by Paula Guran
The hard-packed snow led us forward with unreal lightness between the high pine pillars. Time passed. Now and then I peeked at my watch, ticking deeper and deeper into the night. Rupert was faster than I, he positively flew in front of me, but luckily he stopped at times to wait for his clumsier fellow skier.
I quickly lost my sense of direction. That was fine: I didn’t actually want to think about where we were going—or why. On the surface, I stuck to the explanation that I was taking care of Rupert, at last thoroughly showing him his train fantasies were nothing but misguided imagination. I dared not be honest with myself, admit that I was acting purely by intuition. After all, intuition is nothing but a kind of psychological coin flipped in the air. And to manage important business by intuition is just about as sensible as choosing the right road by flipping a coin (as those irrational ducks did in one of Rupert’s favorite stories). But that night I—for a moment—stepped outside reason, maybe just to see at least a glimpse of what was there. For this one and only time I felt an urgent intuitive need to follow my son on his irrational trip to the core of fantasy.
We partly circled and partly crossed over the massive cliffs of Sheep Rock, where one of the longest railway tunnels of the country ran deep in the bowels of the rock. Somehow we also managed to clear the big abandoned quarry, although we had to carry our skis, to climb over the icy boulders and to watch out for the clefts hidden in the stones’ shadows.
Finally we arrived at a place I had never been before, even though I was a native to the region, and the reason was obvious: there were no paths to reach it. Although I supposed the nearest houses— the whole village, actually—were only about ten kilometers away, the terrain was extremely difficult. The area was well protected from berry pickers, hunters, and other accidental hikers: bog, a dense fir thicket, unfriendly rocks, fallen moldering trees, and a half-collapsed rusty barbed-wire fence that someone for some strange reason had once set up and then forgotten.
The upper branches of the ancient trees caught the quivering moonlight before it had time to touch the snow-covered ground, and we waded in deep darkness. Nature was really using all possible tricks to make us turn aside from our way. And I would have turned, many, many times, if Rupert’s pale figure hadn’t been skiing in front of me, so single-minded and determined; he knew the way even through the most inaccessible looking thickets. At times he seemed like a mythological spirit who’d been sent to lead me through the Underworld’s hollow hills, and I had to remind myself that, in reality, he was only the brain-damaged former lawyer I knew he was.
We skied down a steep but short hill that brought us out from the forest to the railway. We pushed forward along the moonlit railway bank a couple of kilometers. Then we crossed the rails.
“We have to go through here,” Rupert shouted to me over his shoulder and sped downhill with muffler flapping, into the forest that continued on the other side of the track, even more forbidding and intractable.
I looked at my watch: 03:21. We’d been skiing a couple of hours.
“The blind track is probably somewhere close by, but it’s impossible to find,” Rupert’s voice continued, more subdued. “But once we go through here, we’ll get straight to where the hidden blind track leads.”
I followed the Burberry-clad and hatted figure into the dark catacombs of the trees.
The dry and extremely dense fir-thicket made progress very awkward. When I looked up I could see no sky at all, I only saw the grayish lattice of dead branches that blocked the moonlight somewhere above the standing trees. The mummified branches entangled themselves in my woolly coat. They wrenched my muffler loose. They scratched my face and reached at my eyes with their sharp thorns. Over and over again I tore myself away from their grip only to be rewarded with snow and ice and bits of twigs falling on my neck. Then, covering my face, I would again follow the unseen swishing skis and the sound of breaking twigs until the next obstacle stopped my travel.
I was afraid Rupert wouldn’t bother to wait for me but would disappear and leave me wandering alone in that shamble of trees and snow. I couldn’t anticipate the functioning of my son’s mind at all. In a way he still was, to me, my own dear little son—whose logic had never seemed to me any more understandable than Chinese opera anyway—and at times I still saw him as my successful adult lawyer son who was temporarily resting at my house. But, I also knew that after the skull fracture a new side had emerged in him, a strange combination of the other two—the anachronistic Rupert, a secretive and often melancholic stranger whose doings and not-doings I was completely unable to predict or control.
We trudged in the rustling snarl of dead standing trees for at least two or three hours, and for about ten kilometers. At least it felt like ten kilometers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it had either been shorter, perhaps only two hundred meters, or even far longer.
Now and then Rupert flashed ahead of me, a shadow in the shadows. After I didn’t see him for some time I’d think I’d lost him, but when, for the thousandth time, I pushed myself through the firs that had died in each other’s arms, I would see him.
The trees were thinning out a bit and even let some light through; somewhere above, the moon’s pale disk flashed. After a long and breath-taking climb, Rupert had stopped to wait for me in the middle of some juniper bushes. Leaning on his poles, he was staring ahead with a severe expression.
“It’s there,” he whispered, when I had hurried close to him. “We’ve arrived.”
In front of us there was a valley-like depression, a sort of pool filled with darkness, from the bottom of which snowy trees stretched themselves up to the black edges of the sky. And only a stone’s throw away from where we stood was a blind track. I couldn’t see all of it, but here and there between the trees dim rails were gleaming. The track came from somewhere beyond the forest, from the heart of a similar (or perhaps even worse) tangle of darkness than we had just gone through; it ran on a low bank among the trees until it suddenly ended in the middle of a stand of fir trees, as if it had been cut off with enormous scissors.
I frowned. Rails were not supposed to end like that. Where rails ended there had to be a proper barrier so trains wouldn’t accidentally drive too far and fall off the rails! The track seemed to be in quite a wrong place. Perhaps, on some office desk, a line had been drawn in a wrong place on the map, and when the mistake had finally been discovered the men of the railway construction gang had simply left the work unfinished and gone off, swearing and laughing and cracking jokes about the wisdom of engineers.
I drew the peculiar smell of railways into my nostrils. Here it felt markedly stronger than anywhere else. “And this place is . . . ”
“The place where the trains turn,” Rupert said quietly. He seemed embarrassed, or perhaps nervous. The cold sculpted crystal clouds out of his breath and the overlapping shadows of the trees hid his features from the moonlight and my eyes. He took his skis off, stuck the poles close by in the snow, and laid himself down on the ground.
I followed his example.
“One of them ought to be arriving from out there soon,” he said. “Sometimes you have to wait for a long time, but it’s no use worrying about the course of time here. Do you have a watch with you?”
I drew my sleeve up and tried to find some moonlight, but the darkness stubbornly covered the face of my watch and I couldn’t see its hands, however closely I kept looking or turning my hand.
“Where’s your own watch?” I asked then.
Rupert said his Timex used to stop during ferroequinologist observation trips; he hadn’t bothered to keep it with him any more since that kind of stopping would surely harm the delicate watch machinery over time.
I lifted my own watch to my ear and tried to hear if it was ticking. I heard nothing, but maybe my ears were just frozen. Besides, there was an almost non-existent breath of wind among the trees, and it somehow made the dried-up forest continuously crackle and rustle around us, which hampered my efforts to listen.
By and by the waiting started to feel hauntingly familiar to me. My tired brain probably played some kind of electrochemical trick, I thought sleepily. Then I yawned long and slowly started to regret taking this whole purposeless nighttime skiing trip. What had I thought, foolish woman, to leave my warm bed on a night like this . . . ?
We wanted to look Death in the eye and laugh at its face. That’s why we met that Friday around 5:00 p.m.—immediately after we’d come from school and eaten dinner and washed the dishes—and walked to the railway. When we got to the rails, it started to patter raindrops the size of cranberries. Our dresses got wet and stuck to our skin, and we got cold but we didn’t leave; Death had to be humiliated today, Alice said, so we could really feel alive.
We both had some bones to pick with the cosmic saboteur called Death. It had wasted the life off Alice’s mother with tuberculosis when Alice had been only four years old, and it had stolen a good dog from me—a year earlier my high-spirited collie, Robbie, had run under a train when he was chasing a rabbit. (I’d also lost Uncle Gabe quite recently, but I didn’t care that much about him. He had been a boisterous drunkard of a man, never did anything really sensible, just boozed and ran around with his pants down and yelled awful obscenities at kids.) We wanted to defy Death, and what could have represented him better to us than the train that thundered mystically non-stop through Houndbury?
First, it had killed my Robbie, rolled over him like some moving meat grinder on the rails. And only a couple of months before Elmer of Pig Pond had walked into a train somewhere around here, because—during the war—he had lost his ability to see life’s beautiful side. (That’s what Daddy said anyway.) Elmer was not the only Houndbury person who had come to do the same trick—“bitten the train” as people used to say— over the years. Since the beginning of the year, at least six locals had “bitten the train,” and we were not farther than May yet. Considering this, it was understandable that the train nowadays reminded most locals of death. We had no station, and the train didn’t stop at Houndbury except when somebody jumped in front of it with the purpose of self-destruction, so one couldn’t really think of the train as a vehicle.
We breathed in the peculiar smell wafting about by the rails and waited. (Alice said the smell came from rust and the chemicals the railway ties were treated with and some third unknown substance.) While we waited we sucked the sugar lumps Alice had pinched from home.
The train came every Friday at 5:15. Today it was late, I checked the time on my fine Russian watch Daddy had given me as a birthday present. (He’d found it laying on the ground during the war.) We heard the train only at 5:23.
“It’s coming,” Alice whispered. We kissed each other on the cheek according to our ritual and took each other’s hands. Alice had a warm hand and enviably slender fingers. She had the talent to become a pianist, according to our teacher, and Alice was taking piano lessons once a week from Amalie Forrester.
The train puffed into sight from behind the bend. If you stand on the rails when the train comes, Alice had once said, you’ll be smashed like a fly under a hammer. You have no chance at all to survive. But at the moment you step aside from its path, the train becomes harmless and Death loses his grip on you. You can stand half a meter or even just a few centimeters from the moving train, and the Grim Reaper can’t do anything but grin at you. Then you can laugh at his pale disappointed face!
At first the train looked like a smoking huffing toy, a cleverly constructed miniature model of a goods train. Then it took its place in the perspective and grew in my eyes to its real dimensions. I looked at the black-nosed apparition that was rolling toward us, metallically rumbling. I looked at the rails on which it was traveling and between which we were standing, teetering on a tie.
The train meant millions of kilograms of unstoppable weight. If we were to stay on the track, it would tear us to pieces without even having to slow down. Though the engine driver would brake, the train would never stop in time, not before it had wiped the rails with our remains for the length of a couple of kilometers at least.
Usually the thought gave me a bubbling excitement in my stomach, but now I was just cold. I wasn’t feeling well and I kept moving around nervously and aimlessly fiddling with my hair, which didn’t look golden like Alice’s but was boringly dark.
The train hooted. Alice laughed aloud, shrilly, but I didn’t feel like laughing, not one hair of a shrew’s whiskers’ worth.
“Take us if you can!” Alice whispered passionately and laughed again. She was sometimes quite scary when she was like that. Maybe that was why I liked her so much; being with her never felt ordinary.
When the engine’s dark presence was only fifty meters away, the train hooted again. Our play probably made the engine driver nervous, and sometimes we saw him shake his fist at us, but as Alice said: What could he have done to us? Jump off the train to punish us?
The green-black engine rushed toward us. Its long bumpers stretched eagerly forward like the hands of a hungry child. The headlight trembling on its hood looked like a cyclops’ gleaming eye. Steam rasped and swished with terrible pressure in its iron lungs and pipes, and the furiously whipping pistons on its sides forced the steel wheels to revolve faster and faster and faster. The funnel splashed smoke clouds on the sky and they started to spread like black ink dropped into water. There was a plate on the round front of the engine with the number 3159. I read the numbers over and over and thought how easy it would be to go on reading them, endlessly, and to forget oneself on the rails and just let everything happen to you.
We left the rails pretending to be calm and unhurried, although my guts were tightening and my body felt cold and heavy.
We stayed on the railway bank, on our old place just by the rails, not too close but close enough to be able to smell the disappointment of Death when the train was rumbling past. We stood there, erect and proud as princesses and waited for the train’s draft to shake our clothes and the noise of its rhythm to deafen our ears, and for the smoke the engine was puffing to surround us for a moment and brush our faces like a cloak of our ancient enemy, cut from a weave of darkness.
Then we’d know that Uncle Death had once again lost the game and we had won, and we’d feel ourselves quite especially alive.
The engine screamed. Its voice was hungry, it had something in it similar to the crying of the strange, ever-angry baby born to our neighbors when it woke up and started to demand food, mad with rage. I felt the smell of railways in my nose, stronger than ever. The train’s rhythmic noise reached out an invisible arm and seized my heartbeats; for a moment our rhythms were one, and blood started coursing along my veins all too fast—something was different now from earlier times, I’d felt that all the day in my stomach; suddenly I realized that this time the powers we’d been defying had their own plan for us.
I wrenched my eyes off the approaching train and tore my hand off Alice’s and fled in senseless panic.
After the dash of a few heartbeats I slowed down. Embarrassed, I looked behind me, and immediately lost the control of my body as totally as if I’d been shot. I forgot the existence of my feet and how to move them or anything else, and flew on my side into the boulders. If I happened to hurt myself I didn’t remember how to feel any pain.
The last seconds had been full of sound, I now realized. The very same moment I had started to flee there had been a hard metallic slam.
It was followed by a long scratching noise, huge as the sky, it sounded like the Father God Himself had thumped his foot down from the clouds and started to furrow a kilometer deep line into the ground.
My insides constricted and turned into a cold mess when I saw the engine throw gravel, dust, and stones in the air so that the whole sky was filled up with earth.
The engine numbered 3159 no longer ran on rails. It pawed the embankment and then, as if in a fit of anger, started into quite another direction than the rails tried to persuade it to go. It drew the whole chain of wagons after its, over thirty wagons yanked furiously off the rails. The train was now free and mad with exultation. The steam pistons pulled it violently forward like the forearms of a lunatic escaping from an isolation ward. It wanted to conquer the world. Nothing could stop it. The arrogant challenge whispered by a little girl had freed it, and on Death himself was riding on the engine, roaring with laughter in his flowing cloak.
I looked at the train gliding past me as a huge and endlessly long dream monster, darkening the light of the sky and filling all my consciousness.
Had I stood up and taken a couple of steps I could have touched its dark flank, carried along with it. Then I turned my head, now weighing as much as a horse’s, and looked at the little golden-haired girl toward whom the train was speeding. Alice stood in front of the metal monster she had freed, slender and vulnerable and angelically beautiful. I gasped for breath: I’d never realized that she was so exceedingly beautiful! She still seemed to be full of laughter, her mouth a black hole and thin hands twirling like the wings of a windmill. Her voice wasn’t audible, the train’s thousand-voiced scream filled the whole world. The girl was visible only for a hundredth of an instant and then the gravel and smoke and the moving black metal mountain swallowed her up.
And the train still kept pushing forward, rebellious and insatiable and hungry. Off the rails its massive speed was unavoidably slowing down, however. Its wagons were colliding into each other, and a chaos ensued that an orderly mind could no way perceive.