Night Train to Lisbon

by Pascal Mercier

  He had gazed out of the open window of the annexe and thought of his mother’s words, words which had exacerbated his rage at the Rector’s conceit, even though he couldn’t have explained the connection. He felt the blood pulse in his throat. A look at the board assured him that it would take the Rector a while to finish the sentence he had started before he turned round to explain it to the students. As the others went on writing with bent backs, he pushed his chair back without a sound. He left the open notebook on his desk. With the tense slowness of someone preparing a surprise attack, he took two steps to the open window, sat down on the sill, swung his legs over and was outside.

  The last thing he saw inside the classroom was the amazed and amused face of Eva, the girl with red hair, freckles, and the squint that had always rested on him mockingly, to his despair, on the boy wearing the thick glasses with the cheap and ugly frames. She turned to her benchmate and whispered something in her ear. ‘Unbelievable!’ She said it all the time. And so she was called Unbelievable. ‘Unbelievable!’ she had said when she heard about her nickname.

  Gregorius had walked quickly to Bärenplatz. It was a market, and you made your way slowly from one stall to another. When the crowd forced him to stop at a stand, his eye fell on the open cashbox, a simple metal case with one compartment for coins and another for notes, which formed a thick pile. The market woman was now bending over, fiddling with something on the stand, her broad behind jutting out in the coarse cloth of a checked dress. Gregorius had slowly pushed his way towards the cashbox, his look circling over the people near by. With two steps, he was behind the counter, had grabbed the bundle of notes and plunged into the crowd. When he went up the street to the railway station, panting, and forcing himself to walk calmly, he expected somebody to call him from behind or take hold of him. But nothing had happened.

  They lived on Länggasse, in a grey apartment house with dirty plasterwork, and when Gregorius mounted the staircase, which smelt of cabbage from morning to night, he saw himself surprising his sick mother with the announcement that she would soon be seeing the sea. Only when he reached the apartment door did he realize that the whole thing was impossible, absolutely ludicrous. How was he to explain to her, and later to his father, how he had suddenly come by so much money? He, who had no experience of lying?

  On the way back to Bärenplatz, he bought an envelope and stuck the bundle of notes inside. The woman in the checked dress had a tear-stained face when he returned to her stand. He chose some fruit and when she was busy with the scales at the other end of the stall, he pushed the envelope under the vegetables. Shortly before the end of break, he was back at school, had climbed into the annexe through the open window and sat down in his seat.

  ‘Unbelievable!’ said Eva when she saw him and she began to regard him with more respect than before. But that was less important than he had thought. More important was that the discovery about himself made in the past hour didn’t inspire any horror in him, but only a great amazement that reverberated for weeks.

  When the train left Bordeaux station for Biarritz it was getting dark and Gregorius saw himself reflected in the window. What would have become of him if the person who had taken the money out of the cashbox back then had determined his life instead of the one who began to love the ancient silent words so much that he granted them sovereignty over everything else? What did that breakout have in common with this one now? Anything?

  Gregorius reached for Prado’s book and searched for the laconic note the man in the Spanish bookshop on Hirschengraben had translated for him:

  Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us – what happens to the rest?

  In Biarritz, a man and woman got on, stood by the seat in front of Gregorius and discussed their seat reservation. Vinte e oito. It took him a while to identify the repeated sounds as Portuguese words and to confirm his assumption: twenty-eight. He concentrated on what they were saying and now and then in the next half-hour he managed to make out a few words. Tomorrow morning, he would arrive in a city where most of what the people said would be incomprehensible to him. He thought of Bubenplatz, Bärenplatz, Bundesterrasse, the Kirchenfeldbrücke. Meanwhile, it had become pitch-dark outside. Gregorius felt for his money, his credit cards, and his spare pair of glasses. He was feeling anxious.

  At the French border town of Hendaye the carriage emptied. When the Portuguese couple noticed that, they panicked and grabbed their suitcases from the shelf. ‘Isto ainda não é Irún,’ said Gregorius: This isn’t yet Irún. It was a sentence from the language course record; only the name of the town was different. The Portuguese people hesitated because of his awkward pronunciation and the slowness with which he strung the words together. But they looked out and now they saw the railway station sign. ‘Muito obrigada,’ said the woman. ‘De nada,’ replied Gregorius. The Portuguese couple sat down, the train went on.

  Gregorius was never to forget this scene. They were his first Portuguese words in the real world and they worked. That words could cause something in the world, make someone move or stop, laugh or cry: even as a child he had found it extraordinary and it had never stopped impressing him. How did words do that? Wasn’t it like magic? But at this moment, the mystery seemed greater than usual, for these were words he hadn’t even known yesterday morning. A few minutes later, when he set foot on the platform of Irún, all fear had vanished, and he walked confidently towards the Lisbon train.

  6

  It was ten o’clock when the train that would cross the Iberian Peninsula the next morning started moving; the dreary railway station lamps slid past one after another into the dark. The compartment next to Gregorius had remained empty. Two compartments down, towards the dining car, a tall slim man with greying hair was leaning against his door. ‘Boa noite,’ he said when their eyes met. ‘Boa noite,’ said Gregorius.

  When he heard the awkward pronunciation, a smile flitted over the stranger’s face. It was a chiselled face with clear, definite features, and there was something distinguished and reserved about it. The man’s dark clothing was conspicuously elegant and made Gregorius think of the lobby of an opera house. Only the loosened tie didn’t fit. Now the man folded his arms over his shirt, leaned his head against the door and shut his eyes. With his eyes shut, the face looked very white and radiated fatigue, a fatigue that must have come from other things than the late hour. When the train had reached its full speed a few minutes later, the man opened his eyes, nodded to Gregorius, and disappeared into his compartment.

  Gregorius would have given anything to be able to fall asleep, but even the monotonous beat of the wheels didn’t help. He sat up in the bed and pressed his forehead against the window. Desolate little railway stations slid past, milky, diffuse light bulbs, illegible place-names, parked baggage carts, a head with a cap in a railway halt, a stray dog, a rucksack half-concealing a blond mop of hair. The certainty granted by the first Portuguese words began to crumble. Just call. Day or night. He heard Doxiades’s voice and thought of their first meeting twenty years earlier, when the Greek still had a strong accent.

  ‘Blind? No. You’ve just had a bad time with your eyes. We check the retina regularly. Besides, there are lasers now. No reason to panic.’ On the way to the door, he had stood still and looked at him intensely. ‘Any other concerns?’

  Gregorius had shaken his head mutely. Only a few months later did he tell Doxiades that he had seen the divorce from Florence coming. The Greek had nodded, it seemed not to surprise him. Sometimes we’re afraid of something because we’re afraid of something else, he had said.

  Shortly before midnight, Gregorius went into the dining car. It was empty except for the man with greying hair who was playing chess with the waiter. In fact, the car was closed, the waiter indicated, but then he got Gregorius a mineral water and beckoned him to join them. Gregorius quickly saw that the man, who had put on a pair of gold-framed glasses, had fallen into the waiter’s cunning trap. With his hand on the chess piece, the man
looked at him before he made his move. Gregorius shook his head and the man withdrew his hand. The waiter, a man with calloused hands whose coarse features didn’t seem to suggest a brain for chess, looked up surprised. Now the man with the gold-framed glasses turned the board towards Gregorius and gestured to him to play in his place. It was a long, tough struggle and it was two o’clock when the waiter gave up.

  Afterwards, when they stood at his compartment door, the man asked Gregorius where he was from and they spoke in French. He took this train every two weeks, the man said, and only once had he been able to beat this waiter, while he usually beat others. He introduced himself: José António da Silveira. He was, he said, a businessman and sold porcelain in Biarritz; and he took the train because he was afraid of flying.

  ‘Who knows the real reasons for his fear?’ he said after a pause and now the exhaustion Gregorius had noted earlier appeared again on his face.

  Then, when he explained how he had taken over his father’s little business and had built it into a big firm, he talked about himself as if about somebody else, who had made thoroughly understandable but altogether wrong decisions. And it sounded the same when he talked of his divorce and the two children he hardly saw any more. Disappointment and sadness were in his voice, and what impressed Gregorius was his lack of self-pity.

  ‘The problem is,’ said Silveira, as the train stopped at Valladolid station, ‘that we have no grasp of our life as a whole. Neither forward nor backward. If something goes well, we just attribute it to good luck.’ An invisible hammer tested the brakes. ‘And how do you come to be on this train?’

  They sat on the bed in Silveira’s compartment as Gregorius told his story. He left out the Portuguese woman on the Kirchenfeldbrücke. That was something he could tell Doxiades, not a stranger. He was glad Silveira didn’t ask to see Prado’s book. He didn’t want anybody else to read it and pass comment on it.

  There was silence when he had finished. Silveira’s mind was busy, Gregorius saw from the way he turned his signet ring and the brief, shy glances he cast at him.

  ‘And you just got up and left the school? Just like that?’

  Gregorius nodded. Suddenly he regretted talking about it; something precious had been endangered. Now he wanted to get some sleep, he said. Silveira took out a little notebook. Would he repeat to him the words of Marcus Aurelius about the impulses of one’s soul? When Gregorius left his compartment, Silveira sat bent over his notebook copying down the words.

  Gregorius dreamed of red cedars. The words cedros vermelhos kept flickering through his restless sleep. It was the name of the publisher of Prado’s book. He hadn’t paid any special attention to it previously. It was only Silveira’s question of how he could get in touch with the author that reminded him he would first have to find this publishing house. Maybe Amadeu de Prado had published the book privately, Gregorius thought as he fell asleep; then the red cedars would have had a meaning known only to him. In his dream, Gregorius wandered with the mysterious name on his lips and the phone book under his arm, through the twisted, steeply rising streets of Lisbon, lost in a faceless city, knowing only that it was set on hills.

  When he awoke at six o’clock and saw the name Salamanca before his compartment window, out of the blue, a sluicegate of memory opened that had remained closed for four decades. The first thing it released was the name of another city: Isfahan. Suddenly it was there, the name of the Persian city where he had wanted to go after he finished school. The name bearing so much mysterious strangeness touched Gregorius at this moment, like the code of another possible life he hadn’t dared live. And as the train left Salamanca station, once again he lived through the feelings of thirty years earlier when another life had both opened and closed.

  It had started when, after a year of study, the Hebrew teacher had them read the Book of Job. For Gregorius, it had been intoxicating when he started understanding the sentences and a path opened for him leading into the Orient. In Karl May, the Orient sounded very German, not only because of the language. Now, in the Book of Job, which he had read from cover to cover, it sounded like the Orient. Eliphaz of Telman, Bildad of Shuach, Zofar of Na’ama: even the names of Job’s three friends, in their bewitching foreignness, seemed to come from beyond all oceans. What a wonderful, dreamlike world that was!

  Afterwards, for a while, he had wanted to become an Orientalist. Someone who knew his way around in Morgenland, the East, he loved the German word, it led out of Länggasse into a bright light. Shortly before graduation, he had applied for the position of tutor to the children of a Swiss industrialist in Isfahan. Reluctantly – worried about him, but also fearing the vacuum he would leave behind – his father had given him the thirteen francs thirty for a Persian grammar, and he had written the unfamiliar Oriental characters on the small blackboard in his room.

  But then a dream had begun haunting him, one he seemed to dream all night long. It had been a very simple dream and part of the torment was this simplicity, which seemed to increase the more frequently the image returned. For in fact the dream had consisted of only a single image: hot Oriental sand, desert sand, white and scorching, had blown on to his glasses from the smouldering breath of Persia and had settled like a white-hot crust, robbing him of all sight, melting the lenses of his glasses.

  After two or three weeks, when the dream kept popping up and haunting him far into the day, he had taken back the Persian grammar and returned the money to his father. He was allowed to keep the three francs thirty and it had been as if he now possessed Persian money.

  What would have become of him if he had overcome the fear of the scorching dust of the Orient and had gone to Isfahan? Gregorius thought of how cold-bloodedly he had reached into the cashbox of the market woman. Would that have enabled him to cope with everything that would have assailed him in Isfahan? The Papyrus. Why did that decades-old joke that hadn’t bothered him hurt so much all of a sudden?

  Silveira’s place was empty when Gregorius entered the dining car in the morning, and the Portuguese couple with whom he had exchanged his first Portuguese words in the early evening were already on their second cup of coffee.

  He had spent an hour lying awake in bed, thinking about the postman who would enter the lobby of the Gymnasium at nine and give the mail to the janitor. Today, his letter would be there. Kägi wouldn’t be able to believe his eyes. Mundus was running away from his life. Anybody else, but not him. The news would make the rounds, upstairs and down, and the students on the steps at the entrance would talk of nothing else.

  Gregorius had gone through his colleagues in his mind, imagining what they would think, feel and say. As he did so, he had made a discovery that jolted him: he wasn’t sure of a single one of them. At first, things had looked different: Burri, for instance, an army major and enthusiastic churchgoer, found it incomprehensible, perverse, and reprehensible, because of the effect his disappearance would have on the students; Anita Mühletaler, who had just gone through a divorce, tilted her head pensively, she could imagine such a thing, even if not for herself; Kalbermatten, the skirt-chaser and secret anarchist from Saas-Fee, might say in the staffroom: ‘Why not?’; while Virginie Ledoyen, the French teacher, whose prissy appearance contrasted glaringly with her sparkling name, would react to the news with an executioner’s look. All that seemed quite predictable at first. But then it occurred to Gregorius that he had seen the devout paterfamilias, Burri, a few months ago with a blonde in a short dress who seemed to be more than an acquaintance; how petty Anita Mühletaler could be when students raised hell; how cowardly Kalbermatten was about resisting Kägi; and how easily students who knew how to flatter her could wind Virginie Ledoyen around their little finger and make her drop her strict agenda.

  Could something be inferred from that? Something about their attitude to him and his surprising action? Could concealed understanding or even secret envy be assumed? Gregorius had sat up in bed and was looking out at the landscape steeped in the silvery shimmering green of th
e olive groves. His familiarity with his colleagues all these years turned out to be curdled ignorance that had become deceptive habit. And was it indeed important – really important – to know what they thought of him? Was it only because of his thick head that he didn’t know that or was he becoming aware of a strangeness that had always existed between him and them, but had been hidden behind social rituals?

  Compared with the face that had become open in the dim light of the compartment last night – open to the feelings that thrust out from inside, and open to the look from outside that sought to fathom them – this morning, Silveira’s features were closed. At first glance, it looked as if he regretted exposing himself to a total stranger in the intimacy of the compartment smelling of blankets and disinfectant, and Gregorius sat down hesitantly at his table. But he soon understood: it wasn’t retreat and rejection that was expressed in the firm, controlled features, but rather a pensive sobriety suggesting that the encounter with Gregorius had perplexed Silveira, had provoked surprising feelings he was now trying to figure out.

  He pointed to the phone next to his cup. ‘I’ve reserved a room for you in the hotel where I put up my business partner. Here’s the address.’

  He handed Gregorius a business card with the information written on the back. He had to look through some papers before they arrived, he said, and prepared to stand up. But then he leaned back again and the way he looked at Gregorius proved that something had occurred to him. Had he never regretted devoting his life to ancient languages? he asked. That surely meant a very quiet, withdrawn life.

  Do you find me boring? It occurred to Gregorius how the question he had asked Florence back then had preoccupied him on the trip yesterday and something of that must have shown on his face. Silveira said hastily, please don’t misunderstand, he was only trying to imagine how it would be to live a life that was so completely different from his own.