My Other Life

  The moment was crucial—the last interview of the day, the last interview of the week, in a hotel room in a strange city, the whole weekend ahead, yawning emptily at me. I wondered whether I should offer her a drink. We would talk about the city, the brevity of my visit, the real anxieties of a book-promotion tour. Such candor could be risky.

  I hesitated because I felt sure she would accept. A drink meant two drinks, and dinner was a strong possibility, and so was the rest of the evening. The offer of a drink to a stranger in a city like this was a serious gamble. Yet she was someone I wanted to know better.

  "Will you join me for a drink?"

  She reacted brightly, as though it were just what she had been expecting me to say, but instead of saying yes, she clasped the arm of her chair and stood up. The split skirt is made for movement, not for repose. There were several distinct phases of her standing up, like an elaborate dance step that grows bolder. But this was a step backward.

  "Thank you," she said, meaning, No, thank you. "I don't want to keep you. You've given me so much of your time. And I am sure you have other plans."

  "I don't have any other plans," I said, and instantly regretted saying it.

  "But I do," she said.

  Then she was on her way out, her resonant heels mocking me on the polished floor.

  ***

  I had my drink alone, and I rather resented the way she had used my time and tested my patience. I did not want to think that she had also teased and tormented me.

  She was a traveler, there was no doubt of that. Her aloofness, the evidence of her strength, was both the most attractive and the most irritating thing about her. She clearly felt that the way she traveled was superior to my plodding progress and the incessant Look at me of my travel writer's note-taking. She was the traveler. I was the hack.

  It gave me an idea for a short story, one that I had never read but now badly wanted to read, which was my certain proof that writing it would be a good idea.

  A travel writer is on a promotional tour in a distant city. Not Australia, say New Zealand—make something of the starkness of the wind-scoured streets of Wellington. This friendly fellow is interviewed by a woman journalist. Describe the chilly hotel room, the pearly light in the seashell sky, the passersby, all those hats, all those fuzzy sweaters. Instead of allowing the writer to answer the questions, the woman rambles on, interrupting the writer's replies. She tells him about her travels, and he knows her adventures are more colorful than his. He becomes fascinated and interviews her. She is the subject of the story.

  The short story would be the portrait of a traveler, but the irony was that the traveler was an obscure and unremarkable-looking woman in this bleak city off the map. The story would be a way of illustrating something that I felt strongly—that the great trips, the painful ordeals, the dangers and mishaps and close calls, are faced by people who never write a word. The real travelers are people the world does not know.

  Call it "Traveler's Tale." It was a good story, to be told in the first person. For effect I would make her unattractive and earthbound. She was one of those heavy people whose clothes, much too tight, make them seem not just uncomfortable but swollen—and perhaps still swelling, perhaps explosive, the clothes dangerously full and strained, as though threatening to burst. I would call her Joylene, I could make her a tease, a liar, a bore, or a slut. At first she would seem rather stout and lonely, a bit pathetic and self-absorbed, radiating gray monotony like a damp odor. But by the end of the story you would see—I would make you see—that she was brave and imaginative, that she had endured the hardships of travel and discovery.

  And of the narrator—this man who had stories to tell of his travels, of his minor fame and his numerous books and friendships—you would hear nothing at all; nor would the interviewer learn anything of him. Joylene would go heavily away with her own voice on the tape.

  Back at the telescope—but by now night had fallen and my eyes were glazed—I realized that I would rather have had that quiet drink with Erril Jinkins, the pretty girl with the funny name. I wanted to ask her more about the world's wilderness, of the places where no one had ever been. Now there was a list of places worth noting. It was one of my own favorite subjects, almost an obsession with me: undiscovered lands.

  I had my short story. That was some consolation, one of the rewards of solitude. It had not been an entirely wasted book tour.

  ***

  But the tour was not over. The phone was ringing—very early the next morning. And when a phone rings and a voice I barely recognize says accusingly, "I'm right downstairs in the lobby," I become anxious. It can be a worrying announcement.

  There is first of all the suddenness, and the proximity of the voice, and the fact that the person is in the lobby means that your escape route is cut off. What else can you do except listen for more?

  "Shall I come up?"

  I did not know how to reply. Worst of all I could not immediately identify the voice. But then I knew. Even though I had not expected her to call, I had been thinking of her. It seemed willful and perverse, as though she had appeared because I had been thinking of her, as though I had conjured her up like an imp.

  A minute or so later she was leaning on my door chime—Erril Jinkins. But no longer was she the glamorous interviewer in the split skirt and filmy blouse and clicking high heels, moving past me in a gust of perfume, all her clothes lisping and teasing me. No, she was dressed in an Indian shirt and blue jeans, and in sandals she was smaller and simpler. She walked without a sound, she had no odor, she sat lightly in the same chair. It was a seventies look: she was the hippie traveler, ready for anything. In these street clothes she seemed impartial and self-possessed. This was how she had dressed in South America and China.

  I said, "What a surprise. I thought I had seen the last of you."

  "I reckon you were wrong."

  This was the proof that she was a traveler—she was curious, not to say nosy; she was game, even a bit arrogant. She had certainly startled me. And wasn't it a risk, dropping in on me like this?

  "It's a lovely day," I said. "Do you want to do anything? Or go anywhere?"

  She said no. Without makeup she had a slightly different face, more subtly expressive but just as bright, with sleepier eyes and pale lips and a girlishness that I had not seen yesterday.

  "So you really don't know who I am?"

  This threw me.

  I said, "Have I met you before?"

  Instead of saying yes or no, she made a sound in her throat and said, "Don't you recognize my harsh, antipodean groans?"

  I laughed out loud at the absurdity of it. What was she talking about?

  She removed a thick paperback book with a torn and illegible cover from a cloth shoulder bag.

  "I bought this bag in Afghanistan in 1973," she said. "The town of Herat, to be exact."

  "I've been there," I said.

  "Indeed you have," she said. "May I sit down? I want to read you something."

  There was something in her tone that made me suspicious, and so I gestured to a chair rather than uttering a pleasantry such as Be my guest. I was not sure I wanted her as a guest.

  She sat, and flattened the book on her knees, and leaned and read.

  '"He put me in second class with three Australians. It was a situation I grew to recognize over the next three months. At my lowest point, when things were at their most desperate and uncomfortable, I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I had touched bottom. This trio on the Lake Van ferry considered me an intruder. They looked up, surprised in their meal: they were sharing a loaf of bread, hunched over it like monkeys, two boys and a pop-eyed girl. They grumbled when I asked them to remove their knapsacks from my berth.'"

  Here she looked up at me, to smile, but it was a smile of defiance.

  "And it goes on," she said.

  "Don't bother—I remember it."

  But she ignored me. '"I did not sleep well, and once I
was awakened by the harsh, antipodean groans of the girl, who, not two feet from me, lay beneath one of her snorting companions.'"

  She put the book down.

  "That was me, more or less. You say you don't remember me, and yet you wrote that in your Railway Bazaar."

  I said, "A long time ago. Was it really you?"

  "And my boyfriend. And Kevin, Andy's mate. Andy and I got married. We traveled a little and then we moved to Darwin. Andy was a geologist for a mining company. We got a divorce a few years later. Then I did the rest of my traveling. But that trip through Turkey and Iran was one of the best in my life. I was happy. I didn't realize you were spying on us."

  Oh, God. I said, "Why didn't you mention this yesterday?"

  "I just wanted to talk to you. And I had an article to write. I know you wasted your time. Now I'll tell you why." Her eyes were harder, colder, her scrubbed face was fiercer than I had yet seen it. "You think people are insects to catch and exhibit. Their clothes. Their eating habits, their groans. And if they're not ugly you'll make them ugly, or if they're not pretty enough you'll beautify them to please yourself. And the most bloody arrogant thing about you is that you think that once you've written about them they're yours—they belong to you, because you've stuck them on the page."

  "I think the opposite," I said. "Once it's written, it's not mine anymore, it doesn't—"

  But she was already talking, interrupting, a flat-footed Australian, eager to have the last word and shove off.

  "We have our own lives! We can make our own choices," she said, sounding rehearsed. "I don't belong to you. I'm not the person you made me."

  I started to speak, but she hadn't finished.

  "I'm real," she said. "Are you?"

  "We'll see," I said as she left, banging the door so hard the telescope ratded on its tripod.

  That was like a suggestion. I took up my position, searched for her on Circular Quay. I did not see her, and so I went to my desk and began writing.

  ELEVEN

  Forerunners

  THE PUSHY MAN at the Edinburgh Festival kept saying to me, "You mean you haven't read Andreas Vorlaufer?" and I thought: No, but has Andreas Vorlaufer read me?

  I had already made myself unpopular at the festival by refusing to sign "An Open Letter to the Government of Kenya." The Kenayans had put a poet into prison. A fiercely freckled Welsh woman in a long hooded shawl that gave her the look of a gloomy druidess introduced herself as Bronwyn Thomas and thrust a clipboard and pen at me.

  "Agostinho Neto was an Angolan poet," I said. "The Portuguese government put him into prison. He was one of the first prisoners of conscience that Amnesty International adopted, and their pressure got him out of prison. Some years later, after Agostinho Neto became prime minister of Angola, he began throwing his political enemies into jail, and Amnesty had to plead with him to let them out." I smiled at her, because she looked murderous. "That's one reason I'm not signing."

  "You're being totally illogical," Bronwyn Thomas said.

  "No. It's proof that poets can become tyrants, too," I said. "You know, Chairman Mao managed to be a dedicated poet and an imaginative tyrant."

  "You're saying, 'Do nothing.'"

  '"Tear him for his bad verses.' Ring a bell? Coriolanus," I said. "Why does it always have to be poets?"

  "I thought you cared about human rights."

  "I do. I was just filling you in on some background."

  "Then why won't you sign this letter?" Miss Thomas demanded.

  "I never sign anything I have not written myself," I said, and walked away as she muttered after me.

  People usually say the wrong thing to writers. I know it is hard to say the right thing, but why should I want to sign someone's ill-written protest, or chat about someone else's bestseller or the newest travel writer? Believing that I will be grateful for the suggestion, they say, "You've got to read this," and I always think, No, I don't, though I might smile and make a careful note of the tide. I want what I think most writers want: unqualified praise. Criticism is never helpful and always boring. If you cannot encourage me, please leave me alone.

  If I have to listen to anyone, I want it to be the person who remembers something I once wrote that contained an insight or a joke that is still funny. How wonderful it is to be told that a thing I wrote has not been forgotten and that the memory of it continues to give pleasure. It touched you, it has never been reprinted, and yet you quoted it accurately to me and it still sounds fresh. It reminds me powerfully of an earlier time when I was young and anxious, underpaid, working much too hard—burning brightly.

  No one says those things at British literary festivals, which is another reason why I hate them. I had been to only one before Edinburgh, and that was Cheltenham—a tea party as big as a town, books as theater, writers as performers. Dogs walking on their hind legs were what I thought of. It was bad for everyone. The people watching should have been home reading, the writers should either have been writing or else doing something equally dignified—anything except blabbing and making faces.

  Writers when they are away from their desks look so pale, so poor, so hunted. We really shouldn't go out at all, and certainly not to literary festivals, where we are such dismal advertisements for our work. Those novelists with sex on the brain show up and—she's fat, he's pimply and past it, she's posing, he's faded. This is embarrassing. For every second-rater with lovely hair and good clothes there are fifty disappointments, and nearly always it's "I thought he was taller," "He shaved off his beard," or "He's the one with the yellow tie." We are urged to drink at these get-togethers, and that makes everything worse. We are not at our best when people are staring at us. Just the other day a fairly well-known novelist said she had been lying about her age. "I have been forty-seven for the past ten years"—nicely put, but what's the point? Surely the work has nothing to do with the flesh. All that matters is that the gyroscope within us still spins and stays upright.

  Why should I care who Andreas Vorlaufer was? I did not even want to be here. But I had agreed to come to Edinburgh because I liked the city's black heights and narrow streets, its wind and rain, and I had been promised a good hotel, at which I planned to finish a piece I had been writing about Robert Louis Stevenson. My publisher had made it easy for me, and vanity did the rest. I sat on a panel with two novelists and poets, all of them envious and unfriendly and one frankly angry with me.

  "I hear you refused to sign the open letter because you think Jerry Njoki is a bad poet."

  I just laughed and thought how rumors are a form of wish-fulfillment. As you know, I said nothing of the kind.

  The panel discussion went on until late, but I pitched in. I did my stuff, hating my oversimplifications, and I left the stage thinking: Never again.

  So when this freeloading travel writer started praising Andreas Vorlaufer I could not honestly object. I deserved to be tortured like this. I would never make this mistake again.

  "He writes about trains. He's been to Africa and Asia. He's supposed to be really good."

  "What do you mean 'supposed to be'?" I said. "You haven't read him?"

  "He hasn't been translated into English, but he's really popular in East Germany. He's from Leipzig. Someone told me about him."

  It had all been passed along secondhand! Time to leave, I thought. But on the day I planned to flee, I shared breakfast with a stranger who introduced himself as Andreas Vorlaufer.

  He was in his seventies. He had thin, mousy gray hair and a sharp nose and the sort of Eastern European suit that looks like an English boy's school uniform, the jacket too tight, the trousers not quite long enough, the socks wrong—purple in his case.

  "You write about trains," I said, to be polite.

  "I used to, long ago," he said.

  He had the overtidy way of eating that deprived people learn in frugal, failing countries, something to do with starvation and manners, a slow ritual to make the meal last and to avoid waste. He spread jam on his toast as though cl
eaning the knife blade. He opened a small envelope of sugar and emptied it into his coffee without spilling a single grain; and after he stirred it, he tapped his spoon against the lip of the cup, saving the droplets of coffee.

  "Do you read German?" he asked.

  "No. Someone told me about you. And I have written a few things about train travel." A few things!

  He went on eating his toast, sipping his coffee in his methodical, rationing way, showing no interest in me. If I had praised him, I am sure he would have listened.

  "Your English is very good."

  "I have traveled extensively."

  I wanted to tell him: People who speak English well know better than to use the word "extensively."

  "Though it has been exceedingly difficult at times to purchase tickets."

  "Exceedingly" was another one, and so was "purchase."

  But I said, "I lived in Africa for quite a few years."

  "So much of the world is English-speaking. Africa. India. Singapore. And America, of course."

  Was he putting me on? I said, "You've lived in all those places, really?"

  "Yes," he said quietly. "And I have written about them."

  I did not say that so had I—I hated the sort of conversation between strangers that turned into a tennis match. He seemed just as happy to leave the subject, and he became animated only when I asked, "What do you think of the festival?"

  "It is like all literary festivals. It is a tea party, everyone is very polite. No one says anything about the horror and boredom of writing. We are performers, like dogs walking on their hind legs."

  I stared at him. Hadn't I felt precisely that way, in just those words?

  "These novelists with sex on the brain," Andreas Vorlaufer said. "She is fat. He is pimply. Everyone is disappointed. People say, 'I thought he was taller,' 'He has shaved off his beard,' or 'He is so old.' It is most humiliating, don't you agree?"