When they left Zagreb she looked at the lamp. Esti took the hint. He got up and closed the shade round the glass globe.
Eyes open, hands in her lap, the woman waited for sleep. The scenes that she had gone through couldn’t have excited her excessively because she soon fell asleep. She gave one sigh and was asleep. Her eyelids closed heavily. She must have been tired, deathly tired. Her face was motionless. She slept without breathing. The girl’s deep, even breathing became quieter too. It could no longer be heard.
There was silence in the compartment, complete silence. The gas lamp gave out a green misty light, the sort of opal-milky twilight that one sees in an aquarium or in underwater pictures.
Esti began once more to experience that sense of relief that he’d had when the two were away. This too was real solitude. His traveling companions — heads pressed against the back of the seat — sat there torpid and unconscious. While the train hurtled in one direction their spirits wandered elsewhere, who could say on what journeys, who could say on what rails. His soul wandered around those two souls, glancing now at the mother, now at the girl. What sufferings, what passions must tear at them. Poor things, he thought.
Coughing, panting heavily, with ever-increasing effort, the two engines set about the ascent into the barren rocks. Now they were in the mountains. This was an alien world. Dark forests murmured up and up, on the heights, with their impenetrable mysteries. Waterfalls splashed here and there, mountain streams and torrents, sometimes startlingly close to his window. Lights burned on hilltops. The single Cyclops eye of a forge glowed blood-red. Then came the mirror gleam of a river. Dark gray, ice-cold water swirled this way and that, stumbling from rock to rock. It followed the train a long way. It trotted after the train, racing it, until it tired. The air was suddenly cooler.
Esti was cold. He turned up the collar of his jacket and stared into the romance of the night.
Now strange little stations appeared from the darkness, bathed in yellow lamplight, with the deserted seats and table of a closed waiting room, a kitchen garden with lettuces and cabbages, grassy banks, the stationmaster’s wife’s cherished petunias and geraniums. Glass globes bulged on sticks in the garden. A black cat sprang across the path in a sudden ray of light. Even at that late hour the stationmaster saluted, raising a gloved hand to his hat. At his feet his knowing dog pricked up its ears faithfully. A summerhouse sped toward them out of the gloom, the chatter of sunlit family tea parties long silenced, and, quite out of place, a convolvulus quivered among the branches of wild vine, frightened to death, blackened by night, dark blue with terror. These things, those people and animals, however, at which Esti was now looking — like a person who throws off the blankets and talks in his sleep — exposed themselves to him almost immodestly; they allowed a good-for-nothing young poet like him to steal their lives, until then so jealously guarded, so carefully concealed, and to take them with him forever.
Since setting out on that “first Italian journey” of his, he hadn’t slept a wink in more than two days. The many experiences had taken their toll. His ears were burning, his spine aching. He shut his eyes to rest a little.
As he dozed, drifting between sleep and waking, he heard a quiet rustle of clothes. Someone was standing beside him, so close that a hand was poised above his. It was the girl. Esti moved. At that she crept back to her place.
That girl wasn’t asleep. She hadn’t woken just now, but long before. After Zagreb, she hadn’t gone to sleep under the drug but had deceived both him and her mother. She was waiting for something, meaning to do something. At the moment she was lying there, head back and breathing deeply, evenly. Pretending to be asleep, as before. Esti watched her through half-closed eyes. Her eyes weren’t completely shut. She was likewise watching him through half-closed eyes. Esti opened his eyes. The girl did the same.
She giggled at him. She giggled in so strange a way that Esti all but shivered. She was sitting cross-legged. Her lace-edged underskirt dangled, showing her knees and thighs, a bare part of her spindly thighs. Again she giggled. Giggled with a foolish, unmistakable flirtatiousness.
Oh, this was frightful. This girl had fallen for him. This ghastly, hideous chit of a girl had fallen for him. Those legs, those eyes, that mouth too had fallen for him, that dreadful mouth. She wanted to dance with him, with him, at that obscene children’s ball, with her hair ribbon, the strawberry-colored bow, that little dress, that little specter at the ball. Oh, this was frightful.
What could be done about it? He didn’t want to make a scene. That was what he dreaded most of all. He could have woken the woman sleeping opposite. But he felt sorry for her.
Perspiration broke out on his forehead.
His tactics were partly intended to restrain the girl, partly to trick her into action and discover her intentions. Therefore he showed at regular intervals that he wasn’t asleep by coughing or scratching his ear, but he also simulated sleep for equally regular periods because he wanted to find out what the girl’s intentions actually were. These two ploys he alternated, always being very careful that the one went on no longer than the other.
The contest went on for a long time. Meanwhile the train raced on toward its destination. Sometimes it seemed that it was held up at a station but then rattled on, sometimes it seemed to rumble on and on but then would loiter in a station, and the strangely watchful voices of linesmen would be heard and machinery would crunch over the track bed toward the coal store. Were they going backwards or forwards? Had half an hour gone by? Or only half a minute? The strands of time and space were becoming tangled in his head.
This pretense was extremely tiring. Esti would have liked to escape from the trap, reach Fiume, be at home in Sárszeg, in the bedroom where his siblings were sleeping to the ticking of the wall-clock, in his old bed. But he dared not sleep, nor did he mean to. He clenched his teeth and struggled on. If he became a little more sleepy she would resort to all sorts of tricks. He frightened himself most of all with the idea that while he was asleep, that creature would crawl toward him and kiss him with her cold mouth — nothing could be more revolting and terrible.
And so at about three o’clock, Esti, constantly dwelling on these nightmarish thoughts and on his guard as to what to do — whether he should show that he was awake or pretend to be asleep — tried to open his eyes, tried to wake up, but couldn’t. He couldn’t breathe. There was something on his mouth. Some cold foulness, some heavy, soggy bath mat, lying on his mouth, sucking at him, expanding into him, growing fat on him, becoming rigid, like a leech, wouldn’t let go of him. Wouldn’t let him breathe.
He moaned in pain, writhed this way and that, waved his arms about for a long time. Then there burst from his throat a cry. “No,” he croaked, “oh.”
The woman leapt to her feet. Didn’t know where she was. Didn’t know what had happened. Couldn’t see a thing. It was completely dark in the compartment. Someone had put out the gas lamp. Thick smoke was billowing in through the window. Again, a cry for help. She thought that there’d been an accident.
When she had quickly lit the lamp, there stood her daughter facing Esti. She was holding her index finger mischievously to her lips, begging him to hush, he must keep quiet about it. Esti was standing facing the girl, in a fury, trembling from head to foot, deathly pale. He was wiping his mouth and spitting into his handkerchief.
“Oh,” said the woman dully, “I’m so sorry. But surely you can see …” That was all that she said. And she said it as if apologizing for her dog, which had licked a traveling companion’s hand. She was infinitely humiliated.