Читать книгу No Stopping Train - Les Plesko - Страница 14

Here, a stopped clock, factory smoke, windblown leaves. Six hundred kilometers ahead, the borders are open, or they shoot everybody on sight, or we’ll hang by our necks. Last I heard they’d be starving the prisoners soon, you’d be dead. I like to think rumors are leaves, insignificant on the wind.

But Sandor, you always liked facts: the Museum of Coal Mining’s here. In this place they’ve been rooting the earth since before the Bronze Age. A plaque on the station platform says fire burned Kisveresfold in 1836, flood drowned it the following year.

I can’t tell this town from the last, the same suitcases tied with twine line the tracks like the town before this. Coats, faces, soil, all run to gradations of iron and pitch. Couples share cigarettes, I watch them through scratches from coins lovers etched in the train’s rattly glass and it hurts, although you never smoked. Ink from the papers you forged has never come clean from my dress. Your fingerprint bruises are still pressed against my eyelids.

I knuckle them shut so I won’t remember we always did like daytime best, its high white sad grace like today.

Inside your room, our clock was the single note tick of spent rain. A radio faint through the wall jumbled lies masquerading as news, that the peasants would keep all their land. Though I only just stepped inside, I said, “I better go, you’ve got work.” I waited for you to say don’t, took a step toward the bed as if without purpose, intent. You stood cavalier at my back, fingers under the straps of my dress. You turned my shoulders, pressed your thumb in the cleft of my chin.

“Before you were born, that’s where an angel touched you so you’d forget heaven,” you said.

I laughed, it was nerves. “Leave it to God to make us forget the good parts,” I said.

You touched my temple, my jaw, the flushed side of my face. “A little bit scared and a little bit sad,” you said. I wasn’t cold but I shook. “What we know about each other could fit in my pockets,” I said.

“You’re not wearing pockets,” you said.

Light from the window pooled on the barren mattress. We were mostly naked by then, you in your ink-stained blue shirt, me with my underwear trapped around my ankles, my dress to my waist. There was not enough space in my throat for my heart and for swallowing at once, so I stalled, put my mouth to the sour sooty pulse at your neck.

“You’re going to hurt me,” I said. One sock on, I didn’t know what to do with the other one balled in my fist.

“I won’t mean to,” you said. The kicked-aside blanket bunched like a mute chaperone at the foot of the bed.

“Intentions don’t count, only acts,” I replied, then I let you push and I fell. Thin light fell across my eyelids. I helped you turn me around, crumbs and coins in my knees, elbows, wrists. I thought about gathering my wits but I couldn’t even gather my breath, and then mercifully I couldn’t think.

I still see us plain, like this town, its sorrow of commerce passed by. Coal, severed stumps of horseradish in carts, the broken-nosed statue of Stalin that every town has. A flurry of pigeons flutters like loose afterthoughts around its bare head. A man in a shabby brown coat sails a newspaper boat on an isthmus of mud. Where the road meets the track, a woman like me swings her purse, she tucks her ambivalent smile in her scarf as she waits. I recall how that was.

Now I can’t forget the good parts, even under this afternoon light that absolves what remains. The name of this place moving past which means small bloody earth. The man with one arm by the blinking switch box feeds small nervous birds, and I think how before the war, he might have tried cupping their tight beating hearts in both fists.

I have to not look at him, press my brow to the glass like we touched our heads to your low windowpane in 1945. We both saw the same limp-shoed men passing by as right now but it looked different then.

How can I simply explain? It’s not fair you once leaned into my back, reached around with your arms around mine, tipped the window to rain. I plucked a weed through the bars for the vase on your one yellow chair. My breasts became streaked with wet rust, but I liked it, I didn’t care.

“You’re my torture in bed,” I had said.

“Talk like that you’ll get us started again,” you replied. You spoke into my hair and I can’t help but bless you and curse you for this: Sandor, I think plenty now, but I’m still trying to gather my wits.