To the Ends of the Earth

A half hour later I returned to my compartment. The lights were blazing, and in his upper berth Duffill was sleeping; his face turned up to the overhead light gave him a gray corpse-like look, and his pajamas were buttoned to his neck. The expression on his face was one of agony; his features were fixed and his head moved as the train did. I turned out the lights and crawled into my berth. But I couldn’t sleep at first; my cold and all that I’d drunk—the fatigue itself—kept me awake. And then something else alarmed me: it was a glowing circle, the luminous dial of Duffill’s watch, for his arm had slipped down and was swinging back and forth as the train rocked, moving this glowing green dial past my face like a pendulum.

Then the dial disappeared. I heard Duffill climbing down the ladder, groaning on each rung. The dial moved sideways to the sink, and then the light came on. I rolled over against the wall and heard the clunk of Duffill dislodging the chamber pot from the cupboard under the sink; I waited, and after a long moment a warbling burble began, changing in pitch as the pot filled. There was a splash, like a sigh, and the light went out and the ladder creaked. Duffill groaned one last time and I slept.

IN THE MORNING DUFFILL WAS GONE. I LAY IN BED AND worked the window curtain up with my foot; after a few inches it shot up on its roller, revealing a sunny mountainside, the Alps dappled with light and moving past the window. It was the first time I had seen the sun for days, this first morning on the train, and I think this is the place to say that it continued to shine for the next two months. I traveled under clear skies all the way to southern India, and only then, two months later, did I see rain again, the late monsoon of Madras.

At Vevey I restored myself with a glass of fruit salts, and at Montreux felt well enough to shave. Duffill came back in time to admire my rechargeable electric razor. He said he used a blade and on trains always cut himself to pieces. He showed me a nick on his throat, then told me his name. He’d be spending two months in Turkey, but he didn’t say what he’d be doing. In the bright sunlight he looked much older than he had in the grayness of Victoria. I guessed he was about seventy. But he was not in the least spry, and I could not imagine why anyone except a fleeing embezzler would spend two months in Turkey.

He looked out at the Alps and said, “They say if the Swiss had designed these mountains, um, they’d be rather flatter.”

Duffill ate the last of his salami. He offered me some, but I said I was planning to buy my breakfast at an Italian station. Duffill lifted the piece of salami and brought it to his mouth, but just as he bit into it we entered a tunnel and everything went black.

“Try the lights,” he said. “I can’t eat in the dark. I can’t taste it.”

I groped for the light switch and flicked it, but we stayed in darkness.

Duffill said, “Maybe they’re trying to save electricity.”

His voice in the darkness sounded very near to my face. I moved to the window and tried to see the tunnel walls, but I saw only blackness. The sound of the wheels’ drumming seemed louder in the dark and the train itself was gathering speed, the motion and the dark producing in me a suffocating feeling of claustrophobia and an acute awareness of the smell of the room, the salami, Duffill’s woolens, and bread crusts. Minutes had passed and we were still in the tunnel; we might be dropping down a well, a great sinkhole in the Alps that would land us in the clockwork interior of Switzerland, glacial cogs and ratchets and frostbitten cuckoos.

Duffill said, “This must be the Simplon.”

I said, “I wish they’d turn the lights on.”

I heard Duffill wrapping his uneaten salami and punching the parcel into a corner.

I said, “What do you aim to do in Turkey?”

“Me?” Duffill said, as if the compartment was crammed with old men bound for Turkey, each waiting to state a reason. He paused, then said, “I’ll be in Istanbul for a while. After that I’ll be traveling around the country.”

“Business or pleasure?” I was dying to know and in the confessional darkness did not feel so bad about badgering him; he could not see the eagerness on my face. On the other hand, I could hear the tremulous hesitation in his replies.

“A little of both,” he said.

This was not helpful. I waited for him to say more, but when he added nothing further, I said, “What exactly do you do, Mr. Duffill?”

“Me?” he said again, but before I could reply with the sarcasm he was pleading for, the train left the tunnel and the compartment filled with sunlight and Duffill said, “This must be Italy.”

Duffill put on his tweed cap. He saw me staring at it and said, “I’ve had this cap for years—eleven years. You dry-clean it. Bought it in Barrow-on-Humber.” And he dug out his parcel of salami and resumed the meal the Simplon tunnel had interrupted.