their cargoes were safe.
Here at the self-service counter, East met West. An identical array of spicy flour-thickened stews was saved from anonymity only by the exotic labels promising Madras curry, Hungarian goulash, Irish stew and Mexican chilli. With no wish for journeys into the culinary unknown, I took a bowl of noodle soup and a cheese sandwich before moving from table to table soliciting a ride. Eventually I was lucky. After half a dozen negative responses a wavy-haired Dutchman signalled to me from across the room with a barely perceptible beckoning finger.
‘Where are you headed, stranger?’ His use of American vernacular was awkward and unconvincing. He was a muscular man with a puffy face and fair skin reddened at the cheeks and nose by the wind and weather. His neat moustache and eyebrows, like the wavy hair on his head, were blond, so that from a distance he looked like a plump angel who’d fluttered down from the loft of some baroque church. Under his battered brown leather jacket he was wearing what I recognized as a very expensive rainbow-striped silk shirt. On the table in front of him, aligned as if for inspection, there were a bunch of keys, a leather bag, a flashlight and a red plastic folder containing a batch of manifests, registrations and customs documents needed for him to take his truck and cargo across ‘frontierless’ Europe.
‘South. Switzerland. Anywhere in Switzerland,’ I replied.
‘After that you’ll pay your way?’ he asked mockingly.
‘I’ll pay you,’ I offered, ‘if it’s not too much.’
‘Keep your dough in your pocket. Take the weight off your feet. My name is Wim. I’m transporting cars to Milan. I can do with the company; rapping keeps me awake.’
I sat down opposite him and drank my soup and ate my sandwich while he finished his steak. ‘I’m not permitted to take hitchhikers,’ he said with a furtive glance over his shoulders. ‘Plenty of big-mouths in here tonight. Better you wait by the exit from the truck park.’ He tore a bread roll in half, wiped the plate using the crust, and then stood up to drink the final mouthful of his coffee. On his hand there was a heavy gold signet ring and a tattoo that artfully incorporated his fingers into its continuous design, and gave emphasis to his gold wrist-watch. Driving long-distance heavy trucks was a well-paid job. It was not unusual to find such nomads spending their wages on personal luxuries rather than equipping the homes they seldom saw.
He stood up, flicked crumbs from the front of his shirt and picked up his flashlight after putting the rest of his belongings into his leather bag. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘Let’s get the show on the road.’ It was the smooth American-style accent that those brought up speaking Dutch and German often assume. I was to find that his whole education and experience was derived from Hollywood films. From them he could quote episodes and dialogue with the effortless assurance of a preacher summoning Bible texts. I guessed he was going to use me as an English-conversation lesson, but that seemed a fair exchange. ‘You leave now. You’ll spot me all right. I’m driving that rig with the brand-new Saabs on it.’ He was toying with the flashlight and he switched it on to be sure it worked. He did it automatically, more a neurotic habit than a test of its batteries.
The vast car transporter swayed and groaned as it came across the car park to where I was standing at the exit. It stopped with a squeak of brakes and I got in, slammed the door and looked around. This was Wim’s world, and it came complete with air-conditioning, embroidered silk cushions and pin-ups. He ran through the gears and spun the steering wheel with one finger, grinning at me as we sped along the ramp and slid into the stream of traffic heading south. I need not have worried that he would interrogate me or want to be entertained with the story of my life. This fellow Wim wasn’t like that: his idea of entertainment was having an audience for the story of his life.
It was the sort of yarn to be heard in the bars of almost every big town in the modern world. With difficulties in reading, a self-confessed truant and thief, he was well able to manage his spoken English, and German and Italian too according to what he told me. He handled his huge transporter truck with the same casual ease. Sentenced to three years in prison for large-scale car thefts and an armed assault upon a policeman, he had served seven months before being released on a technicality and his police and prison records erased. Thirty-one years old, he had five children by two different mothers: ‘a ready and willing piece of ass in Stockholm and another in Turin’ was how the unrepentant Wim described his present situation. One of them he’d married, but Wim gave no money to either family, for he thought it was the government’s duty to provide for all. Didn’t he pay his income tax? he asked rhetorically. ‘She can give a heart-wrenching plea about money to feed the kids. I said: “Give ’em canned dog-food, at least they’ll have good teeth and hair.”’ He laughed as he remembered this response. ‘Never get married,’ he advised. ‘Once you’re married they demand everything; never a word of gratitude whatever you do. Girlfriends expect little or nothing. And it’s love and kisses when you bring them a box of chocolates.’
I listened, head lolling against the seat and dozing off during his long asides about the failings of society to look after its victims, among which Wim numbered himself. His droning voice was soporific but his caustic jokes jolted me awake from time to time. Despite my reservations about almost everything he said, he was an engaging personality; I could see why so many women had fallen under his spell. And yet his diatribe brought a growing realization of how much I had changed since that fateful night I left Germany for California. I had never cracked, the way the doctor there had warned me I might, but the enforced tedium of my days there on the far side of the Western world – and the pitiless repetitions of my debriefings – had deadened my mind and slowed my reactions, as I’d seen happen so often to those who survived psychoanalysis. Worse, I was taking life day by day … taking things as they came. I’d always despised people who took things as they came.
Frank Harrington had recognized the change in me of course. I could see it in his eyes as soon as we exchanged hellos. The shift I’d seen in Frank’s attitude to me during the uncomfortable interview I’d just had in Berlin had its roots in some new and inadequate something that Frank detected in me.
And Wim’s domestic predicaments were not without an echo in my own consciousness: ‘You live in London but you’re heading south?’ he’d remarked, using that animal instinct which informs such street-wise semi-literates.
Perhaps the look on my face revealed something of the confusion in my mind.
‘Running from one wife to another?’ he said. ‘Or running away from them both, like I am?’
I responded with a soft derisive laugh, but in a way he was right. Perhaps I was going on this excursion to Zurich in order to get vital information from Werner. Perhaps I was going there in order to put off that terrible time when I would be in London and forced to start sorting out my personal affairs. What did I have left of my relationships with two women I loved – with Fiona, my wife, and with Gloria who had patiently pieced together a new life for me when I was at my lowest? And what of my relationships with my two children, who were doubtless as confused as any of us?
‘Be a real man,’ urged Wim, flexing his arm in a lewd signal of machismo. ‘The man makes the decisions; women wait for him to make up his mind. That’s what nature intended. It’s the way life is.’ He offered me a swig from a bottle of Old Jenever that he had tucked into a toolbox behind his head. I declined and he smiled and put the gin away. ‘Drinking and driving don’t mix,’ he said, with that smug air of accomplishment with which we all use cliches in a foreign tongue.
It was beginning to rain. Big droplets hit the glass and then moved sluggishly downwards, flattened by the air flow into wavy patterns. He switched on the massive wipers, which slid across the windscreen with a thirsty slurp and a contented whine from the motor. The weather had changed. It was no longer good weather for driving, for hitchhiking or for anything else.
The heating was switched fully on in the cab of the transporter. I became drowsy and, eyes closed, I found it difficult to respond to Wim’s commentary and his occasional questions. Perhaps he was also succumbing to the warmth, for when I asked him what time he thought we’d cross the Swiss frontier he said: ‘Go back to sleep, it’s a long way yet.’ He changed