I had the books my friends had given me and I also had Suzuki’s book of essays (now well-thumbed and annotated) and a copy of Anna Karenina that had been Annie’s. She had left it behind and – who knows why? – I had picked it up and brought it with me. Perhaps I thought its heightened mood of desolation, its high tragedy, appropriate for the long train-ride across Russia.

  By way of total contrast I brought Alice in Wonderland and Stevenson’s Fables.

  The train rattled and clattered for days across bleak featureless terrain, snow-covered fields. I slept, woke, slept again. At the different stations armed guards came aboard and checked everyone’s documentation, their manner gruff, suspicious. One or two of them peered at my passport, had a look at my books. (Tolstoy seemed to meet with their approval). Then, no doubt deciding I was a harmless academic, they let me be and moved on. But I found the experience unsettling.

  There is a passage I remember reading, though I am never certain if it was written by Churchill or Orwell. But it argues that we in so-called civilised societies sleep easy in our beds at night because some thug with a gun patrols a distant border to keep us safe.

  The image, like the argument, is a powerful one, and thinking back on those guards I feel the strength of it, the challenge.

  My abiding memory of that journey, however, is of reading Anna Karenina, in particular a chapter where Anna is travelling by train and reading an English novel! I huddled, cold, in my heavy overcoat, hunched over the book, and read the extraordinary description of Anna’s experience as she tries to enter into the life of the book she is reading.

  I thought of Tolstoy himself dying after a long train journey in winter at the age of 82. He quarrelled with his wife one last time and simply walked out into the night, ill clad in the freezing cold. He boarded the train with little thought for his destination, travelled for more than 24 hours growing ever weaker. Bronchitis developed into pneumonia and finally he collapsed, was taken from the train and died at a remote station after uttering a few final words of wisdom.

  I read on, losing myself in the book as Anna had tried to do in hers.

  At first she is distracted by the conversations around her, the other passengers, the noise of the train. Then she tries to engage with the book and is overwhelmed by the urge to identify with the characters, to live what they live. She asks herself, What am I? Myself or someone else? Then with a sudden realisation she awakens to the very life she is living. At a station she steps down onto the platform, exhilarated by the cold air and everything she sees.

  With pleasure she drew in deep breaths of the snowy, frosty air and, standing by the carriage, looked around the platform and the lit-up station…

  As I write this account on my lined yellow pages, I allow myself to imagine it being published, years into the future when I am long gone. I further imagine a reader carrying the book on a train journey, reading these pages about me on a train reading about Anna Karenina, on a train reading an English novel….

  Matryoshka. Russian dolls.

  As we pulled out of a station, I wiped a clear patch on the steamed-up window, saw myself reflected in the glass, the bright-lit carriage as if projected out there, and I leaned closer, looked further out, beyond the brightness to the snowy landscape, the dark night.

  Ma, dear Ma, was overwhelmed when I arrived, almost couldn’t speak for joy. She welcomed me like, well, like a long-lost son. She fed me (a lentil pie with bubble-and-squeak!) She ran a bath for me, then let me rest in my old bed, in my old room redolent of fustiness and damp, which I yet found a comfort. I slept deep and woke in the middle of the night, disoriented, thinking I was in Korea (dis-oriented!) but unable to understand why my room there had been superimposed on this one from another life. Or had there been some slippage in time? Had I been propelled back to this, awakening from a dream? I sat up, set my feet down on the cold linoleum, took my bearings. I switched on the bedside lamp, saw in its tired light the room bare and clear, the very objects resting in their own dream, there, things-in-themselves. The candlewick bedspread. The faded floral wallpaper. There.

  In the corner was the desk where I had worked as a boy, and above it a bookshelf stacked with a few books I had left behind. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Pickwick Papers. If I returned to Korea I should take them with me. (If I returned).

  I picked down Robinson Crusoe, opened it at random.

  How strange a Chequer Work of Providence is the Life of Man! and by what secret differing Springs are the Affections hurry’d about as differing Circumstances present!

  I got back under the covers and read till I fell back into sleep.

  At first Annie had moved in with her mother, just for the first few weeks till she found accommodation for herself and Lee. We had made arrangements – a bank account in her name – so she could get by. She had her degree and would be able to teach. In the meantime she had taken a job as a secretary in an insurance office, and Lee was attending school.

  Visiting them in their rented rooms, in Camden, was dispiriting. Annie was civil to me, we made small talk, but there was nothing between us, an emptiness. She had already moved on, consigned me to the past. Any hopes I might have held of reconciliation were dissipated. There was no possibility of her returning to me or to the life we had tried to make.

  The furniture was old and heavy, the curtains drab. But on a sideboard wee a few cut flowers in a glass vase, and on the wall I recognised the Russian ikon from the first rooms we had shared, so long ago. She had kept it all this time, carried it to Korea and back, still turned to it for protection and grace.

  I told her I had been reading her copy of Anna Karenina, said I would return it.

  Keep it, she said. It’s a wonderful book but I don’t think I’ll be reading it again. Karenina is a strong woman, so of course that means she is punished. She is not allowed a fulfilling life of her own. So….

  She gave a little dismissive wave of the hand, a gesture I knew so well.

  Lee came home from school, looked surprised to see me. He was the same bright, earnest young fellow. But he too had grown distant, looked on me as a stranger, someone he had once known. I asked about his school and he said it was fine, he liked it well enough.

  Do they teach you poetry? I asked.

  Some, he said. A little.

  Not Stevenson I suppose? Of speckled eggs the birdie sings.

  No, he said, uncomfortable, looking at me again across a great distance. He had put away childish things.

  Wordsworth?

  Westminster Bridge, he said. And the one about the daffodils.

  Well, I said. That’s something.

  Yes.

  Better than nothing.

  Actually, said Annie, Lee has homework to do.

  The boy looked grateful, relieved, as he picked up his schoolbag, went through to the other room.

  I think he’s going to be a scientist, said Annie, or an engineer.

  Where did I go wrong? I said.

  For a moment there was a flicker, almost a smile. I used to make her laugh.

  Annie.

  The moment passed and was gone. She closed herself to me once more. said we should discuss what she called our situation, come to an agreement about the best way to proceed.

  The whole business was unbearably sad.

  Earth hath not anything to show more fair? London felt grey and drab, unfamiliar. It was more than just my own sense of distance, alienation. There was something in the atmosphere, oppressive as the dank pall that seemed to hang in the air. The country had emerged from the Great War into years of depression, poverty, unemployment, presided over by a national government. Now, incredibly, there was the threat of another Great War with Germany, as if mankind had learned nothing and was hellbent on its own destruction.

  Dora laughed when she opened her door to me.

  Well, Reggie boy, she said. Here we are.

  She took my face in her hands, kissed me full on the lips.

  Everything else fell away.

  I would not circumscribe your love.

  Here we are.

  We fell into it naturally, took to walking out together, arm in arm. She worked in a bank but finished in the late afternoon, had weekends off. We strolled in the park I had known as a boy, The Flats, or we took the tube into town and walked by the Serpentine in Hyde Park, took tea in a Lyons Corner House.

  We went to the cinema – the pictures – usually a matinee at the Rialto in the High Street. (Many a time and oft in the Rialto!) We saw Robert Donat in the Thirty-Nine Steps, Ronald Colman in a Tale of Two Cities. We watched Richard Hannay escape from the train on the Forth Bridge, Sydney Carton climb the steps to the guillotine. A far far better thing. Dora cried and we held hands in the dark, came out blinking into unexpected daylight, the late afternoon sun.

  There was another call I had to make, to pay my respects. Mr Watson had retired from teaching, but he lived in the same house, in Ilford, close to the school.

  He answered my knock at the door, squinted at me, unsure.

  Yes?

  Reg, I said. Reg Blyth.

  He brought me into focus, subtracted the intervening years.

  My God, he said. Reg! Dear boy! Come in, come in!

  In his front room he cleared a space for me on an old sofa, shifted a pile of newspapers and magazines.

  Sit, he said, bustling. Please sit. I’ll put on the kettle.

  He made a pot of tea, then another. I sipped a cup out of politeness. We talked the afternoon away.

  Shoes and ships and sealing wax, he said.

  Cabbages and kings.

  He asked if I was home for good.

  Or ill, I said.

  I told him the whole story – or my side of it – of Annie and the boy, our life in Korea and how it had come to this.

  Loggerheads, I said. Stalemate.

  The eternal note of sadness, he said.

  I still read Arnold, I said, recognising the quote.

  I’m glad, he said. He is somewhat out of fashion these days.

  I laughed. I remember an exam question from my student days. Dover Beach is a plangent threnody. Discuss.

  And did you?

  At great length!

  Now, he said, speaking of books that are very much in fashion, have you seen these? This is the latest publishing venture from Penguin. Novels and other works in soft covers, and selling for sixpence each. Can you imagine? A tanner a book! I bought all ten for five bob.

  He passed the pile of books to me and I leafed through them.

  Agatha Christie, I said. I didn’t know you read crime fiction.

  Guilty as charged, he said. It’s a pleasant diversion, and somehow comforting.

  The mystery is solved, I said. All’s right with the world.

  Exactly. Now this is something else entirely.

  He picked out one of the other books, handed it to me. Ernest Hemingway. A Farewell to Arms.

  A story of love and war, he said. A tragedy.

  How could it be otherwise? I said. Love and war.

  It’s well written, he said. The prose is lean and spare.

  He insisted I keep the book as a gift.

  Are you sure?

  No expense spared, he said. A whole tanner!

  I shall read it, I said, and let you know what I think.

  Sadly, he said, a farewell to arms was unlikely in these times. Pacifism was in danger of becoming a dirty word once again. He said for a time after the War there had been signs of hope. Swords into ploughshares. Now? Germany had withdrawn from the League of Nations and was once more embracing militarism. Britain was ready to commit, albeit reluctantly, to re-arming on a grand scale.

  So soon.

  War and the pity of war.

  Collective madness.

  All we can do is hold to the light, dear boy. Hold to the light.

  I told him of my interest in Zen, that it was not something exotic, or esoteric.

  How can I put it? I said.

  It feels very like the thing, he said.

  Exactly!

  So you’ll go back there, he said, out East?

  I think so.

  I think so too, he said. It’s where your work is.

  His simple words had a curious effect on me. I felt a kind of awakening, or recognition, a kindling of that sense of destiny I have mentioned before in these pages.

  I found myself one day in Great Russell Street, beside the British Museum. I popped into Collet’s Chinese Bookshop and was delighted to find a recently-published volume by Arthur Waley, his translation of the Tao Te Ching which he called The Way and its Power.

  I picked it up and turned the pages.

  The Way that can be told is not the Unvarying Way;

  The names that can be named are not unvarying names.

  It was from the Nameless that Heaven and Earth sprang…

  I bought the book, lost myself in it on the train, rattling out to Leytonstone on the Central Line.

  Only he that rids himself forever of desire can see the Secret Essences.

  He that has never rid himself of desire can see only the Outcomes….

  I knew I would have to go back to Korea, at least in the short term, to deal with what I had left behind – my commitment to Akio and to teaching, the house in Seoul and everything in it, years of accumulated books and papers, my writings. My work.

  But in behind that, beyond it, was a sense of something more, something deeper I had to pursue, my own Journey to the East

  And yet there was the problem of this life here in London. Annie and Lee, Dora and Ma. So much unresolved.

  For Annie there was no going back, not in any sense, not to Korea, not to me.

  Spring had given way to summer, muggy and enervating, the heat unforgiving. Annie wanted clarity, finality. She asked if we could meet one more time to discuss what we should do. She suggested meeting in Hyde Park so we could walk as we talked, and I agreed.

  I saw her as I approached and at first had the strange sensation of not recognising her. She wore a summer dress and a light jacket, her hair loose about her shoulders. A stranger. Then a familiar movement, a turn of the head, brought her into focus, and I saw her, Annie, my wife. I waved and saw her look up and recognise me in the same way, and she caught my eye and waved back, and for a moment I was quite undone. But it passed, a faint glimmer then gone.

  We walked round the Serpentine. (I didn’t mention that I had recently walked there with Dora, but I myself was conscious of how different that had felt). We walked, past children feeding the ducks, past two girls on horseback, past a young man sculling across the water, everyone absorbed in their own dream.

  Annie said Lee was fine. She asked after my mother, and I said she was in good health. We stopped by the statue of Peter Pan and she said she had spoken to a lawyer.

  She had told him we were separated, and living in different countries. He had asked if there was any possibility of reconciliation now that I was here. She’d said, No, absolutely not. It was over. She wanted an ending, a divorce.

  Although we were undeniably estranged, the word still stung. It cut, abrupt – cold legalese.

  Divorce.

  I found myself, ludicrously, inappropriately, recalling the ancient jokes I had read to her in Korea, the old folk tales.

  As you well know…

  Unthinking, I asked if she remembered them too, and she did.

  How could I forget? she said. The three foolish brides, each one more stupid than the one before.

  And I was divorced.

  There are cultures still, I said, where it’s just a matter of saying three times, I divorce thee…

  If you’re a man, she said. And even here it’s more difficult for a woman. The lawyer talked about suing, and going to court. He talked about burden of proof. He talked about getting a decree nisi and then a decree absolute.

  Again it was the coldness of the language, the harsh abstraction. It drained all colour from the day.

  She was looking across at some children playing around the statue, one small boy, intrepid, climbing up on the base.

  But the lawyer did say there was hope, she continued. He said the law is to be changed, this year, maybe next. The new law will say desertion for more than two years is good cause. Sufficient grounds.

  So…

  So if you do go back to Korea, and stay there, and don’t contest it, that should be enough.

  Simple as that.

  Again there was that sense of destiny, necessity. I had to go to Korea. That much was certain (as much as anything was). But for how long? Ma was here, and though she was still robust, that could change. If she grew frail as she aged, would I have to come back to look after her? Then there was Dora.

  It’s a koan, I said.

  Annie rounded on me, her voice no longer matter-of-fact but hard, angry.

  A koan? she said. One of your stupid zen riddles? Next you’ll be telling me there’s a story or a parable. Well there isn’t. This is the story. This. Us.

  The children’s voices carried, clear. Another young man rowed past, his boat cleaving the water, trailing light, bright droplets dripping from the oars.

  This. Us.

  I’m sorry, Annie, I said.

  That doesn’t help, she said.

  Years later – decades – I found myself in that film club in the little flea-pit cinema in Shinjuku, watching Brief Encounter. And for all its sentimentality, the cut glass accents, the overblown Rachmaninoff soundtrack, I found myself moved by it. The scenes where the couple go to the cinema, walk in a London park, took me back to that year. Between the Wars. Annie and I irrevocably estranged. Dora and I, briefly, happy in each other.

  I asked Dora if she would consider coming back with me to Korea.