Trainoholic

I sneaked out of the house, making as subtle an exit as possible. Zare had fallen asleep just a little before I had to leave for the train station, and even though I felt like waking him up to give him a little hug, I didn't. He was curled in a small pile underneath the bed cover in my study, invisible, heaving almost imperceptibly in the rhythm of deep sleep. I stroked him lightly through the bed cover, feeling the kitty warmth oozing from underneath, thinking, this is the best way to leave.

* * * *

I was certainly not going to take it. 20 hours on the train, and no window seat equals a death sentece (or thereabouts). So I was quiet for about 15 minutes, sitting calmly next to a girl who shoved a trunk-looking thing under her feet, and immeditely opened a book (a Dalhousie student, no doubt, just like dozens of others at Montreal's Gare Centrale that evening, all wearing pyjama-like pants and flip-flops, hauling pillows, backpacks, suspicious boxes, and sitting on the floor in the boarding line-up, playing cards or reading Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying -- obviously, Anthony Stewart is still teaching it...). Then I went for a stroll in the cars ahead, hunting for a big, unclaimed, promising window. In the very next car, I found it, in the one-seat row: a novelty in this upgrade of The Ocean servicing between Montreal and Halifax. Forgotten, abandoned, or overlooked, there it was: a perfectly untaken, open-eyed seat. I went back for my stuff and transferred it in stages to the new spot, making sure to take with me also the yellow post-it square with "HX 1"on it (a truncated reminder of my destination and travelling situation), which the train personnel had diligently glued above each taken seat (this is so they can wake up the poor suckers who get off in the middle of the night in places like Rimouski -- at 2 a.m., or Campbellton -- 6 a.m.). I took my boots off, stuck the earphones in my ears, ordered tea, and was set for the deep darkness gliding by seamlessly outside the window, relieved with sporadic glittering of the Christmas lights in lonesome houses or along a small town's main street... a pathetic and heroic attempt to battle the sun's turned back in winter time...

* * * *


The two seats across the aisle to my left are taken by a couple. She seems slightly older (perhaps in her mid-forties), and is reading aloud from a book, while he listens, his head leaning towards her shoulder. She's reading Love in the Time of Cholera, but the words are muffled by the steady, jerky noise of the train, enclosing them in a sound booth meant just for the two of them. Later he pulls out a laptop and edits a text, while she changes the book she was reading aloud for another one, and reads on silently.



Makes me think of a middle-aged couple I saw in passing once on Du Fort close to PA store one summer afternoon: they were on the steps of a house, on their way out. She was standing on a step higher than the step on which he was sitting. Her gaze was fixed somewhere across the street; on the step below, his head bent, he was rolling up her trouser legs. Out in the public, they were having a curiously intimate moment...



* * * *


An hour into the trip (nineteen more to go), I got up to stretch my legs and walked towards the lounge, through the packed car from which I moved. Wait a minute. I stopped, taken by surprise for a second. In front of me stretched a long, totally empty car, without a trace of the recent human presence. No people, no bags, no pillows, no blankets, no girl with her trunk, no nothing. What happened? I walked slowly forward, looking left and right, above and underneath the seats, expecting to see at least overlooked litter, but it looked as if someone had surgically removed anything and anyone that had been there just an hour before. Were they evacuated for some reason? Abducted by strange and selective extraterrestrial forces? Or -- which was the least likely possibility -- had all the passengers in that train car somehow decided to act in unison, and spontaneously migrated to another car beyond the lounge? I never found out, but it looked like the beginning of a good sci-fi story.


* * * *



In the transitional space between two cars, I cast a sideways glance at the firmly barred door beyond which was the flitting night, and I remembered. It was September 20 1992, and I was on the train from Belgrade to Knjazevac with my mother. I don't know any more if we were simply going to visit my grandparents and my brother (who at that point must have just got there from Bosnia, after my parents decided to send him away from the ballooning war), or if she was already looking for a new job in her native town (which she would eventually find but abandon after a year amidst the economic collapse breaking Serbia's back at the time, and return to Bosnia, where my father was trapped all along). In just such an in-between space between two wagons of the old-fashioned JZ train (Jugoslovenske zeleznice, or Yugoslav Railways) -- with the cracks between the metal parts in the floor through which you could see the railway tracks underneath -- we stopped next to the train door at the very back and looked out. I never understood why mom did what she did -- perhaps she wanted to let in some fresh air -- but she pressed the handle and gently pushed the metal door, expecting it to crack open a few centimeters. Instead, the door was blown wide open by the inertia and the forward movement, and clanged heavily against the side of the train, remaining stubbornly out of the reach and leaving the two of us exposed to the whizzing outdoors. We were scared stiff and rooted to the spot, not knowing what to do; luckily, a man who was nearby jumped over and, holding to the door-frame with one hand, leaned forward and reached the door with the other, closing it. My mother thanked him in a vulnerable and flustered voice, and we went back to our seats, a little shaky in the knees.




Funny, how such images spring as if out of nowhere. (And all the while my brain was singing I saved it I saved it I saved it



from the

dark-

ness...)


* * * *






In Campbellton, shortly before dawn, I'm stretching on the platform, among the smokers, and a few people using the brief stop-over to walk and feed their dogs, deliriously happy to be out in the snow. I wonder if anybody takes their cat on a train ride? Soon we're back in motion.



In the gray tail-end of the night, frozen laundry hangs rigidly on the line in one yard; only the black tips of the tombstones stick out from the snow in a road-side cemetery.



In Moncton, the air already has a sea whiff in it.

* * * *

In Halifax, my destination (where the train finally stopped just because there's nowhere else to go) , my body still felt the rocking motion and the ground seemed wobbly for a few minutes after disembarkment (or detraining, as they say).


Then there was F running towards me down the platform.


Then things were the same and different at the same time.



Like this encounter in my favourite bookstore in Halifax -- The Bookmark, on Spring Garden Road. At the end of an aimless stroll, I walked in, looked through the shelves briefly, picked out a promising book, and went to the cashier. Looking up, I recognized the girl working behind the counter -- I used to know her through another friend -- and she recognized me the very same moment, remembering even my name. "Hey, it's Stacy, right?" I said by way of greeting her, proud that I retrived her name from some spiderwebby corner of the mind. She hesitated for a couple of seconds before she said yes, enough for me to show puzzlement on my face. She quickly explained with a smile, "I changed my name three years ago. Now I'm Frances."


* * * *

F and I were walking gingerly around big pools of melting snow on Robie Street, with my duffle bag between us (the pair of white shoelaces my father gave me, for fun, 10 years ago when I left still in the front right pocket), holding one handle each. At the crossing with Spring Garden, we stopped, placing the bag on our boots; I pulled out my cellphone and dialed David, looking at his apartment building, half a block down on Spring Garden. "Hello?" - "Go to your front window and look towards Robie, now." In two seconds he showed up in the bay window above the street, and saw us. All three of us waved, and that was it. F and I continued towards the bus stop across the street, then Number 7 came, and I was off to a replay of the same scenes in reverse, like a long long music video in my head...