My head banged hollowly against the wooden bench, and my thoughts and dreams became confused. What, in the end, did Odysseus dream about? His strategy for returning home, or the path to self-knowledge, the only voyage that everyone undertakes, even if they don't move an inch?
‘Cigarette?’
I opened my eyes. In front of me I saw the soft face of the lieutenant in his American uniform.
What language had he spoken? Italian? In English, his officer's English, clipped, staccato, without the Texan drawl that I had learned to recognise in the speech of the camans? Or had he just held out a cigarette?
I took it, thanking him with a nod. The lieutenant got to his feet and gently closed the door of the compartment. He turned the knob, and came back to sit down. His uniform fitted him more comfortably now, it looked more like the gym kit of an adolescent athlete than the uniform of an officer in the most powerful army that had ever gone into battle in all the history of the world.
He took a single, intense drag. ‘My friend, when are we going to start playing, you and I?’
His voice was deep and persuasive, the voice of a schoolmate to whom you could confide your concerns and anxieties. I could have told him about my torment, I could have told him all about Zita and the professor, my escape, the war we had lost, and even asked him about the dreams of Odysseus, he might have known something about their nature. I opened and closed my mouth, as tuna do on the point of death, and not a word emerged. My life was beginning over again that day, and I didn't know it. The lieutenant brushed back his long, fair, feminine hair. ‘You're an escaped Italian prisoner, I'd say, from Hereford Camp. I don't know how much money you've got, or what kind of papers you're carrying, but you've got one hell of a lucky streak if they haven't spotted you yet. Take a look at your trousers: you can still see the letters POW that you've tried to hide. What trick did you use? Toothpaste? Bicarb? I've seen them all. Listen, you've only got one choice: as I said when the Military Police came round, I'm going to New York. The armed forces have organised a radio station on 47th Street. Boogie-woogie, you know? Datadatadadadatata. It broadcasts in several languages including Italian. It reaches your country, both the parts that have been liberated and the parts still occupied by the Germans. But I didn't tell the MP everything. I was accompanying an Italian prisoner to New York, a goddam raw recruit. In civilian life this bastard was an actor. Beautiful voice, great diction, already famous. My mission? To escort him across the mighty United States, God bless them, and set him down in front of a microphone so that he could use that lovely instrument, that lovely bel canto voice of his to convince the people of Italy of the soundness of our cause.’
He fell silent for a moment. ‘Of the Allied cause.’
‘Where did you learn Italian? You've got a Tuscan accent.’
They were the first words I'd spoken in my own language, and I knew he'd got me.
‘My father was the American consul in Florence, then a diplomat at the Court of St James in London, and that's how I learned my languages. I know half a dozen, including Hungarian, which is so difficult that it counts as four. Listen to me. I'm in trouble too. Not as much trouble as you, but in trouble nonetheless. And since we both speak the lovely tongue of your lovely country, give me a hand. This actor I was escorting, a little fascist who probably never fired a gun in his life, slipped through my fingers, as though plastered from head to toe in brilliantine. He used to keep that stuff in a little green tin, Linetti, two drops on the tips of his fingertips and off he went. I show up at the train station to give him his travelling document and he's gone. Vanished. I should have called the Military Police and given them a report, but I'm about to be transferred to Washington, to military headquarters, and then everything'll be fine. If I confess, who knows what's going to happen. They might send me off to the Pacific to fight my way through the jungle as a punishment. We've won the war, what's the point of stirring things up? Communication between Hereford and New York isn't good. I'm your luck, and you're mine. Luck, you know, fate. Did you go to high school? You did? Ananke, fate: that's me, my friend. Now we're heading for New York. You think the Military Police are going to stop us? Don't worry, I'm sorted for travel documents, and so are you, so we'll escort each other. If you say no, we're finished: you in a cell, me in Japan.’
I looked at him in silence.
‘And when we're on 47th Street … ever been there? Most beautiful street in Manhattan, art galleries, bookshops and cafés full of German girls who have got away from Hitler. We'll go to the radio station there, you'll follow me meekly, I'll go in and get the permits released and you stay in the foyer. After they've stamped the receipt, mission accomplished, I open the door and, bingo!, you've gone. Except that I've got the documents validated, and you've made it through the bureaucracy. A free Italian in Manhattan, ties with Brooklyn, find yourself a mama to load you on to a Portuguese cargo ship, and you'll be in Naples before the feast of San Gennaro.’
I was fascinated by his perfect Italian, which was full of catchphrases and high-school-teacher Latinisms. I didn't reply. This time his smile was drawn, but convincing: it concealed real anxiety, perhaps even fear, for something he was about to lose.
I waited and looked out the window. It was no use. ‘We haven't got too much time, my friend. Look.’
He threw the door open abruptly and pushed me outside. Two compartments further along was a new and immaculate patrol of Military Policemen, soldiers so tall their heads grazed the lights in the ceiling. ‘Papers, papers, please, sir.’
The train slipped into a tunnel and my memory is full to the brim with that one shrill whistle.
My journey with the lieutenant lasted for forty days and forty nights. At the time I didn't realise that between our first meeting and its distant epilogue on the Atlantic coast, precisely forty dawns would pass, the time that the Bible assigns to the all-engulfing flood before the pale dove returns to Noah's Ark with its olive branch in its beak, after crossing the watery world, bearing witness to the end of divine wrath. Nor did I see the rainbow, an earnest of the covenant between man and God. But I did see the great Mississippi River and the Ozark forests, populated by fabulous snakes – ‘They can swallow a whole kid and spit out its horns,’ Sergeant Carraway confided to me. Aboard that long train I passed the dykes of the Tennessee Valley, the pink clay, the dark blue lakes and the trees that bend over the still water, so still that their leaves fall gently and stick perfectly to the surface. I ate in station coffee shops, creamy potato soup, watery black coffee, octopus ink, my grandmother used to call it, still caffeine-rich enough to keep me awake, eyes open to look at the clear sky. Not so the lieutenant: he slept, unconcerned with the dreams of Odysseus. For forty days and forty nights I saw him sleeping motionless like that, as though he just had to flick off the switch of a lamp to be dead to the world. We endured dangers and worries, passion and grief, each of which would have been enough to fill the whole lives of many human beings. And yet, as on that day with the Military Police, the moment the lieutenant closed his eyes, sleep settled on his mind like a black shroud. Who he really was and what drove him across the United States, eastwards today, westwards tomorrow, I didn't understand at the time. But even today, from the false and reassuring position of someone judging the past from the perspective of the future, the lieutenant, with his motives