Stranger on a Train

by Jenny Diski

  ‘Where are you from?’

  The essential first question of all train-travel conversations.

  ‘He’s from the Philippines, and I’m from Bermuda, but we live in Las Vegas.’

  ‘I thought people went on holiday to Las Vegas, not from it.’

  ‘Oh no,’ the man who had been silent began, as if he had explained it many times before but never tired of giving the news out. ‘People think Las Vegas is just casinos. But that’s just the Strip, like Broadway’s got theatres. No, there are people living real lives beyond the Strip. Do you realise that a million people live full-time in Las Vegas? Things have changed. It’s a real city, and growing. We have families, suburbs, everything, just like a regular town.’

  ‘We love Las Vegas,’ the other man said. ‘Can’t wait to get home.’

  We slipped into silence, as I, a little disappointed, came to terms with Las Vegas turning into just another regular place instead of a theme park of American toomuchness. A dowdy woman in her thirties arrived and sat silently in the corner smoking concentratedly. And soon a young black man with short dreadlocks arrived and sat down at the unoccupied table beside her. He lit up and inhaled hard, all the better to sigh deeply as he expelled the air from his lungs.

  ‘Whoa,’ he shook his ringlets slowly. ‘Man, I am coming from a cold situation.’

  ‘Yeah,’ the woman next to him said, nodding, but keeping her eyes down towards the carpet and smoking on. ‘My seat’s up at the front of the coach with people coming through all the time. The door opens and closes, opens and closes. It’s real cold.’

  The young man stared at her for a moment. ‘No, no. I’m coming from a real cold place. From my baby-momma. We had a fight, a bad one so I packed my things and said I’m gone. She said go. Yeah, right, I’m gone. Man, it was a cold situation. You see? So I figured I’d head out west and visit with some brothers who left New York. I reserved a sleeper. I had a sleeper, man, but then I cancelled it because we got back, my momma – we made it up, my baby-momma and me. Next couple of days we fought again, and this time I was really gone. I was outta there in the middle of the fucking night. So I ain’t got no sleeping compartment because now they’re all gone and I gotta spend three nights sitting straight up in those goddamed seats. Three nights. Jesus. If I’d have gone the first time, I’d have had that fucking sleeper. Three fucking nights on a fucking train and no bed. But I tell you what, I’m feeling better with every mile that passes, the further away I get, the better it gets.’

  ‘Yeah,’ the woman next to him said. ‘But it’s real cold where I’m sitting. And they don’t let you change seats.’

  The gay couple threw each other a glance, confirming their good fortune in their own contentment and their warm situation in the world.

  At dinner I was seated in the spare place left by a party of three. Two very elderly men and the middle-aged son of one of them. Only one of the old men spoke throughout the meal. His friend remained silent, occasionally nodding agreements, but mostly concentrating glumly on the apology of a steak he was eating. The man who did speak was garrulous and cheerful and informed me, once he heard my accent, that he had been in the US navy and stationed in Falmouth during World War Two. I regretted that I didn’t know the area, though knowing of it pleased him enough. He had joined up to fight in the war aged fifteen, pretending he was old enough. His son, he told me, had been stationed in Guam during the Vietnam War. The son smiled his agreement. His friend continued to say nothing. They were holidaying, the two friends and the son, as they regularly did, by travelling the trains to fishing spots, and ‘to get away from the women’, he cackled. His son laughed tolerantly (one of the women being his mother) and his friend snorted his agreement.

  ‘You know, it’s so good, getting away, I might send your mother to live permanently with you,’ he teased his son.

  ‘Yeah, you’d be coming to get her soon enough. Once the dishes were piled high.’

  They told me what I needed to know about travelling the trains, what every experienced train traveller or enthusiast would tell me as soon as they asked and I told them why I was on the train. The old men had travelled the US by train to all but five states.

  ‘We’re working on getting the other five under our belts before we die.’

  What they wanted me to know was how terrible the service was, how run down the system had become and what a criminal neglect (or even deliberate destruction) of American heritage that was. The trains were invariably late, and it was because Amtrak’s profit only came from freight; passenger trains were required by law but ran at a loss. Freight, therefore, had priority at all times over passenger trains.

  ‘Course, they’re obliged by the federal government to provide passenger services, but they hell of a don’t care much for it. No money in us. Passengers are just another kind of freight, but not nearly so valuable. It’s all cargo – people, containers, pig iron – but there ain’t no profit in people. Any real business would adapt; supply and demand. Not Amtrak. If more people want to travel than there are seats, that’s just too damn bad. They wouldn’t even think of putting on extra carriages. Some of them freight trains are a mile or more long. You can wait half an hour for them to pass by. The passenger trains have got a set number of coaches and that’s that. So folk can’t rely on getting places on time, and they have to reserve a seat months in advance. Who’s going to use the trains? Just old guys like us with no particular place to go and all the time in the world to go to it, and a few holiday-makers. It’s a crying shame when you think of the history of the railroads. Hell, railroads made this country. Railroads forged a way east and west. Opened up the whole damn landmass. Now they just let the weeds grow if a route isn’t profitable. People died in their hundreds, in their thousands, making the railroads and blasting their way through the mountains. They don’t care. These new people. All they care about is making profits.’

  The other man became quite animated in his nods of agreement, and the son, though he clearly agreed, had the look of someone who had heard this all before and too many times. But the old guy was right. It was extraordinary that the passion and drama that had gone into creating a comprehensive rail network in a country so large that you had to be slightly crazy to dream of it in the first place, had just died away. The achievement was so grand, so saturated in heroics and corruption, and so central to the development of the States, it was hard to believe that people would let it deteriorate into a remnant. But they had.

  So far I had more or less avoided sitting at my seat. Either I was in the observation car while it was daylight watching New York State pass through Pennsylvania into Ohio via Schenectady, Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Erie, Cleveland, Elyria and Sandusky; or I was in my stateless condition in the smoking compartment. Whenever I went to pick up something from my seat – a new pack of cigarettes, money for the bar – the woman and her grandson were asleep. En route from my seat to the smoking coach I passed a group of Amish, a whole bunch of them, taking up several rows at the back of my carriage. Somehow I was surprised to see them out and about, though I shouldn’t have been, because Hollywood has included the Amish in its shadow story of America, and, in Witness, precisely travelling by train. Still, the point of Amish in a movie, even if they are in Grand Central Station and observing a murder, is that they are Amish and their being out of their usual context was the axis of the plot. But here their unreality was startling. There were, I guess, about fifteen or so, and they spanned the generations, tiny children to old men and women. Young families and elderly couples. They spanned the centuries, too. The men wore pudding-basin haircuts under their pudding-crowned flat-brimmed hats, under-chin whiskers, blue workshirts, baggy trousers held up with braces but, because I supposed of their high-tech nature, no flies or even buttons, and heavy black coats. They reminded me of the seven dwarves in Snow White. The women’s faces were scrubbed pink with health and lack of make-up, as if they were permanently blushing, and they wore crisp blue dresses with di
rndl skirts, flat black shoes and pleated white starched bonnets over their heavily controlled straight fair hair. The children were exact miniature versions of their parents, even the smallest; little adults bright-eyed and ready to go to a nineteenth-century fancy dress party. They were charming to look at, and as a group utterly oblivious of their own odd appearance or, if you like, everyone else’s odd appearance. Even the children appeared to show no curiosity about the people around them. They played quietly together or concentratedly alone as if there were nothing interesting to see in the world: all too neat, quiet and well-behaved to be entirely comfortable to observe. They, their parents and grandparents reflected only each other, as if the whole group was a single entity, an inwardly curved one-way mirror. They were perfectly self-contained, the women entertaining and fussing the clothes of the youngest children, the men reading or chatting to each other in a language of immigrants, though not recent immigrants since the language they spoke was Low German from two hundred years back, non-existent now in Europe. They made the interest I had in them, my urge to question them, seem crude and intrusive, although, in all reason, their dress and manner courted attention. But everyone on the train sitting nearby or passing to and fro made a point of ignoring them, as if their quaint clothes and manners were a form of disability that was not to be remarked upon or stared at. How strange it is during childhood that we are told it is rude to point, that is, to point out what is pointedly different, to remark on the remarkable, to notice the noticeable. Don’t look, my mother used to say, whenever there was anything worth looking at. So we all grow up and the fact that there were fifteen throwbacks to another century and another continent sitting among us as if either we or they had made a massive cultural slip was to be treated as nothing out of the ordinary. The young women smoothed the starched aprons of their tiny children playing with puzzle books, whose obedient eyes remained undrawn to the kids in jeans and sweatshirts who passed up and down the aisle with hand-held computer games or zizzing Walkmans, who themselves were oblivious of, or politely tolerant of, the alien presence among them. Me, I wanted to sit down next to them and say, What are you doing? Why? How can you imagine that locking yourselves into the imagination of a people dead for hundreds of years can be godly or whatever it’s supposed to be? Can I come and stay with you and see how it works? But then I find it just as difficult to pass by Hassidic Jews in London without a desire to ask them the same questions and why they think dressing and living in the past will keep them safe from the present. I knew the answer both Amish and Hassidics would give, so that wasn’t really my question. It was really a question about their fear, exclusion, their terror of individuality and modernity, and perhaps also a question about my fascination with such a structured form of rejection of the world. Like monks or junkies. A kind of group-identity that permits abandonment of the world. Why not do it in company and create a firm way of life around the rejection of all other ways of life? There were all kinds of ways to do it. I was once tempted to become a permanent resident in a mental hospital for much the same reasons. A fear of some kind of crucial loss – of individuality, probably – kept me from putting it into action, though individuality and independent thought are troublesome burdens much of the time. In any case, did I know for sure that individuality was suppressed in an Amish community? I made the assumption from the similarity of dress and the religious fervour, but perhaps that’s a crass assumption. Still, when I wanted to hole up in the bin, it was because I wanted to be shrived of the task of being an individual.

  When I returned to the smoking box after dinner there was a strikingly beautiful black man wearing a white collarless shirt and soft cream trousers, and a young Chinese boy sitting next to him, concentrating hard. The beautiful man was explaining to the boy about languages, how he spoke a great many, and the Chinese boy, who evidently did not, or at least English wasn’t yet one of them, was nodding hard with perfect incomprehension in his eyes.

  ‘Welcome. Wilkommen. Bienvenue … You see? It’s easy. And Russian: Dobro pojalovat. I can communicate with people from all over the world. Hello, goodbye, my friend, mon ami, mi amore, muchacho, camarade … Now, you teach me Chinese. You … teach … me … Chinese.’ He pointed at the boy, back at himself and then at his mouth. ‘Speak Chinese. Chink, chink, chink. Hoi sin. Szechwan noodles.’

  The boy nodded, remained baffled and smiled. ‘No good English,’ he said, confessing.

  The linguist lost interest and leaned forward to me across the compartment, forcefully extending a hand. I took it and he enclosed it with his other one.

  ‘You touch an ethnic hand. These are black ethnic pinkies that you are clasping.’

  ‘And very nice, too,’ I smiled.

  ‘English. You’re English. I speak English, too.’ He nudged the ever-amiable Chinese boy. ‘She’s from England. Where we all once came from. Well, not you, or me, but America. She comes from the source of language.’ He turned back to me, still clasping my hand between his and shaking it heartily up and down. ‘I am overwhelmed to meet you. I am known to all my friends as Chef. You are now one of them. Do you ever have tea with the Queen? You can call me Chef.’

  ‘Thanks, Chef. You can call me Jenny. Are you?’

  ‘Am I what?’

  ‘A chef.’

  ‘Ah oui. I am. Ja. Si. Da. I am a multilingual chef of the haute cuisine.’

  The chef was tall and beautiful and either naturally manic or stoned. He had that ebullience and breathless need to talk that could have been either bipolar illness or cocaine. Or he was just a natural comedian. But although he was delightful, I felt a kind of anxious tension in my head and neck that I recognised from being with people close to exploding with manic energy. A scrawny woman in the corner was laughing as the chef babbled on.

  ‘You’re a chef, huh? You make cakes? You make pound cake? I make great pound cake. In my book no one’s a chef unless they make a great pound cake.’

  The chef rattled off his recipe for pound cake.

  ‘Well yeah,’ the woman acknowledged. ‘You know how to make a good pound cake.’

  ‘Did you doubt me? You, chère madame, recognise a great pound cake recipe when you hear one. I salute you. Wait. Wait here.’ He rushed out.

  ‘Crazy guy, eh?’ the woman said. ‘But he might really be a chef.’

  The chef came back, triumphant, and ceremonially placed a pleated, tall paper chef’s hat on the woman. ‘I declare you now an honorary chef, madame.’

  The woman kept the chef’s hat on. ‘Marie’s the name. Can I keep it?’

  ‘Sure, I got a dozen in my bag. I’m on my way to Chicago to cook a lunch for Willie May.’

  An elderly black man in the corner who until now had been silent suddenly became animated. ‘Willie May? Willie May’s dead, ain’t he?’

  ‘That’s his father. The great Willie May. This is Willie May, the son. Also great. The father died not so long ago.’

  ‘That’s sad.’

  ‘Yup. But this Willie May called me from Chicago, and said, “Chef, I’m having some guys round for a barbeque in the garden. You wanna come and make it?”’

  ‘So what are you gonna make?’ Marie asked.

  ‘Aha.’ Finger touched to his lips, hands expressing the exquisite nature of the food he was going to prepare. ‘I plan to begin with a sweet potato soup. Then Beef Wellington. You know what Beef Wellington is?’ He described in detailed how he made Beef Wellington. ‘You just gotta taste mine one day. And we’ll finish with a fresh fruit sorbet, lime and lemon. Good. Oh, very, very good.’

  Marie nodded, impressed, making her chef hat tip forward over her eyes. The old guy in the corner nodded appreciatively.

  ‘Who’s Willie May?’ I asked.

  There was a stunned silence.

  ‘Come on,’ the old man said.

  ‘You’re kidding,’ Marie gasped.

  ‘No, man, she ain’t kidding. She’s from England,’ the chef explained, racing to my defence.

  ‘You
mean they don’t know Willie May in England?’

  I tried to look apologetic.

  ‘He was the greatest, I mean the greatest baseball player this world has ever seen.’

  ‘We don’t play baseball in England,’ I said by way of an explanation.

  ‘Yeah, but Willie May was something else. He was … he was great. What’s his boy like?’

  ‘A chip off the block,’ the chef said.

  The old man nodded his satisfaction at the way of the world.

  ‘Hell, all this talk of cooking makes me homesick,’ Marie said. ‘I miss my farm. I didn’t want to leave my husband and my grandbabies. He and my son sent me on a visit to my sister for a birthday gift, so I had to go. But all I really want is to stay on the farm, cook up a storm in the kitchen, and bounce my grandbabies on my knee.’ She laughed. ‘That must seem pretty unadventurous to you, coming all the way from England and all.’

  Actually, it seemed quite exotic to me: the grandbabies, the farm, the pound cake, the contentment. I realised I’d forgotten about the musicals. Here was Oklahoma and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and never mind that beneath the corn as high as an elephant’s eye and in spite of the joys of spring, spring, spring, the plots are as dark as death, and thick with murder, rape and criminal ignorance. I was back on a sentimental, celluloid journey.