My friend Ciaran put himself through all kinds of crappy travel so he could hang out with me in central Austria for about 36 hours. He sent me this email about the train portion of his return trip and I liked it so much I asked him if I could share it with you. He generously said yes.
The 2am train from Schwarzach-St Veit to Salzburg was full. I walked up and down the carriages looking for a spot to perch. There didn’t seem to be any coach class, so I looked through the glass doors of the compartments to find an empty seat. There were sleeping bodies sprawled across every open seat. There was one carriage where the two occupants – a man and a woman – were sleeping upright on the same side but opposite ends of the eight-seat compartment. I opened the door and stepped over legs that were resting on the opposite seat, settling between the two passengers who were resting, eyes closed, but not asleep. I lay back and closed my eyes.
When we got to Salzburg the man lifted his bag from the overhead rack and left the train. The woman stayed in her seat by the window. I moved to the far corner of the compartment, by the door.
‘Sie gehen auch nach Muenchen?’ I asked, to indicate that I didn’t find her repellent, I just wanted to give her some space. She was tall, blonde and 30-something. There was something Slavonic about the long curved face. She was dressed for the night-train, a loose grey sweat-suit with ankle-socks. She smiled pleasantly and nodded. I leaned back into the corner of my seat and closed my eyes, leaving my feet on the floor. After a few minutes she stretched out full-length across the row of seats opposite and fell asleep, a blanket for a pillow.
We were both asleep when we crossed the border into Germany. The glass door opened suddenly and the light flashed on. There was a man in the carriage, speaking rapidly, something about passports. He had a friendly demeanor and he looked like a cop in plain clothes. I pulled out my passport and handed it to him. He looked at it, smiled, asked me whether I was Irish and where I was going. Then he handed it back and wished me a good trip.
Still blinking in the garish carriage light, my carriage-mate handed over a plastic identity card. ‘You are Polish?’ the official inquired. She nodded. ‘You were in Austria?’ he pursued. She nodded. ‘You now want to visit Germany?’
‘Das ist Verboten?’ she inquired acidly. The shadow of a scowl crossed his good-natured face. ‘Just need the information,’ he responded. He spoke into his walkie-talkie, calling out her name and date of birth. ‘Ja, ja, vier-und-sechsig’ he repeated. 1964? Dang, I would have put her at 1977. Maybe it was vier-und-siebsig? Although mostly I had seen her asleep on a train seat, the guilelessness of sleep and the student pose takes years off you. But 47? No way. Respect.
Still. If she hadn’t slapped him down, would he have read a lady’s age out loud? Perhaps.
We chatted after he left. Neither of us had managed to buy a ticket before boarding, you couldn’t buy them online and you couldn’t buy them from the dispenser in the stations. Nobody seemed to work in the small railway stations, so you couldn’t buy them at a desk. But I was wary of sitting on a Teutonic train without a ticket.
‘Die Osterreicher Fahrkarte-verkaufer, ich hattet angst die vor,” I admitted. I was scared of the Austrian on-board ticket seller.
‘Ich auch,” she admitted.
The train conductor had looked as though she was constructed entirely of ham hocks, jammed into her OBB uniform.
She demanded my ticket and I pulled out the ticket that I had purchased from a machine, because it seemed to most closely resemble the ticket I needed. It seemed to cost roughly the right amount and since the ticket machine wouldn’t allow me to spell out Muenchen, I thought that it might suffice.
‘This is not the right ticket,’ she announced gleefully.
‘I tried to buy the right ticket, on the internet and in the station,’ I said. ‘There was nobody there to ask.’
‘This ticket is not guilty,’ she announced, holding it up like a winning lottery ticket, a grin so wide it looked like her head might split. I shrugged. No point in fighting the system, not when you’re on the one-and-only night-train to Salzburg.
‘Could I please buy the right ticket from you?’ I asked. She gave me a tight-lipped grimace. The ticket might not have been guilty, but I certainly was.
My compartment-mate was coming away from visiting her sister, who had just had a little baby girl. She was on her way to Munich, then onwards to Berlin, then by bus to Stettin. She was afraid to fly.
‘Better to take valium, then close your eyes and fly,’ I offered. She nodded in agreement.
Twenty minutes from Munich, the compartment became jammed with commuters. When get got to the HauptBahnof we nodded farewell, fellow night-train travelers among the commuters and then headed out into the rat race.
As I waited for them to call the flight to Dublin, I ate my Mozart-Kugel, (snuck into my bag by a kind host as I left Aigen) and reflected on a fine weekend. On the Salzburg monastery hostel, with a bedrooms as narrow as passageways; at breakfast, the garrulous grandmother from New Orleans bemoaning the Obama administration’s cutbacks on the space programme; on the bookshop that had a full-sized poster advertising ‘Sisi Die VampirJaegerin,’ but who couldn’t find it in stock; on the gingerbread Austrian village with the dirndals and the reliquary in the crypt of the church; of beers and conversations between 72%-Deutsch speakers and native Styrians on the modern sensibilities of fox-hunting and the imminence of global economic collapse; and on the likelihood that a thunderstorm would soak the documents lying on the bedroom windowsill, while we three sang Folsom Prison on the pristine concrete, steel and glass platform of a deserted midnight railway station.
Ciaran Buckley is an author and recovering journalist. Based in Ireland, he writes about technology and rural life on his blog. You can meet him if you stay at the 4-star accessible self-catering accommodation in Ratoath-Ashbourne on the Duffy family farm.
this post has an almost noir feel. if it was a film it would be an art film. it would be done in black & white.
there would be shots that were seriously about how the characters interacted with each other in their milieu of sharply drawn light and shadows.
there would be sharp dialogue throughout, and the characters would fight against the lessons they were learning until the bitter end.
everything would be cynical, with an underlying feeling that our hero actually was a secret romantic and his cynicism was a pose to protect his hidden heart.
in fine, this was a great story. good job, Mr. Buckley!
I have a snapshot somewhere of this empty train station at night, I need to add it in to the post. Film noir indeed, there’s nothing like an empty platfrom at midnight. We did sing Folsom Prison Blues, and I’m sorry I hadn’t brought my uke.
How delightful to read a post that has its own little narrative going on. I was completely there with you in that train carriage for a few minutes, absolutely whimiscal!