Dancing in Dreamtime (10 page)

With his odd notions about sea craft, his habit of sheltering beneath a fern-colored umbrella, and his energetic pantomimes, this gringo was the most engaging performer they had ever brought
on board. He made the band seem dull. The conductor soon grew jealous, and regretted having offered Jason a ride. But the other musicians were secretly pleased, for they would rather confess their miseries to Jason in the shade of his umbrella than blow on their horns in the sun. They were glum when he strode down the gangplank in Lisbon. Even the conductor, repenting of his jealousy, wept a few tears. The cook chased after him with a savory parcel. Jason tipped his green slouch hat to them and headed off walking across Europe.

If he kept on course as far as the Bering Straits, he would cover twelve thousand miles before reaching another ocean. To keep track of his progress he stuffed a handful of pebbles into his left pocket. Each time his left foot struck the ground for the hundredth time, he moved a pebble to the right pocket. For every ten pebbles thus transferred he would have walked about a mile. After two days he grew weary of such counting, however, and decided to walk on in ignorance of distance.

His dramatic gestures served him well in Portugal and Spain. Three days out from Lisbon, a peasant gave him a ride on a donkey, unlashing a brace of water pots to make room. Jason had never sat astride a beast before, not even at the Lawrence County Fair, where he went each July to admire the champion rabbits and pigs. Riding the donkey was a bit like sailing, and inspired in him the same glee, as if he were playing a trick on the laws of physics. He slept in a hut with the peasant, staying an extra day in order to figure the man's income taxes. For supper each night they ate a flat bread which reminded Jason by its smell of the chicken lady,
Doris Wilkins. One of the man's children asked him in textbook English if he would kindly secure the autograph of a soccer star in Brazil. To be certain of the spelling, Jason had the boy write the hero's name in his notebook.

For several days, as he trudged across the desolate plains of northern Spain, the Pyrenees loomed out of the north like a bank of thunderclouds. Jason rode across the mountains in the truck of a painter who was smuggling marijuana into France. “With the stink of turpentine,” the painter confided, “the dogs cannot smell my weeds.”

Neither dogs nor border guards had any chance of sniffing this delivery, in any case, because the painter veered off the road on the French side of the mountains and bounced the last few miles across a rutted field. “Is it true the Colombian gold leaf is sweeter than our Spanish?” the smuggler wanted to know. Jason explained that he had never smoked any variety of leaf, but offered to seek the opinion of experts.

The smuggler's family turned out to be Loyalists who had been hiding in the south of France since the Spanish Civil War. They gave him the names of other old guerrillas, with addresses ranging across Europe from Toulouse to Bucharest. “Kiss Vladimir in Odessa for me,” said the smuggler's wife.

In order to accommodate the names and addresses, Jason had to buy a second notebook. By the time he reached Vienna he was writing in his third. For many of the questions gathered along the way he had already found answers. These he wrote carefully on postcards, which he mailed to the questioners. Although the drift of his travels had carried him past Africa, he had found in Geneva a packet of stamps from Upper Volta, a present for the captain of the coal barge. He bought a Shetland pony of just the
right color from a circus in Lichtenstein and had it shipped to the girl in Pennsylvania.

Every day or so he would knock at a door—in Berchtesgaden, say, or Zagreb, sometimes at a farm in the middle of nowhere—to pass along a message. A seamstress in Milan was so astonished to find this green apparition on her doorstep that she knelt down and uttered a prayer. When he delivered news of her son, who was earning good money at a fish cannery and had given up drink, she made Jason stay with her for three days so that all her relatives might hear from his lips these revelations about her wandering boy. “You see,” she crowed, “he doesn't take after his good-for-nothing father!”

As Jason was leaving she hung a silver whistle on a thong about his neck. “If you're ever lost or in danger, blow this like fury and God will save you.”

The only danger he encountered in Vienna was the loveliness of the women. He could not understand how their husbands and boyfriends managed to stroll beside them without breaking into shouts. He would have shouted, if he had been permitted so much as to hold one of those women by the hand. Watching them feeding seals in the zoo or tying the knots of kerchiefs beneath their exquisite chins, he was struck again by the improbability of the universe. Nothing in books explained how the sight of a face could set up these enormous tides in his heart.

The women had so disturbed his equilibrium that he nearly forgot to buy a pound of chocolate from a certain confectioner in Vienna for a policeman in Madrid. The main post office happened to be across the street from the confectioner's. While he was mailing the chocolate, he decided on an impulse to ask the
postmistress if there were any general delivery letters for him. No one on earth knew he would pass through Vienna—or even cared, for that matter—and yet asking for general delivery seemed the sort of thing a serious traveler should do. The woman soon returned with a postcard. On one side it bore a photograph of the limestone pyramid under construction in Bedford, Indiana, right near his hometown, and on the other side a printed message:
MR. MOSS, I
'
LL MEET YOU IN TOKYO, IN FRONT OF THE ASSYRIAN EXILE CHURCH, MAY FIRST AT NOON. WE
'
LL CHECK OUT THOSE JAPANESE CHICKENS TOGETHER. HOPE YOU
'
RE HAVING A GOOD TRIP. YOUR ITCHY-FOOTED FRIEND, DORIS WILKINS
. In the upper left corner a forceful hand had written, “Number 212 of 500.”

Jason recalled with perfect clarity jouncing in the truck beside the bearish widow who ranted in rage and affection about her four children and her farm mortgage and her fool husband who had died under five yards of concrete, and behind her voice the groan of the engine and the squawking of chickens, and her nearness filling the cab like the aroma of hot biscuits. Merely thinking about it, here on the tile floor of a Vienna post office, he was pierced by longing.

Of course he could not possibly meet Doris Wilkins in Tokyo. Would she expect him to shake hands? Kiss her? Buy her lunch? He was too old for learning the do-si-do of courtship.

Yet he held off replying to her message. Each time he entered a post office, instead of mailing the letter of apology which he had
laboriously composed, he inquired at the general delivery counter. There were postcards waiting for him in every capital and in many of the secondary cities. One side invariably showed the limestone pyramid, the other carried the familiar message from Doris Wilkins. The only change from card to card was the number.

By the time he reached Ankara, where he collected his twenty-seventh card, Jason realized that he could not mail his letter of apology. He would have to meet the chicken lady. She had gone to so much trouble, and had perhaps already begun studying Japanese in preparation for her trip. Even now, browsing through catalogs, she might be circling the photographs of items she would need. Thinking about her preparations, he recovered some of his own early excitement, almost as if he himself were setting out on a journey once again.

For the truth was, his knees throbbed, his boots had worn thin, his umbrella was springing leaks. After tramping only a quarter of the way around the world, his joints were beginning to sound like old staircases. At least he remembered to rub alcohol into the soles of his feet. This not only prevented blisters but also mitigated the smell, a welcome side effect, for he was often forced to go long stretches without a bath.

In Kabul, a shoemaker to whom he had delivered a recipe for mutton pie rewarded him with a pair of ox hide boots, and also mended his umbrella. “To protect you from the murderous sun,” the shoemaker signaled in gestures.

Jason had chosen to contend with sun instead of snow, taking a southerly route through Asia in order to avoid the Russian winter. This forced him to neglect a good many of the memoranda in his notebooks, including that troublesome kiss which he was
supposed to award in Odessa. But what more could he do? How was one man to run errands for the entire world?

The new ox hide boots and the restored umbrella—as well as, he had to admit, the prospect of meeting Doris Wilkins in Tokyo—stirred up his spirits. He crossed northern Pakistan in a jeep with an army patrol, thus saving his legs a good deal of stony walking. The soldiers advised him against entering India. The beggars and fake holy men in that land would nibble him to nothing. “There is a glow about you which the needy can detect from miles away,” said the lieutenant, who then asked Jason if he would mind carrying a blood-stained handkerchief to an old war comrade in Tibet. “He will know what it means,” the lieutenant added darkly.

Although Jason kept taking on small items for delivery, such as this handkerchief, or a comb from a matron in Damascus, a pair of false teeth from a fisherman in Beirut, a harmonica from a street sweeper in Sofia, he also gave away to urchins some of the equipment he had brought along, and so the weight of his backpack did not vary much up or down. As soon as he delivered anything—the goblet for a Greek Orthodox priest in Baghdad, for example—someone else was sure to give him a new parcel.

The beggars and holy men did indeed flock to him in India, but instead of asking for handouts they asked for advice. They perceived that he was a battered pilgrim, a veteran of untold miles, and wanted to know what visions seized him when the winds turned wicked or rains filled the sky or the sun balanced on a mountain peak. Jason gave the best answers he could. Children toyed with his compass, squealing and leaping about to avoid the magical point of its needle. Old men solemnly tried on his felt hat, sniffing
the headband, examining the sweat stains as if they were some obscure calligraphy.

Here in the land of the original Buddha, Jason shrugged off his weariness. He climbed through a mountain pass into Tibet, in company with a band of refugees from Bangladesh. All night they sang folk songs as they walked, and Jason hummed along. One by one they sidled up to him and showed him an old scar, a tattoo, a talisman, or merely tramped beside him in deep silence, occasionally brushing their fingers against his sleeves. When an avalanche threatened to bury their little party, he remembered the silver whistle hanging round his neck and gave it a powerful puff. As the snow crashed down harmlessly behind them, the refugees decided that Jason was indeed a wayfaring saint. How else explain the odd parchment color of his skin, the unruly beard, the walking stick that became a tent, the tamed avalanche?

Runners carried the news ahead into the hinterlands of Tibet. In the villages, children made him presents of flowers. Elders pressed their foreheads to his and clasped him gravely by the hand. Girls fed him fragrant beans wrapped in leaves. Word of him traveled ahead to the Chinese border guards, who gave him a bamboo flute and escorted him to the nearest communal farm. There he was examined minutely by dozens of curious eyes. Very little in his appearance fit their notions of how a man should look. They did not believe in saints, but knew all about wandering wise men, and took him for one. To entertain them, Jason recounted his entire journey in mime. The old people as well as the children clapped with delight and laughed.

When it was time for him to leave, a doctor on a bicycle led him to the next commune, and from there two girls led him to
the next, and thus he was guided from settlement to settlement across China. In each place he performed the story of his travels. The number of companions escorting him between villages kept growing, until by the time he reached Lanzhou, where another card from Doris awaited him, he was marching at the head of a parade. Although he could not play any musical instrument, he boldly whistled along on his bamboo flute. His followers imagined that the awful noise he made was music in his native land.