I pace up and down between the door and the window. It’s a smoking compartment but I don’t smoke, I gave it up years ago; it’s bad for your sense of taste and smell. I search my jacket pockets and find an open orange pack of cigarettes, Ernte 23 brand. Automatically, I take one out, a box of matches in another pocket, and then I smoke and pace to and fro. ‘Prinz von Hessen 2004 vintage; Domdechant Werner 2005 vintage; Diefenhardt 2002 vintage from Martinsthal; F for Flick, vini et vita, from the vineyard by the mill.’ The names of the wines are in my head, coming out of my mouth along with the smoke from the cigarette I’m smoking even though I don’t smoke any more. I grab at the blind and make it snap back up and look into the night through the reflection of the compartment and my own reflection. What’s behind the wine? What happened yesterday, what happened today? Why am I going wherever I’m going? I sit down again. I pull the ashtray out of the armrest and put out the cigarette. I don’t like the fact that I’m smoking. I’m a wine rep and my sense of taste and smell are among the most important things. That and talking. I take a new bottle out of the holdall. ‘Don’t be fooled by the screw cap. The fashion’s moving away from corks, certainly for mid-range wines. And I’ll tell it to you straight, this is a mid-range wine. And to be perfectly honest, it’s even lower mid-range. But it’s solid, a good solid table wine, a simple French wine but the best you’ll get for the price. Simple but good. A good wine for a good bar. And a good profit margin for an honest business, for you, for me and for your customers.’
She must have been standing there for a good while but I only notice her now, even though my eyes aren’t closed. ‘Your ticket, please.’ I hold the bottle between my knees with both hands and put it down on the floor in front of me. I see the ticket collector looking at the empty bottle on the table. If I’m on a train I must have a ticket, so I search my pockets again — jacket, trousers, shirt. ‘This train will divide in Nuremberg; you’ll have to find a seat at the front of the train then, from carriage 29 on.’
Nuremberg. I’ve been there before, on business sometime. ‘How long before we get to Nuremberg?’ I ask. ‘About fifty minutes,’ she says. She’s holding some kind of device, presumably for my ticket, which I’m still looking for. Coins, pens, tissues. She has reddish hair, a couple of strands falling across her face, and I don’t know why but I can’t help staring at those red strands of hair in her face, and she doesn’t like me looking at her like that while I’m still searching through my pockets. She turns aside and now the device for my ticket is right in front of my face. Those red strands of hair — what is it with that red? I try to remember women I’ve known with red hair but there’s nothing, it’s something else, this red (the wine? No, not the wine), but I can’t get hold of it. I feel some paper in a small inside pocket, folded, and I give it to her. She unfolds it, looks at it for a while, then she takes the device and stamps my ticket. ‘There’s a twenty-minute stay in Nuremberg, you’ll have enough time …’ She hands me my ticket. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Thanks,’ and then she leaves, pulling the compartment door to behind her.
I’m holding the ticket in my hand but I’m looking at the wine bottle on the floor in front of me. I crumple the ticket in my fist, then I spread it out on my knee, stroking it smooth again without looking at it, hearing the rustle of the paper and picking up the bottle and drinking a swig. Why would a veteran wine rep like me ever drink this plonk? ‘Munich — Bitterfeld.’
I read it over and over again, ‘Munich — Bitterfeld, second class, eighty-four euro,’ and I ask myself why on earth I’m going home when I haven’t been home for almost fifteen years now. Bitterfeld. Huge factories with flames coming out of their chimneys at times. As a child, I often used to stand outside the huge factories, the air like rotting eggs, and imagine that one day I’d … it’s all very clear in my head, but what’s behind the smoke and the flames? I drink, and then I press my hands to my forehead.
‘Mind if I have a smoke in here?’ A man’s standing in the open door; why don’t I hear them opening the door? He’s wearing a brown cord jacket, and what I immediately notice is his long, thin neck, and it seems to me like I’ve seen that neck and this man before sometime and spoken to him — his voice seems familiar too. ‘I’m sitting further forward, I booked a seat but you can’t smoke there. You don’t mind me having a quick …’
‘No, no, of course not.’ I look at him and nod but he doesn’t seem to recognise me, and maybe I just saw him at the station in Munich, the station I don’t remember at all; it’s as if someone or something had teleported me onto this train, maybe the cheap wine’s to blame, I’m a wine rep though and I can take my drink, but it’s not just the station and the train; there’s something wrong but I still can’t get hold of it. And again I hear a clinking and again it scares me terribly, but it’s not clinking at all, it’s screeching; the train slows down and then stops. ‘Nuremberg,’ I say and reach for my bag. ‘No,’ says the man, sitting opposite me now and smoking. ‘It’s a while yet to Nuremberg.’
I look out of the window but there’s no station to be seen outside, only darkness, and somewhere pretty far off a few isolated lights.
‘How far are you going, if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘Bitterfeld,’ I say and wait for him to tell me where he’s going, but he just nods and that looks very strange, with his long, thin neck.
‘Bitterfeld. Where exactly is Bitterfeld?’
‘Near Leipzig,’ I say, and he holds out an orange pack of cigarettes to me; he smokes Ernte 23 as well, and I take one out. He gives me a light. ‘You’ll have to change then, won’t you? We’re not stopping in Bitterfeld, are we?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Probably not.’
‘You’ll want to ask the ticket collector then.’ He pulls the ashtray out of the armrest and taps the ash in a couple of times. ‘I bet you have to change in Leipzig. I’ve been to Leipzig. Lovely churches they have there.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Lovely churches.’ The train moves off with a jerk, the empty bottle on the windowsill tips over but the man with the long, thin neck holds onto it; he was pretty fast, as if he’d seen it coming. We’re moving off now.
‘Is it a big place? Bitterfeld, I mean.’
‘No, not very,’ I say.
‘And the churches, are there nice churches there?’