“Vincent?”
“Lisa, where did the people in the train all go to?”
“There wasn’t anyone in the compartment. This train came specially to meet us. Look, the doves disappeared. Outside it’s really night. Vincent, your whole body is cold.”
“I feel like I’m spinning.”
In his dizziness Vincent held Lisa’s hand tightly, but what he held was only a hand. The owner of the hand was gradually moving away from him, and the hand gradually grew icy. In his drowsy state he sensed someone enter the train car and say to Lisa, “Snow is falling outside. This weather is an anomaly.” Lisa gave an earsplitting laugh, clearly fake, then she and the person left together. Someone said in his ear, “Mister, where are you going?” “The Rose Clothing Company.” He struggled to name this, the only place he could think of, his voice thin like a mosquito’s whine. “Oh, so you are the usurer!” The man laughed an ear-piercing laugh, like Lisa’s. Then he sat beside him. After a long while Vincent’s eyes finally recovered their sight. He looked to the right and discovered there was actually no one there, only a cap placed on the seat. Maybe the man had gone to the toilet?
He stood to go find Lisa, walking from one train car to another. He felt as if the train he rode were passing through the dark toward the dawn. The carriages he walked through were all empty. Where was Lisa hiding? Finally he reached the tail end of the train, and Lisa was there at the back, curled up asleep in the last row of seats. When Vincent stepped in front of her, she opened her tired eyes in the faint lamplight. Vincent thought her eyes were beautiful! She made a sign for Vincent to draw near her, and he squatted down.
“That year I took the train away from the gambling city, it was the third day after my mother died. The gambling debt she owed was too great. She died of terror.”
“The old woman in that large house wasn’t your mother?”
“Of course she was. Even I have died many times.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You’ll get used to this sort of thing. Can you hear that? Outside it really is snowing. The places we’re passing are all covered in snow, the same as that year.”
Vincent could hear only the sound of the wheels of the train. He wondered what kind of hearing Lisa possessed. She shut her eyes as if she were going back to sleep. The underground rooms of her hometown seemed to have cost her almost all her energy. Now he was with her on this train, and the train connected the past and the future. What was the future like? Did the dwarf who came to their house in the middle of the night know the answer to this question? Vincent remembered how he and the dwarf had gotten drunk in the kitchen. The two of them climbed from the attic onto the roof. As they sat on the roof, a flock of bats brushed past their cheeks. It was then that the dwarf told him about the gambling city encircled by unbroken stone mountains and its rose-red sky. He said to Vincent, “It’s a truly peaceful scene. No one would think of leaving that place. The stone mountains are only a picture: no one can really pass over them. The train connecting to the outside was something that came later. The train passes through long tunnels before reaching the city. The dark deep tunnels are like a passageway to death.”
At first he wanted to ask Lisa why she had left her hometown. But then he remembered Lisa had explained this before, so he didn’t ask. She wasn’t the only person to leave. Wasn’t there also the dwarf? The people of the gambling city had probably all left for some shared reason.
At daybreak the train conductor finally appeared. He was a fat man who yawned constantly.
“I dreamt of a large snowfall. It’s absurd, how could there be snow now?”
He seemed to solicit the couple’s opinion. Vincent smelled alcohol on him.
“When you live in a lonely town like this, how can you not depend on drinking to pass the time?” He kept speaking, as if uncomfortable, and as if he wanted to spill words from his heart toward them. He invited them to his conductor’s office to sit for a while, because in half an hour the train would reach the station. He didn’t want his guests to lack an impression of his train.
When he opened the door of his “office,” Vincent and Lisa were surprised. The tiny room was just one meter square, with a small student desk attached to a metal chair. If anyone sat there for a long time it would be painful, let alone someone as fat as the conductor, who would have trouble squeezing into the seat. They didn’t understand. Why was the conductor’s office designed like this when it was such a spacious train?
The conductor seemed to have guessed their thoughts. He raised one leg, squeezed behind the desk, and sat down in an extremely painful posture, his stomach tightly propped on the desk drawer. He asked Vincent to give him the liquor bottle. A half-bottle of brandy sat on a separate shelf. The conductor greedily emptied it, drinking straight from the bottle. He threw it away, bent over the desk, and went to sleep. Lisa said to Vincent: “The train can indeed be called a lonely town, but why did he want us to see how he dreamed? He’s a strange man.”
“It’s possible this is how he lives his life. We happened to become the landscape of his world.”
When he said these words, Lisa stared at him for a moment. He couldn’t say whether she approved of what he said or disagreed. The train had already entered the station. They surveyed the conductor and decided he had no intention of waking. Although he looked uncomfortable leaning there, he certainly slept soundly.
That day Vincent and Lisa sat in the garden for a long time. The sun was scorching. The scent of the green grass made them drowsy. He told Lisa that there were a few things he was now unsure of. He couldn’t tell whether he should go to work. Maybe he should become a train conductor, or something like that? But he wouldn’t like that journeying kind of life, and even more he didn’t like loneliness. Yet he felt his career was now a yoke around his neck, because there were things in this world that still held interest for him, things he was unable to pursue. He chattered on. What he talked about seemed to have been suppressed for decades. The more he spoke the more direct his gaze grew, and the more he felt himself near but not touching on reality; but still he couldn’t stop.
Lisa let him talk at first, looking absentminded. Her large brown eyes watching him appeared so remote it was as if he were a passing stranger.
“Vincent, when I picked brake ferns in the gully, where were you hiding?” she mumbled.
Vincent was surprised and shut his mouth.
Lisa made several odd gestures with her hands, appearing nervous. Vincent sensed that she was communicating with someone. With whom? There was not a single person in the vicinity.
“Vincent, I want to leave,” she spoke again, her face turned elsewhere. “Every day I go to the same places. But why do you complain? I think you are complaining.”
Yet she didn’t move. She still sat there, staring into space. Later on she finally stood, circled around the stone table, and placed her hands on Vincent’s shoulders, saying, “I’ve finally remembered. It isn’t Maria going on the long march at night, it’s me. Look how forgetful I am. You don’t need to change jobs. It won’t affect your pursuing those other things.”
“I remember your going on the long march at night, too, but you said it was Maria!”
“The delusion probably emerged when I was in her rose garden. Now, when I’m speaking with you in this garden, I’m already gone, I’ve left. You see my shadow receding? Along with the cook’s.”