by Anna Tambour
“Savva, is it? I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” the Omniscient said confidently, wondering who could possibly have found fault with such a model worker and informed citizen. They must be making a mistake. “Is he not on the train?”
“He’s been carted off, I tell you, for painting this on that.” Galina’s gestures might have been confusing if the painters across the street had finished their job of making the mark not exist, but they’d only just begun.
The chief train driver groaned. If only I had done that. Even now, the driver could not talk directly to the only woman he’d ever loved (besides his mother).
“Tell her,” he asked the Omniscient, though he’d never spoken to the man before, didn’t know him from any passenger, “that the train will not leave without her.”
The distracted smile Galina gave him twisted the dagger.
Two hearts
BURHANETTIN RUSHED FORWARD.
“Good sir,” he began, but the man lay there, face down on Ekmel, like a sack of mud.
Burhanettin rolled the man off onto his back and was going to open a water bladder to revive him, when he saw the hideously mangled lip. He looked more carefully and saw the man’s bare, bleeding feet.
Burhanettin swore. Whoever did this should pay, painfully. And he was sure payment would be made. The man had obviously been attacked, but he was richly attired, was a man of substance, like himself. Travellers both, men of the world who had to help each other.
“Up, Ekmel.”
“Is . . is it you?”
“No, it’s the wolf.” Burhanettin gave him a rousing kick. Ekmel sat up, spat out a tooth, looked around, and laughed. Burhanettin might as well have tickled him, for all the good his boot had done.
Burhanettin had no time for Ekmel’s crazes. “Get out the . . . no, just hold his head up. Carefully.”
Ekmel slid over in the dust, and held up the young man’s head.
Without that monster grape on his lip, the man would have been good looking. Strange, elaborate clothing, but it reminded Ekmel of . . . of course. One of the reasons his father had left Ekmel with so little is that the man of discernment spent so much on clothing, carpets, wine and food, and women—all as permanent as his life. The bigger the pot, the bigger the leak.
Burhanettin, as a guild member of the shop helvassis, specifically, the helvassian-i-dukkan, specialists in honey-based confections, was also a non-qualified but nonetheless amateur expert in healing medicaments. He took from his travelling kit a mortar and pestle, and pounded a certain nougat, adding mastic and water and—luckily, dawn lit his hunt, and luckier still, his prey was close—certain growing things. He compounded two batches: a poultice that made your eyes sting, for the feet: and a sweet- smelling but powerfully drawing salve for the lip.
Using Ekmel as the only helper he could get, he dressed the man’s injuries, muttering all the while about assistants, though Ekmel was an excellent nurse.
By now, the first rays of warming morning sun were striking the man’s eyelids. His head was in Ekmel’s lap, and Ekmel was not only eager to be on their way to somewhere, anywhere, but was getting a sore back. The nuisance’s breath was annoyingly slow and steady.
Ekmel bent over his burden. “Shouldn’t we wake him?” he whispered, wiry hairs from his beard teasing the man’s left ear, whose nose twitched as Ekmel’s breath invaded sleep.
Then the eyelashes fluttered, and finally, the eyes of Ekmel’s burden opened. They were beautiful as a cow’s. The sky above was blue as a hyacinth, but the sky was blocked to those eyes by Ekmel’s face, specifically Ekmel’s nostrils.
“Awgh!” said the man, upright like a corpse in a grandmother’s tale. His eyes were wild.
“Where?”
Burhanettin was prepared.
“Calm yourself, good sir.” He handed over the velvet bag that had tumbled from the man’s hands.
Burhanettin had not allowed himself the vulgarity of opening it, though he was very curious about the man.
“I see you have been attacked.”
“Not really,” said Faldarolo. He felt the bag surreptitiously, but not surreptitiously enough.
“Is that your knot?” asked Burhanettin.
Faldarolo pretended to examine the knot, all the while doing more surreptitious probing through the cloth.
“It is,” he said. “Thank you, sir, for rescuing it.” Burhanettin had never seen such perfect teeth. But this only made the injustice done to the man all the more outrageous.
The traveller happened to notice his feet, and blinked. They were swaddled in fine white cloth and felt curiously cool, as though he had just stepped on a patch of snow.
“They stole your shoes,” said Burhanettin.
“No. They just didn’t give them back.”
Burhanettin’s peaked cap wobbled, he was so surprised. “You are a generous man, not to accuse.”
“There is no one to accuse.”
Burhanettin was stunned. He gazed in awe at this traveller who had shown him what a man of the world can be. Imagine being so high up in the way of thoughts that revenge has no place in your heart. Only—dare he bring up the subject?
“Are you on a Quest?” he asked, as it would have been crude to be direct.
“How did you know?” smiled Faldarolo. “Are you?”
“It shows?” Burhanettin was so delighted, he stroked the horns of his moustache into the shape of a smile.
In seven more circuitous questions, Burhanettin reached the point:
“For love?”
Faldarolo nodded, astounded. This great man has not just doctored my hands and feet while I lay dead. He has opened up my breast and felt my heart.
It was a natural consequence that they decided, these two men of the world—travelling, each for a Great Love—to succour each other in his Quest.
And since they were not competing, to go forth together.
Party of four
THE PARTY was composed of Galina, the Muse, the Omniscient, and the chief train driver. But first the chief train driver went through the carriages informing the work unit that the State did not demand their services for a week, and possibly longer. Report to me in seven days.
A conscientious leader, he spoke quietly to each worker personally. Each left the train with a different step—bouncy, racing, shamelessly holiday-spirited. Only Valentin remained—he had locked himself in his compartment and replied to the news with a curse so rude that the chief train driver broke into smiles. He could have been a detective, so accurately did he assess the foul-mouthed shirker—only one reason could keep Valentin in. Valentin, who escaped the train at every opportunity—Valentin, the train’s legendary swindler, must have been swindled himself!
The chief train driver had never liked the man and had spent endless stretches of track tortured by the question: What value Galina can possibly see in the slimy eel? (oh yes, I have eyes in my head.). But Valentin’s presence in the work unit was something he had borne as another pain in the May Day Parade of pains in this thing called life, a tragedy that only ends with Death.
The meeting convened in the town’s park. The chief train driver, introduced formally by Galina as “Comrade Shurov,” sat literally in the background after announcing again that he was ready to confess.
“No need for that, young man,” said the Omniscient (“Please call me Comrade Dangulov”).
“Heroes,” Galina (“Comrade Boldyrev”) snorted. She looked at the comrade to the left of her, that woman in red (who had introduced herself after the Omniscient, as “just call me Valeria, Comrades,” causing the Omniscient to wish he had been bold enough to be so informal).
Galina remembered vividly: “Millions.” She considered their options. Breaking into the town’s jail was impossible. And what if they considered him so politically dangerous that they put him in an asylum? She, a mere train cook, had nothing to use as a bribe that was better than what anyone in power would already have—except . . . “Valeria?”
Galina’s feet were planted wide, her hands on her hips. She looked like she could carry a city’s powerlines, and you could almost see sparks coming off her. “After your millions,” she said at the Muse, “what would ten or so matter to you?”
The Muse, who was sitting, blinked. “Millions?”
“You’d think I was asking you to sacrifice yourself.”
“I don’t care a snap for me,” the Muse so quietly, it might have been to herself. “But to think you think I!.” A red patch appeared on each cheekbone. “What about you?”
“I doubt that their taste is that particular.”
“Ladies,” the Omniscient crooned. “Comrades?”
They ignored him. “I would cook you cherry dumplings,” Galina lied. “Veal cutlets,” she added desperately. “Pashka with candied orange peel! Fresh mushrooms!” In the old days before there was someone to live and die for, she would have killed for these delicacies.
“So you think that’s the way to my heart?”
“You don’t have a heart.”
The Muse stood. “Our bodies are sacred temples.”
“Of course they are, miss, uh, Comrade Valeria,” said the Omniscient.
The ladies regarded him as they would, an extraterrestrial. One who’d butted into their conversation. He didn’t warrant a reply.
Galina glared at the temptress. “You don’t care.”
“Yes I do!”
“Ch’m,” interrupted the Omniscient, yet again.
“Yes?” the Muse asked dismissively. Her hair had begun to twitch, the first sign of a full writhe.
“I said that the Truth shall set him free, and I declare it will.”
“As I was saying,” said the Muse, directing all her attention to this extraordinary woman, she who has hurt me so. Such an unfair assertion—that I spend my life in a daily mockery of love.
“If the Truth won’t set him free,” interrupted the Omniscient, yet again, “What about my experience at the Bar?”
Trouble brews in Carriage 1
This Time, when the word was given to the workers in our train of interest, a passenger managed to overhear, and in moments the rest of the passengers had been informed through the verbal samizdat—all except the 9 tourists in Carriage 1. So a few minutes after that, the only people on the train were Valentin, and they.
About 1p.m., William “Toots” Riley polished off the last of the Velveeta slices that he had packed in the pockets of his travelling coat. “If this is a Great Railway Journey of the World,” he announced, “then I’m a horse’s ass.”
“Innit,” agreed Calum Boldridge.
Riley had been astounded to learn that the English don’t talk English, but the man was a head nodder, and always agreed with Riley.
“Tut, tut, gentleman,” smiled Mr Sandeep Guruprasad from his top bunk. “You make a delay into a disaster. When my father inspected that disaster of nineteen fifty-six, when the Madras- Tuticorin express plunged into river because the bridge at Ariyalur had been washed away in floods, one hundred fifty-six people were killed, of which full twenty-five were railway employees. Railway Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri accepted moral responsibility and resigned. Now that was a disaster.”
“I remember when—” began Toots.
But Mr Guruprasad’s eyes were closed and he was in flow, not that he was a rude man. He would have been most upset to have done something rude, yet, “We must remember,” he continued, “that none of us has come on this journey to reach a destination. This is the destination.”
“Innit,” said Mr Boldridge, but Mr Guruprasad missed the irony.
“It is true, gentlemen,” he said, “that the service could be improved, and that the ministry of this railways has not come to the conclusion that ours did many years ago, and I quote: ‘To make every effort to make the train journey as pleasant and blissful as the joy of reaching the destination.’ But just think, gentleman, what an adventure we are having!”
He opened his eyes and leaned down to the bottom bunk to look fondly at his wife. “And at no pain to us.”
Mrs Guruprasad looked up from her book. “I could not agree more, Sandeep.” She was delighted with this delay, and as far as she was concerned, it could go on forever. An avid reader of Russian literature, she had lived and breathed its atmosphere for years, in her imagination. This trip had been her husband’s silver wedding anniversary present. “Just think,” he had said, “no coconut grating, no tiffin making, no cleaning up after me for two weeks.”
“It’s always a pleasure,” Mrs Guruprasad had indignantly replied, but now after being on this train for weeks, she had experienced such a powerful spiritual rebirth that she knew, absolutely, that this life’s journey had been destined; that otherwise a part of her would never have been revealed—never, but for this blissful state of enforced leisure.
Oblomov. She rolled the name on her tongue. She’d never considered herself as having been a man in some previous life, but the knowledge didn’t repulse her. She’d never realized the connection between so-called fiction and reputed reality. And but for this experience, she never would have. She fully relaxed her eyelids while she thanked the stars for this wonderful life and her slightly selfish husband. After all, she had never been interested in trains as much as he, but she had never been born to serve them.
Then her fingers and eyes went back to their pleasant work, backtracking to the front page of the book so that her mind could be dazzled yet again, by this revelation:
With Oblomov, lying in bed was neither a necessity (as in the case of an invalid or of a man who stands badly in need of sleep) nor an accident (as in the case of a man who is feeling worn out) nor a gratification (as in the case of a man who is purely lazy). Rather, it represented his normal condition.
1:34 p.m. in Compartment 1A—
Faint sounds emitted from the Guruprasads’ bunks: scratching, cracking and scrunching. Mr Guruprasad writing in his log, Mrs Guruprasad reading. Both eating sunflower seeds, depositing shells in plastic bags.
Mr Boldridge snoring.
Mr Riley drinking from a silver flask.
1:37—
“For goddsake!”
William “Toots” Riley slammed his fist against the wall. “You there, pardner?”
“No, Toots,” came the reply from 1B. “I’m busy holdin’ up this train.”
“Now you’re talkin’.”
Riley grunted, the first sign of him moving his bulk from his bunk. He grabbed the bar of his walker and pulled himself up. “I’m comin’ in,” he yelled.
Mrs Guruprasad turned a page.
Mr Guruprasad repressed an emotion at the outrageous behaviour of some passengers. Imagine striking a carriage’s wall!
“How can it defend itself?” he wrote.
1:52—
The Guruprasads pursed their lips and Mr Boldridge sat up as:
Five passengers burst into 1a, Toots Riley at their head.
“You’re either with us or against us,” he announced. “What’s it to be?”
“I’m widya,” said Mr Boldridge, but Riley wasn’t looking at him. He was challenging Mr Guruprasad, the only train enthusiast with actual work experience. Riley clomped over, instantly seeming to expand to fill every bit of space between bunk and ceiling that wasn’t occupied by the tidy Mr Guruprasad.
“What’s it to be, Sandy?” Toots Riley demanded. Mr Guruprasad resented this coarse man, recoiled from the familiarity and physical closeness. But where would you berth a man who is proud of being called Toots, sounds one takes care to expel only in deepest privacy? Mr Guruprasad, the retired-after- 25-years-with-not-a-day-off-sick, exemplar veteran of the Indian Railways treated his challenger as he would a man who had boarded an a/c carriage with only a 3rd class ticket.
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“Please move,” he said, making a swishing movement with the tips of his fingers.
But Riley’s long years as a broom salesman had made him tough.
“I’m not goin’ anywhere till you swear to get us out of this mess.”
“Sandeep, dear,” sighed Mrs Guruprasad, “I think he means business.”
“If he don’t, we do!” said Calum Boldridge, the longest sentence he’d uttered since boarding the train. He was what his late wife had called ‘a long fuse’, but once lit, he was a pretty lively sputterer.
Sandeep Guruprasad sheathed his pencil in its sleeve in his logbook, closed his logbook, put his logbook in its appropriate pocket in his coat and buttoned that pocket, wrapped a rubber band around the plastic bag holding the sunflower seed shells and put that in another pocket in his coat, and buttoned that; and buttoned the pocket that he had been pulling the sunflower seeds from. Then he sat up. “Please allow me, Mr Riley.”
Riley stepped back and the 67-year-old leapt lightly from his bunk, not because he was such a lightweight (he was a middleweight) but because your body and your mind are one and to be healthy, must be flexible, a philosophy that the other 8 tourists would have done well to embrace, including, it must be said, Mrs Guruprasad, who religiously practiced laugh exercises but could not touch her knees due to the health-giving Badam ka halwa that she dosed herself with daily. Though it was made only of pure ghee, badam (almonds), sugar, milk, and cardamom, her husband said it upset his constitution. He preferred carrot juice with cumin after his morning stretches.
He smoothed his jacket with a graceful flick of his palm. “What do you propose, Mr Riley?”
“Sandy, you gotta—”
“My husband,” interrupted Mrs Guruprasad, closing her book and standing up, “is, if you please, ‘Mister Guruprasad’, but you may call him ‘Conductor’.”
The ex-broom-salesman had met thousands of women in his day. “Yes ma’am,” he said.
He turned to her husband.
“And may I remind you,” she continued, “that this might be the wild west to you, but we come from civil society?”