The Train

They both had the faintest features. They had boarded the train in Lviv, at least, that is the best I remember it. I had been engrossed in my notes and when I looked up, they were in the seat opposite me, caught in a clinch, facing each other, the window light transmuting their faces to the colour of the sun. He had a blue shirt with a cream collar and ridiculous red cords, thick ones, which gave the impression of a great mass of crimson worms suddenly frozen in their churning. She had a shrug with gold frenzels and a dark skirt. They were buried in a mutual gaze.  Their faces were blurred by the light and had an indistinct quality. A face is characterised by contrast - by the shadows around the eyes, by wrinkles around the mouth and forehead, by subtle shading of the skin on different parts of the face. None of that normality was present here, features and age and sex being almost lost in a great light. They were young, though they might have been old. 

He kissed her forehead for a long moment. Then he stopped, shuffled forward in his seat, reached inside a brown paper bag. He rustled quickly to the bottom and brought out a whole loaf of bread. He had a pocket knife ready and carved two, four, six slices. He passed half of them to her and they ate. It was already warm so I was surprised they could eat dry bread with such gusto. Occasionally the wet sounds of eating filled the air. They did not look in my direction but at the bread and at themselves. 

I glanced outside. The foliage was stripped by the summer storms. The oldest trees were strong and pearled with wind. In clumps beneath the largest of them there were haunts of withered saplings. The background scuttered past. Ivory trees, green leaves and the silver of the window frame blended together with the noise of carriages on steel.

It would not have surprised me had the couple vanished when I turned back, but they were still there, and seemed to have snapped back into focus. The bread had been eaten, lightly scattered fragments lay on their laps. A solitary crumb glittered on the ground.

 They had moved from food to food for thought and now had reading material opened in front of them. He was looking at the British Medical Journal. She was reading a palm sized book bound in leather of midnight blue, tooled with faint golden letters on the spine and cover. The book was thick. She was near the beginning, in fact, on a few pages in. She took a long time to scan the text - her eyes moved quickly but only flicked the pages twice, taking a moment, it seemed, to savour the words she had read. From this, I surmised that each page was densely written, clotted with script.  The concentration on her face was intense, but there were other emotions there as well, living only for a moment, as short-lived as the landscape of trees which was constantly disappearing and being replaced through the window. And it seemed to me that there was a thirst there. Her eyes were like black glass, and the light in them had a quality of surprise - the sudden and unexpected glint of stars on a dark ocean.

"Did it happen this way? she asked the man, pointing to a passage with her finger. He waited, set aside his journal and read the marked space attentively.

"Evelyn, it was a long time ago", he answered, and pressed his shirt down to the left, as if the question pained him.

"The longest time ago", she echoed, "When the world was new and nothing had a name.”

Perhaps this was the couple's interlude, babble and banter, but it seemed to me like something more, and I noticed their faces were still indescribable and shining, that, with a start, that the visible fragment of her shin was dense with fur, and in the fantasy of my mind I conceived the cold thought that perhaps neither of them had navels below those coloured clothes, and, maybe, the memory of these strange people in the carriage stretched back to a time before language and flame, to places on an African plain, to the origin of our species. 

I could not bear the intensity of that thought - of them and their conversation. “My fault, excuse me, excuse me”, I mumbled, and hurried to the corridor.