In a Strange Room: Three Journeys Page 0,4
goes to Pylos. A few days after he leaves Mycenae he is passing through a public square in a town when he sees images of bombs and burning on a television in a café. He goes closer. What is this, he asks some of the people sitting watching. One of them who can speak English tells him that it’s war in the Gulf. Everybody has been waiting and waiting for it, now it’s happening, it’s happening in two places, at another point on the planet and at the same time on the television set.
He watches, but what he sees isn’t real to him. Too much travelling and placelessness have put him outside everything, so that history happens elsewhere, it has nothing to do with him. He is only passing through. Maybe horror is felt more easily from home. This is both a redemption and an affliction, he doesn’t carry any abstract moral burdens, but their absence is represented for him by the succession of flyblown and featureless rooms he sleeps in, night after night, always changing but somehow always the same room.
The truth is that he is not a traveller by nature, it is a state that has been forced on him by circumstance. He spends most of his time on the move in acute anxiety, which makes everything heightened and vivid. Life becomes a series of tiny threatening details, he feels no connection with anything around him, he’s constantly afraid of dying. As a result he is hardly ever happy in the place where he is, something in him is already moving forward to the next place, and yet he is also never going towards something, but always away, away. This is a defect in his nature that travel has turned into a condition.
Twenty years before this, for different reasons, something similar had come over his grandfather. Rooted and sedentary for most of his long life, when his wife died something inside the old man broke irrevocably and he took to the road. He travelled all around the world, to the most distant and unlikely places, fuelled not by wonder or curiosity but grief. Postcards and letters with peculiar stamps and markings arrived in the post-box at home. Sometimes he would phone and his voice would come up, it sounded, from the bottom of the sea, hoarse with the longing to be back again. But he didn’t come back. Only much later, when he was very old and exhausted, did he finally return for good, living out his last years in a flat in the back garden behind the house. He wandered around between the flowerbeds, wearing pyjamas at midday, his hair wild and unwashed. By then his mind was going. He couldn’t remember where he’d been. All the images and impressions and countries and continents he’d visited had been erased. What you don’t remember never happened. As far as he was concerned, he had never travelled anywhere beyond the edges of the lawn. Irascible and mean for much of his life, he was mostly docile now, but still capable of irrational rage. What are you talking about, he screamed at me once, I’ve never been to Peru, I don’t know anything about it, don’t talk rubbish to me about Peru.
He leaves Greece two weeks later. He moves around from place to place for a year and a half and then he goes back to South Africa. Nobody knows that he’s arrived. He rides in from the airport on the bus, carrying his bag on his knees, looking through the tinted windows at the city he’s come back to live in, and there is no way to say how he feels.
Everything has changed while he was away. The white government has capitulated, power has succumbed and altered shape. But at the level on which life is lived nothing looks very different. He gets out at the station and stands in the middle of the moving crowds and tries to think, I am home now, I have come home. But he feels that he is only passing through.
He catches a taxi to the house of a friend, who has got married in his absence. She is happy to see him, but even in her first embrace he senses how much of a stranger he’s become. To her, and to himself. He’s never been to this house before and he wanders through it, looking at furniture and ornaments and pictures that feel intolerably heavy to him. Then he goes out into