by C. D. Rose
Little surprise Lev didn’t realise the town had moved; he hardly remembered leaving. Then, twenty years ago, he had nothing in mind other than the journey ahead and had deliberately ignored what lay behind. Now, though, he remembered the square perfectly, with its oak tree and its fountain, places they’d played as children, then where they sat and schemed to escape as young lovers. As he wandered in search of the exact spot, he found other places he remembered: the school, the clump of trees where he’d first kissed his first love, the close behind the church where he’d asked her to marry him. He feared recognition, but the few people he saw took no notice of him, nor he of them. He wondered how much he had changed in twenty years. Some of the buildings seemed newer now than when he had left. At the bottom of the hill stood a lake that he didn’t remember, thinking of it only that the millpond had perhaps grown. He had swum in it, he remembered, his feet touching the bottom.
The whole village, strangely, looked bigger now.
Lila hoped for clues carved in trees and on benches, but found nothing. She didn’t even know her father’s first name. She hoped to talk to men in the café and women in the shops but didn’t dare enter the dark café, and the shop girls looked at her picture of the blind man with the accordion as if it were nothing but a blank sheet of paper. Try the cemetery, they said. Lila hoped not to find her family name on a headstone. She met a man who smiled and told her he had begun to dream again, because how else could he be seeing a girl he’d known fifty years ago, unchanged?
Leon wasn’t surprised to find his map made little sense. The lines on the paper only approximated the lines made by the streets. The small pond was a significant lake, far below. A fat tree and a fountain stood in the main square, though the tree was clearly dying and the fountain didn’t work. He would never find the man he’d been sent to find, he thought. This village, with its walls bereft of the scratches and marks and signs that time makes, its silence as deep as the lake below, and its lost populace shuffling around in search of yesterday, was no place the man who had stolen his father’s fortune would come to hide. There were no riches here.
Alma sat in the cemetery and listened. On quiet days—and all the days were quiet now—she could hear voices, and she wondered if she were hearing the dreams Doctor Albert no longer dreamt. Some days, when the breeze drew up from the valley below, she could hear the church bells ringing under the water, even though the bells hung in the church behind her now and were always silent. She wondered what had happened to the ghosts. Had they moved with the village, or got lost on the way, or were they still there, wandering around under the water?
As Lev searched, he remembered things he’d never noticed before: the angle of the climbing sun, the distant sound of water, the colour of the railings around the school, the smell of milk. He sat on the low wall behind the mill and remembered that moment when their shadows had stretched out together, becoming one in the distance. He stayed there until it grew dark, watching his single shadow lengthen and lose distinction until it vanished entirely, swallowed by the surrounding dark. And then he started to dig. This, he was sure, this was the place. This was the last place he’d seen her, and the place where he’d buried what he kept of her memory, the thing he’d come back to find.
In the cemetery, Lila saw freshly tilled earth and did not dare read names inscribed on wooden crosses. She showed her picture to an old woman there, but thought the woman blind, as she seemed to see nothing and be very lost. May I guide you home? Lila asked, and the old woman smiled and nodded, and took her arm.
Leon thought the problem with his map was one of scale: the streets here weren’t as narrow as the lines on his paper. There was light here, and none of the heavily crosshatched darkness. Perhaps his father had never visited this place, his thieving uncle much less. He sat on the bench in the square and began to realise that he had been sent on a wild errand.
Alma thought for a moment that the kind young woman in the cemetery was a ghost, then realised, as she took her warm and fleshly arm, that she wasn’t, and she realised then that there were no ghosts, that the ghosts hadn’t come with them to the new village.
Leon wondered if he had got the wrong place altogether, and if his uncle had made off with the family fortune in the shape of a gold ring and set up in another village, the shadow-self of this one, somewhere on the other side of the valley. He was in the wrong place, it was certain, but it was better than the place he had been, the place to which he couldn’t return empty-handed anyhow. It was quiet here, and sunny. There were no ghosts here, he thought, and he liked that. A man could live in this place, he thought, even without the benefit of stolen riches. Yes, he thought, I’ll stay here.
As she walked the old woman through the streets, Lila looked out for the kind of men who might have helped beggars, but she saw none, and wondered if her father had not been the rich man giving money, but the other man in the picture. Her journey to find him would be long yet, she thought, and difficult. But was she never to succeed, would that be so bad?
Lev filled in the hole after having spent a fruitless hour sifting through the dry dirt to find what he had buried twenty years earlier. He thought about going to the cemetery to see if her name were there, but was scared to go at night. He dug under the railings where he’d first met her, then by the fountain where they’d played, by the trees where they’d kissed and the place where he had proposed, but found nothing.
As the sun came up, he left the village and walked down to the edge of the lake. Jug handles, bottle tops, and chair legs poked out of its muddy bank, and he wondered where they had all come from. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands to take away his tiredness and smelled perfume. A plant he had brushed against, perhaps, or even the calm green lake water, but no, this was a human smell, even though he had shaken no one’s hand, touched no one, not even spoken to anyone. The smell brought back a memory, nothing he could visualise or even put into words, but with a disturbing clarity. This was what he had been looking for: not an object, but the memory itself.
He turned to leave and a glint in the mud caught his eye. He bent down, then picked up and polished a gold ring, the very one he had offered to her, the one he had buried when she had refused, swearing to come back for it only when he was in love again. Only when he remembered was he free to forget.
As Alma let the young woman guide her, she could smell smoke, and it made her think of baking bread. She couldn’t remember the last time it had rained, and in times of drought, she knew, fire blazed on the hills around them. Once by water, once by fire, she thought, but it mattered little. She was nearly home now.
AN INCIDENT ON THE TRAIN TO LVOV
A POSTER ON the wall beside the ticket office promised glorious holidays in N—. The first gentleman said he had never been to N—, but that the poster had quite enticed him; the second man said that he had been to N— and that it was really quite an awful place. The first woman said she had never heard of N—, while the second woman said only that she knew the work of the artist who had done the picture of the famous funicular railway in N— and had always found his work to be rather second rate.
“Do you take an interest in art, Miss?” asked the first man to the second woman, and the second woman replied that she did, but only of the modern kind.
When the train (a huge black locomotive, billowing steam and spitting coals, an infernal spark from which burned a hole clean through the second gentleman’s Gladstone bag) arrived, the four found themselves seated in the same compartment.
“I wondered, Sir,” said the first man to the second, “on seeing your bag, if you were in the same profession as I?” The second man replied merely that he doubted it, as he was not in much of a profession at all.
“The bag was given to me some time ago,” he said. “I find it useful for travelling, and little more.” This was why the hole so recently burned into it, he explained, left him reasonably untroubled. “It is no gr
eat mischief.”
The first woman, unused to the professional significance of travelling bags, asked the first man what his profession was.
“I am a physician, Ma’am, on my way to visit a complex patient.” The man awaited further inquiries as to the specific nature of his patient’s complexity, but when none came, he decided to continue the conversation. “And you, Ma’am, may I ask where you are bound?”
“I am visiting my brother,” she said. “He is a writer, and he is dangerously ill.”
The second woman suggested that the two people—the physician’s complex patient and the first woman’s ailing brother—might be one and the same person, but the Doctor and the woman both laughed at the suggestion without probing it further, most probably for fear that it should turn out to be true.
The two women could have been sisters. They shared the same nose, the tip of which upturned like the eastern end of Lake Balaton. In other ways, however, they differed: the first had hair that may once have been red, while the second (younger) woman had hair the colour of a particularly lustrous horse chestnut. She did not say why she was travelling.
The two men could not have been brothers. As unlike each other in temperament as in looks, the Doctor—who sported an unfashionable top hat that caused his head to overheat—was phlegmatic, cordial, convivial, and slightly conceited, while the younger man wore a scowl and a black suit grown shiny from overuse and undercleaning.
(There was, in truth, a fifth person in the compartment, but that was myself, and I pretended to sleep for much of what followed, so I shall make no further mention of him.)
The train hauled out of the station and the conductor passed along the corridor, apparently in some haste, as he did not ask to see tickets, nor even turn to face the passengers in the compartment. Everyone, however, noted his smart, well-pressed uniform, the bright green band around his cap, and the thick gleaming hair protruding from it.
“How young the Conductor is,” remarked the first woman, and all the others concurred.
The Doctor produced a pack of cards.
“The journey is long,” he said. “Shall we pass the time with a game?”
“I once heard a story,” began the second man, “about a group of people on a train who played a game of cards. The game went on for days after the train became blocked in a huge snowdrift.”
“Let us hope the same thing does not happen to us!” said the older woman.
“The game of cards, or the snowdrift?” responded the younger. It was agreed that the second option was improbable. It was late spring by now; Easter had passed, and with it even the remote possibility of snow.
“How did the game end?” asked the Doctor.
“The train was set upon by a pack of bandits.”
“Let us hope the same thing does not happen to us!” said the older woman.
“That is unlikely,” said the man. “This took place in Russia.”
It was agreed that Russia was a place filled with bandits and outlaws, and that their own journey would be safe.
The Doctor discreetly replaced the pack of cards in his breast pocket, consoling himself that there would certainly be a game waiting for him once he reached his destination.
The younger woman produced a small magazine from her travelling bag and began to read. The other occupants of the compartment all politely strained their necks in order to discern the title of the magazine, and—perhaps—deduce something more about the young woman from her choice of reading matter. The only thing they could see was the title of the publication, which was called L’accordéoniste aveugle.
“May I ask,” asked the Doctor, “what you are reading?’
“A review of French poetry,” replied the young woman.
“Of the modern kind?” asked the Doctor.
“Oh yes,” said the woman. “Terribly modern, I’m afraid.”
All fell into silence for a considerable time.
The train travelled. The Doctor hummed a tune. The younger man gazed out of the window. The younger woman’s eyes went in and out of focus, the older woman watched her. The train travelled through the endless unspooling countryside. The Doctor hummed his tune more loudly before breaking into speech.
“Yes,” he said. “A train compartment really is the most perfect place for the telling of stories.” None of the other passengers disagreed or agreed with him. “I was once on a train,” he continued, oblivious to his travelling companions’ lack of assent or dissent, “and I overheard a story being told. I tried to listen in, but realised that the teller of the tale wasn’t telling the truth, and moreover, the listener was hearing something else entirely.”
The younger woman had, at this point, her curiosity piqued.
“What was this story?” she asked.
“It’s rather difficult to say,” replied the Doctor. “One person was speaking Russian, the other German. Neither of those are languages I know.”
They all fell into silence again, and the older woman fell asleep. Once asleep, she began to dream, and this is what she dreamt: She was in her childhood home, moving slowly through its long corridors. The house was completely empty, and felt strangely vacant to her. She went into the living room and stood before the fireplace. All the furniture had been removed, and a large mirror hung on the wall, reflecting nothing at all. (Later, when she recalled the dream, she would wonder if it were not a mirror, but perhaps a painting that somehow managed to depict a total absence.) No fire burned, but she looked at the large clock on the mantelpiece whose hands sat at a quarter to twelve (or perhaps, she recalled later, nine o’clock). Then a train came roaring out of the fireplace.
The others agreed that it was a most curious dream when the woman, on waking, told them where she had been.
“One of the earliest memories I have,” said the younger woman, “is very like a dream, and indeed has become so confused in my mind over the years that I am now not at all sure that it wasn’t, in fact, a dream.” She continued, “I had a sister, once. Strange as it may seem, I never knew if we were sisters or twins—we were so close in age, and our mother made us wear dresses that were identical but for their slightly different colours. We lived very close to a large forest, and when it grew dark we would sometimes go out exploring. One night, we found a station in the forest. It had only three tracks and a small white ticket office, and although there were no other people there, two locomotives were steaming and ready to leave. We chose one, and got on. We travelled together for many years, across many places, until one day, when we were twenty, my sister got off the train and never came back. I have been looking for her ever since.”
At this point the train ground to a halt in one of those very small country stations, as if to remind them that they were not dreaming. There was some commotion farther down the train, a man not knowing if it was his stop or not, but the train halted for a few minutes only and they were soon on their way again, the train heaving itself back into its heavy, ceaseless motion.
“I once heard a similar story,” said the Doctor. “A man got off a train and stayed forever. His head was turned, you see, by a young woman he saw on the platform. He jumped out and tried to follow her, but then, I believe, lost her in the crowd. The train left without him, but it seemed to have been of little consequence, for I hear he simply decided to stay in the town, and spent the rest of his life there.”
“That is quite a coincidence,” said the younger man, “as very much the same thing happened to me. No woman turned my head, though, as I was travelling with my companion, with whom I was very happy. I cannot now remember quite why I disembarked at a lonely station—I was hungry, perhaps, or in search of something to read, and there was neither dining car nor library on board. As I say, I cannot remember; it matters little. I got off, and for a moment, I remember the entire world stopping. I wondered how it would be to simply stay there, to never move again, t
o become a different person, and start a new life in this remote place of which I knew nothing, and where no one knew me. When I came out of the reverie, I found the train had departed. The next train didn’t arrive until a day later, but a porter told me he could take me as far as the next station in his trap. If the roads were good and the weather stayed clement, he said, we may be able to get there before the train arrived. The roads were good and the weather clement, and we arrived at the station to see the train that I had so recently vacated just heaving into view. I leapt aboard as soon as I could and ran along the corridor to find my companion. When I reached the compartment where we had been sitting, however, I found it vacant. She had gone. I asked the conductor, the other passengers, but no one had seen her. I have travelled looking for her ever since. I am doing so at this very moment.”
“For me,” said the older woman, “it is different. I always have the feeling that someone is following me.”
At this point the train passed over a deep ravine, the sound of the engine momentarily falling away beneath them as steeply and quickly as the land. The Doctor told everyone that, fifteen years previously, a train had derailed while crossing this bridge, and all the passengers had died, plunging into the river far below.
“The most terrible thing,” he continued, “was that among them was a party of schoolchildren, on their way to visit the waterfalls.” Travelling by train, they all agreed, could sometimes be a most dangerous method of transportation.
To lighten the mood, they all spoke of how magnificent it would be when they arrived. The station, they told each other, was known to be a miracle worked by artists, architects, and engineers, a cathedral to house the railway gods, a frozen dance of delicate glass and iron tracery, a wonder for the modern world.