The car we got into was empty, cold, and poorly lit. There were no compartments so we could be together as at home, just benches on either side beneath baggage racks that looked like bird feeders … and it smelled vaguely of the toilet. It resembled an empty, unheated room. Little white porcelain markers were attached to the windows and doors. The black, arched letters on them resembled drawings of hummingbirds, frogs, and crabs. Except for the vowels, I couldn’t make out a single letter or a complete word in a language I knew. Mother tried to read them — father, too — but with no success. I went to the far end of the car, which was in semi-darkness, so I could take its full measure from door to door, but mother, who had been soaked through by the rain, shouted at me so loudly to come back immediately that I hurried to take my seat next to Vati, because if she shouted again something in the car was bound to explode. Outside the windows there was nothing but blackest rain … Without any ado, blowing of whistles or shouting of railway men, and without my noticing it, the train had begun to move … Through the rain and the dark, its black windowpanes covered with millions of raindrops … It pushed into the tracks with its wheels, as though it were kneeling, then its shock absorbers collided with something, and then it was pushing into the tracks again … The car leaned out to one side and repeated this motion several times and each time it did, I didn’t know if I could move up or down its steep incline without the car breaking in half or my weight causing an accident … A narrow caged door kept opening and closing by itself … nothing was visible through it, except for darkness and some toilet paper on the floor, crumpled and filthy, a whole roll of it, a regular paper garland, like in the boys’ bathroom at school. The floor didn’t have rows of tiny gutters like the car on the train from Basel, it consisted of ordinary wooden floorboards. This fact bothered me, as though they’d removed something essential for the operation of the train … In the windows I could see dim reflections of the benches, the poles and the shapeless white mass of my own figure … I went straight toward myself and pressed my face to the window … to see what I was like since I’d been traveling … I couldn’t see, but I could sense that it was still pretty much me … though blurred, so that I could have taken the image for some counterfeit or substitute for myself … For a tenth of a second I felt uncertain and would have liked to send my ghost to check where I was … inside the train or stuck somewhere out there, flitting through an unknown land … I turned away perplexed, because I couldn’t make out if something had happened to me or if I really was someone else … Did this strange train car have any connection at all with the locomotive, the tracks, the railway, the ventilators on the roof … I knew trains well, every Christmas I got a new one, which I would immediately disassemble down to its motor … It was moving, all right … lost in the darkness, but neither over the earth nor through the sky … so where, then?… it had to be racing toward the place where there were lots of animals in the barns … horses, cows, colts, calves … red boats and little biplanes for doing aerial stunts … I looked at my legs jutting out of my shorts. Sometimes I was amazed I was still so little and hadn’t grown up yet … and sometimes I got angry that parts of me were growing so fast and gawkily, and that I wasn’t a child anymore … Fortunately my family was sitting at the other end of the car … mother in her white hat, which she’d put on over a kerchief, Gisela covered with her little overcoat, Vati with his long graying hair and dandruff on the collar of his blue suit … they were sitting there as if in one of our rooms at home … and for an instant I sensed that this image would stay with me forever … It occurred to me to go check the time on Vati’s watch. It was ten. We had left Basel at one. “Wie komisch das ist … vor neun Stunden waren wir noch in Basel,”
h I said. Father’s lips stretched out in a smile. Mother was turned away, scratching a corner of her mouth with her index finger. Oh, these two were never going to get along if they couldn’t come together on such a nice trip … I had never seen Vati at rest before … in a train, outdoors, on a streetcar … except for once in the sanatorium when he took me there and then came back and fetched me, in the zoo, and on rue de la Couronne … He sat holding his hands between his knees because it was cold, his eyes blinking behind his glasses. Then he got up and went to the bench behind me. He took off his shoes, wiped his feet with the newspaper and then stretched his legs out on the bench. “Dort ist es schmutzig,”i mother said. Vati lay his head on the arm rest. He had made a pillow for himself out of the Basler Nachrichten, put his glasses into their case and covered himself with his coat, so that he now vanished. Nobody was inclined to say anything unusual or amusing. I climbed up on my knees and stretched out on the bench the length of the backrest, on the other side of which he lay. Mother covered me with a coat and tucked a scarf under my head. I could just feel the warmth of my body or of the coat where it covered my face without warming the cold air above me. Although the whole car was ours, with only our luggage on the racks up above, the train chugging and racing, I was spellbound by the blue, dreamlike lights above me … and wished I could be, if only for the short time it took me to fall asleep, back in my bed in Basel, under that fluffy comforter of mine … Mother was dozing in the corner with a scarf on her head and her hat pushed down over her eyes, and Gisela lay in the hollow of her lap, while Vati had begun snoring, invisible on the other side of the bench.