I think in the end I must have really fallen asleep, because I suddenly felt her shaking me:
“You need to get up. You’ll be late for work. Get up. What a sleepyhead.”
I was most surprised of all when she said:
“You snore just the same. But it’s nice to listen to you. Things have gathered in you as well, I can see. When can that have happened? Mother of God, when can that have happened?”
Anyway, I never finished the story about the train. So the train was on its way, I was on it, and the hat was on the opposite shelf so I could keep an eye on it. It wasn’t there anymore? Oh that’s right, he’d moved it to the shelf on my side. At some station the train stopped again, no one got on, someone peeked into the compartment, saw it was filled to bursting, and slammed the door so hard the snorer opened his eyes. He lifted his head from the headrest, looked around at everyone to see whether it was the same people, checked that his bags were there, then nodded toward the window and said:
“Oh, we’re at this station already.”
So it looked like he might not be sleepy anymore. But the moment the train set off again his eyes began to droop, though he seemed in two minds about whether or not to go back to sleep. It was only when the train sped up and began rocking that his head fell back against the headrest as if of its own accord, his mouth opened, and the noise that came out was exactly like the sound of a distant wagon with ironclad wheels rumbling over frozen ground.
At a certain moment his head slipped down from the headrest to the shoulder of his left-hand neighbor. The neighbor allowed the head to remain on his shoulder without protest, but still, as the train crossed a switch and the whole compartment shook, he moved from that neighbor’s shoulder to the shoulder of the woman sitting to his right, without interrupting his sleep. The woman accepted his head on her shoulder just the same. Yet the train, which was rocking like a cradle, must have sent him into such a deep sleep that his head slid from her shoulder to her chest. Her breasts were each almost the size of his head. It wasn’t only that they were large, they seemed to be separate, independent of the rest of her body. There are women that seem to have been created exclusively for the purpose of carrying their own breasts. You might even have had the impression it was her breasts that were rocking the train, especially when it crossed a switch. What harm could it have done, then, for him to sleep his fill there? The woman, though, took as big of a breath as she could, breathed out, took another deep breath, breathed out. She was probably thinking that from the rising and falling of her chest his head would wake up. But he was evidently sound asleep, and so she suddenly exclaimed as if she’d been startled:
“Excuse me, what do you think you’re doing?”
He must have heard. He didn’t actually open his eyes and his mouth remained open, but with the force of his sleep alone he moved his head from her breasts to the headrest. And that was when it started. Not right away. To begin with it was like he was short of breath. His eyes were still closed, but his mouth opened even wider, though not the slightest sound came from it. You’d genuinely have thought he was dead. People in the compartment started looking at him and at each other, but no one dared say anything. In the end somebody finally got up the courage to half-whisper, as if they were trying to ward off their own unease:
“Someone sleeps like that, they must be making up for many a sleepless night.”
Then someone else dared to say:
“He was in the resistance, you heard. You don’t join the resistance to get a decent sleep.”
A third person was even more emboldened by the previous speaker’s words:
“His hat got shot up by machine gun fire. He must have been a brave one.”
To her own misfortune the woman whose chest he’d tried to sleep on also spoke up:
“My man, when he gets drunk he sleeps like that.”
Someone retorted indignantly:
“This man’s sober, you can see that. He’s just tired, tired from so many nights without sleep, years maybe.”
The compartment fell silent. It was like everyone’s mouth was stopped up. For the longest time all you could hear was the train, and the man’s ever louder snoring. We passed one station, another, and finally someone spoke, obviously trying to kick over the traces of the previous conversation:
“If he’s so exhausted it’s no surprise that wherever he closes his eyes he sleeps like the dead.”
“Who isn’t exhausted these days?” The speaker was bristling. “Who is not exhausted? No one wants their life to be in vain. Those three sacks up there are mine, and I’m not as strong as I used to be.”
Someone else swore:
“Exhausted, for fuck’s sake!”
They started arguing about who was more exhausted than who.
“Take me, for instance —” someone was settling in to tell a longer story, when all at once a gurgling noise came from the sleeping man’s throat. Luckily the train hit a switch that shook it, and the gurgling sound broke off. But not for long. When the car resumed its rocking rhythm, a great sigh came from his mouth as if from the depths of his soul. After which, still sleeping, he settled his head more firmly against the headrest and began to make a sound that was half-whistle, half-wheeze. The sound contained a distant murmur that grew with almost every breath he took, and became ever faster, closer, louder. It felt like the train, that up till now had been crawling, gathered speed each time he breathed. After a dozen or so breaths, it seemed to be hurtling along, that it had even stopped clattering over the rails and was virtually leaping across the switches, as if we were headed directly for some waterfall from which any minute now we’d plunge into the abyss.