Journey By Floodlight

‘Now... will this be enough?’ Zsofi asked as she spread a package of noodles, two tomatoes, and a Tupperware filled with Goulash on his desk. 

‘That’s fine, thank you very much.’

She had only brought one bottle of Palinka this time. 

‘Your health is getting worse and I don’t want to be responsible for having you drink yourself to death.’

He couldn’t argue, even though he hadn’t told her about the cancer. She was the only one visiting him after all. Every two days she showed up with a bag full of groceries and some words about the outside world.

‘So, how are you?’

‘I can’t complain.’

He coughed and sat down next to his desk. He noticed that she had put the groceries right on top of his faded blueprints and time schedules. 

‘Good, good. I’m glad. So, did you know that Eszti has a new boyfriend?’

‘I didn’t even know they got divorced.’

Zsofi shook her head.

‘Of course, you knew. I must have told you about a hundred times.’

‘Mmm.’ 

He lit a cigarette. A grey cloud filled the little space, crawling up toward the brown stains on his once-white ceiling.

‘You shouldn’t smoke in here, it’s too small for that.’ 

She opened the window and waved the clouds outside.

‘Anyway, I am off again. The kids are waiting.’

Zoltan nodded and stood up. He always waved her goodbye from the doorpost of his concrete cubicle that stood between two tracks to different nowheres. He liked to watch her walk away. It always looked like she was climbing a ladder to a sky where the rest of humanity found its heavens.

‘See you in two days uncle Zoli!’ she yelled into the darkness.

He waved in return and went back inside.

It had already been 25 years since he’s been living in his conductor’s house. They had closed the line 10 years ago. It was fine with him, there was nowhere he wanted to go. There was the abandoned station further down, the sign of the town that had no need for new people, and the worn-out tracks that were his only reminder that there was a world out there that once rode its people into his life. Nobody had bothered to turn off the floodlight burning above his little house. He didn’t mind. He kind of liked being the light at a horizon that nobody wanted to be swallowed by. 

*

Zoltan laid in bed with his eyes open. He heard the rumbling of thunder. There were ashes between coughed-up blood stains on his sheets and some spilled palinka. His body didn’t know the difference between day and night anymore, as if it was always on standby with no hand to switch him fully on or off. There was a time when he masturbated to a face he had spotted in one of the passing trains, but those days were long gone. 

He sighed.

‘For fuck sake.’

He kicked off the sheets and took his flashlight from the wall. He walked outside, following the bundle of light, like it was guiding him instead of the other way around.

‘It’s bad tonight,’ he mumbled to himself as another flash forked the night, followed by a series of thunderclaps that sounded like a train picking up speed. 

‘Only the train of souls arrives at night.’

It was a joke him and his colleagues made whenever a night train was canceled. 

As he shone his flashlight further down the tracks he saw the silhouette of the abandoned train station. A light was floating above the platform, illuminating the shape of a person sitting on the bench. He climbed up. His flashlight catching patches of weeds growing through the concrete. The old station had all the signs of abandonment. The cracked yellow tiles that once showed the station’s name now revealed the grey concrete underneath. The white bars in front of the ticket office were speckled with rust.

‘You know that no train is coming, right? They have canceled this line many years ago.’

The figure looked up at him. It was a woman. She wore a black and white polka-dotted dress and red lipstick. Her hands lay in her lap, wrapped in silk white gloves.

‘I do know that.’

Zoltan sat down next to her and wiped some sweat from his forehead. 

‘Then what are you doing here? Not that I’m not happy to see you again. I’m just surprised to find you at this place after all these years.’

The thunder strokes were driving further away. 

‘I don’t know,’ the lady said. 

‘I have just been here.’

Zoltan took his cigarettes and offered her one.

‘No, I don’t do that, but thank you.’

The smoke twirled up to mix with the moths that were dancing above their heads.

‘Do you like it here?’ 

She shrugged and straightened her skirt.

‘It’s okay. I don’t have much choice. Once I was waiting and then I became waiting.’

‘Waiting for someone to arrive or to travel yourself?’

‘Well, I don’t have a suitcase so I assume I was waiting for someone.’

Zoltan looked at her big, brown eyes that were vacantly staring into the distance. He noticed very few wrinkles around them.

‘And you, what brings you here?’

Zoltan pointed at his cubicle in the distance.

‘There, that’s my place. I used to work there, but now they canceled the line.’

She put her hand on his knee. 

‘I am sorry to hear that.’

‘Well, I guess we both live in the past.’

She shook her head. 

‘No, I live because of the past. It’s a completely different thing.’

He looked at the piles of sleepers beyond the grass-covered tracks and shot his burning cigarette in their direction.

‘What makes them cut a line anyway?’ 

‘I guess that at first, nobody has the motivation to go there anymore, and then they just let it deteriorate to the point of no return. It becomes so rotten that people get hurt when they travel it.’

She smiled.

‘Isn’t that a nice metaphor for us?’

Zoltan lit a new cigarette and coughed.

‘I don’t know about that. In my years of working at the station, I saw many couples holding each other in the tightest embrace like they meant everything to each other, and just one month later I saw them holding someone else in the same way or just traveling alone. Things fade, that’s just what happens.’

She shrugged.

‘I haven’t faded.’

‘And why haven’t you? Why did you never go anywhere else?’

She straightened her skirt.

‘Where should I travel? I have waited so long that the rest of the world just faded out of my memory. The only place that’s left for me to exist in is here.’  

Zoltan stood up and looked at the horizon that hid his little house.

‘I will come back and I will bring you things that can remind you of the outside world.’

*

‘Marci and Zsuzsi brought this from their trip to New York,’ Zsofi said as she put a plastic version of the statue of liberty on his table. She pushed the head back. A flame appeared.  

‘See, it is a souvenir, but also a lighter. You can use it for decoration and to light your cigarettes. Isn’t that great?’

Zoltan smiled.

‘But don’t use it inside. I have been coughing a lot lately. Frankly, I don’t know why I keep on helping you to destroy yourself.’   

‘No, I won’t, I promise. It’s a beautiful one.’

Zsofi froze for a second while unpacking the rest of the groceries.

‘Yes, it is. It was very nice of them to think of you. Maybe you should call them to thank them.’

‘I will, it would be nice to talk to them again sometime.’

She threw a suspicious look at him.

‘You won’t, will you? Anyway, you got quite a collection now. It’s nice that you picked up this hobby.’

He thought about what she had said to him.

‘It’s like the old days. You are just giving me promises of an adventure.’

Zoltan took a box from the corner of his little room. Inside were his many model trains, blueprints, schedules, and posters. 

‘I want you to have this. Take good care of it, because it’s very important to me.’

Zsofi frowned and then took it from him.

‘Okay...  Mmm, I am glad you are finally cleaning this place up. It was about time. And you didn’t finish your Palinka either. If I wouldn’t know any better I might think you’ve met a woman.’

Zoltan smiled and gave her a hug.

¨Thank you for everything.¨

Zsofi petted his back.

‘It’s okay. That’s what family is for. I’m glad you are doing so well. I will tell everyone back home. They will be happy to hear.’

*

Even though he had only gone a few villages back, it already seemed like a different world to him. He saw teenage girls looking at their phones and groups with backpacks speaking in a language he didn’t understand. The old lady sitting opposite him looked at the flowers in his lap and smiled. 

‘No thanks,’ he said as she offered him a lemon drop. He had his own mints.

The whistle sounded. He liked the old trains more, with their sighing and slow cadence before picking up speed. It announced that you were really going on a journey. Today’s trains just made you find yourself on the way all of a sudden.

‘You are going to see someone special?’ the lady asked. Zoltan nodded as he looked outside the window. The last sun rays were lighting the fields and the rolled-up piles of hay. His obsession with the latest technological developments in the train company turned out to be fruitful. Switching the tracks had been easier than he thought. Then again, real craftsmanship of the kind from his era didn’t exist anymore. 

‘It’s a nice day to travel, isn’t it?’  

‘Yes, it is,’ Zoltan said as he smiled. It was going to be a rocky road, like journeys to final destinations always are.