Cabin Seven
Clara
The man in my cabin had a scar, a glass of whisky, and my ticket.
Not a copy of my ticket. Not a ticket for the cabin next door, which would have been an easy mistake on a train where every door was the same lacquered midnight blue with the same little brass numeral screwed into it. He was holding a heavy cream card embossed with a gold lyre and the words The Aurelian — Paris to Istanbul — Car 3, Cabin 7, and so was I.
“I think,” I said, in French, because the platform behind me was French and so was my mood, “you’re sitting on my bed.”
He looked at the berth under him as if it had arrived there without his permission. It was the lower one, made up with white linen and a dark blue throw stitched with more gold lyres, and he was sitting on the edge of it in shirtsleeves with his jacket folded beside him like a second, tidier passenger.
“I think,” he answered, in English, “it’s my bed. But I’m open to evidence.”
His English was British with something else underneath it, a vowel that had grown up somewhere else. He was tall even sitting down. Dark hair cut short enough to be practical and long enough to have been forgotten about. A face built in straight lines: the brow, the nose, the mouth that didn’t seem to be in the habit of smiling. And the scar, a pale seam running from the hinge of his jaw on the left side up across the cheekbone, stopping just shy of the outer corner of his eye. Old. Healed. Not hidden.
I made myself look at his eyes instead. They were grey, and they were already looking at me with the same patient interest he’d given the bed.
I held up my card. He held up his. We could have been two duellists who had both forgotten to bring a pistol.
“Well,” I said. “That’s annoying.”
“That,” he agreed, “is one word for it.”
I had not meant to start my new life in an argument. I had meant to start it in silence, preferably with a glass of something cold, watching Paris slide away behind me until it was a smudge and then a rumour and then nothing at all.
I was thirty-four years old, and I had been divorced for exactly fourteen days. In a beige room in the eleventh arrondissement, a judge with reading glasses on a chain had declared that I was no longer married to Olivier Marchand. Olivier had worn his good grey suit and the expression he used on television when a minister said something regrettable: grave, sympathetic, faintly superior. I had worn black because it was the only thing clean. Afterwards he had tried to kiss my cheek on the steps and I had stepped back so quickly I nearly fell down them, and the last thing my husband of six years ever said to me was “Careful, Clara.”
Careful. As if I hadn’t been. As if I hadn’t spent three years being careful not to look too closely at his phone, at the late dinners, at the way he started saying ciao when he hung up. He’d thought he was safe because the messages were in Italian. He had forgotten, or never really understood, what I did for a living.
I am a translator. I read everything.
So: a new job, in a new city, in a language I’d learned from my mother in a kitchen in Bath and polished in an apartment in Izmir every childhood summer. Lead translator for a small, serious architecture firm restoring a nineteenth-century han near the Golden Horn, where on any given morning someone would need to explain a structural report to the stonemasons in Turkish, a funding clause to the French investors in French, and the whole mess to the ministry in both, politely. Selin Aydın, the partner who had hired me over three video calls and one very long lunch she’d flown to Paris for, had sent the train ticket as a welcome gift.
Our founding partner insists, she’d written. He says new people should arrive slowly. He says you should see the distance you’re crossing. He’s a romantic about trains and nothing else, I promise.
I had never met the founding partner. His initial sat at the top of the letterhead, M. Lorne, and his face sat nowhere at all on the internet. The firm’s website was all vaults and courtyards and cracked tiles lovingly brought back to life. Not a single portrait.
I’d liked that. It had seemed honest. Buildings first.
And now a stranger was sitting on my bed holding my ticket, and the train was going to leave in eleven minutes whether either of us liked it or not.
The conductor arrived at a brisk trot, a compact man of sixty or so with silver hair oiled back and a uniform the colour of the carriage, gold piping at the cuffs. His name badge said BASTIEN. He looked at my card, then at the man’s card, and then up at the ceiling as if appealing to a higher authority who had also failed him.
“Ah,” he said. “Non.”
“Non?” I repeated.
“The two reservations came through the same agency,” Bastien said, frowning at a tablet that looked absurdly modern in his hand. “A duplication. It happens once a season, perhaps, and always on the full nights. Madame, monsieur, I am desolated.”
“Is there another cabin?” the man asked.
“Monsieur, there is not another pillow. The train is full to Istanbul. We have a honeymoon in five, a very famous cellist in nine, and an American family in the Grand Suite who have brought, I am told, eleven pieces of luggage for three days.” He spread his hands. “The cabin is a twin. There are two berths. That is the only good news I have.”
I looked at the berths. The lower one, with a stranger on it. The upper one, folded up against the wall like a secret, a little ladder of polished walnut hooked beside it. Between them there was perhaps enough floor for two people to stand if neither of them breathed out.
“I’ll get off,” the man said.
He said it simply, already reaching for his jacket. Not a martyr’s offer. A practical one, as if he’d measured the room and found it could hold one more person than it should and had decided the excess was him.
That annoyed me more than the ticket.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.
He paused, jacket half lifted. “It’s not ridiculous. You were clearly looking forward to this.”
“So were you. You’ve already unpacked your whisky.”
“The whisky came with the cabin.”
“Then it’s half mine, and I’m not drinking it alone while you stand on the platform being noble.” I turned to Bastien. “Are there rules? About sharing?”
Bastien had the face of a man who had seen a great deal on night trains and been surprised by very little of it. “The Aurelian,” he said, with a slight bow, “has rules about jackets in the dining car after seven and about the bell, which must not be rung for amusement. On the question of who shares a cabin with whom, the Aurelian is French.”
The stranger made a noise that might, in a man more practised at it, have been a laugh.
“I’ll take the upper,” he said to me.
“You won’t fit in the upper.”
“I’ll fold.”
“You’ll fall out and crush me in the night.”
“Then you take the upper,” he said, “and I’ll worry about you falling out on me instead.”
We looked at each other. Somewhere down the platform a whistle blew, long and thin, and the whole carriage shivered under my feet like a horse that had heard its name.
“Flip for it,” I said.
He reached into his trouser pocket and came out with a coin, old and worn, and held it up between two long fingers. His hands were the hands of someone who used them: a pale nick across one knuckle, a callus on the side of his index finger where a pen would sit.
“Call it,” he said.
“Heads.”
He flipped. Caught it. Turned it onto the back of his wrist and lifted his hand.
Tails.
“The upper’s yours,” I said, a little too pleased.
“I won,” he pointed out. “That means I choose.”
“Then choose.”
He looked at the lower berth, then at me, then at the ladder, and something passed over his face that I couldn’t read and was annoyed not to be able to read. I read for a living. I read faces across conference tables, I read the hesitation before a minister’s aide said in principle, I read what Olivier wasn’t saying for three years before I read what he was.
“Upper,” he said, and the train began to move.
Bastien took our passports before he left. It was standard, he assured us; the Aurelian handled all the frontier formalities at night so that guests would not be woken by officials with torches. Mine went into a leather wallet with a little brass clasp. So did the stranger’s, face down. Neither of us looked at the other’s.
I noticed that. I noticed him noticing that I noticed.
Then the door slid shut and it was just the two of us and the long golden sigh of Paris going backwards past the window.
The cabin was beautiful in the way only things built for no practical reason can be. The walls were inlaid with pale wood in a pattern of interlocking fans. A small sink folded out of a cabinet with a mirror etched at its edges with lilies. The window was wide, almost the width of the berth, with a blind of dark blue silk that could be lowered by a cord with a tassel on the end. There was a little table under it, and on the table the bottle of whisky and two cut-glass tumblers and a card that said Welcome aboard in four languages, two of which had small errors.
I picked up the card. I couldn’t help it.
“Something wrong?” he asked.
“The German says welcome on board like you’re a parcel. And the Turkish has lost a letter.” I put it down. “It’s not important.”
“It’s important to you.”
“Everything written down is important to me. It’s a sickness.”
He considered me. He was standing with his back to the door because there was nowhere else to stand, and I was standing with my back to the window, and the distance between us was about the length of my forearm.
“I should introduce myself,” he said.
“Should you?”
“It’s traditional. When you’re about to sleep four feet above someone.”
He held out his hand. I looked at it, and at the scar, and at the grey eyes that were very steady and not entirely calm, and some impulse that had been asleep in me for a long time sat up and said: Don’t.
“Wait,” I said.
His hand stayed where it was. “Wait?”
“If you tell me your name, I’ll look you up. I won’t be able to help it. Somewhere between here and Strasbourg I’ll sit in the toilet with my phone and find out where you went to school and who you used to date and whether you have a blog about cycling.” I was talking too fast. “And then you’ll be a person with a past, and I’ll be a person with a past, and I am so tired of the past I could lie down on these tracks.”
He lowered his hand, slowly.
“So we don’t,” he said.
“We don’t.”
“For three nights.”
“For three nights.” I swallowed. “I know it’s strange.”
“It’s not strange.” He leaned his shoulders back against the door. “It’s the most sensible thing anyone has said to me in a year.”
We made the rules over dinner.
The dining car was a long jewel box of a room, all brass lamps with pleated shades and white tablecloths and windows full of the dark, so that every table floated twice, once in the car and once out there in the night beside us, reflected over fields and church spires and the occasional startled cow. He wore a dark jacket and no tie. I wore the one good dress I’d packed, green silk, and I’d put it on in the cabin while he waited in the corridor with his back to the door like a sentry.
“No names,” I said, over the first course, which was something with scallops and a foam that tasted of the sea and of money.
“No names,” he agreed.
“No past. Nothing that happened before Gare de l’Est. No jobs we’ve left, no places we grew up, no people we’ve—” I stopped.
“Divorced,” he offered.
I put my fork down. “How did you know that?”
“I didn’t.” He took a sip of the wine, which he’d let me choose and had not commented on, which I liked. “You said people we’ve and then you went pale and looked at your left hand. There’s still a line on your finger.”
I looked down. There was. A faint band of paler skin, like the ghost of a word erased from a page.
“That,” I said, “is against the rules.”
“The rules haven’t started yet. We’re still drafting.”
“Fine. Then here’s a clause. No deductions. No reading each other.”
“That’s going to be hard for you,” he said. “You’ve been reading me since you opened the door.”
I had no answer to that, so I drank my wine.
“The future,” he said after a moment. “Is that allowed?”
“The future hasn’t happened. It’s fair game.”
“And the present?”
“The present is all we have.” I heard how that sounded and wanted to take it back, but he only nodded, as if I’d said something about load-bearing walls.
“Then we need a way to know each other a little,” he said. “Or it’s three nights of talking about the weather in Bavaria.”
“What do you suggest?”
He was quiet while the waiter took our plates. Outside, the lights of a town slid by, a station without a stop, a man on a bench lifting his head to watch us go.
“One truth or one dare,” he said. “Every station where the train stops. We take turns asking. Whoever’s asked chooses. Truth has to be true. Dare has to be done.”
I laughed. It surprised me. It came out of somewhere low in my chest that had been boarded up for months. “You’re joking. Truth or dare? What are we, nineteen?”
“I wasn’t this interesting at nineteen,” he said. “Were you?”
“God, no.”
“Then we’ll do it better this time.”
He was not smiling. That was the thing about him, I was learning; he said the most outrageous things with the face of a man reading a tide table, and you had to look at the very corners of his eyes to catch the joke.
“And if one of us won’t?” I asked. “If the truth’s too much, or the dare is?”
“Then you say so, and it’s forfeit, and the other person gets to ask twice at the next stop.” He turned his glass a quarter turn on the tablecloth. “Nothing happens that you don’t choose. That’s the only rule I care about.”
The way he said it made my skin feel too warm for the green silk.
“What do I call you?” I asked. “I can’t spend three nights saying you.”
He thought about it. His eyes went to my hands, which had been sketching shapes on the tablecloth, apparently, while I talked: little squares and arches traced with my fingernail.
“You’ve been drawing on that cloth since the soup,” he said. “Arches. A tower.”
“It’s the lamp,” I said. “The shape of the shade. It’s nothing.”
“You keep translating the menu under your breath. Three languages, I think. Possibly four.” He tipped his head. “You build towers out of words. I’ll call you Babel.”
The name landed somewhere behind my breastbone and stayed there, warm, a little dangerous.
“That’s presumptuous,” I said.
“Do you hate it?”
I didn’t. I hated how much I didn’t.
“Then I get to name you,” I said, and pointed at his right hand, at the callus on the side of his index finger, then at the napkin by his plate, where at some point between the scallops and the wine he had drawn, in quick, certain lines, the vaulted ceiling of the dining car with every brass lamp in its place. “You’ve been measuring this room since we sat down. You looked at the ceiling before you looked at the menu. You know exactly how many rivets are in that window frame.”
“Forty-four,” he said.
“Architect,” I said.
He went very still for a moment. Then he inclined his head, a small, formal concession.
“That’s not a deduction about my past,” he said. “That’s a deduction about my present.”
“It’s allowed.”
“It’s allowed,” he agreed.
The waiter brought the next course, something with duck and cherries. I watched him lift his knife and fork and set them down again without starting.
“One more clause,” he said.
“You’re very fond of clauses for a man with no past.”
“Clauses are how you stop a building falling on people.” He said it lightly, but his eyes went briefly somewhere else, somewhere a long way behind the train, and came back. “Lies. What do we do about lies?”
“There aren’t any. That’s the point.”
“There will be temptations. You’ll ask a truth I don’t want to give. I’ll be tempted to invent something charming.”
“Then don’t answer. Forfeit.” I turned my glass by its stem, the way he’d turned his. “Silence is allowed. I can live with silence. I’ve lived with a great deal of it.” I hadn’t meant to say that much. I went on before he could pick it up. “But if you open your mouth at a station and tell me something, it has to be true. Every word. That’s the one thing I can’t—” I stopped. “That’s the whole game. Otherwise it’s just two people on a train being clever.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he held out his hand across the tablecloth, the way he’d tried to in the cabin, and this time I understood it wasn’t an introduction. It was a contract.
“No lies,” he said. “Silence is allowed. Lies aren’t.”
I shook it. His palm was warm and dry and the callus on his finger pressed against my knuckle. He held on a beat longer than a handshake needed. So did I.
I would remember that clause, later. I would turn it over and over like a coin, looking for the side I’d missed. Silence is allowed. I wrote that rule myself.
Strasbourg was two hours out of Paris and the only stop before midnight. We felt the train begin to slow over coffee and something chocolate I couldn’t finish. The fields outside had given way to warehouses, then houses with steep roofs and lit windows, then the long grey canopy of the station gliding in over us like a hand cupping a candle.
He looked at his watch, then at me.
“The first station,” he said. “Who asks?”
“You invented the game.”
“Then the first question is yours. It’s only polite.”
My heart was doing something undignified. I wiped my mouth with my napkin, folded it, put it beside my plate with great care, as if all of this were a negotiation in a ministry and I had a clause to defend.
The train sighed to a stop. On the platform, a woman in a red coat was kissing a man goodbye as if she meant to climb inside his collar and travel with him. A porter wheeled a trolley of crates past our window. The dining car hushed the way rooms do when the motion under them stops, every fork suddenly loud.
I looked across the table at a stranger with a scar and a ruined, beautiful face and a coin in his pocket that always seemed to land his way.
“Architect,” I said. “Truth or dare?”
He held my eyes for a long moment, and I watched him decide, and I watched him not even pretend to hesitate.
“Dare,” he said.
The Window
Matthias
I said dare because truth was a door I couldn’t afford to open, and because she was looking at me as though she expected me to take the safe road.
I hadn’t taken a safe road in four years. I had taken slow ones. It isn’t the same thing. I was thirty-nine years old, and slow was the only thing that had kept me upright.
She sat back. The lamp on our table put a gold edge on her cheekbone and turned the green of her dress almost black where it folded at her waist. She had brown hair pinned up with something that was losing the argument, and a mouth that was too wide for her face in a way I suspected she’d been told about as a girl and had decided, sometime in her twenties, to stop apologising for. Thirty-something. Mid-thirties, perhaps. A woman who’d had a long year and had dressed for dinner anyway.
Babel. I’d named her before I could stop myself, and the name suited her so well it felt like something I’d found rather than invented.
“A dare,” she said. “All right.”
“Take your time.”
“The train’s only here for eight minutes.”
“Then don’t take too much of it.”
She looked out at the platform, at the woman in the red coat, now alone, walking back towards the exit with her hands deep in her pockets. Then she looked at my face, and I watched her eyes go where everyone’s eyes go eventually, to the left side, to the seam.
Most people look and then look away, quickly, ashamed of looking. Some people look and keep looking, which is worse. She did neither. She looked at it the way I’d look at a crack in a vault: with attention, without fear, as if it were information.
“You’re allowed to say no,” she said.
“I know the rules. I wrote half of them.”
“I dare you,” she said slowly, “to let me touch it. No questions. I won’t ask how. I won’t ask when. That’s past, and the past is forbidden.” Her voice dropped. “I just want to know what it feels like.”
The dining car had gone quiet around us, or I had stopped hearing it. The American family three tables down was arguing about whether the eleven suitcases had all made it on. A waiter set down a tray of glasses with a small crystalline chime. All of it far away.
Nobody had touched my face in four years. Not like that. Doctors had, professionally, with gloves and lights. My mother had, once, at the hospital, and then never again, because she’d cried, and neither of us could bear it. The woman I’d been engaged to had tried exactly once, in the first month after, and I had caught her wrist without meaning to, and she had looked at me with a pity so total that I’d ended things a week later to spare us both.
“Done,” I said.
She leaned forward across the table. The candle between us bent away from her sleeve. She raised her right hand, and it was not entirely steady, and that was what undid me a little: that she was nervous too.
Her fingertips touched my jaw first, just below the place where the scar began. Cool. Light. Then she traced upward, slowly, along the ridge of it, over the place where the skin had healed thick and slightly raised, across the cheekbone where it went thin and shiny and the nerve endings had never entirely decided what they were for. In some places I felt her as heat. In others I felt her as pressure without texture, like being touched through a glove. Near my eye I felt her very clearly indeed, a soft brush that went straight down my spine and lodged somewhere low in my body where I had not expected to feel anything at a dinner table in Strasbourg.
She stopped at the top. Her thumb rested just beside the corner of my eye.
“It’s warm,” she said, almost to herself. “I thought it would be cold. I don’t know why.”
I couldn’t speak. I was aware of my own pulse in the side of my neck, aware that she could probably feel it under the heel of her hand.
“Thank you,” she said, and took her hand back, and folded it in her lap as if it had done something it would need to answer for later.
Outside, the whistle blew. The platform began to slide. Strasbourg let go of us.
“That,” I said eventually, and my voice came out lower than I intended, “was a very unfair dare.”
“You chose dare.”
“I’ll remember that.”
She smiled, finally, a real one, quick and crooked, gone almost before I’d seen it.
“Good,” she said. “You’ll be asking at the next one.”
The next stop was Munich, at dawn. Between Strasbourg and Munich there was a night, and a cabin the size of a generous wardrobe, and the two of us.
I had built rooms. Small rooms are an engineering problem like any other. You plan the sequence. Who moves when. Where the bodies go. I was reasonably confident that two adults who had agreed to be civil could prepare for bed in a space that size without incident.
I was wrong, but not in the way I expected.
She asked for the sink first, so I stood in the corridor with my back to our door and studied the marquetry on the wall opposite: a scene of birds rising from reeds, cut in three woods, beautifully jointed. I heard water run. I heard the soft rasp of a zip.
Down the corridor Bastien was turning down beds, moving from cabin to cabin with a stack of folded towels and a face like a closed book. He caught my eye as he passed and said nothing at all, which was more eloquent than anything he could have said.
When she opened the door she was in a long T-shirt the colour of milky tea and soft grey trousers, her face scrubbed clean, her hair down. It was longer than I’d thought, and heavier, falling past her shoulders in a way that made her look younger and more tired and much more dangerous.
“Your turn,” she said, and edged past me into the corridor.
The edging was the problem. The corridor was narrow and the train chose that moment to take a curve, and for one second her body pressed along the length of mine, shoulder to knee, the warmth of her through two thin layers of cotton, the smell of her hair, something green and bitter, orange peel or bergamot. Her hand landed flat on my chest to steady herself. Mine landed on her waist for the same reason.
The train straightened. Neither of us moved.
“Sorry,” she said, not moving.
“Physics,” I said, not moving either.
Then she slid the rest of the way past me and I went into the cabin and shut the door and leaned on the little sink and looked at myself in the etched mirror and said, quietly, in French, a word my mother would not have approved of.
I’d changed and turned off the main light and was halfway up the walnut ladder when she knocked and came back in, and that was when I made my second mistake. I came down again to let her pass, and stood at the window to give her room, and looked out.
The blind was still up. Outside, it was full night now, the dark country of eastern France giving way to the dark country of Germany without any border you could see. No moon. The window had become a mirror.
And in the mirror, I could see her.
She was behind me, sitting on the edge of the lower berth, pulling the pins out of what remained of her hair and dropping them one by one into a little enamel dish. She had taken off the soft grey trousers to sleep in the T-shirt alone. In the glass her legs were long and pale, crossed at the knee. The reading lamp by her pillow made a small warm room of light around her, and the darkness outside ran through her reflection like a river through a painted landscape, so that every so often a lit farmhouse window passed straight through her heart.
I should have looked away. I should have pulled the blind.
I didn’t. And then she looked up and met my eyes in the glass.
She knew. Of course she knew. She had probably known for longer than I had. For a moment neither of us did anything at all. The train rocked. A level crossing went by in a smear of red light and a bell that rang and was gone.
She didn’t pull her T-shirt down over her knees. She didn’t tell me to turn around. She uncrossed her legs, slowly, and crossed them the other way, and lifted her chin a fraction of an inch, and held my gaze in the black glass as if daring me to be the first to break it.
I didn’t break it. I watched her reach up and gather her hair over one shoulder, the line of her throat exposed, the fabric pulling across her breasts so that it was obvious, even in the reflection, that she wore nothing under it. I watched her watch me watching. My hands were braced on the little table under the window, and I was gripping the edge of it hard enough to feel the grain of the wood.
The farmhouses stopped. A forest began. The reflection deepened to nothing but her and me and the small gold circle of the lamp.
“Architect,” she said quietly, to the glass.
“Babel.”
“The game’s only at stations.”
“I know.”
“So this,” she said, “doesn’t count.”
“No,” I said. “This doesn’t count.”
She reached over and switched off the lamp. The window went black, then slowly filled with the faint grey of the land outside, the shapes of trees, the last of our reflections fading like breath from a mirror.
I climbed the ladder in the dark. The upper berth was exactly as cramped as she’d predicted. I lay on my back with my feet against the far wall and my head against the near one, and listened to her below me, turning over, settling, the whisper of linen.
“Are you asleep?” she said, much later.
“No.”
“Is it terrible up there?”
“It’s like sleeping in a beautifully made coffin.”
She laughed, low, muffled by her pillow. The sound went into me like heat into stone.
“We could swap,” she said.
“I won the toss.”
“You lost the toss.”
“I won the right to choose. I chose this. Live with it.”
Silence. The rhythm of the wheels, which on a train like this is not the old clatter you remember from childhood but a deeper thing, a long rolling heartbeat felt more than heard. Somewhere in the next cabin a man was snoring in a stately, rhythmic baritone.
“Can I ask something,” she said, “that isn’t a question?”
“That’s a very good trick if you can manage it.”
“Why did you agree? To no names.” Her voice was quiet, careful. “You didn’t even hesitate. Most people would have thought I was mad.”
I looked at the ceiling of the berth, eight inches from my nose. Polished wood. A tiny brass reading light I hadn’t turned on.
The truth was that my name had been in newspapers. Not famous, nothing like that. Just enough. Four years ago, for one long, sour season in Lyon, my name had sat in headlines next to words like collapse and inquiry and negligence, and even though the inquiry had eventually said otherwise, a name doesn’t forget that kind of company. People looked me up. They always did. And then they looked at my face and connected the scar to the story, and I could see them do it, the little click behind the eyes.
For three nights she couldn’t. For three nights I was a man with a scar and nothing behind it.
“That’s past,” I said. “You’ll have to wait for a station.”
“That’s cheating.”
“It’s the rules. You wrote that one.”
She was quiet for so long I thought she’d fallen asleep. Then her voice came up through the dark, softer than before, almost drowsy.
“Architect?”
“Mm.”
“You looked at me. In the window.”
I closed my eyes. “I did.”
“I liked it.”
I lay very still in my beautiful coffin and listened to her breathing slow and deepen and finally even out into sleep, and I did not sleep at all.
My phone, face down on the tiny shelf by my head, buzzed twice in the night. Both times it was my partner in Istanbul, who did not believe in time zones. I didn’t read the messages. There were forty-three unread emails from Selin already, most of them titled URGENT, one of them titled PLEASE BE HUMAN TO THE NEW PEOPLE, and I had decided somewhere around Reims that the Aurelian was going to be the last three days of quiet I’d get for a year and that the building waiting for me at the other end could wait three days more. It had waited a hundred and sixty years. It was patient. I was trying to learn from it.
Around five the sky began to grey. I gave up on sleep and lay watching it through the narrow strip of window my berth allowed me, the top six inches of the glass, a ribbon of world. Pylons. A church spire. Fog lying in the fields like milk in a saucer.
Munich came in on a long slow curve, grey and enormous and almost empty at that hour, a few early commuters on the platforms with their collars up. The Aurelian rolled under the great roof and stopped with a sigh.
Below me, she stirred.
“Is this Munich?” Her voice was thick with sleep.
“It’s Munich.”
“Then it’s your turn.” A rustle of linen. “Go on. Ask.”
I hung my head over the edge of the berth. She was lying on her back looking up at me, hair everywhere, one arm flung over her head, the sheet at her waist. The grey light made her look like a drawing in charcoal, all soft edges.
“Babel,” I said. “Truth or dare?”
She looked at me for a long moment. I could see her weigh it, see her think about what truth I might ask for, what she’d have to give up.
“Dare,” she said.
The train jolted. We were moving again, sliding out from under the station roof into the open, and the east was beginning to colour, a thin band of rose along the bottom of the sky.
“Come up here,” I said. “Watch the sun come up with me. That’s all. Just that.”
Her eyes widened slightly. “There isn’t room.”
“There’s almost room.”
“You’ll fall out.”
“Then hold on to me,” I said, “and I won’t.”
She didn’t answer. She threw back the sheet, swung her bare legs out of the berth, and set her foot on the first rung of the ladder.
Doesn’t Count
Clara
There was not almost room. There was no room at all.
The upper berth was built for one person of reasonable size who intended to lie flat and think about nothing. He was not of reasonable size, and I was not thinking about nothing. When I reached the top of the ladder he shifted onto his side, his back against the wall, and lifted the blanket, and I climbed in beside him and lay down on my side facing the window with my spine against his chest because there was nowhere else for my spine to go.
His arm came over me. Not around me exactly. Over me, his forearm resting along my ribs, his hand braced flat on the narrow ledge in front of my stomach, a barrier between me and the drop.
“There,” he said into my hair. “You’re not going anywhere.”
“That’s what worries me,” I said, and felt him laugh, silently, a movement of his chest against my back.
The window from up here was a long letterbox of sky. Bavaria was waking up beneath it: fields white with frost, black fir woods, a lake lying flat and pewter-coloured with mist lifting off it in slow curls. Far off, along the bottom of the world, a jagged line of mountains was turning from grey to violet to the faintest, most improbable pink.
“The Alps,” he said.
“I know what they are.”
“I’m being a good host.”
“It’s not your train.”
“It’s my berth.”
I couldn’t argue with that. I couldn’t argue with anything. Every inch of my back was learning the shape of him. The flat hard plane of his chest. His breath against the nape of my neck, slow and even and, I was almost sure, deliberate. The long line of his thigh behind mine, separated from my bare leg by one layer of soft cotton. His knee had settled into the bend of my knee as though it had been measured for it.
And lower. Pressed against the curve of my backside, unmistakable, not hidden, not pushed at me either. Just there. Just true.
He didn’t apologise for it, and he didn’t move against me, and somehow that was worse, or better. He simply held still and let me know, and let me decide what to do with knowing.
I didn’t do anything. I lay there with my heart going like the wheels beneath us and watched the sun come up over the mountains.
It came all at once, the way it does in high country. A spark on the highest peak, then a blaze, and the whole range lit gold from left to right like a row of lamps. The light poured across the frost and the lake caught fire and the window filled with it, so bright I had to half close my eyes, and in that gold, with his hand flat beside my stomach and his breath in my hair, I felt something I hadn’t felt in so long I didn’t have a word for it in any of my languages.
Safe was close. It wasn’t right. Safe doesn’t make your skin hum.
“Babel,” he said, very quietly.
“Mm.”
“You’re shaking.”
“It’s cold.”
“It isn’t.”
“Then it’s the sun,” I said. “It’s a lot of sun all at once.”
His hand moved. Just slightly. His thumb brushed once along the edge of my ribs, through the T-shirt, a slow arc, there and back. That was all. One stroke of a thumb. My whole body tightened around it like a fist.
Then someone knocked on the door.
“Petit déjeuner,” called Bastien’s voice, cheerfully merciless. “Coffee, croissants, and the weather in Salzburg, which is excellent.”
I buried my face in the pillow. Behind me, the man I didn’t have a name for made a low sound that was half laugh and half something that sounded like pain.
“Coming,” he called. And then, much more quietly, into my ear: “That doesn’t count either.”
Day two on a train is a strange country. You’re no longer leaving and you haven’t yet arrived. You’ve stopped noticing the motion and started living inside it. The Aurelian slid through Austria all morning like a long blue thought, and the two of us moved around each other with exaggerated courtesy, as if we hadn’t spent the dawn pressed together in a space the size of a coffin.
I worked. I’d brought a folder of documents Selin had sent ahead: a condition survey of the han, forty pages of Turkish dense with technical terms, which I was turning into English and French in a notebook because I think better with a pen. I sat at the little table in our cabin with the blind half down. He went to the dining car with a sketchbook and came back at intervals with coffee he hadn’t been asked to bring, which he set at my elbow without comment.
The third time, he glanced down at my notebook. I covered the top of the page with my hand. The name of the building was written there, and the street, and the firm.
“Future,” I said. “But not yet.”
“I wasn’t reading.”
“You were. You read the word kemer.”
“I don’t know what kemer means.”
“Arch,” I said. “It means arch. It also means belt.”
He looked at me for a moment with an expression I couldn’t decipher.
“Good language,” he said, and went away again.
Salzburg was mine to ask. It came at noon, a small handsome station with mountains standing over it like elderly relatives at a christening. We were in the corridor, where the windows were wider, both of us leaning on the brass rail and looking out at nothing much.
“Truth or dare,” I said.
“Truth,” he said, which surprised me.
I thought about it. I wanted to ask about the scar, and couldn’t. I wanted to ask whether there was someone waiting for him at the other end, a woman at the station with flowers, and was afraid of the answer.
“What are you afraid of?” I said. “Not the past. Going forward. What are you afraid is going to happen?”
He was quiet for so long the whistle blew and we began to move. The platform slipped away. A child on it waved, and he lifted two fingers from the rail in solemn answer.
“That someone will look at me long enough to see all of it,” he said at last. “And stay anyway. And I won’t know what to do.”
I turned my head. He was still looking out of the window, his profile to me, the scarred side, and his face was perfectly composed, and his knuckles on the brass rail were white.
“That’s a strange thing to be afraid of,” I said softly.
“I’m aware.”
“Most people are afraid of the opposite.”
“I’ve done the opposite,” he said. “I know how it goes. It’s the other one I’ve never practised.”
I didn’t say anything. I put my hand on the rail next to his, not touching, just near, our little fingers a centimetre apart, and we stood like that through the outskirts of Salzburg and out into the green valley beyond, and neither of us closed the centimetre, and both of us knew exactly how big it was.
Vienna was his, and the train stopped there for two hours.
We got off. It felt like playing truant. The rest of the passengers spilled out onto the platform in a wave of cashmere and expensive luggage tags, the American family herding its children, the honeymooners from cabin five holding hands so tightly their knuckles had gone pale. The famous cellist, a stooped woman in a cape, was met by a man with an umbrella and a car.
It was raining, a fine grey Viennese drizzle. He bought an umbrella from a kiosk and held it over me, and we walked out of the station and along a broad, wet street lined with buildings the colour of cake, and found a café with marble tables and mirrors and waiters in long white aprons who treated us both with the same exquisite contempt.
He ordered for himself in German that was correct and wooden. I ordered for myself in German that made the waiter’s eyebrows rise a millimetre in reluctant respect.
“Show-off,” he said.
“It’s my present. It’s allowed.”
The coffee came in silver trays with little glasses of water. Rain ran down the window beside us. He sat with his back to the wall, I noticed, so that the scarred side of his face was turned to the window and away from the room. I wondered how long he’d been doing that. Whether he even knew he did it.
“It’s my turn,” he said. “This counts. We’re still at a station. Just not on the train.”
“Technicality.”
“I’m an architect. I live in technicalities.” He turned his cup on its saucer. “Truth or dare, Babel?”
I’d chosen dare at Munich and ended up in his bed watching the sun rise. I wasn’t sure I could survive another one before lunch. I said, “Truth,” and then wished I hadn’t, because his eyes went very steady.
“What do you want?” he asked. “From this. From the next two days.” He paused. “From me.”
The café clattered around us. A woman at the next table was feeding cake to a small dog in her lap. I looked at my coffee, at the thin brown skin forming on the cream, and made myself tell the truth, because that was the rule, and because the rule was the only thing holding up the whole beautiful, ridiculous structure.
“I want to be touched,” I said, “by someone who doesn’t know enough about me to lie to me.”
He didn’t move. Didn’t speak.
“That’s not a nice truth,” I said. “I know. It’s selfish. It’s using you.”
“It isn’t,” he said.
“You don’t know that.”
“I know what using feels like.” His voice was very quiet. “This isn’t it.”
He reached across the marble table and took my hand, turned it over, and laid his thumb on the inside of my wrist, over the pulse, the way you’d lay a hand on a wall to feel whether a train was coming. He didn’t say anything else. He just held it there, in the middle of a Viennese café, while my heart ran against his thumb like it was trying to get out.
We walked back the long way, under one umbrella.
The rain had thickened. The pavements shone. He held the umbrella tilted towards me so that his own left shoulder darkened steadily with wet, and when I pointed it out he said, “I’m waterproof,” in the tone of a man stating his blood type.
Halfway along a side street he stopped.
On the corner stood an old apartment building, five storeys of ochre stucco with stone garlands over the windows and a pair of bearded giants holding up the balcony on their bent shoulders. Half of it was wrapped in scaffolding and green netting. Through the gaps you could see where the stucco had been stripped back to brick, and where someone had pinned little paper tags to the cracks, each one numbered in pencil.
He looked at it for a long time. Not the way tourists look at buildings. The way a doctor looks at an X-ray.
“It’s leaning,” he said. “Very slightly. Towards the street. See the third-floor windows? The lintels aren’t level.”
I tilted my head. I saw nothing but a pretty building in the rain. “Is it going to fall down?”
“No. It’s been leaning for a hundred years. It’s comfortable like that.” He nodded at the paper tags. “Whoever’s working on it knows what they’re doing. They’re not trying to force it straight. You don’t make an old building do anything. You ask it where it hurts, and then you listen, and then you help it carry what it’s already carrying.”
“That sounds like a philosophy.”
“It’s engineering.”
“It sounds,” I said, “like a man describing something other than a building.”
He didn’t answer that. His eyes were on the scaffolding, on the poles and planks and the netting stirring in the wind, and for a moment something crossed his face that I had no name for. Not sadness. Something tighter and older. He looked at the scaffolding the way some people look at deep water.
Then a cyclist came round the corner too fast and hit the puddle beside us, and a sheet of grey water rose up, and he pulled me against him and turned his back to it, and took the whole thing across his shoulders.
I was laughing. He was dripping. He looked down at me from very close, rain running off his hair and down the scar, and I reached up without thinking and wiped it away with my thumb.
My hand was freezing. He caught it, frowned at it, and put it in the pocket of his coat, his own hand closing round mine inside. There was something small and hard and round in there with us.
“Your coin,” I said.
“It goes everywhere with me.”
“Is it lucky?”
“It always lands the way I need it to.” His fingers laced through mine in the dark of the pocket. “That’s not luck. That’s knowing which way you’re going to call.”
I stopped walking. “You cheated. The first night. With the berths.”
“I won fairly.”
“You knew I’d say heads.”
“Everyone says heads,” he said. “Almost nobody wants to admit they’re the tails sort of person.”
“And what sort am I?”
He looked down at me under the umbrella, my hand caught in his pocket, both of us damp and cold and not in any hurry at all.
“I’m still working that out,” he said. “I’d like to take my time.”
We walked the rest of the way to the station like that, my hand in his pocket, his coin pressed warm between our palms, and I didn’t take it back.
The dining car that night was full and loud and gold, and we were shown to a small table for two at the far end, against the window, with a white tablecloth that fell almost to the floor.
I noticed the tablecloth. I would think about that tablecloth for the rest of my life.
We’d left Vienna at dusk. Outside, the flat lands east of the city were going blue and then black, with the occasional cluster of lights that might have been a village or a petrol station or a lonely farmhouse with someone at the window watching our long lit train go by and wondering who we were.
He’d changed into a dark suit. I’d changed into the only other dress I’d brought that wasn’t for work, black, sleeveless, cut low at the back. I’d felt his eyes on that back all the way down the corridor, like a hand.
We ordered. We talked. About the Danube, which we’d be meeting soon and would meet again at the very end of the line. About whether the cellist was really as famous as Bastien said. About the American father, who’d tried to tip the barman in dollars. Small, safe things. Present things.
Halfway through the main course, his knee touched mine under the table.
I kept eating. I kept talking, something about the duck. He kept looking at me with that grave, attentive face, as if I were explaining something important. His knee didn’t move away. Mine didn’t either.
When the waiter cleared our plates, his hand came to rest on my knee.
Just resting. Warm through the thin silk of my stocking. Heavy. His thumb lay along the inside of my knee and didn’t move, and I put my glass down very carefully because my hand had stopped being reliable.
“This doesn’t count,” I said, low.
“There’s no station,” he agreed. “Nothing counts.”
“Someone could see.”
“The tablecloth’s very long.” He leaned back in his chair, perfectly composed, his free hand turning the stem of his wine glass. “And you’re the one who knows how many languages to say stop in.”
“I’m not saying it.”
“I noticed.”
The sommelier arrived. He was a solemn young Austrian with a silver chain round his neck and a strong opinion about Hungarian dessert wines, and he addressed me, because I’d ordered the first bottle, in rapid, earnest German.
Under the table, the hand on my knee began to move.
Slowly. Up the inside of my thigh, a few inches. Stopped. The sommelier was explaining something about noble rot. I nodded. I said, “Ja,” and my voice came out almost normal. The hand moved again, another few inches, the silk whispering under his palm, and found the place where the stocking ended and skin began, and rested there, his thumb drawing one slow line along that border, back and forth, back and forth.
I was looking at the sommelier. I was looking at his silver chain. I had stopped hearing a single word he said.
“Und für die Dame?” the sommelier asked. And for the lady?
The thumb stilled, waiting.
Across the table, the man whose name I didn’t know was watching me over the rim of his glass. Grey eyes, steady, dark in the lamplight. Waiting to see what I’d say. Giving me every chance to move my knee away.
I didn’t move my knee.
“Ja,” I said to the sommelier, holding those grey eyes. “Genau das. Bitte. Mehr davon.“
Yes. Exactly that. Please. More of it.
The sommelier beamed and went away to fetch the Tokaji. The architect, who spoke German that was correct and wooden, set down his glass with great precision.
“I understood that,” he said.
“I know,” I said.
His hand slid one inch higher, and stopped, and I heard my own breath catch, loud in my ears though nobody turned.
Then he took his hand away, and folded his napkin, and stood up, and held out his hand to me across the table as if inviting me to dance.
“Walk with me,” he said.
The corridor was dim and swaying and empty. Everyone else was still at dinner. The windows were black mirrors running the whole length of the car, and our reflections walked beside us, the tall dark man and the woman in black, ghosts on the outside of the glass.
At the end of the carriage there was a small vestibule where the corridor narrowed before the connecting door to the next car, and the floor shifted under your feet with the joint between the two, and the noise of the wheels came up louder, a long iron roar.
He stopped there. I stopped too.
He didn’t kiss me. He put one hand flat on the glass behind my head, and looked at me, and waited.
I’d spent three years waiting for a man to tell me the truth. I wasn’t waiting for this one to kiss me.
I took his face in both hands, the smooth side and the scarred side, and pulled him down to me.
His mouth was warm and tasted of the sweet wine we hadn’t finished. The first touch was careful, almost questioning, his lips moving over mine as if reading something written there. Then I made a sound, small and helpless, against his mouth, and something in him gave way like a wall going down. His other hand came to the bare skin at the small of my back, inside the low dip of the dress, and pulled me in against him, and he kissed me as though he’d been thinking about nothing else since Paris.
The train roared. The floor shifted under us. I was pressed between the cold black glass and the hard heat of him, his hand spread wide over my bare back, his thumb finding the knobs of my spine one at a time, counting them like steps in the dark. I bit his lower lip and he groaned, a low, rough sound I felt in my own chest, and his knee pressed between mine, and my fingers were in his hair, and I didn’t care who came through that door.
Then the wheels changed their note.
Slower. The rhythm stretching out. Lights sliding past the black glass, then more lights, a platform, a sign in two languages I read without wanting to. Hegyeshalom. The border. A change of engines, Bastien had said at breakfast. Fifteen minutes.
He lifted his head. We were both breathing as though we’d run the length of the train.
“A station,” he said hoarsely.
“A station,” I said.
“Your turn to ask.”
I looked up at him. His hair was wrecked from my hands and his mouth was dark from mine and the scar was flushed at its edges, faintly pink against the pale seam, and his grey eyes weren’t calm at all any more. Not even a little.
“Architect,” I said. “Truth or dare?”
“Dare,” he said, at once.
“Take me back to our cabin,” I said, “and lock the door.”
He took my hand. We walked the length of the corridor without speaking, past the blue doors with their brass numerals, past cabin five, where someone was laughing softly, past the marquetry birds rising from their reeds. Cabin seven. He slid the door open and drew me in and slid it shut behind us.
The lock was a small brass bolt. He turned it. In the silence of the stopped train, the click was as loud as a gunshot.
He turned around. His back against the door. Me with my back to the window, the way it had been the very first evening, the length of my forearm between us.
“Dare done,” he said. “The next station is Budapest. Two hours.”
“Then for two hours,” I said, “nothing counts.”
Outside on the platform, someone shouted in Hungarian. A new engine coupled to the front of the train with a deep metallic shudder that ran through the floor, through the walls, through my bare feet and up into my body.
I reached behind me, found the cord of the silk blind, and left it exactly where it was. Up.
“Babel,” he said, very low.
“Take off your jacket,” I said.
