So reading on trains intensifies the thrill. People have always wanted to read differently, think differently even, when they’re on the move. The aeroplane novel, the beach read, the flysheet, the trashy yellowbacks. Valentine Vox, The Ventriloquist, The Stockbroker’s Wife. (In that first film of the first kiss on a train, the woman isn’t looking out of the window, but reading a book. It’s double transport. Doubly erotic. The book is pushed aside as the clinch begins. She is a reckless thrill-seeker, dangerously addicted to her yellow-backed novel. Bigamy and bodices and bloody murder.)
Everyone still reads on Russian trains. If you look around the Sapsan Express, which runs nine times a day between Moscow and St Petersburg, you’ll see them all. A man turning the pages of an essay collection by Marilynne Robinson. A woman engrossed in a Russian translation of Brave New World. A bleached blonde, asleep, a copy of Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry resting on her patent red-leather handbag, an Anna for our time.
Anna is both hidden and on show. As a woman reading on a train, she is doubly disturbed, and doubly disturbing. Her mind is guessable – but nothing is really known. She is like any public reader. Nearly – but not quite – in a world of her own. Absorbed in her book, but visible to us, the reader is always an alluring figure. Abandoned, partially lost to us in another world. I cannot have, or touch, what she has as she reads. Reading is an act of retreat, of privacy – a pushing away. There used to be an art to reading on trains. Guides tell Victorian readers that the secret of reading in railway carriages is to hold one’s arms at a perfect 90-degree angle to prevent the vibrations from the carriages spreading to the arms and book. It sounds like an elaborate kind of yoga. It can only be achieved through the exertion of muscular power; the full elasticity of the arms, from the shoulders downwards, acting like carriage-springs to the volume.
The readers on my train are strangely hidden too. The woman near the aisle is looking through the back pages of an old Letts diary. The person near the door, in maroon and orange trousers, is scrolling on their phone. Another man opens up a blue plastic carrier bag, looking around him almost furtively. It contains a biography of Marilyn Monroe. I catch his eye and we both look down. The secret of reading.
Bologoye Station
And when I say you, I don’t mean you
Rainald Goetz, Insane
The train moves slowly along its gauge, around about 23 mph, then slows for a stop. Anna pulls out her book, that English novel, and finds her place. It’s a difficult re-orientation, from clock time to novel time, like jumping between two carriages when you can see the ground moving beneath you. At first she cannot concentrate on the book. There are too many people moving around, opening and closing doors, making noises, and then the louder sound of the train grinding and juddering, picking up speed. But at last she manages to focus, to follow the line of the story. But not for long. She puts her book aside, overcome by the heat of the carriage, almost dizzy, delirious. Not even sure if she is going backwards or forwards or standing still. She starts to feel as if the world is unreal. Wondering if it really is her maid sitting beside her or someone that she’s never even met. Is she, Anna, really even there? Am I myself or someone else? she asks. Scenes from the previous night jump into her mind, each distinct, each bright, like the paper strip of a magic lantern. There is a dark place that she might walk towards. She knows that she does not need to, but that she might. The train pulls in to Bologoye. She decides that she has to get out, to feel the night air and the snow storm that surrounds her. She hears the tearing and whistling around the corner of the station between the wheels of the carriages and along the posts. Carriages, posts, people – everything that was visible was covered on one side with snow, and being continually covered with more. People are making their last-minute dash to re-board the night train. For a moment there are men running to and fro, their steps crackling on the platform, telegrams, confusion, smokers. Now, as then, Bologoye Station is a junction. For the twenty thousand odd people who live there, it is a home, a workplace, a place of birth and death and happening. For many others, it is simply a waiting point. A refreshment break. An expanse of pearl grey sky behind a criss-cross of wires and lamps and railings.
As Anna stands at Bologoye, feeling the air on her face, Vronsky appears. He has come – he says – to be where she is.
When something like this happens – happens to a person who is meant to be part of a happy family – things fall apart. Your heart jumps, catching you somewhere at the back of your throat. It’s as if, for a moment, your breath has been taken from you. Perhaps part of the surprise is the inevitability of it all. You knew it was there. You know that they are going to say what they say. The shock is not so much in the hearing it, as in the fact that the declaration has been made. You stand at a platform, or hang on the line. You try to speak, but you are frozen and the words have melted like dry ice. You split into pieces. You are left wanting.
There is, for Anna, nowhere for this new self to exist.
As Karenin’s wife, she is one person – another when Seryozha’s mother. She is sister to Stepan Oblonsky, inspiration to her friend Kitty, and confidante to her sister-in-law Dolly. She is Kate Field, in part. As Anna appears in scene after scene, she multiplies into self after self, until the night when she dances with Vronsky, when her friends notice her trembling with something almost of a self reborn – she becomes a lover, with a quivering light flashing her eyes, the smile of happiness and elation that involuntarily curled her lips, and the graceful precision, the exactitude and lightness of her movements … the blow had fallen.
Geographically, romantically, morally, this feeling has no home. A feeling that both frightened her and made her happy. As things progress, she is even more muddled in shame, joy, and horror. She is lost for words. No way to describe all the complexity of those feelings, no thoughts with which to reflect on all that was in her soul. There are many thoughts for which we have no words, and perhaps words for which we may have no feelings. No single word in English, writes Nabokov, renders all the shades of the Russian toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom. Anna experiences them all. With nobody to tell, and nobody to hold her, she returns to her seat. She begins playing with the clasp of her handbag again. Opening and anxiously shutting it. She feels the clip lock tight beneath her fingers, then open with a sigh.
Anna’s book lies, unread, on the seat. So does mine. She wants to live, not to read. Can a book like Anna Karenina give me what I want? I wonder if any book can. Has my reading been a way of keeping me company – of helping me through the worlds of nearlys and barelys and the feelings of missing, and the hopeless messiness? Sometimes, perhaps, this is what reading does. I am at least nostalgic for the time I really believed it could. I think of Jane Eyre, who reads in her orphaned loneliness, hiding in a small breakfast room, then mounting into a window seat. She sits on the seat, shrined in double retirement, enclosed by a red curtain, turning the pages of an illustrated copy of Bewick’s Birds. I think of my own reading of Jane Eyre, as I lay on top of the pale green sofa aged thirteen, trying to forget my father’s death. I remember not just the story, but the tactile experience of that copy, with its tissue-thin pages, and small navy cover. I remember it as a thing to hold. I think of my reading of Anna Karenina for the first time, the weeks after I took my university examinations – a summer I fell in love with a man who was running in the other direction. As the end of the book approached, I read more and more slowly. I was toying with time, hoping that if I didn’t reach the end, then this world would go on, and on. It’s as if the act of reading might form a protective layer around the reader, an insulation against the world – shrink-wrap
ped, or shimmering as if suspended in jelly.
But perhaps this is too dark a vision, too self-sealing. I think back through the readers I saw on the train today. Each seemed to float in their transparent reading bubble, suspended in a book time that runs on a different line. Perhaps reading is more like an opening, a dissolving. You are inside it; it is inside you; there is no longer either outside or inside. Books, then, could be both the holder and the held. Division, for a moment, evaporates.
I have never truly felt this.
When we open a book, we are partly absorbed, but never fully lost in it. Never completely. Many of us forget, as well as recall, the stories of others. (I am not Madame Bovary, nor was meant to be.) They evaporate in us, a vast dying sea. That’s a phrase from John Updike, half-remembered, by Nicholson Baker. When we finish, he writes, what stays in our mind isn’t the story, but our experience of it, and how we lived it in every tactile, visceral moment. We remember a few details of a book – and those details spill out from the pages to the moment we were in, to the place we were when we read it. For you, perhaps, it is the way you spilled a cup of coffee on your lap while you turned the pages of a book of essays on the way to the job interview for the job you didn’t get. For Baker, what was once The Portrait of a Lady is now … only a plaid lap-blanket bobbing on the waves. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina survives as a picnic basket containing a single jar of honey. Perhaps you are haunted by the image of a beach villa in the book you read on holiday, which you have reimagined in your head, and have dreamed of living in ever since. Or maybe an account of a dreaming lettuce in the garden gets half-remembered on a shopping trip, and a cabbage is bought instead. Our reading life is porous and fragmentary, and often far more self-absorbed than we admit.
I have read Anna Karenina twice, just about, and skimmed it many times. I have carried it around and not read it many more. I have invented things in it that have never happened in it, and have forgotten things that did. But reading, like any kind of connection, is hard to render in a true account. For me, most books are half-remembered and half-lost things. This one is in the bag beside me, but it has also become the memory of feeling lonely in a park in north London in July 1998 while looking at a tumbledown bridge. And the memory of watching a YouTube video about how to syringe your own ear in a hotel room in Moscow. And a visit to a film studio and the way my friend looked on a sunny day on a bench when a telephone rang. And a handbag. The handbag and the hotel room and the bridge and the earwax and the phone all become the book and float free of the book. They exist for me as a space of wondering. The book is an object I think on and with.
We do not, I think, get lost in books, so much as catch and lose and tangle their details in the narratives of our own lives. The idea of fictional absorption – of becoming another person, of falling in love with a book – is strange to me. But perhaps this is just me. I am a careless reader, losing most of what I see along the way. A careless reader of books and, at times, of people.
Because being at one with another person is something I feel I have never quite understood. As I make my daily journey from home to work and back again, or down the landing from the bathroom to bed, or as I stand in the kitchen making breakfast, or hunting for packed lunch items that are not there, from the back of a fridge that has frosted up and been sprayed by an exploding can of Fanta, I wonder if there is some vital bit of heart that I’ve missed. Real love, real life – like a real imaginative encounter – is meant to be all-encompassing, transformative, metaphysical. For me, it feels more like a stop on a railway line that I pass on a regular basis, seen through the glass at speed. Somewhere I do not belong, or don’t deserve, or don’t fully believe in any more. (Maybe I’m not on a stopping service.)
The journey has worn me down, but I wanted to believe, once upon a time.
I was six years old, sitting on an orange plastic chair in a darkened assembly hall. A nine-year-old boy was singing, dressed in a waistcoat and knickerbockers, accompanied by an out-of-tune school piano, stage right. He was singing about love and asking where it was, and I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.
As Bill Sykes came out of the wings to sit on his mum’s lap, Oliver rubbed his nose with the back of his hand, and embarked on the second verse. The sadness of his song struck me then, as now. The words stretched out into the air for so long that the question seemed to lose its question mark. Where air air rare is she, he sang. With the introduction of ‘she’, love became the act of loving, a thing one person does, not a thing in itself. But the opening lines still ghost the song. Where is love? There’s a conviction in those words, that love has coordinates. A belief that love is in a place, and, like a geocache or Pokémon Go, it must, therefore, be out there. For Oliver, stuck in the cellar of Mr Sowerberry’s funeral parlour, love is a thing lying hidden on a map. It exists apart, over the rainbow, a thing gone astray. The lost properties of love.
But what are the properties of lostness, if lostness is a property that love possesses? Lost can be missing a geographical place. Off the map you expect to be on. Or being lost can be a kind of rapture. A surrender. Lost, like love, is when you cannot find yourself. Lost in love is when you are vulnerable to change. I think back on losing myself with you.
Someone I nearly loved is dying.
Ghost Train
Why nearly loved?
Something changes in a child’s heart when they lose a parent. If you aren’t careful, it changes for ever. Dead dads. Count them up. It’s easy to miss the fact that Anna Karenina was an orphan. Her husband too. Tolstoy lost his father when he was nine. His mother when he was two. It left him desolate. He looked around for someone or something that might stand for pure love. None will do, he wrote in his diary. To whom shall I cling?
Kate Field was still young by most standards when her father died. It was 1856, and she was seventeen. She was one of the last to know. Away at school in Boston, the night of the school play. Field stands, still as a statue, in a series of tableaux sketches, before singing ‘Come è Bello’ and ‘She Wore a Wreath of Roses’ to an audience of a hundred worthy Bostonians. The idea of people playing at statues was quite a thing in the nineteenth century – and Field was playing the role of an audience member, her eyes focused on the centre of the imaginary action. She was, the papers said, the most observed of all observers.
Halfway through the evening, a telegram arrived. Joseph Field had died, unexpectedly, 1,400 miles away in Mobile, Alabama. Not wishing to disrupt the action, or shock the players, the school matron stood in the wings, holding the envelope, and let the show go on. There Field posed, a living statue, dead still, not knowing that she was enjoying her last hour of still not knowing.
Joseph Field had been her rock and her hero. The only one she adored. The world without him seemed, she wrote, so sad, so strange, so desolate. Where shall I find a second father? She was lost without him.
What is worse for those left behind? (I am concerned only with those left behind.) To lose someone suddenly? Or to witness the gradual trickling away of life? Slow death is like watching a building being dismantled before your eyes. The back wall, the side walls, the roof – all taken away. Catheters and morphine pumps and jejunal tubes hold it together for a while – prosthetic body parts, like struts behind a façade. And then it crumbles. When it has finally gone, with a slow death, you have had the time to track the collapse. You can walk the painfully disintegrating stairs, the holes in the roof. You can trace the routes around the house with your eyes. You have time to touch the wall and feel the bumps and the grain. To walk among the archways and watch the fallen stones. With a slow death, even as they lie there, you can be with them. Revisiting the memories. Walking down their corridors, rearranging the furniture. It is my preference.
With sudden death we read the signs too late. We realise too late what we could have done or said. To be told that someone you love is gone, unexpectedly, is as if the building exploded while your back was turned. You may receive the
news formally, or gravely. You might read it in a newspaper or on Twitter. RIP #muchmissed. A policeman might come to the door. Or someone might just tell you casually, on a street corner. Oh, hadn’t you heard? It exploded last Thursday. Terrible mess. Unbelievable. Something in your windpipe rises and descends and then drops, as if swallowing itself into your stomach. It hurts. You drop to the ground and start looking for the pieces. Buildings can’t just vanish into thin air. You try to remember how it looked, how it was put together – but it is no good. You go to the site, but you are too late. It has been built over. People walk past the hole where it stood, as if the world hasn’t fallen apart. You wish you had taken the time to walk up the stairs and admire the view last Thursday. You nearly went there for coffee. But it is too late. There isn’t even a hole in the ground. Just scaffolding, and passing traffic.
A fair percentage of people who lose a loved one try to get them back. The nucleus accumbens in the brain works overtime. Dense with dopamine and yearning, the bereaved will try what they will. Horoscopes and mediums. Chantings and regression. Kate Field tried too. At first she thought to find him in the spirit world, making plans to visit two sisters who famously haunted Boston with their (later found to be fraudulent) séances. Then she tried to write her way back to him, even borrowing his pen name for her newspaper columns. He wrote as ‘Straws’. She was ‘Straws Jr.’. Later she got haunted, walking down Broadway to Kirby’s bookstore at number 663. There, amid the high-end toiletries and croquet sets, was the latest in table-rapping accessories, the Planchette. The newspaper ads promised that this small board on wheels would send word from her father from beyond the grave. Kirby’s Planchette was a capricious ghostwriter, which claimed to channel one’s natural magnetism in order to commune with the spirit world.
The Lost Properties of Love Page 8