‘What have I told you!,’ admonishes W. as we board a train in Frankfurt. ‘This is public space. Pub-lic. That means outside your head.’ He points to my head. ‘Private’. And then out to the world ‘public.’ W. is a great upholder of this division. Abolish the public/ private divide and you abolish civilisation, W. always says. He looks around him contentedly. ‘See how quiet it is in Europe. It’s civilised,’ he says, ‘not like you.’
We are drinking. The European countryside rushes by. It’s so green! So fresh! And the buildings are so old. ‘Europe!’, I sigh. – ‘It’s a mystery to you, isn’t it?’ Even the names of the stations are intimidating, I tell W. ‘Think of everything that has happened here! All that history.’ W. takes it all in his strife, he says. Europe makes him gentler, better. It improves him. It’s the public spaces, he says. They’re so quiet in Germany. So calm.
W. says he’s more European than me. ‘You’re British,’ he says. ‘A British ape.’ We drink. ‘I can hold my drink’, says W., ‘I drink like a European, see?’ His glass is two thirds full. Mine’s empty. – ‘Can I have some of yours?’ – ‘Fuck off.’ I take out my notepad. ‘I’m going to write down our European thoughts.’ W. says he hasn’t had any yet. I tell him we should keep a record of our journey.
Later, and W. is in a contemplative mood. ‘Are you thinking of your Canadian boyhood?’, I ask him. W. is thinking of his many European trips. Back and forth across Europe, W.’s travelled. Not like me. ‘You haven’t been anywhere. Anyone can tell.’ W. is an experienced traveller. Take drinking, for example. He can pace himself, he says. Morning to night, he drinks like a European. Steadily. That’s the secret. ‘You should watch the Poles’, he says, ‘they’re experts.’ Poles – experts, I write down in my notebook.
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