She Comes and Goes

I left my friends on the train. We were arguing about whether the phrase 'proud for your country', was correct. I was travelling with a group of hyper-academic Jews, an outsider who had been fully absorbed into their querulous, hard-nosed world.

Mid argument, I left them. One step off the train from Vienna and suddenly I was in Salzburg. And I was alone.

The walk to the hostel was hot, and, with nobody around to distract me from the details, I began to notice the less attractive features of the city. The reversing lorries, the unfamiliar sweet packages skidding around the ground in oh so familiar ways.

A well of gloom grew in my chest that day. Why had I wanted to travel alone? My parents had made it sound so wonderful, so free. But all it meant to me was that nobody would be around to help if I messed up train booking, or to tell me which museums we were going to visit. I was obligated to Do. It frightened me.

Salzburg was my home for three days, and the first two were very lonely. Everything seemed tacky and uninteresting: Mozart Balls; violinists in the street with white powdered wigs. Old men smelling of beer saw me as an easy target. I was miserable. I missed arguing.

My train was due around two on the third day. It seemed that I had done everything that Salzburg had to offer, and had labelled it an empty city, because I felt empty in it.

I wandered into a graveyard. There was nobody else about, and I sat on a cool stone, regarding the monuments with as much reverence as I would later show in the Uffizi gallery in Florence. I felt calm, although still lonely. There was an urn that reminded me of my favourite Keats poem. I wouldn't have noticed it, if I hadn't been alone, would have gone out and talked about what was for dinner rather than paying attention to the city. I left the graveyard, chastened.

And I walked down to the river and looked up at the mountains. I had crossed the bridge many times, but I had crossed it with the ghosts of companionship, on my way to see something else. Now I was alone, and I could really look.

My journey was better, after that. I travelled for two weeks by myself, and it taught me how to see. It also taught me how to speak, how to meet. I had been sheltered by familiarity and friendship; two great things, of course. But the first time I travelled by myself, I learnt the hard way that there was so much hidden inside strangeness, and that sometimes you needed to stop arguing to find it.