Hitchhiking to the Black Sea — Part 2
They were now crossing Pazardzhik Province and had left the forested area near Gorno Varshilo. The pick-up truck cruised smoothly along the Trakia motorway which runs almost straight eastwards across the Upper Thrakian Plain, passing the town of Pazardzhik at a distance, its urban silhouette barely discernible.
This time, it was him who broke the silence that had lasted for another couple of minutes. “Why do you want to go to Burgas?” he asked, briefly taking his eyes off the road to look at her from the side.
She didn’t look at him, but gazed straight ahead towards the point where the motorway met the horizon, beyond which there were still about 300 km to go to reach the coast. “I really hope I’ll be able to go to the seaside.” She paused before adding another sentence, as if her fervent wish required an explanation: “As you might imagine, some things are easier for me when I’m afloat in salt water.” He let the sentence sink in, nodded slowly and, after a few moments, cast another sidelong glance at her.
She caught his questioning glance as she was looking at him for the first time in an hour’s drive. The swaying of the little skull dangling from the rear-view mirror was noticeable less vivid than ten or twenty minutes ago, now being caused by fewer steering movements and with less deflection, and she let her gaze wander away from it eventually. It was apparent that she sensed her explanatory remark had puzzled him rather than clarifying why precisely she wanted to go to the seaside. She turned slowly towards him. It was a sideways twist of her entire upper body, not just a movement of her head, and she might even have leaned a few inches towards him. He suddenly felt her presence more keenly than he had during the first hour of their journey, when it had almost seemed as if she hadn’t really been there at all. With a piercing gaze she asked a question in which he detected a certain bitterness, and perhaps also a challenge directed at him: “For example, have you ever tried playing water polo without moving your legs?”
“Hmm,” he nodded. “I see.” He wondered whether she had been paralysed from the waist down since birth, or whether her disability might have developed later in life. He also wondered what unfortunate circumstance could cause a young person — he estimated her to be in her early twenties; she could have been his daughter — to become paraplegic.
His next thought was that, despite his genuine interest, he should not ask any questions on the subject, as he feared she might find it intrusive. He looked towards her once more and gave her a gentle smile. Then he turned his attention back to the road. He felt a little unsure as to which topics he could bring up in conversation and which he would be better off avoiding. Nevertheless, he was relieved that his passenger had expressed her bitter feelings regarding her impairment. He spent a little while thinking about the responsibilities that fall on those without disabilities when it comes to mindful, considerate communication. It’s not easy to get everything right, he thought. Not asking about it could also mean showing no interest in what matters to her in life.
As she remained silent, he wanted to try and ask her an open-ended question designed to elicit positive thoughts. He hoped this would give her the opportunity to talk about things she found pleasant. He thought about it for a moment until a question came to mind that he thought was pretty good. Before speaking it aloud, he wanted to test the question by answering it silently to himself. His first take would be: to get a massage. Or: to kiss a loved one deeply. He was a little startled by his associations and feared that his thoughts — which he wasn’t even going to voice — might subliminally come across to her in a way that was misleading. Yet he convinced himself that his spontaneous answer to the question did not relate to the young person sitting besides him, whom he had only known for an hour. Or had his subconscious in fact linked these associations to the young woman next to him? He began to feel increasingly uncertain about how to pursue his honest desire not to make his passenger feel uneasy, but rather to ensure she felt comfortable, relaxed and safe. Finally, he encouraged himself with the maxim ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ and cleared his throat to pose the question that he had come up with:
“Can you think of anything that would do you good?” Having asked this question which, in his view, was truly open-ended as can be, he turned his head to see what reaction it might provoke in her. She did not answer, but resumed to stare at the dangling skull for another fifteen seconds that felt like half an eternity to him. Of course, he could not keep looking over at his passenger for that long — otherwise the car would have crashed into one of the guardrails — but had to turn his eyes back to the road. Eventually she asked a question in return, without taking her glance off that morbid good luck charm. “What do you mean, something you could do for me? Right now?”
“Er, no — not necessarily something I could do. Just anything that might be pleasant for you and makes you feel good, whatever that may be.” He noticed that he was trying to sound innocent, even though there was really no reason for him to feel guilty in the first place. Why on earth is there this double entendre of sexual innuendo when a guy asks a young woman what might do her good, he wondered. In his case, such insinuations were entirely unintentional here. He now began to curse himself for the stupid idea of asking that question.
His question did indeed thoughtlessly ignore what she had already mentioned. This occurred to him when she stopped staring at the dangling skull, instead looked down to where his right hand rested on his thigh, reaching for the gear lever from time to time, and replied, “As I’ve said before: floating in salt water does do me good.” Again she paused before continuing. “But that’s not the reason I’m travelling to the coast.” She turned her head to look out the passenger-side window, where the railroad tracks were coming into view again. She watched the tracks coming nearer and cutting deeper into the terrain as the pick-up truck was moving along in the right lane of the motorway. Then they crossed the railroad tracks at an acute angle via an overpass. She continued to look out her window, even though on this side there wasn’t much to see now besides plain fields. There was another long pause, and he waited patiently to hear what she would say next. When he glanced in the rear-view mirror as he passed a tractor-trailer and moved back into the right lane, his eyes fell on the little skull dangling there; he kept his gaze fixed on it for a few seconds until it was due time to look at the road ahead.
“You know,“ she began her sentence, “life is hard enough as it is when you’re lacking motor and sensory function of your lower extremities.” As if to emphasize her words, she clapped both hands on her thighs. “But I can handle it. I’ve had plenty of time to get used to it. And I was lucky to have wonderful people around me who supported me.” She took another long look out the passenger-side window, as if the words for expressing her next thought were hanging somewhere up there in the sky above the fields, waiting for her to gather them up and put them together into a sentence. “It may sound ungrateful in my case, but the hardest part is that people who support their child as much as they possibly can end up focusing their whole lives on that. You can’t imagine what it takes to break free from a helicopter parent.” After a pause, she added, in an understanding, forgiving tone: “I know that it wasn’t her wish or her destiny to become such a helicopter mum. It really isn’t easy to avoid it when you’re dealing with a disability like mine.” She looked at him now, and he turned his gaze away from the road to give her a quiet nod. This prompted her to add another remark that summed up her analysis and description of the situation: “The prospect of leaving her behind with empty-nest syndrome is particularly tricky. I had no other way to get out of that situation than to take a bold step.” There was another pause, and she was now gazing straight ahead through the windscreen, her eyes fixed on the distant point where the coast must lie beyond the horizon. “That’s probably the answer to your question about what would do me good.”
“Hmm,” he nodded once more. “I see.” One hand at the wheel and pushing off from the seat cushion with his other hand, he turned in his seat to look out the rear window, checking if the motorized wheelchair on the flatbed of the pick-up truck was still safely fastened. It was gently swaying with the truck’s movements, and the loose end of one of the heavy-duty straps fluttered in the wind.