Highway

My suitcase was packed. I’d had my green suit pressed by the cabin steward. I walked down the gang-plank and kept walking. The town was old and ramshackle, and almost everyone I saw looked vaguely demoralised. The air was full of the noxious fumes of the disorderly traffic. The Purser, acting on orders or from the goodness of his heart, had given me a handful of drachma notes—the first foreign money I’d ever seen. It seemed a lot to me. I had no intention of following the route to the Australian Consulate, and was instead intending to hitch my way to Germany. I’d earn a lot of money there, then head off to the Seychelles.

I thought it might be wise to buy a packet of biscuits and a bottle of Coke for the long road ahead. In a roughly cobbled street I stepped into a gloomy shop, which turned out not to be a shop but a bar. A number of women in short skirts and tight tops were sprawled on chairs, looking ill with boredom. I put down my suitcase, smiled in what I hoped was a winning way and asked the barman, who seemed as bored as the women, for a bottle of Coke to take away. I was not so stupid as to ask for a packet of biscuits. The barman placed an opened bottle of what was surely beer in front of me. I offered the handful of drachma notes and the barman took all but one. The oldest and least attractive of the bored women put her hip against my groin and lifted one of her breasts out of her blouse for a moment. She wobbled her tongue between her lips, then asked me something I didn’t understand. Another woman, more attractive than the first, roused herself from her chair, took my hand and tugged me upstairs to a small room with lace curtains and a hand basin in the corner. I took my suitcase with me.

What I was thinking was this: perhaps I should put in some practice here in order to prepare myself for the more desirable women of the Seychelles. It was not destined to work out, however, because the woman wanted money. I showed her what I had—my two-pound note and my only remaining drachma note—and she lost all interest. I stood silently beside her while she went to sleep on a rickety chaise lounge. A monopoly board was open on the bed. Little wooden houses and hotels were set up on most of the properties. I apologised to the woman’s sleeping form, picked up my suitcase and left.

I was a competent hitch-hiker; back home, I’d hitched all the time. I realised I was an easy person to pick up, for nothing about me looked menacing. Quite the contrary. I’d also realised that it was pointless to walk while hitching. If you were walking, drivers could persuade themselves that it was within your power to reach your destination on foot. Also, it was difficult for drivers to get a look at your unthreatening face and form if your back was to them. I stood erect on the roadside with my face to the oncoming traffic, attempting to look polite and also pitiable.

One ride and another and another took me from Piraeus to Athens (which looked as if it had been built, badly, about two hours before my arrival) and through Athens to a leafy suburb of big, attractive houses surrounded by tall walls. Left standing on the roadside in this silent and pleasant suburb, I thought I would read for a while. Before long, a Mercedes rolled gracefully out of a nearby driveway. The driver, a flawlessly groomed woman in white, asked if I was a student. I thought it best to say that I was. She asked me where I would like to go. I said, to Germany.

Cruising along towards somewhere, the woman asked a long series of questions about conditions for students in various European countries. I answered all of her questions. Suddenly, the woman brought the car to a halt and put one hand over her face. She was weeping. I thought she must have fallen in love with me. Her weeping made hardly any sound at all. After a few minutes, she shook off her tears, looked straight ahead and told me I would have to get out of the car. I asked if there were anything I could do. She laughed mirthlessly and patted my cheek. ‘When you grow up, be a good boy, you understand? Be a good boy.’ No sooner had I closed the boot after retrieving my suitcase than the Mercedes ground out a furious U-turn and sped off.

I puzzled over the woman’s behaviour as I waited for my next lift. I could only make sense of it by thinking of the woman as Chekhovian. She had probably just lost a large estate. Possibly she was married to some decrepit old idiot and was dying of unfulfilment. When she saw me on the side of the road, reading my book, she maybe thought she could begin a new life with me in Germany, but then realised that we would have to live on next to nothing and didn’t have the strength of character to give up her pampered existence for the sake of love, no matter how much she wanted to. As I fashioned the story that I thought I might write about the woman, I found myself thrilled with the line, ‘The tears she shed as she farewelled the young man were as bitter as olives.’ I knew about olives, having eventually nibbled on one only, from a shipboard dry martini. The woman I would write of was more beautiful and thirty years younger, and naked from the waist up.

Further rides north took me through the dreary cities of Lamia and Larisa. It had been dark for some hours when I was dropped off in the middle of nowhere by a furiously bickering carload of Bulgarians. They were heading for Sofia, not for Germany. I sat on my suitcase, staring futilely into the dark for some indication of the direction I should now take. It was late November, almost winter, and the night was cold.

I had to give up on waiting in one place for a lift. The highway was deserted of traffic of any sort. I headed down the road towards nothing with tears as bitter as olives welling in my eyes. I wished I were home and still working in Bertie’s and had some food and money. I was terribly tired and Greece seemed such a barren place, no trees, no paddocks, the cities a mess. And my suitcase could not have been heavier if it had been full of house bricks. A terrible fear was curdling into panic. I feared that I might be completely mad, and that everybody knew except me. The Chekhovian woman in the car—she might have noticed it. Maybe that was why she had suddenly abandoned me. But as I trudged on, I decided that I would refuse to believe that I was mad. Even if it were true, it would be better not to believe it. Sometime in the future, when I was warm and secure, I would examine my behaviour and come to some balanced assessment of my sanity.

After a lot of walking I saw a roadhouse standing forlorn in the silence of the night, as if abandoned there. It was an unadorned roadhouse—it didn’t seem to take itself seriously. I trudged inside, barely able to keep my suitcase from dragging.

Two men were playing cards at a formica-topped table and, behind a glass-fronted refrigerated cabinet, a women was guarding the only fare on display—a single doughnut. The card players looked up briefly from the table; the woman paid no attention to me at all. I negotiated the purchase of the doughnut with my last drachma note, then headed back out into the night.

Further along the road, I made out a few dim lights that suggested a camp rather than a township. I came to a tiny shack, a kiosk, with a young man and two older men sitting outside on canvas stools. By this time, I was crying. The two older men looked both surprised and a bit offended—offended perhaps by my sookiness and my appearance. I blubbered out that I had no home, no money, no food, no nothing—in effect, throwing myself on their mercy. The two older men bestirred themselves slowly from their stools and held a candle to my face, chatting back and forth. One threw his arm around my shoulders, the other made small clucking sounds of sympathy. The young man, who seemed to be the proprietor of the kiosk—pistachios and pumpkin seeds were all it offered—put two hands to the side of his head and made the universal sleepy-time gesture. He gathered the three canvas stools, locked up the kiosk and signalled for me to follow him.

As we approached his home, he whistled twice. A girl opened the door for us, greeting me shyly after listening to an explanation from the young man. He made me understand, by pointing to the ring on his finger and the ring on the woman’s finger, that they were married. Within, the house was furnished in the simplest way, nothing but the necessities. Out of the darkness an old woman appeared, made the sign of the cross, then vanished. The young man and I sat in silence at the kitchen table, he opening and closing his hands and shrugging to cover the awkwardness, me smiling in the most ingratiating way I could summon.

I didn’t know what was being offered, but probably a place to sleep for the night, for the young woman was busy with blankets and sheets. The young man would want money, I thought, and wretchedly, fearing the cold and dark outside, I made him understand that I had no money, could not pay. He threw up his hands, making, so it seemed, embarrassed denials, then laughing as he explained it to his wife. She came at last and sat with us at the table, smiling and pretty, her dark hair tied at the back of her head. After more awkward smiles and embarrassed laughter, the young man showed me to the makeshift bed that had been set up on the floor beside an old iron double bed on the far side of the kitchen. Beneath the sheets and blankets, I gloried in the relief of rest for a time, but then felt ashamed. My loneliness and neediness had brought me all the way across the world to cadge hospitality from people who could not afford such luxuries as loneliness.

Some time after I’d snuggled down, the young man and his wife came to bed. I listened to their whispers, and to the progress of the whispers into murmurs and soft laughter, then into love-making, to his rapid endearments (as I supposed) and her moans and gasps. Afterwards, they spoke quietly with each other for a long time. I think they went to sleep before I did.

The couple gave me breakfast in the morning, and the young woman wrapped a sandwich in brown paper and handed it to me as I departed. The husband took me down to the road and told me where to wait for a ride. He took himself off with a wave, but then hurried back. He put a finger under each of my eyes and screwed his face up into an imitation of sobbing. Then he waved his finger under my nose and smiled. ‘Don’t be a baby anymore,’ was surely the message.

I was chastened for a while. But in the lulls of the day, waiting for rides, I thought back to the small, bare house and the lovely young wife, and it came over me that happiness was to be found in just such a place with just such a wife. My pretty young wife’s name would be Athena, but she would look very much like the young wife who had given me the sandwich I was carrying in my pocket. We would live on a farm in some more attractive part of Greece than any I’d so far laid eyes on—somewhere green and vivid, where peasants spent the whole day singing and dancing and drinking wine. Being a peasant girl, Athena would naturally want babies. We would have a number of babies, but only after maybe five years of incessant love-making. Athena would be somewhat in awe of my erudition, and indeed the entire peasant community would think of me as a genius, and bring their troubles to me to solve. I would be supported in my writing and study by a subscription taken up by the cheerful peasants. They would jokingly, but warmly, speak of me as ‘the scholar’, and take pride in showing me off to neighbouring communities. I would probably have a number of love affairs with other maidens of the village, but Athena would be very understanding.

These reveries lasted for the whole day and into the night, by which time I had been delivered, after a number of lifts, to Polykastro, a tiny village in Macedonia. It was snowing in Polykastro when I arrived, and there were no lights to be seen. It was not long before I was blubbering again, and was rescued this time by a small posse of kids who gathered about me with grave looks, then hustled me off to a house where I was greeted by an entire family as if expected at just this time on just this day. It was the home, once again, of a poor family; mum, dad and two kids were all sitting by an open fire when I was ushered in. Whatever account of my sudden arrival was being given by the posse seemed unimportant to the dad. He waved the kids away, shook my hand and introduced me to the mum, to the son, to the daughter. I tried to smile, but the open fire so attracted me that I could barely concentrate. Like a dog that has slunk in from the cold, my eyes kept sliding toward the flames, and the pleading look in my eyes finally won me a spot by the hearth.

The mum served me a plate of something dominated by eggs and spinach, so delicious that I began to sniffle once more, but with gratitude. The daughter brought me a school atlas, and I pointed out my country and city. A whoop of delight came from the dad, and a big congratulatory slap on the back, as if he’d just learned that I’d swum from Australia to Greece then jogged overland to his front door. I was made to understand that one member of the family was absent—an elder son, by the sound of it, who was in Germany. I was put to bed in the absent son’s room, which had been maintained to a particularly strict standard of housekeeping. I settled under crisp, white sheets, heaped blankets, slept like a baby and awoke to a hot breakfast.

An interpreter arrived a little after breakfast—a boy of about twelve whose uncle lived in Sydney. As he translated back and forth, he maintained that objective and disciplined air of the interpreter, smoothing out what seemed like surprise and alarm in the Greek he was taking in, and offering me a calmer English version.

‘Where you going for this day?’ he asked, prodded by the dad.

‘To Germany.’

Sounds of surprise.

‘Mister Kouriapoulis saying Germany many far.’

‘Oh? Well, that’s where I’m going.’

Shrugs, Scratching of heads.

‘Mister Kouriapoulis saying you too little—little?—too young for going to Germany.’

‘I’ll be right.’

Worried expressions.

‘Mister Kouriapoulis saying you going to Germany on bus?’

‘Hitch-hiking.’ I displayed my thumb.

Sounds of alarm.

‘Mister Kouriapoulis saying is bad.’

The upshot was that Mr Kouriapoulis paid my fare by bus to the border of Yugoslavia—a journey of an hour. He also produced four large, silver coins—Deutschmarks as it turned out, probably sent by his son—and made me understand (for the boy who had been translating had gone off to school, together with Mr Kouriapoulis’ son and daughter) that these were for buying food (hand up to mouth, biting action, rubbing of tummy). I had earlier been given a piece of paper on which the boy who’d been translating had written Mr Kouriapoulis’ name, his wife’s name, and the names of the son and daughter. I was to write to Mr Kouriapoulis when I reached Germany and tell him that I was safe and in good employment. (I still have the piece of paper. It should be filed in a dossier under ‘L’ for Little Bastard, for I did not write to Mr Kouriapoulis.)

The bus to Yugoslavia stopped a little distance from the border. Together with thirty or so other passengers, I wandered towards a shack that was being guarded by a soldier dressed in what my reading of comic books prepared me to recognise as a Commie uniform; that is, an ill-tailored uniform with a lot of padding and big red stars pinned to it. The passengers were carrying light luggage, as if ready for a day trip, and not one of them seemed happy about the journey. I would later learn that they were Macedonians visiting other Macedonians across the border, but at the time I imagined them to be forced labour heading for work in dark cavities beneath the earth. Sure enough, they all climbed aboard a second bus after enduring the surly scrutiny of the soldier. As for me, it appeared that I would have to walk to wherever I was going. The soldier didn’t think me worth serious attention.

The countryside was green and sweet, but here and there off the roadside and on the hillsides I noticed grim, bunker-like buildings that offended me with their ugliness. I was, in a cluttered part of my head where a host of ill-sorted beliefs lived a fairy-tale life, a dedicated communist. It seemed to me that my fellow communists could do a little more to please the eye, so far as architecture was concerned. In my imagination, communist states were full of glorious palaces and castles (now the homes of the workers), charming cottages and lots of other good old stuff. I expected the workers to be cheerful, spending a part of each day doing nothing much more than chuckling, and maybe singing. It was my further belief that communist women had very loose morals (a good thing) and put sex, particularly with visitors from non-communist states, high on their agendas (because by having sex with visitors, they were subverting capitalism—I think that was my reasoning.) So far (an hour into Yugoslavia), not so good. But perhaps I was in a bad-tempered corner of the country. Things would improve.

I was puzzling over the whole business when someone shouted from a distance away. I put my suitcase down and looked about. I was alone. The nearest building was a turret-shaped hut on a hillside a fair way off. I picked up my suitcase and resumed my journey. Again, the shout, a little louder. This time I saw a figure advancing downhill.

The figure became a soldier. He had a rifle, and the rifle was aimed at me. I was thrilled. As he drew closer, I could see that he was young, very young, in fact no older than me, surely. He approached me with a serious yet not uncompromising expression, as if the rules of a game were about to discussed. Noticing my delight in having a genuine firearm aimed at me, he lowered the weapon and grinned. His teeth were not so good. ‘Passaport!’ he shrilled, and I smiled, fished out my passport and offered it to him. He propped his rifle against his flank while he studied my picture. The rifle fell to the ground and he left it there.

He handed back my passport (which bore no entry stamp, let alone a visa), grinned even more broadly and made a motion towards his mouth with two spread fingers. ‘Cigarette!’ he said. I raised my shoulders and displayed my empty hands—the international alas! gesture. He nodded, still grinning. ‘Is Tray Ee?’ he said, and I smiled and nodded. He put his hands together in front of his chest and gave a series of small jumps. ‘Kang Crew!’ he said. Then a very loud, very pissed-off shout from the turret put an end to this cultural exchange. The boy-soldier picked up his rifle, straightened his cap, and ran back up the hill. I was disappointed to see him go. I’d been hoping he’d let me hold his rifle for a little bit.

A series of rides in trucks built with a stern disdain for anything elaborate in the way of suspension took me to the city of Skopje. The city, even under a pale blue sky, had a grieved, wintery look. The people also seemed a bit sleety. Every glance was hedged with suspicion. The goodwill I’d met with in the north of Greece had encouraged me to believe that Europe had taken me to its heart, and I held it against the Yugoslavs that they weren’t just a little more welcoming—me being a fellow communist.

That was one issue. Another was hunger. The day was getting on, and visions of the sort of food I would have loved to have seen laid out on a table began to torment me. Weetbix. Toast. Apricot jam. Sausages and mashed potatoes and gravy and tomato sauce. Tinned peaches. A big tub of Peters ice cream. I came to a bakery and drooled over the cakes in the window, spartan little pastries though they were. I went inside and displayed my silver coins. The woman behind the counter studied them aggressively, her jaw thrust out, and the customers in the shop joined in. Some senior person, probably the baker himself, was called in from the back. He shrugged laconically, and gave the thumbs up. Then I did something uncharacteristically sensible. I chose a fat loaf of bread instead of a bag full of cakes.

I had only the vaguest notion of the road I should take. Whenever a truck stopped for me I mentioned Germany, but if the driver indicated that he was going elsewhere, I changed my plans accordingly. This made for a lot of meandering. Sometimes I went through a town twice. Only trucks stopped. Yugoslavian car drivers never conceded the possibility of changing down a gear once they’d reached top. In any case, the truck drivers suited me fine. They were nearly all drunks, so I was able to rely on my experience of hitching with drunks back in Australia.

A drunk doesn’t require much of you. You’re offered a swig from a bottle (plum brandy in Yugoslavia, beer in Australia); you are invited to look at pictures of naked women in a magazine fetched from the glovebox, and to listen to tales of the drunk’s legendary sexual exploits; a little later, you join in a song (back in Australia, ‘The Green, Green Grass of Home’, ‘Do What You Do Do Well’, ‘From a Jack to a King’; the Yugo drunks were, I’m sure, singing local equivalents). The golden rule is this: sympathise. If the drunk is jolly, you’re jolly; if the drunk becomes weepy, you go a fair way down that track with him. It all works out beautifully in the end.

But there was one local variation to the international rules of hitching with pisspots: the Yugo drunks wanted payment, and they weren’t kidding. I didn’t have any money except for my tatty Australian two-pound note, but I did have a suitcase full of items that the drunks could be persuaded to accept in lieu. My two packs of cards went first, then my pocket knife, followed by a couple of my copies of Life magazine, one of my four pairs of white socks and one of my spare ties (Paisley, much treasured). One drunk demanded my typewriter, but I said no, and I said it emphatically.

Night fell in what I think must have been Kosovo. My last ride had taken about two hours in a very low gear, climbing the mountains. We came to a branch road that looked as if it led exactly nowhere, and I got out with the sky turning a delicate quartz pink along the peaks. It seemed unlikely that I would get another ride that night, so I wandered into the scrub with my suitcase and unpacked two woolly blue blankets that I’d stolen from the ship. I put one on the ground and made myself a pillow out of my beach towel. I was feeling smug because I had in my suitcase the very items that would lend me comfort in this forsaken place: the loaf of bread and a candle. I actually had twelve candles. Back home when I was packing, it had suddenly struck me that I might want to write late into the night in my little hut in the Seychelles, and was it likely the Seychellois had electric light? It was not.

I fixed the candle in the ground, took off my tie and shoes and lay down with the second blanket pulled up to my chin. The bread was still fresh, still soft. I ate the entire loaf, watching the candlelight cast its own mini-sunset over the broad leaves above me. I was about to start reading The Grapes of Wrath, also stolen from the ship. I expected to enjoy it. The night was not cold, even so high up in the mountains, and in any case I was fully dressed in my green suit. Happiness filled my little world from horizon to horizon.

I awoke to birdsong of a sort I’d never heard before: a soft chattering that would suddenly rise to shrill argument, then abate again. I was surprised to find how far I’d gone into the forest and how alien its features were. I felt rested, and potent—ready to make terrific observations. A few years earlier I’d read in an obituary for Ernest Hemingway that he had so dedicated himself to capturing the real, the essential thing in landscape that he would set himself up somewhere out in the mulga with a notebook and pencil, just like a painter with easel and brushes. And he would get down what was real and essential just exactly as it unfolded. I wanted to do something of the sort.

I brushed off my green suit, put on my shoes and tie, then hunkered down with my typewriter on the grassy floor of the forest. I didn’t quite know what I should observe, though. I typed out a few sentences about the trees. I recall noting that the trees were big and that the leaves of the trees were green and shiny.

Waiting on the side of the road for the first lift of the morning, I made an important decision. Come what may, I would not be a baby anymore. Imagine Ernest Hemingway crying because he didn’t have a place to sleep. Or imagine the scorn of Woody Guthrie if he had seen me sobbing because my feet were cold and my tummy empty. Nope, no more baby stuff. Also, it wouldn’t be all that attractive to women, probably. I had once looked up a term I’d come across in a novel—sang-froid—and I was pretty sure that I wanted to be just that, or have that, or be known for that, or whatever it was that you did with it. Sang-froid.

But at the same time I was very hungry. I wished I’d kept some of the bread for brekky. As soon as I got to a decent-sized town, I would exchange my two-pound note and buy a pie and some chips and a bottle of Coke and a doughnut.

Hours passed. No trucks, no cars. Gazing at the mountain peaks, at the silent forest, at outcrops of bleak, grey stone, it occurred to me that I could possibly starve to death where I stood. What on earth would be the use of sang-froid if nobody could see me displaying it? The Zen book I’d read about the archer who tried too hard to hit the target had made the point that nothing much good can come of craving an audience, craving approval. But I couldn’t see what else there was if you ruled out approval, applause. I might have been content to starve to death with great stoicism if only a thousand people had been watching. But to be found cold and still on the roadside without anyone knowing what I’d endured!

Looking back, I can see that it wasn’t fame that I craved, but endorsement. I wanted people—anybody really—to shake their heads in disbelief and murmur, ‘What a kid! What guts!’ Back in my home town I once got a game in the local Juniors (the Thirds) footy team—I was hanging around when the captain was struggling desperately to find enough players. At half-time it was the habit of the coach of the senior team to stagger over, blind drunk from the nearby pub, and regardless of the score to counsel the players to show a bit of guts and determination: ‘Y’ fuckin’ weak the pack of yez, fuckin’ like a pack of fuckin’ bridesmaids the way y’ fuckin’ tackle …’ Then back he’d trot to the pub to put away a few more glasses before he led out the senior team. ‘Guts and determination’ was one of the immortal clichés of the code, and I loved the sound of it. I wanted with all my heart to be known for guts and determination.

Standing on that roadside in the mountains of Kosovo, I began to think of my death, and to compose the sort of obituary that I would have enjoyed reading: ‘He left the comforts of home at the tender age of sixteen to try his luck in the wide world, but not in his wildest dreams could he have predicted that he would languish fatally in Yugoslavia and die a painful death from hunger and exposure. Yet not a murmur was heard from him as death stealthily approached across the frigid mountains. What his premature death robbed us of, it is too moving to dwell on, but in notes we find stories that rival those of Ernest Hemingway and Anton Chekhov at their best, full of extraordinary observations both of the landscape and of the many exceptional characters he came across in his strange travels …’

I was obliged to bed down in the Kosovo forest for a second night. This time, I was less jolly. My bread was gone. All I had were candles and books. I watched the sunset with my blanket at my chin. The Grapes of Wrath was providing no cheer. It is one thing to read of people struggling against the tide of the greatest economic calamity of the twentieth century when you feel happy and contented. It is quite another when you’re hungry and cold. But I was at least able to dwell on the motives and incitements that had landed me on that mountain.

The fluctuations of thought, mimicking the flickering flame of the candle burning beside my cheek, eventually produced a bright moment of insight. This was not the first time I had set off in search of paradise, I realised. It was not the second, third or even tenth time. For years I had been fashioning Edens for myself. A lost city in the hills above my home town. A lost city in the valleys at the back of the green hills on the way to Thornton. A lost city on the island mountains across the lake. A lost city in the bush on Dry Creek Road. I carried sandwiches and cake and a tomato-sauce bottle full of cordial when I set off in search of those lost cities. And each time, the disappointment of not finding them was like a grievous and painful insult.

I wasn’t expecting to find gold and jewels in these lost cities. I had no interest in gold and jewels. I was expecting radiance. Every surface would glow. The green of the grass would be more vivid than any green I had seen before. Creamy clouds would cross the blue sky in a silence so finely spun it would sound like music. The shadows of the clouds would follow the undulations of the hills and slide over wheatfields and forests. The trees would spread their branches so broadly that in the space beneath them whole families could live without any other shelter. The buildings were labyrinthine miracles, endless alleyways and tunnels lined with flowerbeds and banquet tables where you might pause to gobble down not two slices of toast and jam, but a hundred slices if you wished, and not only toast but crumpets, too, and not only one sort of breakfast cereal but a hundred sorts.

Surpassing the glowing colours of the city and the hills and the splendour of the architecture was the rich, warm, welcoming embrace of the people you met, the folk of the lost city. They smiled, and the beauty and warmth of their smiles blurred and melded, and you were left with an overwhelming feeling of sanction for anything you might say or display. Each feature of the lost city was airbrushed clean of scales or scabs. But more importantly, an airbrush had been expertly at work on the hearts and souls of these smiling people; what was mean or little or harsh or cruel had been smoothened, softened, made to disappear. The lost cities were made of a love that could not be exhausted, could not be altered; fall and tumble as you may, you were comforted.

As I lay there under my blue blanket, I did not go on to consider that these lost cities might be dramatised corollaries of longing, and even now I doubt that psychology could adequately explain them. I wanted paradise. The search was made more urgent by the furious hissing and scolding that my father and step-mother dished out to each other; by the faltering of joy in my life; by hard surfaces that bruised or sliced or left dark splinters under my skin. But even without these incitements to fantasy and escape, I would still have believed in lost cities. Where the idea of paradise came from, I don’t know. Perhaps it was a sort of spiritual atavism. I believed the stories of Adam’s children: stories of a secret garden to which we cannot return. I went peeking through holes in the wall of Eden, a desperado of happiness, mad to get inside, and always I was chased away, just as I’d been warned, by a killjoy character with a flaming sword.

Next day I was at last picked up by a surly truck driver who wanted payment immediately. Fees were usually settled at the end of the ride. I offered socks, my last pack of playing cards, and a novel (Nicholas Nickleby). The truck driver carried me for ten hours without speaking and without drinking anything at all. He kept a big, brown paper-bag of hard, mint lollies on the dashboard, and sucked his way through the lot. His cheeks flexed and the lollies clunked against his teeth. The names of towns and cities loomed in all their consonantal strangeness. Every time I saw a face in the street, its expression was sullen. The Yugoslavs seemed the most pissed-off people on earth. It was nightfall when the ride came to an end in Ljubljana, wherever that was.

Trudging through what appeared to be a suburb, I was forced to revisit the question of character. Approaching strangers with tears was no longer an option. How about approaching strangers to soberly request a place to sleep for the night? Anything wrong with that? I was working class, the Yugoslavs were working class. Brotherhood was the issue. Was it likely that Tom Joad would have felt squeamish about asking for a floor to sleep on? He was starving and cold; I was starving and cold. It was settled—I’d knock on doors and put my case. It does require a fair bit of egocentricity to draw a parallel between the experience of a boy on holiday without a cracker and that of a young man battling for survival in dustbowl America, but I was able to muster it. I was inflicting on the world the intolerable narcissism that most teenagers have the decency to reserve for their immediate families.

The suburbs of Ljubljana had not benefited from the cheerful, weekend attention that Australian suburbanites lavish on their plots. It was not that the lawns were left unmowed; there were no lawns, no gardens, no nature strips, no neat concrete curbing—just rows of stark, semi-detached bungalows. I went from door to door in the misty rain asking the dwellers if I might sleep on their floor. Looks of dismay and fear met me. Mothers shook their heads in panicky refusal, their puzzled children peeping out from behind them. Fathers stared at me in alarm, as if I were the harbinger of some new official torment. I’d been doorknocking for half an hour or so when a car screeched to a stop nearby and two policemen (by the look of them) demanded things that I could not understand. I was excited by this turn of events, just as I’d been by the young soldier a couple of days before. I had not the least fear that anything bad would befall me. Why should it? I wasn’t doing anything wrong. And these guys had guns, always a fascinating sight to me.

Down at the station I was handed over to another policeman, a man with a great monument of a body and a magnificent, carved noggin. He looked like Omar Sharif twenty years on from Sherrif Ali, and twice the size. Every gesture he made underscored his vanity, but it was pleasant vanity. The mature, physically beautiful male (I’ve since noticed) is usually a very relaxed chap, often generous. This cop, Omar, gave me a few minutes to take in his magnificence, his perfect teeth, chemical blue eyes, the touches of central-casting grey at the temples, then quietly beckoned me to open my suitcase. He lifted out one item after another, chuckling all the while. The typewriter amused him especially. He held up the books at arm’s length, and pretended to be reading in the manner of an egghead professor. I laughed, keen to ingratiate myself—a good policy.

When he came to my sheath knife, Omar could scarcely contain himself. He called in a subordinate and displayed the weapon, his blue eyes twinkling. He studied the knife with approval, then balanced its tip on the tip of a finger, moving his hand just slightly, expertly, keeping the knife upright. He suddenly spun the knife in the air. It landed dead on its point, quivering in the brown linoleum. I shook my head and whistled in unfeigned admiration. The weasel subordinate gave a grudging grimace and took himself off.

The Life magazines particularly pleased Omar. He flicked through an issue, turning the pages to me when a picture thrilled him. ‘Chevrolet!’ he said, and ‘Bobby Kennedy!’ and ‘Elizabeth Taylor!’ I told him to keep the magazine, and added a second. He protested, but agreed in the end. In return, he indicated that I would be brought some food, after my passport was scrutinised. He disappeared from my life with the two magazines, and a few hours later the weaselly constable brought me a quarter of an orange, a small piece of crumbly cheese and a glass of water. I sat under a portrait I recognised as that of President Tito, and read The Grapes of Wrath.

In the morning, an official arrived to review my case. While he was studying my passport, he munched on fresh toast fetched by the poor, exhausted weasel. Oh God, that toast! If only I’d been asked to confess to something with the promise of a slice of toast as a reward! When I returned to The Grapes of Wrath, my sympathy for the Okies on their journey to the Garden of Eden had passed all limits.

The upshot of my detention was that I was to be sent by train to Belgrade—a city which my maundering route across Yugoslavia had bypassed. I was horrified to discover, after consulting a map on the wall of the police station, that Ljubljana was no more than a skip and a jump away from Germany. The Yugos might have let me sneak over into Austria then on to Germany. But no, I was to present myself at the British Embassy in Belgrade, and the British, acting for the Australian government, would send me back to Athens, and the Australian Consulate in Athens would send me back to Australia, and the whole journey would have been wasted. My duty was clear. I had to escape. But when I learned that I would be fed on the train, I decided that I would make my escape from Belgrade.

I was met at the station in Belgrade by an embassy car—a highly polished black Humber. The chauffeur looked familiar. I was sure he’d appeared in From Russia With Love, as a chauffeur. I risked asking him if any espionage went on in Belgrade. He didn’t know what I was talking about. ‘Spying,’ I said. He shrugged. ‘Who knows?’ His answer satisfied me. A spy would always say, ‘Who knows?’ in reply to such a question.

Belgrade looked nothing like any other Yugoslavian city I’d passed through. It seemed prosperous and exuberant. If I were to run away here in Belgrade, I would likely find employment before long. I saw department stores. It was possible that I could get a job selling ladies’ shoes and slippers. I had brought my reference from the Myer Emporium with me. It said, ‘Robert showed diligence and left of his own accord.’

The British Embassy impressed me a great deal. It had a cobblestoned courtyard, where all the black, shining embassy vehicles parked. The door by which we entered the building was varnished and gleaming. The door knobs were polished brass. Within, the embassy looked exactly like the Oxford University of my imagining: varnished panels, tiled floors, and efficient men and women, perfectly groomed, calmly going about their business. I was shown into a room like a study, books in glass-fronted cases, an enormous desk on which a spotless white blotter was spread. A tall, urbane man in his forties smiled at me and flattered me terrifically by shaking my hand. His tailoring was impeccable.

Wandering about the embassy wide-eyed, I was sure that I detected admiration in the eyes of the people I met. It seemed to me that I was being checked out for possible employment—perhaps as a courier, conveying an important document or message to Athens. Or something grander. Maybe the embassy had been scouting for a clever boy with a bit of daring about him. I might be sent to London for training, then to Moscow. In London, I would perhaps be required to undergo torture to show that I could bear up. I might be wired to an electric shock machine, or have my head held under water. People would perhaps shout at me and abuse me, just to see if I had what it takes.

This was a mission that I’d been preparing myself for all my life. At the age of five I was convinced that I was being secretly watched by the army. The army wanted to see if I were good, thoughtful, considerate. Whenever I saw a tap left dripping anywhere about the town, I would turn it off firmly, then glance about with a stern expression to illustrate my disappointment with people who left taps dripping. I picked up pieces of litter, fragments of broken glass. If I found a dog wandering loose, I tried to find where it lived, or at least made sure it was off the road. None of this was done out of plain goodness (although I have remained a great worrier about stray dogs); it was done to impress the army. Every day I made sure that I looked up at the wall of the huge dam that loomed above the town, hoping that I would be the first to detect a crack in the wall, and that I would then be the first to give the alarm, and that I would be praised for saving the town, and a big tick entered beside my name in the dossier that was being kept on me by the army.

It was mid-afternoon when I arrived at the embassy—too late for me to be put aboard the train to Athens. I was placed in the care of a man who worked for the embassy in some capacity that seemed to cause him grief, for he spoke about it in a piqued manner, as if dwelling on it brought on dyspepsia. His name was Alex, and I was to stay with him for the night.

Alex drove me to his home in a down-at-heel suburb and cautioned me, before we entered his flat, that his mother was ill and would be a little frightened. The flat was dark but snug, and I found the rugs and ornamental objects attractive. Alex led me to a curtained doorway, eased the curtain aside and spoke softly to a shadowed figure propped up in a bed under a window. The cries of an agitated bird came from the bed as he approached, leading me by the hand. His mother looked at me in alarm, her cheeks trembling. She was old, but not ancient. After more gentle, placatory words from Alex, the old woman lifted a hand from under the covers and beckoned me closer. She studied my face in the grey light. We left the room after what sounded like a short, repeated phrase of approval or acquiesence.

In the tiny kitchen, Alex explained that his mother had been tortured during the war, and still suffered. The news filled me with awe. I said, ‘The Germans?’ Alex gave a bitter laugh. ‘I’m afraid you don’t know the history of this country,’ he said. While he prepared an omelette, I asked about Yugoslavia, about Tito, about communism, but he was dismissive. I desperately wanted to ask him about his mother’s torture, but managed not to. Why I should have wished to know baffles me now.

I slept on a mattress on the sitting-room floor. Every time I woke, I heard the bird cries of the old woman. Alex in his pyjamas stepped over me a number of times to go to her aid. I heard the soft, lapping phrases he spoke, his voice never rising. This must have been his task each night.

The train from Belgrade took me back over terrain I had thought was behind me. At least I was neat, once more. Hitching had left my green suit looking weary, but I had taken the opportunity at Alex’s apartment to iron it, and also to shower. Shaving was still a few years off.