watched by a woman, three gray pigs driven by a man with a truncheon, scrawny chickens watched by scrawny children. “In Yugoslavia we have three things,” I was told, “freedom, women, and drinking.” A woman in a field tipped a water bottle to her mouth; she swallowed and bent from the waist to continue tying up cornstalks. Large ocher squashes sat plumply in fields of withering vines; people priming pumps and swinging buckets out of wells on long poles; tall narrow haystocks, and pepper fields in so many stages of ripeness I first took them for flower gardens. It is a feeling of utter quietness, deep rural isolation the train briefly penetrates. It goes on without a change for hours, this afternoon in Yugoslavia, and then all people disappear and the effect is eerie: roads without cars or bicycles, cottages with empty windows at the fringes of empty fields, trees heavy with apples and no one picking them. Perhaps it’s the wrong time—three-thirty; perhaps it’s too hot. But where are the people who stacked that hay and set those peppers so carefully to dry? The train passes on—that’s the beauty of a train, this heedless movement—but it passes on to more of the same. Six neat beehives, a derelict steam engine with wildflowers garlanding its smokestack, a stalled ox at a level crossing. In the heat haze of the afternoon my compartment grows dusty, and down at the front of the train Turks lie all over their seats, sleeping with their mouths open and children wakeful on their stomachs. At each river and bridge there were square brick emplacements, like Croatian copies of Martello towers, pocked by bombs. Then I saw a man, headless, bent over in a field, camouflaged by cornstalks that were taller than he; I wondered if I had missed all the others because they were made so tiny by their crops.