Night Train to Lisbon

by Pascal Mercier

  Thank you for the trust you have always shown me and for the good co-operation. You will find – I’m sure – the right words to explain my decision to the students, words that will let them know how much I liked working with them. Before I left yesterday, I looked at them and thought: How much time they still have before them!

  In the hope of your understanding and with best wishes for you and your work, I remain yours,

  Raimund Gregorius

  P.S. I left my books on the desk. Would you pick them up and make sure nothing happens to them?

  Gregorius mailed the letter at the railway station and boarded the train. He found a seat at the window and his hands shook as he polished his glasses and made sure he had his passport, ticket and address book. When the train left for Geneva, it was snowing big, slow flakes.

  4

  For as long as possible, Gregorius’s eyes clung to the last houses of the city. When they had finally and irrevocably disappeared from view, he took out his notebook and started writing down the names of the students he had taught over the years. He started with the previous year and worked backwards into the past. For every name he sought a face, a characteristic gesture and a telling episode. He had no trouble with the last three years, but then he kept having the feeling that somebody was missing. In the mid-nineties, the classes consisted of only a few faces and names, and then the chronological sequence blurred. What remained were only a few boys and girls who stood out.

  He shut the notebook. From time to time, in the city, he had run into a student he had taught many years earlier. They weren’t boys and girls now, but men and women with spouses, professions and children. He was taken aback when he saw the changes in their faces: sometimes a premature bitterness, a harried look, a symptom of serious illness. But what usually startled him was the simple fact that the altered faces indicated the incessant passing of time and the merciless decline of all living things. Then he looked at his hands with their first age spots, and sometimes he took out photos of himself as a student and tried to visualize what it had been like to live through this long stretch to the present, day after day, year after year. On such days, he was jumpier than usual and then would appear unannounced at Doxiades’s office so that he could once again dispel his fear of going blind. Encounters with former students who had lived many years abroad, on other continents, in other climates, with other languages, threw him off balance the most. And you? Still in Kirchenfeld? they asked, and their movements showed their impatience to move on. At night, after such an encounter, first he would defend himself against these questions and later against the feeling of having to defend himself.

  And now, with all this going through his head, he sat in the train, after more than twenty-four hours without sleep, and travelled towards a future as uncertain as any he had ever had to contemplate.

  The stop in Lausanne was a temptation. Across the same platform was the train to Bern. Gregorius caught it and looked at the clock. If he took a taxi to Kirchenfeld, he could still make the fourth period. The letter – he would have to catch the postman tomorrow or ask Kägi to give him back the envelope unopened. Unpleasant but not impossible. Now his look fell on the notebook on the compartment table. Without opening it, he saw the list of student names. And all of a sudden, he understood: what had started as the temptation to hold on to something familiar after the last houses of Bern slipped away, had become more like a farewell as the hours passed. To be able to part from something, he thought as the train started moving, you had to confront it in a way that created internal distance. You had to turn the unspoken, diffuse self-understanding it had wrapped around you into a clarity that showed what it meant to you. And that meant it had to congeal into something with distinct contours. Something as distinct as the list of the many students who had meant more to his life than anything else. Gregorius felt as if the train, now rolling out of the railway station, was leaving a piece of him behind, as if he was marooned on an ice floe that had come loose in a mild earthquake, in an open cold sea.

  As the train picked up speed, he fell asleep and woke up only when he felt it draw to a halt at Geneva. On the way to the French high-speed train, he was as excited as if he had set out for a trip on the Trans-Siberian Railway. As soon as he had taken his seat, the carriage filled up with a group of French tourists. Hysterical chatter filled the car, and when someone in an open coat bent over him to put a suitcase on the storage shelf, Gregorius’s glasses were knocked off. Then he did something he had never done before: he took his things and moved into first class.

  The few opportunities he had had to travel first class had been twenty years ago. It had been Florence who had urged it; he had followed her and sat down on the expensive cushion feeling like a fraud. Do you find me boring? he had asked her after one of those trips. What? But Mundus, you can’t ask me such a thing! she had said and ran her hand through her hair as she always did when she was at a loss. Now, when the train started moving, as Gregorius stroked the elegant upholstery with both hands, his act seemed like a belated, childish revenge he didn’t really understand. He was glad nobody was sitting near by who could have witnessed the foolish feeling.

  He was shocked at the extra amount he had to pay the conductor, and when the man had gone, he counted his money twice. He whispered the pin number of his credit card to himself and wrote it in the notebook. Shortly after, he tore out the page and threw it away. In Geneva, it had stopped snowing and now he saw the sun again for the first time in weeks. It warmed his face behind the windowpane and he calmed down. He had always had much too much money in his savings account, he knew that. What’s going on with your money? said the bank clerk when she saw how much had accumulated because he withdrew so little. You must do something with your money! She invested it for him and so, over the years, he had become a prosperous man who seemed oblivious to his prosperity.

  Gregorius thought of the two Latin books he had left on the desk this time yesterday. The name Anneli Weiss was on the flyleaf, written in ink in a childish hand. In his youth there wasn’t money for new books, so he had scoured the city until he found used copies in second-hand bookshops. When he produced his find, his father’s Adam’s apple had moved fiercely; it always did when something weighed on his mind. At first, Gregorius was bothered by the strange name in the book. But then he had imagined the previous owner as a girl with white knee socks and windblown hair, and soon he wouldn’t have exchanged the used book for a new one at any price. Nevertheless, he had later enjoyed being able to buy old texts in beautiful, expensive editions with the money he started earning as a substitute teacher. That was now more than thirty years ago, and still seemed a little unreal to him. Only recently, he had stood at his bookshelves and marvelled that he had been able to afford such a library.

  Slowly, these memory images were distorted into dream images in which the slim book where his mother wrote down what she earned from cleaning kept popping up like a tormenting will-o’-the-wisp. He was glad when he was awakened by the noise of a smashing glass further up the carriage.

  An hour to Paris. Gregorius sat down in the dining car and looked out on to a bright, early spring day. And there, all of a sudden, he realized that he was in fact making this trip – that it wasn’t only a possibility, something he had thought up during a sleepless night, but something that really and truly was taking place. And the more space he gave this feeling, the more it seemed to him that the relation of possibility and reality was beginning to change. Kägi, his school and all the students listed in his notebook really had existed, but only as possibilities that had been accidentally realized. But what he was experiencing in this moment – the sliding motion and muted thunder of the train, the slight clink of the glasses on the next table, the odour of rancid oil coming from the kitchen, the smoke of the cigarette the cook now and then puffed – possessed a reality that had nothing to do with mere possibility, but was filled with the density and overwhelming inevitability that marked something utterly real.

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bsp; Gregorius sat before the empty plate and the steaming cup of coffee and had the feeling of never having been so awake in his whole life. And it seemed to him that it wasn’t a matter of degree, as when you slowly shook off sleep until you were fully alert. It was different. It was a different, new kind of wakefulness, a state of being in the world that he had never known before. When the Gare de Lyon came in sight, he went back to his seat and afterwards, when he set foot on the platform, it seemed to him as if, for the first time, he was fully aware of getting off a train.

  5

  The force of memory hit him unprepared. He hadn’t forgotten that this had been their first railway station, their first arrival together in a foreign city. Naturally he hadn’t forgotten that. But he hadn’t figured that, when he stood here, it would be as if no time at all had elapsed. The green iron girders and the red pipes. The arches. The translucent roof.

  ‘Let’s go to Paris!’ Florence had suddenly said at the first breakfast in his kitchen, arms wound around a drawn-up leg.

  ‘You mean …’

  ‘Yes, now. Right now!’

  She had been his student, a pretty, usually dishevelled girl who turned all heads with her provocative moodiness. From one term to the next, she had become first-rate in Latin and Greek, and the first time he entered the optional Hebrew class that year, she was sitting in the front row. But Gregorius would never have even dreamed it could have anything to do with him.

  The matriculation exam came and another year went by before they met in the university cafeteria and sat there until they were thrown out.

  ‘What a blind worm you are!’ she said when she took off his glasses. ‘You didn’t notice anything! Everybody knew! Everybody!’

  It was correct, thought Gregorius, in the taxi taking him to Gare Montparnasse, that he was a person who didn’t notice such things – one who was so inconspicuous even to himself that he couldn’t have believed that someone could have strong feelings for him – him! But with Florence he was right in the end.

  ‘You never really meant me.’ Those were the only accusing words he had said to her during their five-year marriage. They had burned like fire and everything seemed to turn to ashes.

  She had looked at the floor. In spite of everything, he had hoped for denial. It hadn’t come.

  La Coupole. Gregorius hadn’t expected to drive along Boulevard Montparnasse and see the restaurant where their separation had been sealed without a word. He asked the driver to stop and looked silently for a while at the red awning with the yellow letters and the three stars left and right. It had been an honour for Florence, a doctoral student, to be invited to this conference on Romance literature. On the phone, she had sounded ecstatic, almost hysterical, he thought, so he had hesitated to meet her for the weekend as arranged. But then he had gone and had met with her new friends in this famous restaurant, whose reputation for the most exquisite food and the most expensive wines had proved to him as soon as he entered that he didn’t belong here.

  ‘One more moment,’ he said to the driver and crossed the street.

  Nothing had changed, and he immediately saw the table where he, very unsuitably dressed, had faced those literary hotshots boldly. They had been talking about Horace and Sappho, he remembered, as he now stood in the way of the hurrying and irritated waiters. Nobody could keep up with him as he quoted verse after verse, crushing to dust the witty aperçus of the well-dressed gentlemen of the Sorbonne with his Bernese accent, one after the other, until the table grew silent.

  On the way home, Florence had sat alone in the dining car while the aftershock of his rage slowly ebbed and gave way to a sadness that he had needed to stand up to her like that; for that’s what it was naturally about.

  Lost in those distant events, Gregorius had forgotten the time and now the taxi driver had to drive at breakneck speed to get him to Gare Montparnasse on time. When he finally sat breathless in his seat and the train for Irún started moving, a sense that had assaulted him in Geneva returned: that it was the train and not he who decided that this very real trip carrying him further out of his former life, hour after hour, station after station, would continue. For three hours, until the train reached Bordeaux, there would be no more stops, no possibility of turning back.

  He looked at the clock. At school, the first day without him was coming to an end. At this time, the six students of Hebrew would be waiting for him. At six, after the double class, he had sometimes gone with them to a café, and then he had talked to them of the historical growth and contingency of the biblical texts. Ruth Gautschi and David Lehmann, who wanted to study theology and worked the hardest, kept finding a reason not to go along. A month ago he had questioned them about it. They had the feeling that he was taking something away from them, they had answered evasively. Naturally, these texts could also be examined philologically. After all, they were the Holy Scriptures.

  Gregorius recommended to the Rector that a theology student should be hired to teach Hebrew, one of his former students. With her copper-coloured hair, she had sat in the same place as Florence once had. But his hope that that might not be accidental had been in vain.

  For a few moments his head was perfectly empty, then Gregorius again pictured the face of the Portuguese woman emerging white, almost transparent, from behind the towel. Once again, he stood at the mirror in the school cloakroom and felt that he didn’t want to wipe away the phone number the enigmatic woman had written on his forehead. Once again, he stood up at his desk, took the damp coat off the hook and walked out of the classroom.

  Português. Gregorius started, opened his eyes, and looked out at the flat French landscape, where the sun was now low on the horizon. The word that had been like a melody lost in a dreamy expanse, had suddenly lost its force. He tried to retrieve the magical sound of the voice, but what he managed to grasp was only a rapidly fading echo, and the vain attempt only strengthened the feeling that the precious word, the basis of this whole crazy trip, had slipped away. And it didn’t help that he still knew precisely how the speaker on the language record had pronounced the word.

  He went to the bathroom and held his face under the chlorinated water for a long time. Back in his seat, he took the book by the Portuguese aristocrat out of his bag and started translating the next passage. At first, it was mainly an escape, a desperate attempt, despite the fear, to keep on believing in this trip. But after the first sentence, the text fascinated him again as much as it had in his kitchen the previous night.

  NOBREZA SILENCIOSA. SILENT NOBILITY. It is a mistake to believe that the decisive moments of a life when its direction changes for ever must be marked by sentimental loud and shrill dramatics, manifested by violent inner surges. This is a sentimental fairy tale invented by drunken journalists, flashbulb happy film-makers and readers of the tabloids. In truth, the dramatic moments of a life-determining experience are often unbelievably low-key. It has so little in common with the bang, the flash, or the volcanic eruption that, at the moment it happens, the experience is often not even noticed. When it unfolds its revolutionary effect, and ensures that a life is revealed in a brand-new light, with a brand-new melody, it does that silently and in this wonderful silence resides its special nobility.

  From time to time, Gregorius glanced up from the text and looked out to the west. In the remaining brightness of the twilight sky, it seemed the sea could now be imagined. He put the dictionary away and shut his eyes.

  If I could see the sea just once, his mother had said six months before her death, as if she felt that the end was near; but we simply can’t afford that.

  What bank will give me a loan, Gregorius heard the father say, and for such a thing?

  Gregorius had been angry with him for his placid resignation. And then, he, who was still a student in Kirchenfeld, had done something that surprised him so much he never shook off the feeling that maybe it hadn’t really happened.

  It was late March, early spring. People hung their coats over their arms, and mild air strea
med into the annexe through the open window. The annexe had been put up a few years earlier because the Gymnasium had outgrown the main building, and it had become a tradition to put the seniors there. Moving to the annexe seemed the first step towards graduation. Feelings of liberation and fear balanced each other. One more year and then it was finally over … One more year and then you had to … These alternating feeling were expressed in the way the students strolled to the annexe, nonchalant and scared at the same time. Even now, forty years later in the train to Irún, Gregorius could feel how it had been to be in his body back then.

  The afternoon began with Greek. It was the Rector who taught them, Kägi’s predecessor. He had the most beautiful Greek handwriting you could imagine; he drew the letters ceremonially, and the loops especially – as in Omega or Theta, or when he pulled the Eta down – were the purest calligraphy. He loved Greek. But he loved it in the wrong way, thought Gregorius at the back of the classroom. His way of loving it was a conceited way. It wasn’t by celebrating the words. If it had been that – Gregorius would have liked it. But when this man wrote out the most difficult verb froms, he celebrated not the words, but rather himself as one who knew them. The words thus became ornaments to him, he adorned himself with them, they turned into something like the polka-dotted bow tie he wore year in, year out. They flowed from his writing hand with the signet ring as if they too were a kind of signet ring, a conceited jewel and just as superfluous. And so, the Greek words really stopped being Greek words. It was as if the gold dust from the signet ring corroded their Greek essence that was revealed only to those who loved it for its own sake. Poetry for the Rector was like an exquisite piece of furniture, a fine wine or an elegant evening gown. Gregorius had the feeling that the Rector robbed him of the verses of Aeschylus and Sophocles with this smugness. He seemed to know nothing of Greek theatre. Or rather, he knew everything about it, was often in Greece, guided educational tours there and came back with a suntan. But he didn’t understand anything about it – even if Gregorius couldn’t have said what he meant by that.