A Runner Through the Mist

MY NEW shoes, French made, squashed water out of their canvas tops as I tramped over the Flanders plain in the direction of Calais and the English Channel crossing station. Ahead, only a few yards away, the soaking armor of the road sunk into a spongy hole of fog and disappeared.

I pulled my cap down against the rain and sloshed on, inhaling the odors of wet trees, wet earth, and my own wet clothing, drifting in puffs of fog. Behind arose the oncoming murmur of an auto. I turned and raised a hand. A powerful Mercedes stormed out of the murky ground, passed in a shower of spray, grew rheumy, and plunged into the hole ahead. Nothing. Above my head the trees heaved as twists of the car’s backlash struck them. Their leavings fell, heavier than the rain. A cow bawled somewhere in a field on my left. It bawled again. Imaginings began — this was no road at all, no man walking, no trees, no passing auto. This was drift sand and sea, with that wicked bawl floating over.

The sound of another motor drove away this despondent vision, and to my surprise the car slowed down when I turned around. A door flew open. I ran, wriggling the gear off my shoulders — bedroll and Malmberg knapsack — and shoved it through the door while hawking out a torrent of words. I clambered in. Yes, he was going all the way. His delight seemed equal to my own. Grinning giddily, I welcomed the reckless surge forward that flattened me back on the seat before I had quite settled down.

We spurted straight toward the hole in the fog. It rolled back. We pursued it. I sat grasping my soaking trouser legs and leaning forward in the leathery interior of the small car, conscious of a presence humming deliriously beside me as my eyes lay on the speedometer needle racing up the face of the dial. Black cigars came out, and one was offered, but I refused, partly because I was hungry. When the needle, slowing, edged past seventy, I switched off worrying. A burst of tobacco smoke rebounding off the windshield singed the lining of my nose.

Thank God, I thought. The weeks of shagging my fading body over the chary earth of Western Europe were almost over. Soon, for me, there would be England; the Canterbury road to London. I could find a job there, saving for the trip back home. I could beg; they would understand me there. I could even go to jail and get treatment as good as in any Belgian or German hotel. What couldn’t be done in a country half the world still believed was a haven for the dispossessed and homeless? Merrie England!

The fog and rain were gone, blown out over the Strait of Dover, by the time we arrived at Calais. In place of imagined drift sand and sea now there were drenched rooftops and clean rows of houses, some with scaffolding all the way up; waiters unpiling chairs in sidewalk cafés; traffic posts throwing long reflections, steadily changing, of reds, yellows, and greens on the shiny streets; and, over all, a kind of layer of atmosphere conveying the scents of ocean trawler fishnets and the hanging press of things locked in crowded gardens. Up in the low clouds a hole or two, opening and closing under the thrashing of the wind, disclosed a star out on its dry, cold rounds in the early evening sky.

The driver ran through a section of town, timing the lights, and over a mile of unpaved road and railroad tracks to the ferryboat dock. He drew up beside some pilings at the edge of the water and pointed at the clouds and sea, toward where England might lie.

“Chacun a son goût. Bon soir!” he said, and reached across my knees to throw open the door. He rotated his body around and began pushing my gear out of the back seat. Smiling, he gave me a hand. I climbed out and strained the pack straps over my shoulders as he backed up the car, wheeled it over, and started like a hellbender back toward town. Good-bye! Good-bye!

WATER washed over the pilings and began soaking through my shoes. I edged away, forward, going miserably toward a three-deck boat tied up between two piers, noting its limp mooring cables and ropes, its empty decks, its vacant windows, its cold stacks. Surrounding the boat were shanties and shacks, a smashed pillbox from the war with weeds growing out of its blasted machine-gun slits, and a row of cranes or derricks with grappling hooks dangling high in the air as still as objects on the moon. From far out a desolate bell tinkled the movement of the waves as a buoy was stirred in the channel.

I crossed some tracks and walked alongside the boat. Not far from the lower end of the dock a huge shed painted green and white seemed to offer some covering until sailing time. I lurched toward it, skirting puddles. Somebody short and lean emerged from a doorway on the low platform of a shanty I was passing, a hunk of bread in his hand going up to his mouth and curious eyes taking me in. He smiled down. “You’re too late, or maybe too early,” he called. “You’d better go back to town and get some sleep.” I laughed in relief, nodding and waving in a show of gratitude, and he, chewing lustily, sank back out of sight.

I reached the shed and tried a door. It yielded easily. I swung it wide. My thievish eyes moved over a low-pitched long room as large as a bank and lined with benches and some caged windows, very empty and dark but warm and dry. A company sign on the window of the door announced sailing times — daily at noon and six P.M., two hours ago or sixteen from now. Eight dollars’ worth of francs in my pocket, and six of them for the ride across. How narrow could it have been?

I stepped inside and closed the door, then moseyed around the benches and selected one in the center of the room. Unbelting the bedroll from the knapsack, I dropped it at the head of the bench and sat down to change socks and whatever else I could. I placed my cap and shoes on the knapsack on the floor. Then I sprawled out, laying my neck on the wet bedroll. It was moist and warm. How lucky I felt.

I streaked awake in the morning, anxious to throw myself at the boat, tear off its restraining lines, and drift away. But the shed was dark. A wretched, even-grained light, like dye, worked through the windows and without strength or joy dissolved in a faint shine on the varnished tops of benches. It was not raining, but everything outdoors looked wet. Water dripped from the roof of a shanty close by, and its platform loomed slick and black in the gallows light of another murderous dawn. Groaning, I fell back on the bench and closed my eyes.

A mop began thumping around the legs of the bench. Dock workers gathered at one end of the shed spoke together in voices that labored and snored through the empty depths. Shivering, I cranked myself downstairs to a toilet and washroom, then sat around with my hands in my pockets, in stocking feet, until a coffee shop opened at nine thirty. I ate an orange, a bar of chocolate, and was finishing a second coffee when the ticket sellers appeared. I gathered my belongings and ran out to the boat — the first passenger on board. I chose a seat on the glass-enclosed second deck and sat down by the window. Glad. And hoping no one would speak to me all the way across.

Bulging boat trains arrived, and throngs of people converged on the shed. Long-eyed French and Italian girls, hatless and wearing black hose and spiked heels, stared lonesomely at the lean English faces of pursers and boat hands as they emerged with tickets, went up the gangplank, and disappeared in the deck below. Three people threw their purses and bags on the seats next to mine and asked loudly if I would watch their junk for a while, exercising a sort of social tyranny over me by their air of clubmanship. I said yes.

Then came a swelling bear of an old lady, an enormous and lovely lady with dark face and naked hands, who might have been Spanish. She wore a black lace shawl, black silk stockings, black linen skirt, and a blouse with a gray fourcornered bow at the neck. So subtle was the air, so refined and liquid the mystery in which she moved through the crowded aisle looking for a place, that I could not take my eyes away. She stopped and looked down at me, eye upon eye, with an intensity that scared me. Her large mouth formed a smile as she asked if one of the seats was vacant. I told her no, they were already called for.

“But take mine, please,” I said, and began to rise. She declined, in a voice of such near-green unfolding it told me how special, how honored the man would feel who was permitted to please her. She moved away.

A score of dock workers, talking it up, hauled the gangplank to one side of the dock. Winches rattled, the engines started and swelled to thunder, then stopped. Straining, with prolonged sounds of grating from the seats and windows, the boat glided backward out of the pier, bumping the rotted pilings. With mounting waves of vibration it slowly left the shore.

The three seats holding the belongings I watched remained vacant for over an hour, giving me time to enjoy my solitude. A young French priest who sat across from me seemed to sense how good I felt. I knew he glanced over from time to time. I became aware of him slowly; he was my age, with freckles and red hair, a shabby cassock and wilted collar yellowing around the edge, and a faded white bib covering his underwear. While a sturdylooking older woman beside him spoke in low tones, he made his hands busy by slitting open, with a simple table knife, the pages of a paperbound book — page, page, page, slowly and ungrudgingly, with the graceful movements long practice brings. Several times as he sat and worked that way with his hands our eyes met. Now he smiled. I looked away, then sat questioning why I had: why turn away from the smile of a stranger who showed what he had no wish to conceal, how lively his interest was in me, in the lady, in books, boats, water, and sky?

A COMMAND rang out over the ship’s loudspeaker for passengers to show passports to the English control officer on deck one. The three people had not yet returned, so I remained where I was. The priest arose, placing book and knife carefully on the seat he was leaving, and he touched my knees with his legs as he moved out to the aisle.

“Excuse me, please,” he turned and said in deliberate English. And he lingered, looking down, beyond the moment when he should have gone.

“Of . . . course,” I answered, and felt my face redden.

He smiled and began working through the crowd. Leaving me what is felt among children who are honored and protected. I looked at his seat, at the table knife lying on top of the closed book, and knew I had just seen a marvelously adoring way to handle a new volume with the word Fesu in the title.

When the people returned and claimed their belongings I made off for deck one. I joined a line that extended along the dented brass floor in a snake path from the control office door into a side passage of the boat. Through a stairwell on my right floated the English odors of jam and ham that pulled the saliva right out of my mouth.

In front of me waited a teen-age girl with a round face, frowning worriedly and holding a black German passport in a hand so plump and short it seemed stunted. She was going to London, too, I learned when it came her turn to step into the office. A young officer of the customs authority asked her questions in a coldly friendly voice. Yes, she had received permission to work in London, she told him, and she carried papers to prove it. She produced these, and a letter from the firm where she was going to work. I leaned a little inside the door, but all I could make out on the letterhead were three characters reading “DUN —”

“All right, then. Good luck. Enjoy your stay in England, and be certain you read this,” the official said, and he handed her a booklet telling visitors how to behave in the United Kingdom. “Next!” he called, and I stepped inside.

The officer looked over my passport carefully, turning the pages and scanning each so closely I began to think every visa stamp was wrong. I wished I had somehow got a haircut. I felt seedy in front of his manicure and recent shave.

“American?” he asked. He looked up and smiled hard. “How long will you stay in England?”

“I’m not sure. It will depend.”

“Depend on what, exactly?”

“I’d like to look around. Perhaps spend some time in Avon.”

“Are you a student? A teacher?”

“Not either, no.”

“What, exactly, are you?”

“I’m interested. You might say I’m an interested person.”

“And you’ve been — let me see. In Sweden. You were — how did you put that?” He looked up. “ ‘An interested person.’ And has your interest in Sweden been exhausted?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way. I just thought I’d find it cheaper to live in England.”

“Cheaper as to what?”

“As to living.”

“You don’t have much money then?”

“No, not much.”

“How much, exactly?”

“Two dollars — but there’ll be some waiting for me in London,” I added, lying dangerously.

“Waiting for you where?”

“At Poste Restante. I suppose you call it General Post Office there.”

“Who’s sending you this money?”

“A friend.”

“Do you have any letter, any confirmation of its actually being sent?”

“Not exactly.”

“Do you have passage home stuffed away somewhere? A steamship ticket? Air reservation? Any kind of paper will do.”

“I’ve sent it on ahead.”

“Sent what on ahead?”

“My steamship ticket.”

“To whom? Do you have friends in London?”

“No. No one there.”

“Then where was it sent?”

“I have some possessions. They were sent ahead in boxes. My ticket was in one of those boxes.”

“And you have a post office receipt and insurance number?”

“In my knapsack, yes,” I said without hesitating.

“Good, then you’ll show it in a moment. First, about this money you say will be waiting in London. It’s from your account back home, you said?”

“No, I didn’t say that. I said it was from a friend.”

“Money owed you? How has it come to be sent?”

“It’s simply from a friend. To help me along.”

“Have you any letter at all? Any kind of paper from this friend or any other to prove for us that you exist for someone back there?”

“I have a letter in my pocket,” I said, remembering too late how scruffy it was and why it was written at all. I withdrew a damp envelope and dropped it on the table. The officer gingerly pulled out a single sheet of typewritten paper and carefully pressed it smooth with the heel of his hand. He began to read out loud:

“‘I forget sometimes the hard time you are having, wandering, actually feeling in your bones what homelessness means, the loneliness and insecurity you must feel. And I console myself with the thought that if there is a will to live, then strength can be mustered. I see that as a sequence of life. Nor do I mean to say it’s easy, even if the will is there. Strength has its limits, and it’s often a surprise when we come to the test to find that its resources are shallower than we thought.’ ”

The officer glanced hopelessly up at me and went on:

“ ‘Anyway, if you can still believe that a personal value is possible in spite of the pressures society brings to bear on debasing us in our own eyes, then you have crossed some kind of line. Your suffering becomes a routine bit of play within the larger game which you are winning or may have won. Come home and tell me about it. We’ll have a beer together, and break the empty glasses over the head of a bald official.’ ”

The officer quit reading. He folded the letter and replaced it in the envelope, taking a very long time about this and not looking at me.

“Is this the man who sends you money?” He made a bridge of his fingers, let them fall and lace, and watched them as he cracked the knuckles.

I drew a deep breath, trying to fill the empty space that seemed to have developed below my heart, and said, “Yes, that’s the man.”

“A debt being repaid?”

“Not a debt, no.”

His knuckles sounded dry and must have hurt. He pulled the fingers apart and drummed on the table.

“Why does he send you money then?”

“We’re friends. He wants me to see England.”

“Isn’t all this rather odd?” he said, looking up harshly.

“I don’t think it’s odd.”

“How much does he send you?”

“Ten, sometimes twenty. What he can spare.”

“I see.” He thought a moment. “I’m trying to help you,” he said. “I’m trying to put my hands on something firm to save you.” He placed the letter on top of my passport and pushed both over to a corner of his desk, beside another passport that already lay there. He spoke to some papers in his hand. “Please wait out that side door over there. There are still a lot of people to see. I’ll call you back later. Next, please!”

I WAITED in the passage where I formerly stood. Food odors coming in waves from the stairwell sent me to the rail. I watched the sea. I hadn’t seen it before. A gull left the water and climbed to the level of the deck. It glided, moving its small head about, then wheeled away, leaving me with a glimpse of the sky. I lifted up my hands.

I was alone when I did that, or nearly alone. The bovine lady who asked me for a seat was there, standing with her back against a white-painted cabin wall. She saw what I did. She allowed me to see that she saw. She did not smile or nod. The lips of her large mouth seemed dry; she seemed buried in life as she stood gazing at me. Her eyes absorbed me. They showed what a rich concentrate of color surmounted all that blackness and grayness that walled her in. They gave me suffering and resigned sensuality, the odor of warm rains in Galicia, black churches, the fumes of the brave human stable surrounded by poverty and tyranny and the laughter of children.

“You there, sir,” a voice behind me called, and I stepped back into the office just as Folkestone came into view. A little distance to the right rose the drastic cliffs of Dover, filmed grayly by the straining stale overcast of the weather.

“Now, then, about this letter,” the officer began hurriedly. “You say this is the man who sends you money?”

“Yes.”

“You expect to live on what he sends, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Were you able to do that in Sweden?”

“No.”

“What were you doing in Sweden?”

“It’s not easy to put in a word. I was drawn there. I’ve always heard about what a clean country it is, and so I went there to see.”

“On a fellowship? A grant of some kind? To study?”

“No, not to study.”

“And now you want to come to England. To see?”

“Yes, to see England.”

“Did you bring the post office receipt from your luggage? I should like to examine it, you know.” He looked at me starvedly.

I blurted, “No, I didn’t bring the receipt. I have no receipt. I lied to you. I have no steamship ticket. I have no hopes of raising a penny in England unless I find a job. The truth is, I’m straight on the bum.”

The officer nodded, too quickly, and turned away, looking at the wall. He glanced down at his desk, then over at the side door. When he turned his dry look back on me, he wet his lips. He seemed to be ashamed of something; alert, but mystified — emptied out. A wave of pity passed through me because of the hard job he had to do. Hard.

“I see,” he said at last. “Please wait outside again. I shan’t rule myself. I’ll have to speak to my chief about you.”

The boat docked with a bump, a mild bump easily ignored, befitting the English side. The gangplank crashed against the heavy plate sides of the boat, and stevedores hustled over the soaking dock. The Spanish lady remained standing in the passage, and I noted that she made no move to leave.

A group of American tourists left the boat first, a special way being made for them by a guide. Britishers clad in Alpine rigs followed, with climbing staves in their hands. Behind them went the young priest, thin and black-suited, nodding and smiling down at the lady who sat beside him. I saw the German girl again, on her way to the factory or office named “DUN—” She climbed timidly up the five steps leading from the boat to the gangplank, behind some hard-boiled fellows in shorts, with hairy legs, who wore fierce beards and carried knapsacks. She looked so distantly withdrawn as she carried a heavy suitcase up those steps, the booklet the officer had given her clutched in one hand, that I knew she was composing in her mind a child’s letter to her mother, telling her how kind the world she was entering was. I hoped so. She deserved it, because everybody deserved it, and I hoped she would continue to find the world that way the rest of her life.

The officer brushed me as he came out of the office, snapping shut the lock on a well-used briefcase under his arm. His eyes were streaked with red, and dull.

“You’ll wait here,” he said. “A constable will go back with you.” Inept, he stood a moment, looking into my eyes. “Why did you tell me that?” he said mournfully. “I was trying to save you. If only you’d given me something to reach out for and grasp.”

Fresh passengers climbed on board. The Spanish lady moved from the iron wall through the passage and over to the opposite side of the boat. There she wrapped both her arms caressingly around a metal post and looked out to sea. She seemed very special to me as she stood in that position, her beautiful woman’s body turned away from England and her arms curved around the post like a dancer’s.

I RODE the unsheltered top deck going back, along with the British types in tennis sweaters, with outthrust jaws clenching pipes. Dreamily watching water cascade chastely aft, surrounded by its plain of heaving lava. I got up and moved around. Once more fear, the learner, rain, cold nights, mornings without coffee, lack of money, the humdrum things. The day had not changed its look since dawn; still misty vapors, misty clouds. Violent loops of warm wind furled the wraps of women strolling on the deck. Moving on beside canvas-covered railings, past men smoking banded Havanas, a white-hooded nun, and tall, unsurprised English girls going to Paris and Rome. Going from life into a novel and back into life again. Who is she? Is she going or has she arrived? I thought: I should have stayed below and watched her all the way across, trying to convey in the silent way she taught me that I knew, and shared her grief. I stared over the railing at pieces of floating wood, at streams of slop and what must have been discarded soup, at raw water, and gulls. And then to my horror I heard my name piped over the loudspeaker, once, twice, monstrously loud, followed by a command to appear at the ticket window on deck one. I hurried down the stairs to the repeated drumming of the command.

An Englishman there, behind spikes of iron and a shield of glass, asked how much money I had, and I said two American dollars. He scribbled something on the back of a ticket and slipped the ticket under the grille. “Here, take this. I imagine they’ll demand it when you get off on the other side.”

I stuffed the ticket in a pocket and hurried back to where I had left her. But she had moved away.

I waited until the boat unloaded before taking up the knapsack and bedroll again. Shifting it to places on my shoulders that didn’t hurt, I walked down the gangplank and set foot once more on France. It was about seven o’clock. Trains with vintage engines were scattered over the dock area, and the smell of coal gas and steam pervaded the heavy air.

A French control officer and a British constable stood at the bottom of the gangplank. “That’s one of them,” the constable said as I came down. He handed over my passport opened to a page that showed a stamped re-entry visa for France and, above that, the stamp of the United Kingdom canceled by a big black cross.

“Where are you going now?” the Frenchman asked, smiling. “I hope you do not say Paris, or I’ll have to arrest you.”

“To Liége. Amsterdam, maybe.” I couldn’t help smiling back.

He grasped my arm and pointed to the left of the green and white painted shed. “Go over there and take the train marked ‘B.C.’ For only a few francs it will take you to Lille before dark. And from there it will be easy to get a ride to Brussels.”

He warmly pumped my hand. “Good luck to you,” he said, and turned to the constable. “Wasn’t there one more?”

“A woman, yes. I’ll bring her down.”

The constable started up the gangplank, hand over hand on the ropes, and disappeared in the tiers of the boat.

I didn’t pause. I began to run, taking long swinging strides past the shed and over tracks to the train. I clambered up the iron steps and worked my way to a compartment where four Italians sat feeding themselves and laughing plumply. Dropping my gear temporarily on the floor, I lowered myself to a seat. Then, because I found no strength to will them anywhere else, my eyes moved to the window of the compartment.

Out there was water, and beyond the water, England. There was the boat. There on the dock stood the French control officer good-naturedly watching the departing trains.

Out there, too, spread over the window in layer on layer of gray, was a picture of the great natural silence that lies over all things. The immense silence through which all life flows.

And the constable appeared at the railing of deck three, waving awkwardly to the man below. He shouted something down. The Frenchman started up the gangplank with fast and jerky strides.

The boat rocked like an empty hull. The train whistle blew. Again. Unnaturally comic, the signal floated back the image of an organist alone in a choir loft, tooting in lofty believing that he was being heard in the spheres. Steam twisted backward, great lumps of it, and the coach moved slowly — it was as though we were being conveyed forward more by the smoke, by the mist, by a fiction, than by an ordinary engine. Then a man beside the window leaned in front of it and blocked out the view.