At the tail end of the 1960s Sy Safransky, who would go on to found The Sun in 1974, quit his job as a newspaperman in New York City. He later wrote that he “just walked out and kept walking. Better to be a pilgrim without a destination, I figured, than to cross the wrong threshold every day.” His wanderlust brought him to Europe. After landing in England in July 1969, he explored the European continent by rented van with his first wife, Judy, before ending up in North Africa in February 1970. What follows are excerpts from his journals during that time.—Ed.
Aboard the SS France, the Atlantic Ocean
July 1969
Riotous beginnings.
Being borne back fiercely to the Old.
Being born.
England
Summer
The cramped, stuffy hotel room; the night I cried; the guilt of disappointing our parents (Judy, how could we do this to them?); the ego-shattering act of stalling in traffic; the physical discomfort; the absence of things scorned yet dear; the warm Coca-Cola.
The old woman, I do not remember her face, who walked into the electrician’s shop in London and wanted to know the price of the television in the window, and if it was new, and if it came with a one-year guarantee—and who then watched the picture and ran her hand across the top.
The giant red machine in which we travel, eat, piss, fight, love: the chapel in which I seek deliverance, the hurtling killer that chops down butterflies, its headlights, like hollow eyes, splattered with blood and wings and insect souls. So I have come here to pray—and to kill.
The hooks in the walls from which to hang tired towels and dead underwear. Do not display me thus when I am old.
The questionnaire when we arrived. Told them we came in on a flying carpet.
Keeping a list of what we buy, but if I ask the man at customs, What duty on experience? What tariff on discoveries of the soul? he’ll think I’m un-American.
Almost every tourist I see tells me how he dislikes other tourists. I imagine I do too. Maybe we should all go home.
When I look at a man and cannot imagine him making love to a woman, he has lost something, and it is more than youth.
Norway
July
Angry streams tearing through the land; mighty snow-capped peaks dropping thousands of feet into rippling fjords; glaciers, orphaned by time; reckless waterfalls smashing themselves to death and winning immortality; naked children peeing in a river; lean, sunburned women bent over strawberry vines; dry farms clinging to steep cliffs; long, sunlit nights and warm, insistent dawns.
On the road to Geiranger we talked to Karl Plotte—red-haired, bespectacled, mustached, a couple of teeth missing up front, fat, dressed in old clothes and sneakers, sitting in a beaten-up Mercedes—who owns granite mines and is wealthy but is afraid to spend his money on new cars and clothes because his workers will object, so each year he goes to the Azores for six weeks, where he lives like a king and worries he’ll meet someone he knows.
Lightning now. We have closed the curtains against the sky and hear only the rain on the roof and the thunder. There’s a fly inside with us. I imagine this is his home too.
Now the curtains are open, and Judy says the storm is far away, so she is no longer afraid. But the rain still falls gently on Trondheimsfjord, where small waves lap quietly against the shore. In one of the tents a light is burning, and where the sun has set, the sky is still streaked with pink and gray. Over there, lightning. And there. And there. A neon-lit advertisement for Earth.
Finland
August
The men with faces like the sides of mountains. Their women, dried up riverbeds.
In Porvoo he stood behind me, in his hand a rubber doll, his mouth set hard, his face a shattered monument to all his yesterdays. He wanted two markkas. I wanted him to go away.
Everywhere, shrines to this tyrant’s truncheon, that robed charlatan’s holy design. We honor gods and generals, the bearers of our devastation and our mystery, while our brothers lie covered with weeds.
Denmark
September
In the National Museum there was a skeleton displayed in a glass case, her bones neatly arranged, a harpin just so, a ring on the fourth finger. Where is the priest who told her she would rest in peace?
The Netherlands
October
Clustered at the base of the National Monument in Amsterdam, a tribute to Holland’s war dead, are hundreds of the city’s youth. In the shadow of the giant granite structure, so like a phallus, they mill about as if waiting for the inevitable summons to go forth and die.
Amsterdam, a city of wide, busy boulevards and narrow, twisting side streets lined with cheese shops, taverns, tobacco stores, coffeehouses, wine-tasting parlors, and centuries-old churches; the bicycles, one for every two of the nearly one million people.
In the boisterous sailors’ quarter—with its red-light district, striptease nightclubs, pornographic bookshops, and tiny cafés—bridges with delicate railings span canals whose dark waters reflect the light of irregularly placed streetlamps. Behind the windows of distinctive four- and five-story houses sit the women, their breasts tumbling out of their shirts, their skirts in precise disarray, their painted faces catching the glow of the red bulbs outside. Streets, some no wider than three feet, run their tortured course through the district. They are alive with movement, yet not noisy. Cars inch past groups of boys shuffling from café to café. An old woman walks a dog. A man wearing an old-fashioned black suit sits in a deserted park, mumbling an alcoholic litany. A fashionable couple steps briskly toward a cellar restaurant, the sound of the woman’s heels on the cobblestone in sharp counterpoint to the music from one of the bars. A pimp cruises by in a big car, stops, and talks to a woman. In one apartment, a family gathers around a television. In another, three elderly women look at wedding pictures. There is a palpable sense of life. Though it may not be the kind we would commend to our children, neither is it the soulless symmetry and sterility we now seem willing to make their inheritance.
On the shore at Scheveningen: horses kicking up a salty spray as a yelping dog gives chase; men wading out of the chilly sea with a rich haul of shrimp; a child studying a beheaded rubber toy floating in a pool of water; elderly men with suits and ties and sand in their shoes, clustered around an open-air herring stand; a boy climbing a grass-covered dune to examine a German-built concrete bunker, its presence a reminder of other warm October afternoons.
John and Hannie’s small, warm apartment, up three treacherous flights of stairs. Their cat, their cooking, their affection.
Germany
October
The concentration camp at Dachau disappointed me. I came looking for some handle to the past with which I could pull myself into that horror. I found none. Not in the tourists, the wisecracking students, the visitors posing for snapshots. Not in the awkward monuments. I came to plunder the past and found, appropriately, only a bit of play history. What did I expect? A tape recording of the cries of the condemned? It was foolish to seek Dachau, for its meaning will elude me as long as I elude myself, refusing to recognize my own capacity for hate, denying that the executioner’s hood in the closet is mine, turning from the barbed wire strung around my soul.
The countryside is alive with color. From a distance the trees look like mounds of crayon shavings. The autumnal mosaic is, to be sure, a pageant of death, but in it there is beauty.
The Moselle and the Rhine wind past villages cluttered with medieval buildings, bell-tolling cathedrals, souvenir shops, TV antennas. Along the riverbanks, on mountains sometimes rising steeply from the shore, are hundreds of thousands of grapevines arranged in neat rows. Every morning families of pickers, huddled against the chill, are driven to the fields on a tractor along bumpy, cobblestone roads. The men—lean, weathered, joyless—and the women—aging, ruddy—work with long baskets strapped to their backs. Narrow barges ply their way up and down the rivers, flying their laundry in the morning like flags. Along the twisting highway that follows the waterways are the ruins of once-elegant mansions, often obscured by fog atop the mountains. Their hollow majesty dominates the valley, as if the ghosts of those who once inhabited them were loath to relinquish their hegemony.
Austria
November
Show palaces, frosted gardens: icing on the earthquake.
Italy
November
Vesuvius, coated with caked lava, now so like a flaccid penis, sticky with its own emission. What was it that excited you so?
In southern Italy we approached a fishing village on a footpath lined with gnarled olive trees, whose trunks split in middle age and now twist around one another derangedly. Small shipbuilding garages fill the alleys. The sound of hammers and the smell of wood fill the air. In the square perhaps twenty boats—some freshly painted, others dry and peeling, their warped intestines exposed to the sun—sit separated by piles of nets and ropes, over which ducks, chickens, and dogs wander aimlessly. A woman leans out a window and hangs a sheet from a sill, its whiteness stark against the drab colors of the town. Three small, barefoot girls run from the doorway of a crooked wooden building to help pull a small boat ashore, laughing as they’re thrown a line on which they tenderly yank. Two old men tug too, their faces, like the mountains shadowing the village, worn by the passage of time, their mouths tight with the knowledge of defeat.
Off the Amalfi Coast, reefs and boulders like the creation of a mad sculptor rear suddenly out of the sea—the avant-garde art of Nature, indifferent to criticism.
Picture the streets of the Lower East Side filled with shit. That’s New York. Picture the streets of the Lower East Side filled with shit and water. That’s Venice.
Along the Riviera in December—sunny, frozen, deserted—two old ladies wrapped in mink walk toward the shore, brightly colored beach chairs in their hands, forgetting why they came here or how to get away.
Spain
December
Semana Santa in Seville, the theater of the Inquisition: hoods, candles, trumpets, sickly thick incense, soldiers bearing tools of death, shoeless sinners bearing grief, wooden crosses high against a black and tortured sky.
Across from the bullring in Rhonda, in the bar with stone-topped tables and cracked tile floors littered with cigarette butts and toothpicks, its pictures of soccer teams on the wall, the men playing dice by the window. The bartender brings a cup of tea to the old man with the wide-brimmed hat and the jacket that does not match his pants. His hand shakes as he lifts it to his mouth. Behind him a little black-eyed girl dressed in pink sits with her mother. The voices grow louder toward four o’clock, and the dice rattle in the cup, and the bottle is brought down hard upon the bar, and the wind howls against the door.
And El Meson in Seville, with the dried hams and garlic hanging from the ceiling, the wine casks set against the wall, the bullfight posters, the waiters marking tables with a blunt piece of chalk, the fried squid and octopus and swordfish and sausage and peanuts and cheese.
Of the Alhambra: If only latter-day tyrants had such style, how much we could forgive.
Andalusia’s pregnant earth: almond and cherry blossoms, orange and lemon groves, fields of sugarcane, rows of twisted olive trees.
Portugal
January 1970
The fish auction on the beach in Sines, the giant eels lying in dead heaps on the sand, the skates and rays in neat rows, the fishermen with faces like the driftwood that floats ashore.
Morocco
February
After we’ve forgotten how warm the hot springs of Goulimine were, and the asking price for hash pipes, and Brahim’s graciousness in Tafraoute, and the chilly stream we waded through at the Cascades, and the acrobats and snake charmers and musicians and conmen at the Square of the Dead, and Azadin’s fat younger brother, and the mountains north of Ouarzazate studded with crystal and amethyst, and Paul the crazy mathematician, and the tall glasses of mint tea, and the veiled Arab women, and the shepherd boys in raggedly djellabas, there will still be the memory of those Agadir oranges like miniature suns, the two-cents-a-pound oranges that finally, unmistakably tasted like oranges, and for a while we believed again in God.
