TODAY’S TRAINS, whose seats aren’t arranged so we’re forced to sit face to face with strangers, are not conducive to travel stories. Instead, there are silent ghosts with headphones covering their ears, their eyes fixed on a video of an American film. You heard more stories in those old second-class coaches, which had the flavor of a waiting room or a room where poor families eat. During my first trip to Madrid, as I dozed on the hard, blue plastic seat, I listened in the dark to my grandfather Manuel and another passenger tell each other tales of train trips during the winters of the war. “In the battalion of assault troops I served in they marched us all up to a train in this same station and made us get on, and although they didn’t tell us where they were taking us, the rumor spread that our destination was the front along the Ebro River. My legs trembled at the thought all night, there in the dark of the closed coach. In the morning they made us get off and with no word of explanation sent us back to our usual posts. A different battalion had been dispatched in our stead, and of the eight hundred men who went no more than thirty returned. Had that train taken us to the front,” my grandfather said, “I wouldn’t be telling you this story,” and suddenly I thought, half asleep, if that journey along the Ebro hadn’t been canceled, my grandfather probably would have died and I wouldn’t have been born.
Everything was strange that night, that rare and magical night of my first trip; it was as if when I got on the train — or earlier, when I arrived at the station — I had abandoned the everyday and entered a kingdom very much like the world of films or books: the insomniac world of travelers. Almost without leaving my home I had been nourished by stories of travels to far-off places, including the moon, the center of the earth, the bottom of the sea, the islands of the Caribbean and the Pacific, the North Pole, and that enormous Russia that Jules Verne’s reporter named Claudius Bombarnac traveled through.
As I recall, it was a June night. I was sitting on a bench on the train platform between my grandmother and grandfather, and a train, not yet ours, arrived at the station and stopped with a slow screech. In the darkness it had the shape of some great mythological beast, and as it approached, the round headlight on the engine reminded me of Captain Nemo’s submarine. A woman was leaning against the railing of the observation platform; I was instantaneously overwhelmed with desire, the innocent, frightened, and fervent desire of a fourteen-year-old boy. I wanted her so badly my legs trembled, and the pressure in my chest made it difficult to breathe. I can still see her, although I don’t know now whether what I remember is in fact a memory: a tall blond foreigner wearing a black skirt and a black blouse unbuttoned low. I looked at her windswept hair and the brightly painted toenails of her bare feet. A deep tan brought out the gleam of her blond hair and light eyes. She moved a knee forward, and thigh showed through the slit in her skirt. The train started off, and as I watched she moved away, still leaning on the rail and watching the disappearing faces observe her from the platform of that remote station. Midnight in a foreign country.
In shifting tatters of dreams, the woman appeared again as I dozed and my grandfather and the other man kept talking in the darkened coach. Through half-opened eyes I could see the tips of their cigarettes, and when my grandfather or his companion took a drag, their country faces were visible in the reddish glow. Oh, the acrid black tobacco that men smoked then. As I watched those faces and listened, their words dissolved into sleep, and I felt myself on one of the trains they were telling about, past trains of defeated soldiers or deportees who traveled without ever reaching their destination, stopped for whole nights beside darkened platforms. Shortly before he died, Primo Levi said that he was still frightened by the sealed freight cars he occasionally saw on sidetracks. “I served in Russia,” the man said, “in the Blue Division. We got on a train at the North Station, and it took ten days to reach a place called Riga.” And I thought, or half said in my sleep, Riga is the capital of Latvia, because I’d studied it in the atlases I liked so much and because one of Jules Verne’s novels is set in Riga and his books filled my imagination and my life.
Now I understand that in our dry inland country night trains are the great river that carries us to the world outside and then brings us back, the great waterway slipping through shadows toward the sea or the beautiful cities where a new life awaits us, luminous and true to what we were promised in books. As clearly as I remember that first train trip, I remember the first time I stopped at a border station; in both memories are the brilliant night, anticipation, and fear of the unknown that made my pulse race and my knees buckle. Scowling, rough-mannered policemen examined our passports on the platform at Cerbère Station. Cerbère. Cerberus. Sometimes stations at night do resemble the entrance to Hades, and their names contain curses: Cerbère, where in the winter of 1939 French gendarmes humiliated the soldiers of the Spanish Republic, insulted them, pushed and kicked them; Port Bou, where Walter Benjamin took his life in 1940; Gmünd, the station on the border between Czechoslovakia and Austria where Franz Kafka and Milena Jesenska sometimes met secretly, within the parentheses of train schedules, within the exasperating brevity of time running out the minute they saw each other, the minute they climbed the stairs toward the inhospitable room in the station hotel where the rumble of passing trains rattled the windowpanes.
What would it be like to arrive at a German or Polish station in a cattle car, to hear orders shouted in German over the loudspeakers and not understand a word, to see the distant lights, wire fences, and tall, tall chimneys expelling black smoke? For five days, in February 1944, Primo Levi traveled in a cattle car toward Auschwitz. Through cracks in the wood planks where he pressed his lips to breathe he glimpsed the names of the last stations in Italy, and each name was a farewell, a step in the voyage north toward winter cold, toward names of stations in German and then Polish, isolated towns no one had yet heard of: Mauthausen, Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz. It took Margarete Buber-Neumann three weeks to travel from Moscow to the Siberian camp where she had been sentenced to serve ten years. When only three had passed, they ordered her onto a train back to Moscow, and she thought she would be set free; the train, however, did not stop in Moscow, it continued west. When finally it stopped at the border station of Brest-Litovsk, the Russian guards told Buber-Neumann to hurry and get her belongings together, because they were in German territory. Between the boards nailed over the window, she saw the black-uniformed SS on the platform and understood with horror and infinite fatigue that because she was German, Stalin’s guard were handing her over to Hitler’s guard, fulfilling an infamous clause in the German-Soviet pact.
The great night of Europe is shot through with long, sinister trains, with convoys of cattle and freight cars with boarded-up windows moving very slowly toward barren, wintry, snow- or mud-covered expanses encircled by barbed wire and guard towers. Arrested in 1937, tortured, subjected to interrogations that lasted four or five days without interruption, days and nights during which she had to remain standing, then locked for two years in solitary confinement, Eugenia Ginzburg, a militant Communist, was sentenced to twenty years of forced labor in camps near the Arctic Circle, and the train that carried her to her imprisonment took an entire month to cover the distance between Moscow and Vladivostok. During the journey, the women prisoners told one another their life stories, and sometimes when the train was stopped at a station, they put their heads out a window or to a breathing place between two boards and shouted their names to anyone passing by, or tossed out a letter or a piece of paper on which they’d scrawled their names, with the hope that the news that they were still alive would eventually reach their families. If one of two survives, if she gets back, before doing anything else she will look for the other’s parents or husband or children and tell them how her friend lived and died, give evidence that through hell and in the farthest reaches her friend never stopped thinking of them. In the Ravensbrück camp, Margarete Buber-Neumann and her soul mate Milena Jesenska made that vow. Milena told Margarete about her love affair with a man dead for twenty years, Franz Kafka, and she also told her the stories he had written, stories Margarete hadn’t read or heard till then and for that reason enjoyed even more, like the age-old stories no one has written down and yet are revived whole and powerful as soon as someone tells them aloud: the story, say, of the surveyor who comes to a village where there’s a castle he is never able to enter, or the one about the man who wakes one morning turned into an insect, or the one where police come to the director of a bank one day and tell him that he is going to be tried, although he never learns what accusation was brought against him.