The dual carriageway comes to an end. I turn off onto a smaller road, trying to make sense of the day.
The white lines finally fade. A long, straight stretch through woods of pine and silver birch. Through a last village. And then the little road, barely signed at all. The road where you never meet another vehicle. Driving in a trance now, slowed to twenty, fifteen miles per hour. A tunnel of trees. Right-angle bend sweeps round. The telegraph pole where the barn owl was. To the left, a final sway the other way, out into the open again, over a small, white bridge. Tall reeds now on both sides. And finally the road becomes a track, and the track ends at the blackness of the sea. As the engine fades the certainty of that soft roar of waves and wind. And a flickering understanding that the end and the beginning are the same.
An almost full moon to the south, scudding silver cloud coming in from the sea. I crunch through the shingle to the front door of the cottage. 2.30 a.m., nineteen hours after I left here this morning. But, before I go inside, there’s something I want to do – I walk the hundred yards or so down to the sea, and look south, trying to connect the waters of Suffolk with the waters of Kent, wondering how long it would take a piece of driftwood to travel the distance. And at that moment I feel in my pocket, and pull out the pebble Alice gave me a few hours ago. I kneel down by the shore, and pick up another one of a similar size, to accompany hers. They chink together in my pocket as I walk back to the cottage over the shingle, picking my way through the sea holly.
Postscript: 2019
Years on, I’m back in the west, with the cliffs and the ravens. Night has come. Authoritarianism is on the march again. Extreme nationalism and the viciousness of intolerance is suddenly everywhere. This time it will not return in the shape of killers in black uniforms, but in the anonymous tapping of algorithms into keyboards, and digital surveillance on a scale that none of us can imagine.
I’m still writing, past midnight, at my window in Wales, overlooking an inky high tide, shaping these strange arcs and lines onto a white page. I don’t know what they can do. Words in the dark. But I still have hope. On the table in front of me are two pebbles – one grey, pockmarked with white scars, the other reddish but also with white marks.
I cannot now remember which comes from where. The grey one rests firmly on the wood of the table, the reddish one, more rounded, rocks gently as I push them together. Shingle from the east coast years ago. Carriers from another place and time. Touching the stones, I think about how far we have come. And how far we have to go.
I. You. We.
to be continued …
Notes
1 ‘Once we accept, for a single hour …’ The Tolstoy quotation is taken from Resurrection, Part II, Chapter 40. (I’ve elided two sections of text from the chapter here – I hope Tolstoy’s ghost is not offended by my editing).
1 ‘In a dark time the eye begins to see …’ is from Theodore Roethke’s poem ‘In A Dark Time’.
Book One
Preface: First Day, white page
1 Walter Stier, the railway official who timetabled the trains to Treblinka, insists again, ‘I just sat at my desk … I was just a desk man.’ This is from Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah – the wording is directly transcribed from the original English subtitles of the film. The exchange between Lanzmann and Stier is as follows:
‘Did you know that Treblinka meant extermination?’
‘Of course not!’
‘You didn’t know?’
‘Good God no! How could we know? I never went to Treblinka. I never left Krakow, Warsaw, I just sat at my desk.’
‘You were a desk man?’
‘I was a desk man, just a desk man.’
The words Lanzmann and Stier use here in German are ‘schreibtisch mann’ (accurately translated as ‘desk man’). However, in the official text of the film, published in 1995, there are many discrepancies – sometimes minor, sometimes not – between the original wording and the official text (for instance, the above exchange is changed to: ‘I stayed in Krakow, in Warsaw ,glued to my desk … I was strictly a bureaucrat!’). In my view, the original subtitles are both more literal, and more accurate, than the subsequent text version, and so throughout this work, when I quote from Shoah I use the original wording from the film subtitles.
Chapter One: Explorations: Maps and the Curiosity of a Child’s Mind
1 ‘man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.’ I came across this quotation from Heraclitus reading the introduction to the Redstone Diary 2018, the theme of which was ‘Play’. I later found that Nietzsche had borrowed Heraclitus’s concept in Beyond Good and Evil, Part 4, where he writes: ‘Human maturity … means rediscovering the seriousness we had towards play when we were children.’
2 Perhaps another reason why the act of walking is so alluring in our societies is that it is one of the few activities that cannot really be commodified; you can spend hours walking in cities or countryside without spending any money at all. And, in a world where the insatiability of capitalism and the frenzied buying and selling of everything seems to increase exponentially, walking, in this way, becomes an almost invisible act of resistance.
3 These lines of John Clare’s are all from ‘The Moors’ – a poem written in response to the 1809 Parliament ‘Act for Inclosing Lands in the Parishes of Maxey and Helpstone, in the County of Northamptonshire’.
4 ‘Who possesses this landscape? / The man who bought it or / I who am possessed by it? …’ from ‘A Man in Assynt’ by Norman MacCaig.
5 Today the former clinic is a pizza place, one of those bizarre London transmutations – from VD to Venezianas. The only tricky period came when my friend suggested his Czech girlfriend could move in too, not fully appreciating the diplomatic sensitivity of Russo-Czech relations. Those couple of months pushed the notion of the ‘one-bedroom flat’ to its limits, though it did enable me to record a message on our answerphone which began: ‘Welcome to the Centre for Anglo-Slavonic Research Studies, please leave a message after the beep …’
6 In the years since I first noticed these words on the steps at Tottenham Court Road underground station, the steel and name plates have now been superseded in the redevelopment of this station, so you will search in vain to find these traces of ‘permanence’ at Tottenham Court Road, though I’ve noticed recently that these nameplates still exist at other stations on the underground.
7 The wording of this memorandum is exactly the wording of the English subtitles when Shoah was first released in 1986, and the wording subsequently broadcast on Channel 4. This differs, in certain details, from the text of Shoah, published as a book in 1995 (see earlier note). Both of these versions differ considerably from the actual wording of the memorandum – as I explain in Chapter Five.
8 It’s easy to forget how iconic the A-Z once was – a book containing maps of all the streets in London, designed with grid references so you could effortlessly find any street in the city, however small. In pre-app days it was simply an essential companion for anyone who lived and worked in London (not only for cabbies).