Cities of the Red Night

paddle wheel turns slowly in the wind. Written on the wheel: THE MISSING AND THE DEAD.

The priest is talking to the mother and the other man.

'Do be careful, and if anything goes wrong don't hesitate to contact me.'

Dead fingers in smoke pointing to Gibraltar. 'Captain Clark welcomes you aboard. Set your watches forward an hour.' British we are, British we stay. Marmalade and tea in the shops, ivory elephants, carved ivory balls one inside the other, jade trees, Indian tapestries of tigers and minarets, watches, cameras, postcards, music boxes, rusty barbed wire, signal towers.

Coming in for a landing, he hears a tired gray priest voice:

'And how long will you be staying, Mr. Tyler?'

It is difficult in train 'A'

On the train with Waring. Smell of steam, soot, and iron. The WCs are clogged with shit. Landscape of red soil, streams, ponds, and farmhouses.

I have a little round box which contains a number of scenes on parchment-like paper that come alive as I turn the pages. Some oxen by a river mired in concrete up to the forelocks. Now four figures, two boys and two girls in eighteenth-century garb, get out of a gilded carriage. They take off their clothes, pirouetting to tinkling music-box notes.

In the train corridor, I encounter a French customs agent—a short heavyset man with a red face and bloodshot green eyes—accompanied by a tall gaunt gray-faced assistant. It seems that we are passing through a tip of French Canada and he is here to examine passports.

The door the agent is standing before opens towards him but he is pushing the other way with his shoulder, his weight preventing two conductors from opening the door from the other side. At this point, he tells his assistant to break the door down with a fire ax. I intervene to point out that the door opens towards him. He has but to pull it open. This he finally does, then upbraids me and the two conductors for blocking his way.

'Mais je suis passenger,' I protest.

'Quand meme!' he snaps.

Now the passengers all disembark from the train and line up with passports in an open-air booth. The customs agent sits behind a table against a wooden partition. Every time anyone lights a cigarette, a DEFENSE DE FUMAR sign appears and he looks up from the table shouting, 'Defense de fumer.'

I am first in line. The agent looks at my passport and sneers.

'Is this something of your own invention?'

I tell him it is something issued by the United States Government.

He looks at me suspiciously and says: 'It says here that you live in London.'

'And so?'

There is a girl behind me in line holding an American passport. I point out that my passport is the same. He snatches her passport and looks at it. Then he slaps both passports down on the table and turns to his assistant.

'Destroy these documents.'

'But you can't go around destroying people's passports. Are you deranged?' I ask.

'Derange?' he sneers, turning now to the girl. 'Is this man your accomplice?'

'Nothing of the sort. I never saw him before.'

'But you travel on the same train?'

'Well, yes ... but ...'