Riding the Iron Rooster

It was a wet, black morning in Paris, the street sweepers and milkmen doing their solitary rounds by the light of the street lamps, and just as dawn broke over the eaves and chimney pots we plodded out of the Gare de l'Est. I thought we had left the suburbs behind in the Rue St.-Jacques, but there were more, and they were deeper and grimmer. The people in the group, with their faces at the windows of the train, were shocked and disillusioned. It wasn't gay Paree, it wasn't even Cleveland. The Americans looked very closely. We were unused to this. We put up suburbs too quickly and cheaply for them to wear well. We expected them to decline and collapse and be replaced; they weren't built to last, and they look temporary because they are temporary. But French suburbs—villas, terrace houses and apartment blocks—are solid and fairly ugly, and their most horrific aspect is that they look as though they will last forever. It had been the same in outer London: How could houses so old look so awful?

'That was a battlefield," Morris said, as we crossed into Belgium. He had been telling war stories since we crossed the Channel. "Some buddies of mine died there."

"—And over there, too," Morris said, looking at a map, and meaning more dead buddies in a wartime battlefield.

He was smirking at the bare trees, the young poplars standing like switches and whips; the dark sludge and stained froth in the black canals.

I was still reading Sinclair Lewis and scribbling notes on the flyleaf.

"Making notes?" Mrs. Wittrick said.

I denied it.

"Keeping a diary?"

I said no.

I hated being observed. One of the pleasures of travel is being anonymous. I had not realized how everyone was conspicuous in a group, and the person who kept to himself was a threat. I decided to make notes on those big blank postcards that look like filing cards.

Wilma, the bald girl, said, "I haven't seen anyone use those postcards for years."

And then I regretted that I had told her I was sending them back home, because it gave her the excuse to ask me where I was from.

"I do a little teaching," I said to Wilma.

As far as I could tell there were no readers in the group, no one likely to buttonhole me after lunch to talk about American fiction, or to be threatened by my scrutiny. I liked being a teacher. I liked the way the others looked at me and thought: Poor guy, doesn't seem to have a lot to say, might as well leave him alone.

It was extremely hard for me to appear to be a quiet, modest, incurious person. These people seemed to be illiterate, which was a virtue, because they didn't know me. But neither could they be trusted with the slightest piece of information. Not long after I told Wilma I happened to be living in London, Richard Cathcart came up to me and said, "I hear you live in London..."

At Namur, Bud Wittrick confided to me that Belgium was a hell of a lot uglier than America, and when I agreed that it did look hideous, he said, "You said it, Paul!"

When had I told him my name?

The only empty seat in the dining car at lunch was next to Wilma. It seemed as though everyone was avoiding her, but when I sat with her everyone avoided me. She told me she had been fired from her job, selling toys somewhere in London. She complained that the New Zealanders had made a hoo-hah about her immigrating, but that she was going there just the same, probably for good. She said she liked a challenge.

I made a note of the fact that we had just stopped at Liège. I had an idea that I could look it up later and write We passed Liège, famous for its lacemaking and its sausages, birthplace of Georges Simenon...

Wilma said, "You're always writing."

"No, I'm not," I said, too quickly, and I thought: Stop looking at me!

I dozed after lunch and was awakened by Morris saying, "Hey, Kicker, it's Aachen!" And both men stood in the aisle, blocking the traffic.

It was obvious that the Germans on the train were very irritated by these two loud Americans, and would probably have been very glad to throw them off. It was unlikely that the Germans were able to follow the loud twanging monologue in which Morris revealed that he had been in the three-week battle for Aachen during the war. This monkey was a liberator! It seemed poetic justice that he had returned to bore the pants off everyone within earshot.

At Cologne I noticed that there were four new people on the tour. They were French—three women and a man. They stayed together. They spoke to no one except themselves for almost the whole trip. They quarreled a great deal, but no one knew why. About one month later, in southern Mongolia, I saw one of these French women standing alone on a railway platform. We had just eaten a disgusting meal of cold potatoes and mutton fat.

I smiled and said in a companionable way, "Isn't the food dreadful?"