A book might have filled the space between cities, but the silence necessary for reading was slaughtered by the casual aggression of uninvited conversation. An old man sat across from Tómáš, filling the compartment (and Tómáš) with brooding ill-ease; he’d spoken for long, long minutes, above the noise rhythmic thunder of the old and dingy southbound train. There were other trains to take, but he’d chosen the Number 8 local. “To be a nationalist,” the old man said, shrugging and staring into some vague and immeasurable distance. He shook his head and shuddered as if dismissing an unpleasant recollection. “It isn’t possible for me. Not like that. Not so easily.” There might have been regret in his voice. There might have been some note of cryptic accusation. There was a stark quality to him; he wore only the barest essentials of anything that Tómáš might have recognized as belonging to a casual human being. He’d entered the train-carriage and sat directly across from Tómáš. Despite the mid-day hour, no one else occupied the enclosure, and so Tómáš felt himself trapped on one end of a troubling symmetry: an old, gray man and an insignificant, younger companion like opposite ends of a quote, misheard and with nothing more than three dots between them. “I was younger than you when it happened. In Berlin. The Wall went up and I was on the other side, with my mother, my father, and my sisters. I grew up, Western: a refugee; and, so, I never really understood what it was to be here. There was the abstraction, and the occasional photos in one newspaper or another, but after a while, The Wall was just so much graffiti; it wasn’t until now that I saw what lived on the other side of it. Can you guess what it’s like to have your life divided by paint? Not even the wall…just the paint that hooligans—a bunch of dumb kids—put on it!” Tómáš had planned to spend only one day in Preskiýn, but there’d been no real plan after that, and so he packed fresh socks (in a neat, compact wad,) underwear, a toothbrush, deodorant, and a spare pack of cigarettes. Just in case. He could stay at a hostel if it came to that, and catch the Number-8 on the next afternoon’s return from anything and everything that lay south of Pekkúr. “And now that I’m back, all I can think is that the landscape—here—reminds me of skeletons.” The old man’s eyes were a dark, watery hazel: like sea water and sand beneath a storm-shadowed sky. “And what does Abál have to say about that?” “I don’t know,” Tómáš said, shrugging. “Then why read him?” “He says other things.” The words, as Tómáš spoke them, sounded hollow and insubstantial, weak and idiotic: school-boy words, the quote of an ivory-tower critic vomited on cue. “About history?” “About men and about women,” Tómáš said, considering the weight of the book in his lap. He listened, for a moment, to his own lapse into silence, and to the rhythm of the train on its rails. The sound of speed, weight, and metal did nothing to draw him out of the carriage, and so he felt like the smallest and most ancient of obsolete flies, trapped in a translucent, yellow hunk of expensive, Polish amber. He felt insubstantial and pale: a bit too gawky, and a bit too blond, with big knuckles. Though the spare old man seemed like nothing more than a withered and sullen abbreviation of someone else, his presence here—between Pekkúr and the next town south—unsettled Tómáš, and made him recall— “Is there anything to say about men without a mention of history?” Tómáš raked through his hair with outstretched fingers; he flinched at the pallor of his flesh in the merciless, midday sunlight; he wished that he’d worn something other than sandals. He glanced down at the prominence of his toe-joints; the scant hairs, on his instep and beneath each knuckle, were like parenthetical brackets shaved out of some old text and left to fade and oxidize in the merciless light of the late-summer sun. “I don’t know,” he said, as firmly as he could, and maybe a little too quietly. Brilliant, yellow fields scrolled by the window. They kept speed—in reverse—with the train’s relentless forward motion. Insects, Tómáš knew, skimmed through the garish yellow carpet of blossoms, softening the already oblique contours of the land beyond the train tracks. He needed a cigarette. He wanted a drink. It was still possible to smoke here: the most stringent EU regulations had made it only as far as Slovakia, but some indistinct warp in the old man’s presence killed the strength Tómáš needed to pull the half-full pack of cheap, local cigarettes from the left breast pocket of his denim jacket. He was afraid of what that man might say about smoking—about anything—in that clipped and abrupt accent so at odds with the sonorous lilt—and logic—of local speech. “What is there to learn about men…?” Tómáš could think of nothing to say, no simple answer to the needling belligerence in the stranger’s voice. There might have been ways to answer; there might have been something to say about the vast and ponderous sense of exhaustion embedded in the old man’s words. He could only hear the noise of the southbound train, and maybe there was some answer to the man’s question there: in the secret language of metal wheels on metal rails, in the waft of a breeze through the open window. An answer might have lurked in the motion of searing, yellow fields of rape-seed: yellow blossoms heavy with the industry of both men and bees. There might have been a dozen things to say, a dozen good answers, but Tómáš heard only train-sounds, the sound of motion, and the silence of the knotted boulder lodged in the depths of his throat. He could think of nothing but the need for a cigarette: the sting of smoke in his trachea and the heady infusion of nicotine into his addiction-attuned corpuscles. “Do I frighten you?” the old man asked. “I am—sometimes—too blunt; but that kind of bluntness isn’t valued as much here as it is out there…on the other side of the graffiti. I don’t want to frighten you. I don’t want you to mistake my bluntness for something mean.” “I appreciate honesty,” Tómáš said, rankled by his evasion. I appreciate honesty. A lie; he’d have slapped himself if such an act didn’t look so foolish, so insane; he hunched in his seat instead; he clenched the book in his lap and curled his toes until his blunt nails scratched at the insoles of his sandals. “Honesty is a universal constant,” the old man said. “But…here…there’s a different convention, a kind of flourish.” The man smiled, but there was sadness in his expression. “Our language is nearly inaudible to the German ear.” He grinned, and still, his ponderous and weighty silence remained. “Americans laugh. They say we speak Russian. Sideways.” “You don’t frighten me,” Tómáš said. “But I’ve had beer before boarding this train. I need the lavatory.” It was an easy lie, an easy truth as well. He needed to feel something different, to break away from the course this conversation had taken. There was silence in the lavatory, as much as a moving train might allow. There, he might simply stand before the sink and the mirror above it, clearing his head: he needed to do that. He thought that he might smoke in there, too: if there wasn’t a queue to get in. * * * Though famous in its own right, the Number-8 train was little more than a Communist-era throwback. Its shapes, its fittings, its existential core had all been maintained with scrupulous, nationalistic devotion, and now, in the lavatory cubicle—with the vibrations of movement and the tracks, underfoot—Tómáš stared at his reflection in the mirror above the sink. Is there anything to say about men without a mention of history? The old man’s question wove its way through the muddled convolution of thoughts and impressions wadded into the space between Tómáš’s ears, and behind his eyes. The question and its echo were equally dangerous—now—because they invited history into the foreground of Tómáš’s thoughts, but he’d bought a ticket to Preskiýn, in order to avoid the more recent stretches of history. He’d been there: at the discovery of the body next door: —because of mis-delivered mail… —because of the landlord and his key… —and because it wasn’t so unusual to check in—on occasion—on Mrs. Stróma; she needed an extra pair of eyes, sometimes, and it had always fallen to Tómáš to lend his, and because she needed an extra pair of arms as well: to lift something, to move something, to help in some way. She was a nice, old lady, someone’s grandmother, and—indeed—everyone, Tómáš foremost among them, called her bábá with overt and shameless affection. She sat in an old, plush armchair: it was a comfort, something friendly to an old lady’s bones. She sat, as if sleeping, her head drooped forward, hair disheveled and hanging—like a sparse, silver veil—before her face. She sat as if she’d simply fallen asleep to whatever she’d decided to listen to on the radio, and now, something classical, jaunty, and whimsical in an antiquated way, drifted from the radio, followed after a few moments, by the drab, laconic tones of a bored announcer’s voice. Tómáš had expected her to shift and stir into a moment of panic at the sight of two familiar strangers, standing—and now stooping—in front of her. It didn’t matter that the landlord was careful to announce their presence and ask if everything was okay. But there was something wrong with her hands: one on her lap and one hanging, limp, beside the chair. Her fingers were pale and bloated like cheap, canned sausages. Her feet were distorted as well: swollen into her slippers. She wasn’t breathing, the landlord said, after a few tense moments of interrogation and investigation. She was dead, Tómáš knew, even as he fumbled for his smart phone and called Emergency Services, and as a hasty afterthought, the police. Her blood—no longer flowing—had surrendered to the hoarding pull of gravity, but couldn’t go any lower than her hands or her feet, and that Tómáš thought—now—was history, at least in terms of his singular urge to leave the city and spend uncounted hours in the forests south of Preskiýn, or in Preskiýn itself. He wiped salt from his cheeks with the back of one, trembling hand, yanked toilet paper from the wall-mounted roll, and blew his nose in the crinkly, scratchy wad. He’d only wanted to read a book and lose himself in a world that had nothing to do with a dead grandmother next door. He’d wanted to be away from the activities of a daughter and a near-estranged son, rummaging through the apartment on the other side of Tómáš’s wall, having their discussions, their arguments, their moments of guilt and recrimination: walls, even old ones, were too thin and too flimsy a defense against harrowing family dramas. It might have been different had this been a work-day; Tómáš could have simply gone in early or stayed after closing: catching up on things, making tomorrow’s work-load smaller, but it was Saturday, an off day…and so the Number-8 train to Preskiýn was his most realistic option. But he hadn’t prepared himself for intrusive conversation with an old, repatriated man who’d lived his life on the other side of German graffiti. He clenched both sides of the grubby, little sink; there were stains in the basin from hardened soap and splatters of hand-lotion. He spun the squeaky taps as far as they’d go, but only a lukewarm trickle of water dribbled from the faucet. He cupped his hands beneath it and splashed water on his face; it caught the fringes of his hair and dripped—like sweat—down his brow, before he splashed his face again, and a third time. He tugged paper sheets from the dispenser and dried his face, and then he stood—for a long, long time—staring into the mirror, and then down into the sink, as if he might find something in the drain. Down past the sink, a gray patch of floor mottled the space between his feet, and for a second, the tips of his own toes, peeking out from the complicated straps and buckles of his expensive, leather sandals. For a moment—a beat of the heart or maybe two—it seemed as if a ghost stood here, riding a southbound train in flight from the aftermath of someone else’s death. * * * “We’re all running,” the old man said, long moments after Tómáš’s return to his seat and his backpack, and his book: emblazoned on its front cover with an illuminated manuscript bespeckled with cockroaches. “It doesn’t matter where we’re going: away from something or toward something else. It’s all the same. Running. For good reasons or bad, it’s all just running.” The words, as Tómáš heard them, had the sound and the comfort of a confession. “I’m running,” Tómáš said, tasting the bitterness in his faint smile. “All the way from Pekkúr to Preskiýn.” He shrugged and scratched at the insides of his sandals with the blunt-filed crests of his toenails. “I’m running by train, and so it’ll only take three hours.” The weathered, old man nodded. “And I’m running too. All the way fromGermany.” “Was it bad for you there?” A shrug. “No.” A glance out of the window, and back again. “There are wonders in Germany, beautiful things. There are Turks in Berlin, and they’re like us. A lot. They’re from another world; they were raised as children in ways not Western. They wear terror in their eyes: as if they’re afraid of the efficient, German history surrounding them, and as if they’re convinced that they’re dying. All they want to do—it seems—is to see, once more, the things they’ve run away from. Some of them may return to Turkey. Running. Some of them may stay in Berlin, but they’ll still be running, and in my way, I’m running away from them because they’re too much like me, like us, but especially like me because they live in Berlin and speak with a Berliner’s accent, but they are aliens in an alien land and they can’t stop running, because they’re just as human as all of us, and humans never stop running until they die. Look at the Americans! They run. They evade. They ran all the way to the moon and back, and still—because they’re human—they haven’t stopped. They won’t stop. None of us will. Until we die.” Another shrug and a bitter — ironic— smile. “I’m not running as far as Preskiýn. I get to stretch my legs before you, in the town where I was born. I’m only running as far as Žiedsk, only as far as the next stop. I’m running into the town where I was born, where my sisters were born. I’m running into my past, and the funny thing about it, my young reader of nationalistic books, is I cannot tell you why? I don’t know why. I simply know that I do it. Does your author, your beloved Mister Abál say anything about that.” Tómáš nodded, and touched the book on the seat beside him. “He writes about ghosts, and says what you have said, that a man does not stop running until he dies, but if he dies and continues to run, then he becomes a ghost. I’m reading about a ghost, only he isn’t dead yet. That’s the point of the book, I think, to recognize yourself; to learn how to see.” “And what do you see?” “I don’t know. I’m not so good at it. I can only say what I don’t want to see…but I can’t talk about that. Not now.” Because—even here, and even now—all he could see was the cramped comfort of bábá’s dim apartment, and her sausage-swollen fingers, as pale as the bellies of dead minnows. “I am a ghost,” the old man said, quietly and with frightening self-assurance. “And it’s frightening to know that—perhaps—your beloved national author has written a novel about me.” Another shrug, another half-smile. “I think it’s better, though, to read about a ghost than to be one.” Tómáš could think of nothing to say in response to that, and so he sat in silence, contemplating the cover of the book, and the movement beyond the window. He fastened his thoughts to the blur of passing trees, the rise and dip of the land, and the roof-tops of distant houses, marking the clotted shapes of distant towns. He glanced back at the old man, disturbed at the subtle changes in his demeanor and the shape of his body. He was an old man, no doubt about it, but he seemed more substantial, more real, and—perhaps because of a trick of sunlight—younger. He’d been a handsome man, Tómáš thought, in caressing the slope of the man’s narrow, aquiline nose with his gaze. He wore the face of a gentleman, a soldier, someone likely to draw the refined attentions of women (and more than a few men) at home in the stylized chaos of so large a city. He seemed fresher and more alive, and perhaps—Tómáš thought—it had been wise for him to make this trip to the other side of what had once been a wall, or at least a surface upon which young men (and more than a few young women) inscribed their tags, their art, and their declarations in layers of aerosol paint. In silence, he watched the old man, now settling further into his seat while closing his eyes, and after a while, he was asleep. Dreams, Tómáš saw, moved behind his eyelids. Tómáš touched the book on the seat beside him, drew it to his lap, and opened it to the page that had been marked by a neat rectangle of foil wrapper, torn from the inside of a cigarette pack. The scent of ink and paper wafted into his nostrils, as his gaze touched the contours of another life, rendered only in black marks on white paper. He read for an hour. * * * And watched as the old man gathered his composure and his scant belongings. He offered departing courtesies, and the old man returned them in a crisp manner that implied the clicking of heels and the faintest, stiff bow. There was movement outside of the compartment. There were voices: parents and children locked in the common—almost ritual—exchange of entreaty and admonishment. The train slowed, as it pieced the town-border and coasted past old, worn buildings (still gray and lifeless and begrimed with the dregs of Communism.) Tómáš kept to his silence, as –at last—the old man departed (to wait with others) for the inevitable, full stop, descent onto the platform, and dispersal into the town, like some substance (medical or otherwise) diffused into the blood of some ponderous, somnolent animal. And during that time, those long moments of full stop, Tómáš watched men, women, and more than a few children stretching their legs and gaining their bearings. They checked maps and kiosk-mounted timetables; they thumbed commands onto smart-phone touch-screens: hailing cabs, finding restaurants, and whatever else day-travelers did with their phones. He searched for the old man among those making their common way to the station exits emblazoned with signs and maps to cafes, hostels, museums, and—if one knew the code—to the inevitable brothel disguised as a massage parlor. He saw no signs, however, of the old man in his drab, gray clothes as relevant as yesterday’s fashion, but as pointed as a comment…a declaration that only the old man might have understood. His eyes picked out the near-colorless shape of a lean, near-colorless younger man, with hair like wet sand, and a fine, aquiline nose, set above thin lips and a firm, squared chin, dimpled in the center. There was something stiff and mechanical in his bearing, something that made Tómáš think of the movements of an insect: something patient and predatory, something venomous, with a harpoon stinger carried in its rear end. The young man stood apart from the others; and they flowed around him, like river water, parted by a stone, and surging back to itself once the flow had gone far enough downstream. He simply stared back, through the window, and directly into Tómáš’s eyes. He was tall. He was handsome, and something—a kind of strength, predatory focus, and sadness—crackled around him, just beyond the range of normal human perception. And for reasons he scarcely understood, Tómáš grabbed the book beside him, and opened the compartment window. He gestured for the young man to approach, and watched as the stranger took calm, effortless strides to the edge of the platform. He heard an echo of the old man’s voice, and saw what had just happened. “Take this,” Tómáš said, thrusting the book into the stranger’s upraised hands; his fingers brushed—for just an instant—the stranger’s warm fingertips. “Read it if you want. Hold on to it,” he said. “In case you finish running, and want to return. This isn’t Germany. You were never an alien here.” The young, slender man with the hawk-like nose, smiled, reached out and clasped Tómáš’s fingers. He smiled again. “Thank you,” he said. But if there was anything else to say, it went unsaid, as an automated voice announced the departure of the Number-8, local to Preskiýn. It went unsaid, as—moments later—the train gave a little, shuddering jolt and pulled—slowly—from the platform, and the platform was empty, except for a tall, slender man—not nearly as old as the man who’d gotten off of the train: a whole man, not sullen and abbreviated—but Tómáš knew, with absolute certainty that the old man and the young man were the same. One was the ghost of the other, but he didn’t know which. It seemed right, however, to defend one against the other, and a book about existential ghosts might just have done the trick. He’d had enough of dead people and lifeless, fat fingers, and as the Number-8 pulled away from the platform, he thought of the warmth of slender, long, handsome fingers, brushing his own: the end-punctuation to a gesture of exchange. He’d intended to read on the way to Preskiýn, and he’d just given his book away. It didn’t matter. The touch of those warm, living fingers was all that he thought of now, and as the town fell behind the train and the sound of metal wheels on metal rails, Tómáš stretched his legs out in front of him, closed his eyes, and stole long, long moments of silence, in the compartment. Alone. End * I'd planned on posting something else, but this story pushed its way out of my Muse-pores, and so I went with it. I hadn't planned on taking the Number 8 train through Agara...and yet.... Hopefully, you've enjoyed this and thank you for reading, viewing, and commenting.