As I have already repeated – perhaps too insistently? – I am not at all given to the mystical, but I must record a curious, not to say unnerving, phenomenon from that time. In the days before I met Max Schaudeine I experienced a truly extraordinary succession of coincidences. They were trivial, as these things usually are, but no less remarkable for that. I would begin to read about a character in a novel, say, and put down the book and walk outside and encounter someone in the street of the same and not at all commonplace name. I had started to write an essay on Napoleon at Jena the morning that a letter came to me from that city, from an acquaintance who was at the university there, studying Hegel, of course. I knew two girls both of whom were called Sara; I arranged to meet one of them at a particular corner at a particular time one evening; she did not turn up, but at precisely the arranged hour I spotted the other Sara walking past on the far side of the street. What could be the explanation for these strange conjunctions? Probably no more than that I was at such a pitch of watchfulness that I fixed on things that otherwise would have passed unremarked, even unnoticed. But why in those days in particular, for was I not constantly on the watch now for the world's sly and menacing stratagems? Was it an animal presentiment of approaching danger? Were these unlikely minor events a way that kindly fate had found of delivering me a warning nudge? I do not want to think so, for if they were, then my conception of the random nature of reality is put in question, and I do not like to entertain such a possibility.
At once, then, I set foot upon the sticky web of Schaudeine's continent-wide network, and began the journey that would take me in big, unsteady, bouncing bounds to a place of refuge elsewhere. Perhaps, if I am still alive when I have done with this confession, and have energy enough left over, I shall write a full account of that time: Katabasis, or, My Flight to Freedom. For now, the merest sketch must suffice. Sit up and pay attention, please.
The route of my escape – I do not like the word, it sounds so cloak-and-daggerish, but what else can I call it? – took me initially in a sharp diagonal across France to the south-east corner of the Bay of Biscay. It was not such hard going; there were Schaudeine's people to help me at each knot of the network along which I made my way, they offered food, shelter, forged documents, cautionary advice. I stole things, even from those who were aiding me. I became quite a skilled thief; there is an art to stealing, as there is to everything, if one's approach is pure enough, disinterested enough. That especially is something I learned, that one must be disinterested, or at least present a credible semblance of being so, if one is to succeed in the tricky business of survival. The farther south I travelled, though, the more heartsick I became. I was not despairing, I was not even afraid, really, any more, only I could see no end to this flight I was embarked upon, and felt sometimes that this would be my life forever, just this endless journeying, and that eventually I would find myself retracing this same route from the start, seeing this same spider, and this same moonlight between the trees, over and over. I reached my lowest point on a December twilight in Hendaye, where I sat in a tenebrous bar listening to the flags flapping mournfully along the deserted sea front and realised with a sad start that it was Christmas Eve. Matters lightened next day, however – even the pendent sky lifted a little – when I met my contact in the town, a crop-haired girl in a beret and an out-sized black coat whom I took for a boy until she spoke. She and her father were to drive me that night in her father's truck across the border to San Sebastian. Meantime she looked me over with a bright gleam in her dark eye – remember, I was young then, and large, and vigorous, still sound in limb and whole of sight – and brought me to her tiny room overlooking the sea, where we took off our clothes in the fish-coloured marine light, and she clambered all over me, lithe and quick as a minnow, nosing into cracks and crevices as if in search of some elusive tidbit. When we had finished, and I was finally, utterly empty, she sprang up and sat on my chest like a gymnast straddling the wooden horse, and I saw a silvery filament of my semen strung for a second between her open lips as she grinned and said in her hot, high little voice, "Joyeux Noël, mon petit!"
She was called, quaintly, Josette. I am ashamed to say I stole her watch, a chunky, cheap thing, but remarkably sturdy, for I have it still, and it still keeps time, of a sort. It had been given to her by one of my predecessors along this route, which probably for him too had included a detour through that bedroom above the sea front. Josette. In manner as well as stature she was an eerie prefigurement of my Lady Laura, whom some weeks later, in an English spring all sleet and spiked, wet sunlight, I met on a train travelling up to London from the port of Southampton. I had arrived that morning on a boat from Lisbon, a city of which I recall only the smell of tar and the rank taste of raw olive oil, and the aluminium-bright sheets of rain undulating across the docks at dawn when I was leaving. At Southampton a military official of indeterminate rank sitting behind a table had glared crossly for a long moment at my passport, lovingly made for me by an octogenarian forger in Liège, then with a snort of unamused laughter had snapped it shut and dealt it to me across the table, my winning card. I was supposed to be a pilot with the Free French forces, I had a paper to prove it. There was no heating on the train. The compartment was crowded with army officers, and smelled of cigarette smoke and wet wool. Lady Laura was huddled in a corner diagonally across from me, wearing a huge coat, just like Josette's only much more costly, and a drooping black hat with a drooping, pavonian plume. It was hard to make out her features under all that felt and feather, except for a pair of darkly glowing eyes, which I sensed settling upon me now and then, speculatively. I noticed her silk-stockinged white little feet in their expensive shoes with the strap buttoned tightly across the instep. Her tiny hands were pale as polished bone, and came out of the coat's wide sleeves like the claws of an animal's skeleton peeping out of its pelt. She was hardly bigger than a child. The soldiers, fizzing with battle fatigue, talked loudly among themselves and paid her no heed. Beads of melting sleet ran slantwise like spit across the fogged windows. The ticket collector came, and breathed worriedly over my ticket, and told me in a tone of awkward regret, for which I remember him with a warm spot of fondness even yet, that I was in a first class carriage and would have to move. Before I could get my things together the coat in the corner stirred and a hand dipped into a purse made of woven miniature silver chains and came up with a large white bank note and wagged it languidly back and forth in the air. The ticket collector took the money and clipped my ticket and tipped his cap and withdrew, giving me a wink as he went. From under the wing of the feathered hat those eyes, big and dark and velvety as pansies, held me briefly, without expression, and looked away.