Tour

She may have given me a mailing address, but if she did I didn't use it, or maybe-did, but with my constant address-changes, she would have gotten lost in the dead-letter-box. On the train I shared the compartment with seven-men on wood plank seating, separated by fold-up metal arm-rests. This was sit-em-up seating. The other side was four Italian men, the father and three sons in their twenties. They did not speak English. They were heavy-set men with rotund stomachs, and must have been joke-tellers, because they laughed a-lot.

The old man liked to tell stories, which were illustrated by the motion of the right forefinger poked in-and-out of the left forefinger and thumb - made an OK circle. This was all I understood. My seat was next to the sliding, upper half-glass door, and view to the passage-way and windows the other side with my back to the engine, and I believe I journeyed from Istanbul to Venice - backwards. It was easy for me to get up, slide the door open and closed, and get out or in, stretch-my-legs and stand in the tan linoleum aisle, the gallery-wall of windows, swaying a little un-steady, noisy, light frequent-flashing, click/click, clack/clack, click/clack alas clack/click, or at night the pale-yellow aisle and black window-peers reflections.

Epeck had told-me to bring food. I didn't know what to bring. Food in the markets in Istanbul, might just have-been different grades of iron ore. It was unrecognisable to me, as raw or cooked. Now if I would have had a stove I might have made enough sense to not-starve in a bone yard. I had been told that food was sold at the stations, but there again, I didn't know what I was looking at.

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