Night Train

March 7, 2007

The train rocks…

Finally, we’re alone in our coach and can extinguish the light and try to sleep. We can stretch out along seats where before had been an Italian girl and Moroccan man swept up with intense conversation. Such chemistry between them that they talked nonstop from Venice to beyond Verona, in what amounts to a new Esperanto, their common second language of English, speaking on all manner of subjects: Judaism, Christianity and Islam; travel experiences; the romanticism of Paris; and most interestingly the United States. They spoke with such interest to one another that they seemed not to acknowledge our presence. Who did they think we were? Where did they assume we were from? Become like flies on walls, it was funny to hear their opinions: She would not like to travel to America, believing it all to be “deserts and big cities.” She acknowledges there is possibly more, relating how she met an American soldier who had shown her photos of home. “There are actually mountains there, and even snow!” she says with genuine surprise. He speaks of how dense Americans are and uninterested in the rest of the world. “They would not be able to find France on a map,” he insists, though she defends in saying he would have a hard time finding Massachusetts. An exchange of contact information and they’re gone, each at their respective stops. And we can perhaps close our eyes and sleep.

The train lurches…

We’re in a new town, a new station, who can tell where in the mystery and fog of night? I imagine it is Austria, raising my weary head to the window and squinting my eyes to a lamp-lit rail yard with old buildings and spotty patches of snow. The conductor arrives, a shadow in the corridor of the train car. We present our tickets and passports. He studies, nods approval. Is gone. Hard to believe what has transpired at the last station, somewhere in northern Italy: a man growing increasingly belligerent after a confrontation with another conductor. Does he not have a ticket? Is he desperate to get to some destination? We hear loud exchanges of words unintelligible to us. There is a sudden banging in the corridor but we cannot see. We can tell then by the sound that the man is outside, screaming, shrieking in Italian in protestation of…something. We cannot see. So we watch the faces of those waiting on the platform. They seem concerned, and suddenly they react. Police running - two, now four - the belligerent man is wrestled to the ground, is hauled away. What the hell has happened? Did the man accost the conductor? Is he an African immigrant claiming discriminatory treatment? Is he a poor man trying for a free ride? No answers found in the distorted faces of those on the platform, those who now cower in an enclosed waiting booth, worried eyes pressed to glass. No explanation of what we have witnessed, while we sit wishing for a lock on our coach’s door, later to fall into a troubled sleep.

And the train clacks arrhythmically on into the night.