The call came an hour or so later.
“Speak louder, please!”
I said, “Darling, can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
It was a faint voice, the merest vibration in a sea of sound, but it was unmistakably Jenny’s.
“I’m in Siberia. I’ve had so much trouble trying to call you — first in Japan, and now here. I had to call Moscow first”—and then not getting any response I became self-conscious and said, “Are you sure you can hear me?”
“Yes.”
One-word replies usually made me talkative, but this made me uneasy as well.
“Is there anything wrong?”
“You woke me up.”
“I’m sorry — I didn’t know. Jenny, I’m in Siberia!”
“It’s six o’clock in the morning.”
It sounded distinct and complaining, but I blamed the line for distorting it.
I said, “I miss you.”
There was no reply to this.
I said, “Can you still hear me?”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing?”
“I was sleeping. You woke me up.”
One can always tell from the pauses and the tone of voice when the other person wants to put the phone down. I felt this strongly, but it was so disturbing to me that I resisted it and kept talking.
“I’m coming home soon.”
After a pause, she said, “When?”
“The end of the month.”
“You said you’d be home by Christmas.”
I started to explain.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. But she was not letting me off. This was not sympathy or a way of excusing me. It sounded more like: You don’t matter.
The receiver had gone cold in my hand. Another silence was loudly buzzing in my ear.
I said, “I’m so lonely here.”
“It was your idea. The whole trip. I didn’t want you to go.”
“It’s been very hard—”
But she was finishing her own thought: “It doesn’t matter now.”
I said, “Jenny, I’m really sorry I woke you up. I’ll see you in a few weeks. I love you. Can you hear me? Darling, I love you.”
“Jack misses you,” she said.
Her voice was still cold. I blamed the wire, the baffled sound, the echo.
“I must go,” she said. “I’m standing in the hall in my nightdress. I’ll catch cold—”
“I’m in Siberia!”
My scream frightened me, but the line had gone dead.
“Thirty-four rubles,” Irina said the next morning at the service desk. “You make a very long telephone call.”
I pretended to be intent on counting the money.
“Everything is all right now,” she said, and smiled at me. She gave me the receipt.
I said, “Yes,” but I knew something was badly wrong. I did not want to think what it was. I only knew that it was very urgent that I hurry home.
No more stops, I thought. I took the Trans-Siberian that night straight through to Moscow — eight days of the twisty, jouncy train, and the cold and the birches. I spent Christmas Eve drunk with the kitchen manager in the dining car, and Christmas day at the window.
I thought of a story. A murderer is so overcome with remorse at the thought of his crime and the fact that he has not been caught, that he changes his name and takes the name of his victim. His personality begins to alter, and it softens to the point where he is very meek and timid, and at last he is himself murdered.
Why does this story happen in this macabre way? I could not answer the question, so I thought of another story, about an American in London. He stood at the window, looking out at the street—always the same opening sentence. I knew everything about this man, that he was my age, that he had been in Vietnam, that he was alone. Looking out the window, he saw a street-sweeper being bullied by a young man. What made this particularly awful was that the streetsweeper’s son witnessed his father being humiliated. The American followed the bully through south London, and picked a fight with him and killed him. The story was the price he had to pay for doing that: a long story that I saw in vivid scenes.
I did not stop in Moscow any longer than it took to cross the city in wet snow and get a Polish visa. I boarded the next train and went straight through to the Hook of Holland, seeing everything in a blur, and reading the whole time to hold myself together.
My book was a collection of Chekhov’s stories; I had started it in Russia, and now I was on the last story, “Lady With Lap-dog.” It was the progress of a love affair, and it appalled me with its truthfulness. I kept reading, and stopping; reading, and stopping. When I finished it I sat silently in the train, holding the paperback in my hands. I read it again. I read it four times. Each time I was drawn and stalled by the same paragraph, which began, As he was speaking, he kept thinking that he was going to meet his mistress and not a living soul knew about it. He led a double life, one for all who were interested to see … and another which went on in secret.
It was something I understood perfectly, but it was a way in which I had ceased to live. I had one life now — I had Jenny and Jack. I had no mistress. I had been happy at home, which was why I had felt secure enough to leave for such a long time on this trip: I had a home to return to. But the description in the story was such an accurate description of how I had once felt. And by a kind of strange concatenation of circumstances, possibly quite by accident, everything that was important, interesting, essential, everything about which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made up the quintessence of his life, went on in secret …
Not anymore, I thought. I had rid myself of my secrets; my life was simple now, and I shared it with my wife and son. But still the paragraph nagged at me. He judged others by himself, did not believe what he saw, and was always of the opinion that every man’s real and most interesting life went on in secret, under cover of night.
Not mine; but crossing the Channel I became sad, and the sadness stayed with me. It was deeper than a mood — it was more like a physical condition. I could not bear to read the story anymore. I kept having nightmares that I was still in Siberia.
2
After all that time I was very eager to see her. I also wanted to be seen. Was I the same? How did I look? I needed someone to tell me I was all right. That was one. of the anxieties of coming home — the fear of someone saying You’ve changed, you’re different, and looking closely at your face and frowning.
I had been married to Jenny for five years, but traveling for nine — since Africa; so the travel overlapped the marriage, and circumscribed it. It was not a routine, nothing annual or planned far in advance. It was an impulsive going-away, whenever I could. It was not an escape, but a means of concentrating my mind and being alone. It helped my writing. I found it extremely peaceful to travel. And it gave me ideas. It seemed to suit Jenny, a modern woman, whose idea of freedom was a job. She knew that to me travel was air.
Marriage made travel possible by giving me a corresponding sense of peace: I was not a searcher, looking for another home; I was a wanderer, interested in everything and always intending to return to my little family. For me, nothing was better than arriving back home. I was reassured by the solidity and the dullness, by the smells and the pictures on the wall, and by the familiar simplicities. Most of all I was reassured by the faces of the people I loved, Jenny and our son Jack.
I arrived in the dim late afternoon at Harwich, but it was night, black and blowy, when I reached London. I met some Indians in the taxi rank at Liverpool Street Station, and we agreed to share a cab to south London. We were aliens in a strange city, trying to save money. And having been so long in India it seemed more natural for me to talk to them than to the English people waiting for a taxi.