And I woke well, too, in time to see the dawn come up blood red. The country was hillier now and more rocky. Mulga, salt, and blue bush, according to my strip map. Kangaroo country, also, I suddenly realized. I hadn’t noticed them at first, camouflaged against the sandy backdrop, but now there they were, dozens and dozens of them, standing stock still so that the train shouldn’t spot them. Immobilized by fear, with their abbreviated front feet held out under their chins, like so many giant bunnies.

The old but the by no means infirm had also come up well this morning. After a shaky start around shower time – I could hear them groaning and complaining in the corridors – they were blooming by breakfast. They teased the stewards. They hid the condiments from one another. They fished out teabags from teapots with long red fingernails whose calcium sufficiency a teenager would have envied. And they consulted maps. They were on the move all right; and getting stronger with every kilometre.

12 Ich Hatt’ Einst Ein Schön’ Vaterland

Twelve
 
Ich Hatt’ Einst Ein Schön’ Vaterland

Staying in our hotel in Adelaide were a number of men with grey complexions and startled expressions, carrying battered suitcases or lunchboxes, and wearing Ukranian baseball hats and the sorts of suits worn by witnesses at the Nuremberg Trials. Had I not already gone so badly wrong with the English brass band that turned out to be our stewards I would have picked these for the USSR State Symphony Orchestra. Which was of course what they were.

They had a concert that very night at the Festival Theatre – Svetlanov conducting, Timofeeva on the piano. A real piano, presumably; not the portable Japanese Rhythm-Mate that emptied the Piano Bar of the Trans-Australian. I felt sorry for them; not for being in Adelaide, but for being Russians. Russians break my heart. They are the last people left on the face of the earth who think there is some merit in being serious. I travelled up and down in the hotel lifts with them at every opportunity, just so that they might see a friendly and encouraging face. Whenever any one of them left the hotel he had to write his name and intended itinerary on a sheet of foolscap paper pinned to a column near the reception desk. This didn’t strike me as too high a price to pay for living in a society free of disc jockeys. It didn’t strike me as particularly sinister either. Clearly an orchestra has to be kept together; and you couldn’t be absolutely certain that an oboeist from Grozny wouldn’t take it into his head to go missing in Adelaide. This was a literary city; there would be girls out there who would stop at nothing to get a conversation about Lermontov going.