Now and then Rupert drew strange little pictures, which he tore up immediately and burned in the sauna oven. I got the impression that he was trying to draw Birgitta and other things he had lost with the accident, things that now only haunted him as vague dream images.
The old Timex had again found its place on his wrist, although I had to go and buy a new, longer strap for it from the Houndbury Watch—since he could not really believe that the golden Rolex glittering in the chest drawer actually belonged to him.
All that dissolved into a sleepy anticipation-filled dormancy which was held together only by the ticking of the clocks, the repetitive daily routines and my belief that something would happen. Something that would give me the keys to a solution, a way out from the deadlocked dream I couldn’t possibly imagine continuing endlessly the same (as unfounded as such a subjective notion of course was, objectively considered).
* * *
March came, with harsh nightly colds. The ribs of the house cracked in the squeeze of coldness, and sometimes just before falling asleep I imagined that the walls were breaking to splinters around me and winter was rushing in and freezing me into a rigid naked statue in my bed. I dreamed of a terrible cold that rolled over me.
Now and then I woke up and did not know who or where I was—I had to sneak around the house and go look at the sleeping Rupert and look over the objects I found for evidence to be able to locate myself back in my own life.
On the last week of the month, on the night between Thursday and Friday at 01:12 in the morning, I woke up to muffled sounds of departure seeping to my ears through the floorboards.
Rupert had slipped out at night before, but each time I had noticed it only afterwards from his wet shoes and the trails left in the snow. Through the clogged ducts of my mind gushed a sudden excitement that quickened even my numb flesh—I yanked a thick housecoat over myself and dashed down the cold stairs.
I threw the front door open. Rupert stood in the courtyard with skis and sticks in his hands and with a rucksack on his back and stared at me. He may have been a little scared for thinking he would be scolded, but at the same time I could sense unusual determination in him—it was just a fact that he was leaving somewhere and I could do absolutely nothing about it.
That was all right by me.
I let the icy black night air fill my lungs and soak into my bloodstream. The sky spreading above us seemed to open directly to the cold halls of space. The stars were skimping on their scant light, but in the middle of them the Moon hunched big and bright and yet grieving for its imagined imperfection: only after a couple of nights would it be perfectly round and beautiful and could really wallow in its own light. The cold made the black-and-white night scene crackle and pop as if it were the plateful of rice crispies in thick cream and sugar that Rupert ate in the mornings.
I shivered in my housecoat and we stared at each other without words, Rupert and I, and then I broke the silence: “Don’t worry, you aren’t going to become mink food.” (I remembered my threat from over twenty years back, and so probably did Rupert, because he looked relieved.) “Besides, the old Traphollow died in a heart attack last fall when he was hunting rabbits and we have a new policeman, too, whom I wouldn’t try to bribe for his silence. But why don’t you wait a little before you start. This time I’m coming with you if you don’t mind. Who knows: perhaps I’ll be a ferroequinologist, too.”
Rupert seemed to frown thoughtfully under his broad rimmed Stetson but then he nodded. The hems of his grey Burberry were sweeping the ground. He had wrapped a medium length red muffler round his neck and covered his ears with black earmuffs. He didn’t at all look like a brain damaged man who thought like a nine-year old. He looked like a gentleman who was going to take a breath of fresh air after an evening of theatre, then afterwards have a nightcap, read a few lines of Dostoyevsky and withdraw to his bed.
I dressed as quickly as I could, found my skiing shoes, locked the house and fetched my old skis from the woodshed where they had spent the last twenty years. Then we started skiing in the blocked lightlessness of the forest, the son ahead with coat hems flapping and the mother behind, stumbling in her slippery skis and with the unfamiliar sticks.
The hard packed snow led us forward with unreal lightness between the high pine pillars, and 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 all right by me: 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 that 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 favourite 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 Hill, 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 ways or paths to reach it. Although I supposed the nearest houses and the whole village actually were only about ten kilometers away, the terrain was extremely difficult, so that the area was well protected from berry pickers, hunters and other accidental hikers. Bog, dense fir thicket, unfriendly rocks, fallen mouldering trees, half collapsed rusty barbed wire fences that a stranger 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 he in reality 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 when 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 cumbersome. When I looked up I could see no sky at all, I only saw the greyish lattice of dead branches that blocked the moonlight to 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 off from their grip and received down my nec
k the falling snow and ice and bits of twigs, and then again I followed, covering my face, 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 around alone in that shambles 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 anyhow had never seemed to me any more understandable than Chinese opera), and at times I still saw him as my successful adult lawyer son who was temporarily resting at my house. But after the skull fracture also a new side had emerged in him, a strange combination of the above 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 jam of dead standing trees at least for two or three hours and for maybe ten kilometres. At least it felt like ten kilometres, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it had been shorter, perhaps only two hundred meters, or perhaps even far longer.
Now and then Rupert flashed ahead of me, a shadow in the shadows, and then after I didn’t see him for some time and thought I’d lost him, but when for the thousandth time I pushed myself, protecting my face, through the firs that had died in each other’s arms, I saw 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 juniper bushes. Leaning on his sticks 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 valleylike 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 that trains wouldn’t accidentally drive too far and fall off the rails! The track seemed anyhow to be in quite a wrong place. Perhaps by 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 in the forest 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 breathe and the overlapping shadows of the trees hid his features from the moonlight and my eyes. He took the skis off, stuck the sticks close by in the snow and laid himself down in a prone position.
I followed his example.
“One of them ought to be arriving from out there soon enough. Sometimes you have to wait for a long time, but it’s no use worrying about the course of time here, I’ve noticed. Do you have a watch with you?”
I drew my sleeve up and tried to find some moonlight, but the darkness stubbornly covered the hands of my watch and I couldn’t see them, however closely I kept peeking or turning my hand.
“Where’s your own watch?” I asked then.
Rupert said his own Timex used to stop during ferroequinologist observation trips; he hadn’t bothered to keep it with him any more since that kind of stopping surely would 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 nonexistent 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.
Rupert surprised me by asking whether I wanted a half of his chocolate bar. I was going to automatically refuse, but then I realized that I did want chocolate, very much, the first time since my childhood. Rupert took a chocolate bar from his rucksack and passed me one of the bits. Then he wrapped his Burberry closer around himself and settled into a comfortable position like an experienced watcher. And we watched the rails drawn into the wildwood and the rustling trees standing around us, and the white snow packed to keep company with darkness and shadows in the narrow spaces between the trees, and we ate chocolate and we waited.
By and by the waiting started to feel ghostly familiar to me. My tired brain probably played some kind of electrochemical trick, I thought sleepily, and 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 eyes and laugh at its face, and that’s why we that Saturday met and walked to the railway around five p.m., immediately after we’d come from school and eaten dinner and washed the dishes. 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, too, 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 from me it had stolen a good dog—a year earlier my gay collie Robbie had run under the train when he was chasing a rabbit. (I’d also lost Uncle Gabe quite recently, but I didn’t care that much about him, for 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 to kids.) We wanted to defy Death, and what would have represented him to us better than the train that thundered non-stop mystically 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 he had lost in the war his ability to see life’s beautiful side (that’s what daddy said anyway), and Elmer was by far not the only Houndbury person who over the years had come to do the same trick, “bitten the train”, as people used to say—during the last year at least six locals had “bitten the train”, and we were not farther than May yet. Considering that, it was understandable that the train nowadays reminded most locals of death—we had no station anyway, 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 impregnation stuff used in the sleepers and some third unknown substance). While we waited we sucked the sugar lumps Alice had pinched from home.
The train came every Saturday at 5:15. Today it was late, I checked the time on my fine Russian watch I’d got from daddy as birthday present (he’d found it laying on the ground during 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, said 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 up like a fly under a hammer. You have no chance at all to survive. But at the very
same 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 centimetres 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 up to its real dimensions. I looked at the black nosed apparition that was rolling towards us, metallically rumbling; I looked at the rails on which it was travelling and between which we were standing, teetering on the sleeper.
The train meant millions of kilograms of unstoppable weight. If we were to stay on the rails, it would tear us to pieces without even having to slow down. Though the engine driver would brake, the train would never get to stop in time, not before it had wiped the rails with our remains for the length of a couple of kilometres 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.
“Take us if you can!” Alice whispered sensuously and laughed again. She was sometimes quite scary when she was like that, and 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 towards 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 dye dropped into water. There was a number plate on the round end of the metal hood with the series “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.
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