These Dreams of You

~ ~ ~

Now the Belgian conductor on the Eurostar who otherwise seems so sternly disapproving reappears twenty minutes later with a sandwich and plastic cup of red wine, for which Viv thanks him gratefully. Eating the sandwich, she pulls from her purse the photograph of the young woman that she was given in Addis and looks at it. She reproaches herself now for not having pressed harder for answers from the journalist, for not having pressed harder for answers from the grandmother and aunt and father. Zan believes in the integrity of secrets, that some things aren’t meant to be known; by this, thinks Viv, he really means mysteries. Is there a difference between a secret and a mystery? A secret sounds dishonest, like something withheld, as opposed to a mystery, where something is unknowable.

But God keeps more secrets than anyone. Is it a conceit, then, for a human being to presume that a mystery is a secret, or is it an aspiration to a larger wisdom? Viv can’t answer this. She just knows that now there are things about Sheba and her mother and her past that will be secrets forever, and that the acceptance of this, however unsatisfactory, is a fitful grace.

In the seat of the train where she’s been consigned for the duration of the ride, trying to reclaim a sense of calm, she has a sudden burst of disorientation and becomes convinced for a split moment that the train in fact is barreling south, back toward Africa. For a while she contemplates the contradiction of someone with wanderlust having no sense of direction.

That wanderlust she inherited from her father, the son and grandson of locomotionists who never could stay put, packing up five children and moving them all to Africa when Viv was twelve. As Zan would point out, Viv has a hard time staying put too. Thirty-six hours after any trip she becomes possessed of whatever is the newest strain of cabin fever, or maybe she invents one. Is Sheba’s adoption somehow an expression of that? she wonders as the window of the train exchanges the black of the european night for the black of the tunnel beneath the Channel. Is a restlessness of the body a restlessness of the heart? Like futuristic rhythm and blues, has Viv spiraled round the sphere of her own life to come back up through its birth canal and find waiting for her a small daughter of the abyss?

I’m a flawed human being! Viv moans to herself for the thousandth time in her life. The voice in her head is a running monologue of personal failings. She’s heard that a family is only as happy as the mother, and she knows that the girl she brought into all their lives is trailed by the betrayals of one mother after another; this is Sheba’s special burden that no one else can understand. Not so long ago, back in the canyon, Viv asked Zan one day, “Where’s the joy in our lives?” and Zan looked at her like she spoke some language as lost as the time back in that room in Addis. At this point Zan will settle for freedom from the fear to which he wakes every morning. But Viv will not, and neither will her wanderlust.

At St. Pancras a little before midnight, Viv is escorted by the conductor and security official to a back room in the offices of the Eurostar. In the room is a desk with a telephone and several chairs. The walls are bare.

Viv asks to use the telephone and is told to be seated. She waits half an hour before the security official returns to the room with someone she takes to be a policeman and another official affiliated with the railways company, who sits behind the desk and takes over the conversation. “Of course,” she says to Viv, “you know it’s a serious matter to breach the gate as you did in Paris and not have a ticket.”

“I didn’t have the money,” says Viv.

“Yes, well,” the official sighs, “that rather goes without saying, doesn’t it? But that’s not an excuse, is it?”