Fish swim together in the seas by their thousands, great shoals of them, moving and heaving and circling together, never stopping, never making a home in one place. When the day comes and something tells them that it is time to continue their race, something in the water or some strange pull of the moon, then they mingle and have their joy of each other and cast their babies adrift in the sea, clouds of them, baby fish by the millions scattered across the whole ocean with never a mother to bring them up. Hundreds of thousands are gobbled up, hundreds of thousands more sink to the bottom, hundreds of thousands of others grow up and starve to death but thousands live, swimming alone through the endless ocean. They never see themselves, they have no one to tell them who or what they are and yet, somehow, they come together again. They find their way across all the unmeasured sea. They find one another again, their own kind. They recognize one another and they never part again.

That was Sarah and me. We found one another.

I remember every moment of that train journey, even the ones I spent asleep, and we did sleep, eventually, the comfortable, exhausted sleep of two happy people jammed into a single bed. Some people say they can’t sleep on a train. All the rattling and bumping, the endless clicketyclacking keeps them awake, but for me it was like a lullaby, it was like being rocked in a warm cradle and I fell asleep, holding Sarah.

That lovely old train went trundling through the night, taking our hot little bed with it. From time to time we stopped, wheels squealed, signals clanked, coal rattled into the bunkers, water gushed on board in torrents and disappeared again in hisses of steam, and then we would wake up and, all amazed, discover one another again. I hope you know what that means. I hope you know what it’s like to wake from a dream and discover that, after all, it’s true. You do. I know you do. But not everybody knows that sometimes it can be a happy thing. I hope you know the surprising joy of that.

The train gave another jolt and, when it woke us, there was a soft gray light coming through the crack in the curtains.

“I have to go,” she said, and she crept away.

Not long after that the steward was working along the carriage, waking everybody up with jugs of hot water. I had a shave in the tiny little sink, brushed my teeth, combed my face and, when I was looking respectable again, as the Imperial Camel Keeper deserved to look, then I went along to the saloon for my ham and eggs.

My mate Max was already there, sharing a table with the Professor. I watched them from the door for a moment, Max with his great bear paws, holding the Professor by the elbow, helping him into his seat, pouring out his coffee. Tifty had the decency to arrive a bit late for breakfast. She came up behind me in the narrow doorway and gave me a little goose to hurry me on, “Come on, darling, we can’t have you blocking my passage!” and she laughed that beautiful, filthy laugh of hers and squeezed past me.

Tifty was every bit as gorgeous as she had been the night before—perhaps the more so, since she had that replete glow about her which sometimes hangs on a woman after a night of love, or something very like love. She was a hell of a girl, Tifty, and I had gone to bed the night before envying Max, but that morning I knew better.

I sat down at the table with the others—the Professor staring straight ahead, looking at nothing, Tifty and Max playing footsie under the table and trying not to giggle, and me, sitting with a cup of coffee and looking at the door that led back to the sleeping car. Sure enough, Sarah came through it. She was like summer; I told you that, didn’t I? Well, imagine what it would be like if it had been winter all your life and it was, all of a sudden, summer. That’s what it was like when Sarah came in. All along the sides of the track flowers burst into bloom and the windows filled with sunshine and nobody seemed to notice but me.

This is where I trip up and fall flat on my face, writing nonsense like that. I’ve read a book before. I know how it is. I’m supposed to tell you how I felt. Well, I felt like that. And I’m supposed to write about what it was like to be inside Sarah’s head and in her heart and tell you how she felt, seeing me, but I can’t do that. I can’t write about how “her heart leapt like a startled deer in the forest.” I can’t do that. All I can tell you is that I saw her and I loved her and I knew she loved me.

Sarah said, “Good morning, everybody,” sat down beside her dad and gave him a kiss. “So what’s the plan, Otto?” She said that—Sarah, who had been running the whole show from the start without my noticing.

I took out my watch and wound it. “The steward says we should be in Fumey in about an hour. Professor, over to you.”

“Fiume”—he was careful about the pronunciation—“is the principal harbor of the Kaiserliche und Königliche Kriegsmarine, the naval force of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and home of the Naval Academy. Fortified since Roman times, its natural harbor on the mouth of the Rječina and at the head of Kvarner Bay, an inlet of the Adriatic Sea, overlooks the islands of Cres and Krk to the south. The city is ringed by mountains on the other three sides, creating a humid, subtropical climate with frequent rainfall and cold ‘bura’ winds in the winter.”

When he was finished, it was as if somebody had flipped a switch on one of those musical clockwork monkeys. Snap! And it all stopped and he went back to looking at nothing and lifting bread to his mouth.

“So there we have it,” I said. “This is the end of the line and as close as we can get to the poor, lonely Albanoks, crying out to meet me. I reckon we have to get the camel unloaded—can you take care of that, Max? He seems to like you.”

Max nodded. Nothing was ever too much trouble for my mate Max.

“Then we have to get down to the docks and find a boat.”

Max said, “I would think that the Keeper of the Imperial Camels ought to be entitled to a berth on board any ship of the Kaiserliche und … what he said.”

The Professor said, “We can’t just commandeer an Imperial warship.”

“Oh, but it’s all right to steal an entire country, is it? Anyway, I wasn’t talking about anything fancy, just a cruiser or something.”

“A cruiser!” And the Professor turned those black goggles to the roof again.

It was up to Sarah to calm things down. “Let’s just play it by ear,” she said. “We’ll get the camel off the train first, like Otto says, and then we can see about boats and things—don’t you think, Otto?”

So that was the start of it. That was the very first time I ever had to make a choice between siding with Max and siding with a woman—any woman—and it turned out to be Sarah.

“Yes,” I said, “that’s what to do. One step at a time and, you know, Max, even an Imperial cruiser might be a little bit ambitious.”

Tifty put her spoon down in her saucer with a noise like a tiny silver bell. She said, “I don’t know about that, darling. I seem to recall a young man I used to know. I’m sure he’s something in the navy.”