That evidence or his own part in the boy’s existence the man had never even tried to question. I knew of course that he liked to appear a perfect gentleman, a kind of modern blueblood (and with one’s noblesse oblige), but still his correctness bordering upon the noble was a bit amazing, considering the unconventional circumstances of the child’s conception.
From between the orange kitchen curtains I watched how Gunnar called the boy down from the tree, caught him in his arms from a trustful leap and took him away in his thunder-coloured BMW.
My stomach was hurting nastily, though my menses were still days off. I didn’t like to let Rupert out of my sight. From the very moment I had felt the first faint kicks inside me, I’d also started to fear losing my child in some totally unpredictable manner (as irrational as the feeling may have been), and that early fear never fully let go.
Once a month I was unavoidably left alone, the house became quiet, and I became uneasy. I lived with Rupert every day. I chose, bought and washed his clothes, I ate with him, I listened to his troubles. I woke him up in the morning and tucked him up in the evening. I had subscribed to Donald Duck comics for him. I applied sticking plasters to his cuts. I measured and weighed him regularly and kept a diary of his development. I took snapshots of him for the family album. A couple of days before I’d baked him his seventh birthday cake, which we two had (for once not caring about the consequences) eaten the same day, and I had held his head above the toilet when he had finally started to puke. Nevertheless I felt like a terrific outsider when I thought about the outings Rupert and Gunnar had together. They seemed to mean so much for the boy, sometimes more than all the rest of his life.
And why was that?
One could easily have imagined that a successful businessman like Gunnar would have taken the boy from one amusement park to another and ladled into the boy’s bottomless gullet ice cream helpings the price of a bicycle and deluxe pear lemonades and special order hamburgers and generally used all the tricks made possible by money to treat the boy like a divine child emperor. So lightly he could have afforded even to fly the boy once a month to Disneyland to shake hands with Donald Duck; so easily he could have with the power of money made the child’s whole home environment seem like a furnished cardboard box. He could well have filled the pockets of his son with absurdly big allowance and bought him the moon from the sky and had two spare ones made.
But nothing like that from Gunnar; the larger-than-life moments of Rupert’s life were created in a quite different way. Once a month the man simply arrived with a packet of sandwiches and a bottle of juice or perhaps a couple of gingerbreads in his pocket and took the boy to look at rails. Railways, tracks, those that trains use to go from one place to another. Not the elephants and giraffes and monkeys in the zoo, not the newest movie hit, not the dancing clowns, not the new wonderful toys in the department stores. To look at the rust coloured railway tracks, that’s where he took the boy: they searched on the map and in the nature for always new railway sections and walked the hours of their day together along the tracks doing nothing special, they just walked and enjoyed each other’s company and stopped for a while to eat their sandwiches and then went on, and when the boy came home, I saw him simply tremble with restrained happiness and excitement and satisfaction as if he had seen at least all the wonders of the universe and met Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and a thousand speaking gingerbread reindeers as well.
I had sometimes tried to ask Rupert about it. He made my temples throb when he started to speak like a preacher about the Wonderful Smell of Railways and how it actually contained all the world’s secrets.
I knew well enough when I was not in my own territory, not even close. Besides, it was after all a question of something shared between the two, father and son, which wasn’t really my business, so in spite of my vague forebodings I thought best to let it be.
Until Rupert came home from such a track excursion hysterically sobbing and shaking, white as a washbasin, as if he had met eye to eye with the Children’s Own Grinning Reaper himself and had to shake his bony hand.
* * *
I knew at once that everything was not all right when I lifted my eyes from the flowerbed I’d been scraping, and saw them returning already at 3:25.
I had my hands full coping with the situation. To start, I chased Gunnar off, bleeding with scratches as he was. I acted purely from my spinal cord, as mothers always do in such situations; acted with the rage of a dinosaur in a white summer dress. Gunnar tried to explain: he could not understand what had come over the boy, he’d just been carrying him piggyback and stepped on the bank as he’d heard the approaching train, and suddenly the boy had gone completely crazy on his back and started to tear Gunnar’s hair and face and to scream unintelligibly like some rabid, drooling monkey.
If Rupert had come home thoroughly scared, Gunnar was just as terrified. He behaved like a dog that vaguely understands he’s being judged for complicity in some Very Bad Thing and knows for certain that he’ll get a bullet in his brain.
I almost felt sorry for him.
The dinosaur in me felt no pity, it attacked. I yelled at him till my lungs hurt. I probably hit him, too—at least his nose suddenly started to bleed.
He shook his head perplexed, stepping back and forth on the backyard, dabbing his nose with a handkerchief and nervously straightening his suit, covered in grey dust, having for once lost his relaxed erectness of carriage (for which I, for a brief moment, felt maliciously pleased). Then he glanced quickly at me, turned his eyes somewhere up, at Rupert’s window I suppose, and started to speak: “If I have caused trouble, I’m sincerely sorry. If you want, I’ll leave. But I have to say that with the boy I’ve always felt that for once I’m involved with something larger than my own life. You know what: he will yet do something significant, something wonderful, something which neither of us now can even dream about. I have an instinct for those things. And if he—”
I told him to be quiet and leave my backyard (although not quite in those words), and he obeyed. As Gunnar, defeated, got in his car and drove away, the dinosaur was gratified—it had won.
I had no idea that I’d never again see the only man in this life I’d ever allowed to push his male protrusion inside me: about half an hour later he would be crushed to death together with his car and his wiry bird boned being would be transformed to a mixed metal-and-bone paste (I know, because I later went to see the photo the police had taken of the accident scene).
But that shock was still to come. Now I had to compose myself so that I could go and calm down Rupert who, piteously wailing, had run upstairs and locked himself in his room.
I went up the stairs and knocked on Rupert’s door. “Let me in!” I ordered, my cheek at the door. “What’s got into you?”
“The trains,” came a trembling whisper from the other side of the door. “The trains!”
“What about them?” I tried to keep my voice calm. I strained hard and realized suddenly that I’d been trying to see through the chipping white painted surface of the door. Just like that x-ray eyed Superman Rupert admired, it struck me. Well this was how it went, this was how Rupert made even me behave irrationally! (I had always felt a deep antipathy towards that red-caped clown who wiped his unholed arse with logic and credibility and, besides, provoked children to jump out of windows with bath towels on their neck.)
I wondered whether my poor child had on his face a foolish maniacal grin, and a sudden horror stabbed my ovaries. Had my worst fears now come true in this dreadful way? Would my son end up for the rest of his life in a little boys’ mental institution, where he would be dressed in a little teddy bear patterned straightjacket?
I heard a choked request: “Mummy, please go and look out of the window.”
I did. A cold bit of flesh pretending to be a heart was slapping in my breast and I felt faint. I looked out of the round window in the upper hall, where sweaty houseflies kept buzzing in competition in the shady afternoon light.
/>
“And then what? What should I see? Your father? He had to leave already. He may phone you later. Or you can phone him.”
“Do you see a train there?” asked a wan voice. “It didn’t follow me here, did it?”
Finally I got Rupert convinced that there was no train on the backyard, not even the smallest inspection trolley, and he let me in his room and, after a long stumble over his words, started to tell what it had all been about.
* * *
In the crèche and the kindergarten and even in the school they had praised my son’s “boundless and creative imagination”, which they said was manifested in his play and his artistic creations. I did admit that imagination might be useful, too, provided it remained within certain proper limits. But what was there worth praising in something that made a human being babble to stones and trees and see nonexistent things?
Perceiving reality was hard enough for the child, even without idle and completely unnecessary fantasies. And imagination by no means made Rupert happy, on the contrary he had always suffered greatly from it. A hairy monkey paw growing in the middle of his forehead would have brought him just as much joy. His social life was surely not cultivated by talking to birds rather than to other kids. And the drawings expressing “boundless and creative imagination” which he manufactured would have been enough to employ a legion of child psychiatrists:
“Oh what a nice picture! Is it a cow? And that must be a milking machine.”
“No.” (The child is very indignant about his mother’s poor insight.) “It’s a horse-moose who travels in a time machine to the Jurassic period where the dinosaurs will eat him up.”
(Mother takes an aspirin and a glass of water.)
Rupert’s drawings were technically quite sophisticated and even precocious, but he never let the objective reality interfere with their content. Such can be very depressing to a sensible adult who only wants to make her child understand how the real world functions.
* * *
“The train tried to kill us,” said Rupert.
He sat, feet crossed, upon the comic books spread on his bed, wiped sweat from his round forehead and stared absentmindedly at the beam of afternoon light in the room. It was catching the dust motes in between model airplanes hanging from the ceiling. I crouched on the floor by the bed and tried to catch his eyes.
“The train tried to kill you,” I repeated expressionlessly as a machine to show that I listened.
“We were walking on the track with Daddy. I sat on Daddy’s shoulders. It was warm and the sun warmed our skin and the air was shimmering and everything looked funny. Daddy even took his coat off and opened his waistcoat and rolled up his sleeves. The tie he never takes off, however hot it is. He says it’s a matter of principle and every time a man dresses or undresses he makes a far-reaching decision on who he actually is and who he is not. We’d found a whole new section of tracks, it’s far beyond that long tunnel and the big rocky mountain. We had to drive a long way on the big road and back along all kinds of funny side roads to get there. The rails there smelled completely different. Much stronger. Daddy said it might mean that we were closer to the secret of railways than ever before. I asked what the secret was, but he just smiled as always, kind of pleased.
“Then we started hearing a train noise. Such a queer rattle, like a hundred tin buckets were banged with iron pipes, each in a rhythm that was a bit different. It’s a kind of scary noise. Like thunder on the ground. It came from somewhere behind us.
“At first I wasn’t scared, but then I started to feel that all was not as it should. That smell started to feel too strong in my nose, and somehow wrong.
“And I glanced behind and saw the train. It came towards us. It was hard to see because it came from the direction of the sun, but I saw it anyway. First it was sneaking slowly but then, when it saw that I had noticed it, it started to come faster. It accelerated. And I saw that it wanted us. Daddy heard it coming, too, and we moved to the bank, but it was not enough. It would never have been enough, the train would have got us from there, too. But Daddy did not understand, he was like in a dream. I had to get Daddy somehow to run off before it was too late.”
“How could it have got you from there?” I asked in an unnaturally calm voice.
Rupert stared at me with his big blue eyes that now were like two deep saucers of cold fear. “That train was one of the outside-of-timetables kind. It did not run on rails. It pretended to, but it went a little beside them. I saw. I tried to get Daddy to realize that we had to run, but he seemed not to understand anything I told him. Not even when we had just before been talking about such trains.”
The boy swallowed audibly and crept to the window. His paranoid gaze raked the view.
“Such trains,” I repeated again. The back of my head was pricking. “Now listen Rupert, what kind of trains are we actually talking about here?”
“The ones that leave the timetable and run off rails,” Rupert sighed.
He kept looking out. The rowan crown was swaying behind the window; it stirred the now oppressive backyard air that swarmed with insects flying dazedly to and fro.
The boy’s fingers were fumbling with each other nervously and the narrow chest beneath the yellow shirt was heaving violently. There was an asthmatic, wheezing tone in his respiration that I’d never noticed before.
I had to talk seriously with him, really talk. I assumed an understanding and gently motherly smile and opened my mouth.
“What has that man put into your head!” I shrieked.
The voice escaping from my mouth startled even me; I sprang up and hit my head badly on the window board. I groaned from pain.
Rupert turned to look at me in astonishment—at last I’d achieved his full attention.
“Trains do not jump off the rails,” I articulated carefully so that the child was sure to hear and understand what I was saying. “They stay on the rails and go along them from one place to another. And besides—”
Rupert looked at me expectantly.
“Besides, trains are just big inanimate machines driven by humans,” I declared.
The boy smiled at me. Not in a relieved way. He smiled in that special way reserved for those who clearly do not know what they are talking about.
“Trains do go along rails from one place to another,” he admitted kindly. “And usually they also stay on the rails. Usually. That’s the official truth. But there is another truth that is less known. A secret. Sometimes they leave their timetables and tracks and are in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then they make trouble for people. Then they are not as they normally are, and you’d better not trust them at all. They are supposed to stay on the rails and follow the timetables to be as they are meant to be, just inanimate machines that obey people. But sometimes they do actually leave the rails and break off beyond their timetables. And then they change. Their own deep hidden nature comes out. They become different. Mean and clever. And very dangerous.
“Indeed.” I found it difficult to speak. “So they leave the tracks?”
“Yes. They leave their tracks,” Rupert enlightened me. His voice broke when he continued:
“There, where the trains turn.”
* * *
The sad news of the death of Rupert’s father reached us a couple of days later, and I can’t say that it made my efforts to normalize the situation any easier (I admit that ”to normalize” is a somewhat peculiar choice of words in connection with Rupert). The identity of the victim of last Sunday’s railroad crossing accident had started to become clear only the following day, when a swarm of little boys found the lost number plate; it had drifted downstream in the brook close to the accident site and got stuck in a dam the boys had built.
The term “obscure circumstances” was used a couple of times. Police and all kinds of inspectors came to talk to us, and afterwards I could not remember what they had asked or what I had answered to them.
When I went shopping on the north side I heard the vil
lagers talk almost nostalgically about a train accident that had taken place two decades earlier in the neighbourhood. That had after all been of a completely different scale than this minor tame railroad crossing accident which didn’t even merit a proper news story: In the past a goods train had actually been derailed in the Houndbury railway section, with dramatically unpleasant consequences—then, in the middle of the fifties, there had of course been in front of the train cars one of those good old steam locomotives, the last of which had been taken off sometimes in the seventies.
Two persons had died in the accident: an engine driver and a little local girl. There had been large horrified headlines in almost all newspapers and it had even been announced on the radio; publicity loves innocent victims (at least when they are not too many and not too far away). When the train had been derailed it had by a terrible whim of chance crushed the child playing on the bank, the daughter Alice of the district surgeon Holmsten.
Unless I completely misremembered, Alice Holmsten had been in the same class with me in primary school, and we had perhaps been friends. But of all memories the childhood memories are always the most confused and subjective, so I couldn’t be sure about it. Actually I didn’t even manage to think about the matter, the present was too much for me.
After he had left us, Gunnar had obviously been driving south along little side roads—he lived after all in Helsinki, when he wasn’t on a business trip to Bonn, London, Paris, Tokyo or some other distant place (Rupert received picture postcards with a railway theme from everywhere). Thirty kilometers away there was a level crossing, with scant traffic but not completely unused. The two o’clock slow extra train from Tampere to Eastern Finland had lead to Gunnar’s death.
The engine driver said in the interrogation that when the train arrived at the railroad crossing everything had seemed to be in order, the track had been free, and suddenly the purple car waiting behind the crossing had driven straight in front of the train—obviously the gate hadn’t come properly down either. The train hurrying eastward had caught Gunnar’s thunder-reflecting car with it, crumbled and torn it in passing as if it hadn’t been a real car at all but an origami folded of purple paper, and then thrown its remains in the willow bushes growing by the track.
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