D. D. West—Writing Sample
From Going Into It, Chapter 3, "Europe"
The first page of Marshal and Josée’s passports say, “See page 8”, and on page 8 it says, “The bearer of this passport is the dependent of Canadian military personnel.” This worries them a little: Marshal and Josée’s fathers have high security clearances, work for NATO, are right up against it in the east-west conflict. Maybe this isn’t such a great idea? The train is to go down through Graz, then into Ljubljana, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Skopje, before coming out the other side to Thessaloniki, after which they’ll work their way down to Athens.
They look for a cabin that has no one in it, but quickly discover that is not going to be possible on this train. There seem to be people everywhere: grizzled looking peasants, soldiers, young women, old women. The train seems to keep stopping, the polizei seem to keep slamming the cabin doors open and saying “Passe Controle”; they walk away with their passports, and the train starts to roll away before they return with them.
Marshal and Luc and Josée meet people. An old woman shows them a giant paper bag within a paper bag that she has sitting on the floor down between her legs, full of crumbly feta cheese she says was made partly in a cow’s stomach and partly in a sheep’s stomach. She seems to see it as her job to feed them—and it is the best thing they have ever tasted. They have been eating tins of sardines, tins of octopus—which is full of tentacles and suckers and has an unfamiliar rubbery texture.
Many times the train slows almost to a stop and rolls along like that for hours, so they open the doors and jump off, walk along beside it as it rolls at about one mile an hour; if it seems to be starting to pick back up, they jump back on and close the doors behind them.
People seem to be everywhere on the train—not only in the cabins but in the aisles, in the ends of the cars, between cars, next to the washrooms. They meet a crass old guy with a heavy New York accent, who gleefully tells them, “I was eating pussy before you were born.” They see a big black guy on a platform stand in front of a garbage can, pull out his penis, and pee into the garbage can. A soldier and a woman start to talk, and then go into the washroom together, emerging again some minutes later.
At some point, Marshal finds himself talking to a young American—a third-year economics student—and Marshal asks him, “What’s inflation?” The guy looks at him and laughs and says, “How much time have you got?” Marshal and Luc and Josée talk to a young Swedish guy, and the guy is keen to explain his theory of education: “It’s like going from point A to point B”—he holds up his hands far apart, one lower and one higher, to mark out the points, and then he sweeps his hand between them—“without going through all of the points in between.”
At some point Marshal and Josée fall asleep—and then are woken up by Luc putting a hand on them, shaking them, saying, “Can you lend me a traveller’s check?” Before starting the trip they had discussed how best to carry their money, what currency, what denomination, what form to have it in, where to keep it—and they decided the best way
was to convert everything to American dollars, in $50 travellers checks, folded into money belts. They each had about $300—several dollars a day plus emergency funds. But now here is Luc asking them to lend them a traveller’s check. It doesn’t make any sense, and neither of them is really awake enough yet to understand what is going on. Luc seems agitated, wired, talking fast like he is in some
kind of strange state that they haven’t exactly seen before and can’t really place.
They finally manage to slow him down, get him to just stop for a minute, explain to them what’s been going on, why does he want to borrow the money? And he explains: he’s met a bunch of guys between cars. Old guys, nice guys. He’s been playing a shell game with them. At first he won some cash, and then he lost his cash. So then he got out his traveller’s checks: you can sign them over—did they know that? But then they won those too, so now he needs to win them back. He just needs to borrow some traveller’s checks. He’s being very forceful about this, very insistent. What are they waiting for? He just lost all his money; he needs their help. They should stop jerking him around.
Marshall is tucked down inside his sleeping back, wearing his clothes with his money belt on—and as insistent as Luc is being, he is very clear headed that he is not going to take off his money belt, unzip it, and start taking out fifties to
give to Luc.
Josée looks at Luc and says, “Luc, we can’t give you more money. Those guys will obviously just take that too.”
Luc looks confused, as if this wasn’t the answer he had been expecting. Marshal says, “I think we need to do some math. Figure out if we can live on what we’ve got.” Luc looks at him, incredulous, and Marshal continues, “We each budgeted something like $10 a day for a month—but so far we’ve been eating bread and cheese and jam and cans of stuff. Sleeping in the Europahof, sleeping at Josée’s dad’s apartment, sleeping on the train. I think we’re averaging more like $5 a day—and Greece is supposed to be even cheaper. In other words, we each started out with about twice as much money as we probably need—so I think we should just play it safe, stick with what we’ve got, and keep our expenses down.” Josée nods along with him, and Luc has no choice but to sit tight in the cabin with them—just stay where he is, and no one comes looking for him.