In Györ, with its modest but heavily rusted station sign, the border guard — the beard and pointy nose who tracked down the mop of gray hair — gets off and walks down the platform. He’s dragging a bright shiny blue suitcase behind him. He waves to someone, he shouts, he laughs.
Our traveler — he’s past being assigned a name now — presses his head to the window, but all he can see is the border guard disappearing from view. He asks himself why he even wants to see the person the border guard is hailing. He has no real interest in the border guard, any more than he has an interest in the man in the pink shirt. The man in the pink shirt will have some difficulties to deal with, maybe he’ll have to postpone his flight. Then again, maybe the border guards in Hegyeshalom will help him.
Because their job isn’t really travelers with Vienna guide books in hand — no, they’re just bunglers, maybe even morons. The guards are there for other people, the ones we don’t see, who aren’t sitting on the train, who can only dream of sitting on a train like this, alone with a Vienna guide book, who perhaps have far more dreams of sitting on a train than our traveler ever did, although he’s always dreamed of sitting on a train like this one.
The train departs from Györ. “We do the driving for Audi,” “We do the driving for VW.” The UFO on the shaft. The same conductor with the round cap from the trip to Vienna. He smiles when I pull out the envelope, with no ticket inside, Vonnattal Európaba apparently means “By train to Europe.” In addition to the Eiffel Tower and two red London telephone booths, there are also pictures of the Hungarian Parliament and Schönbrunn Castle. He signs off on my ticket again, where all the information is in both Hungarian and German.
From the empty seat next to him our traveler picks up a leaflet entitled “Your Trip Plan,” with an ad on the cover that proclaims: “April 23rd … World Day of the Book … Grand Sweepstakes.” The pages of an open book, the two center ones reprehensibly folded inward to form a pink heart. He leafs through the accordion-fold brochure until he finally finds the end station for the EC 25 from Dortmund. He reads: Budapest Keleti pu., Arrivaclass="underline" 6:28 p.m. After 128 kilometers or one hour and twenty minutes our traveler will be in Budapest. From Keleti pu. there’s a train at 7:10 p.m. for Kraków Glówny, which arrives shortly after six o’clock the next morning, and at 7:15 there’s one to Istanbul via Szolnok, Bucharest, Sofia, and Thessaloniki. This one arrives a day and a half later at 8:45 a.m. at Istanbul Sirkeci. Our traveler is amazed that the timetable gives thirteen minutes from Kelenföld to Budapest — Keleti pu., although the distance is listed as zero kilometers. But he doesn’t let it upset him. On the contrary, the inconsistency pleases him. And all the bells are scolding. It was a lovely day.
Our traveler, until now neither happy nor sad, halfway, so to speak, between a lost story and a secret rendezvous, is experiencing a feeling about as illogical as the timetable. But he surrenders himself to the indomitable rise of jubilation in his soul, as if he has in fact crossed a border, escaped some ignominious fate, arrived at some grand decision. Our traveler is full of love, so that he cannot possibly read and closes the book by Örkény, shuts his eyes, and like some spoiled but content house pet cuddles his temple against the headrest.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ingo Schulze was born in Dresden in 1962, studied classics at Jena University, and worked as a dramaturge and newspaper editor in Altenburg. For his first book, 33 Moments of Happiness, published in 1995, he won various prizes, including the Aspekte Prize for Best Debut. In 1998 he won both the Berlin Literature Prize and the associated Johannes Bobrowski Medal for Simple Stories. In the same year, The New Yorker numbered him among the six best young European novelists, and the London Observer described him as one of the “twenty-one writers to look out for in the 21st century.” In 2005 his novel New Lives was honored with the Peter Weiss Prize and the Premio Grinzane Cavour. In 2007 he won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for One More Story, his second collection of stories. He is a member of the Academy of the Arts in Berlin and the German Academy for Language and Literature. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in Berlin with his wife, Natalia, and their two daughters, Clara and Franziska.
A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
John E. Woods is the distinguished translator of many books — most notably Arno Schmidt’s Evening Edged in Gold, for which he won both the American Book Award for translation and the PEN Translation Prize in 1981; Patrick Süskind’s Perfume, for which he again won the PEN Translation Prize in 1987; Christoph Ransmayr’s The Terrors of Ice and Darkness, The Last World (for which he was awarded the Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 1991), and The Dog King; Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain (for which, together with his translation of Arno Schmidt’s Nobodaddy’s Children, he was awarded the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize in 1996), Doctor Faustus, and Joseph and His Brothers; and Ingo Schulze’s 33 Moments of Happiness, Simple Stories, and New Lives. In 2008 he was awarded the Goethe Medallion of the Goethe-Institut. He lives in Berlin.