MY SISTER LEAVES ME AT THE JUNCTION, at the railway station that looks like the end of the world. It’s the last station, the end of the journey. It looks deserted even when there are people about.

“Off you go then, I’ve got work to do,” says my sister, waiting just long enough for me to take my case out of the trunk, and then her car disappears. She just winked, she didn’t hug me and I didn’t need to say anything along the lines of take care of yourself, take care of Ma, or any of the other things I’d been rehearsing in my head on our way here.

The junction is behind the abandoned halls of the former fish-processing factory, which everyone calls the Sardine Factory and which has served for years mainly as a squat—until the police come and throw the squatters out, and then it becomes yet another shithouse and refuge for the most desperate dopeheads. At the entrance there’s a half-illigible graffito: LOVE HURTS LIKE A RASP RUNNING OVER…

The former Sardine Factory building is not high, but it’s the only protection against the wind between the railway station and the warehouses of the industrial port. Cargo ships, water tankers and tugs fray their ropes. Tugs are, along with tow-boats, the nicest boats in the world, I reflect: little musclemen with big names on their prows and a piece of car tire instead of a protégé. Tugs with rough thick paint in bright colors, green, orange, on a steel hull—they are definitely the nicest boats in the world, although in principle, and even with none, I would have no objection to being shat on by some bird and sailing off on a yacht.

The wind swirls weed from the shore, so there is dried seaweed and sea salad all over the junction—and on the rails.

I’m the last person to get onto the train, at the last minute.

“You do everything by the skin of your teeth, Dada,” my roommate would say. A cheery emo girl. She’ll be waiting for me tomorrow at the Munich Hauptbahnhof. For us to cook tortillas together, for our legs to swell up from standing too much, and for us to go out into the streets clattering our little boots in a harmonious rhythm while around us stretches one of the centers of the universe, which we wouldn’t be able to traverse even if we had a hundred days.

“There’s nowhere to escape to,” said Herr Professor, once, I recall, maybe in the letter he left me or in a conversation, I can’t remember now, but it was about journeys, departures, and the like.

But it’s not about escaping, Professor, I tell him to myself, you’re the one escaping, I’m done here and it’s time for me to ride off into the sunset.

* * *

There’s a woman with dark hair sitting in my compartment, reading a newspaper. The way she responds to my greeting suggests that she’s not pleased to be sharing those few cubic meters of stale air with me, a stranger. The seats are covered in artificial leather, with the stuffing spilling out in places where it’s been pierced and scrawled over with ballpoint pens, but the windowpanes are crystal clear.

Later, my traveling companion introduces herself: “Mrs. Nought, writer.”

On the seat beside her there’s a bag for a laptop. She’s put her feet onto her suitcase—black boots, with laces—and thrust her nose still more deeply into her newspaper.

She’s no more agreeable than a corpse, I reflect, but nevertheless I don’t think she’ll take out the usual snack of meat, onion, and brandy in the middle of the journey, and that’s something. Although you can never be quite sure of these things in this part of the world.

The engine whistles.

On our way out of town I see a crowd of people, whole columns. They’re railway workers, on strike.

“Someone’s on strike every day,” said Ma in the hospital.

She’s bored, but she hates watching programs in the TV room “with those lunatics,” as she calls them. “They stink.” So she reads all the newspapers that Mariana Mateljan brings her. She is most interested in the people on hunger strike. “They’re going to die,” she said, shaking her head. But none of the strikers died, and the journalists would soon forget them, and then new ones would appear, and so it went on.

There are lots of workers in the street, they look as though they don’t know where to go: I see them through the train window, men and women. They’re not so much carrying their placards as dragging them along.

No one shouts or bursts into song like in the old textbooks.

The engine driver has to slow down and whistle because some of the workers are strolling across the track as though they weren’t remotely concerned about the train. In the end, the train stops before we’ve even properly got going.

It looks as though we’re being driven by strikebreakers.

The woman in the compartment doesn’t notice what’s going on or else she pretends not to; she’s taken off her black leather jacket and made herself comfortable as she carries on reading. On the front page of the tabloid she has in her hands it says STRIKE and something else hidden by her fingers.

She looks only a few years older than me, but there’s something about Mrs. 0 that would make even older people prefer to remain on formal terms with her.

“Do you like trains?”

“Not particularly.”

“I like trains, regardless of the bad air. What precisely is it that you don’t like about trains?”

“Someone close to me threw himself under one. So it’d be stupid for me to say I like trains. Otherwise I don’t have anything against them.”

“I’m sorry. Now I feel awkward.”

“I understand, but there’s no need.”

“Peter Pan threw himself under a train, as well, did you know? Peter Davis, actually, on whom Barrie based Peter Pan. He didn’t fly, the poor flying boy—or flying granddad. He was already an old man up to his ears in debt. Although some say the fact that he killed himself had something to do with his brother Michael who had drowned very young, deliberately, out rowing with his boyfriend. Romeo and Romeo. Poor Peter, apparently, never got over it. Sometimes I wonder, hypothetically, whether it wouldn’t have been better for poor Peter to have done it straight away, rather than wait all those years, for his wife and children to fall ill, to get into financial trouble, and so on. In a word, for all those things to happen that it’s virtually impossible to avoid.”

“A very sad story. A bit absurd.”

“It depends how you look at it. Are you very sad?”

“I was. I’m not sad now.”

“But you’re not happy either?”

“No, I’m not happy, but I’m calm.”

“Can you explain?”

“The person I lost was my brother Daniel. I believed that we were very close, but he didn’t ask for my help. It seems I didn’t know him that well. Can one get over that, Mrs. 0? Or does one just become dulled to an extent that’s bearable. I went back to the Old Settlement in order to discover the truth about him.”

“And? Was the quest successful? Did you find the Holy Grail?”

“Well, I’m just trying to tell you, I found some of his letters and discovered that his heart was in the right place. Unfortunately, for a while I hadn’t been sure of that. But there’s no question, my brother wasn’t selfish or bad. He was a fine boy. He could have become an astronomer or a poet, not everyone can do that.”

“What does bad mean for you?”

“That he wasn’t bad? Treacherous or violent, he wasn’t that. All vicious people are one or the other. One shouldn’t have anything to do with such people. He was sound.”

“And is that some consolation?”

“Not really, is it, but it helps nevertheless. One day at a time.”

“What was your brother like?”

“Different. Everything about him was over the top. Too much fog in his head, our sister would say. It seems he wanted to be an astronomer, he knew a lot about stars, but one could also say he could have been a poet—but I didn’t know that until a few days ago. What else. He had lots of animals and took care of them. On the other hand, he wasn’t brilliant at everyday things. In school he was slower than the others. His teachers said he didn’t concentrate… he played at being a cowboy. That’s charming when you’re nine, but not really after that.”

“Like Shane?”

“Yes, like Alan Ladd, James Stewart, Gregory Peck, Kirk Douglas, Charles Bronson, Burt Lancaster, Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, James Coburn, Terence Hill, Lee Marvin, Lee Van Cleef, Montgomery Clift, Ned Montgomery.”

“You’ve got a good memory.”

“I like lists, they’re amusing.”

“I’d completely forgotten about cowboys. Gold diggers, cattle rustlers, and law keepers. Mythical fellows with honor, balls, a swagger in their step. What posers, don’t you think?”

“Some just look like cowboys, but some really are.”

“A shame they’ve lost their point. Wonderful posers. How did you put it? With their hearts in the right place, well centered.”

“Yes, and with balls. In the right place.”

“Do you know any?”

“Cowboys? They exist, for sure,” I say.

“Like life in space,” Mrs. 0 smiles. “Don’t be cross,” she adds. “I believe in life in space.”

Suddenly she moves over to me. She sits down by my feet and plays with her fingers.

“Have you other family?”

“I’ve got Ma and my sister.”

“How do you get on with them?”

“I want my sister and Ma to be happy and well, more than anything, but I can also live without them.”

“One day at a time, is that how you live?”

“That’s one way. It can be one minute at a time, as well.”

“You mention your mother and sister. No one else. Don’t you have anyone else close to you? Aren’t you in love, for instance?”

“No. But I’ve slept with several men and I cared for them then.”

“And now?”

“There was a young man I liked, but he turned out bad.”

“Bad in bed?”

“In bed we were one. That doesn’t happen with everyone, I thought that meant something.”

“So the young man is, how did you put it—vicious? Violent or treacherous?”

“He was in a group with violent people who mistreated my brother and he didn’t tell me. He hurt me.”

“Treacherous, then? Is that why you’re leaving?”

“That’s just one of the reasons I didn’t stay.”

“That’s your revenge?”

“I don’t know, I don’t think so, I didn’t have a choice. Revenge includes choice.”

“You know what they say: revenge is best served cold. It’s not an empty phrase. But if you ask me, it’s also excellent hot. But you’re tepid. Some would say—lukewarm. If you ask me, you ought either to have stayed with him or killed him at once, as soon as you found out. Shoot him, and that’s the end of it. Hypothetically: if his life depended on your word, would you take revenge or save him?”

I say nothing.

“You forget about the good side of death. Death redeems,” she adds.

“To be quite honest, I don’t give a damn about the good side of death.”

“I thought as much,” says the writer 0 and smiles.

The police come and order the workers to get off the tracks and let the train through. A woman shouts, but soon the strikers withdraw, still carrying their placards at half mast. Some have stuck theirs in garbage bins. “At least people used to be alarmed by them, but now no one gives a flying fuck,” my sister had said a few days earlier when the shipyards were on strike.

Mrs. 0 keeps smiling and clicking her fingers.

“They’re ignoring them,” she says as though she has suddenly noticed the people outside.

“What do you think’s going to happen?” I ask.

“When they’re hungry enough, they’ll take up arms, then people will have to take notice. They’ll be given some money or the angry will blow them to smithereens.”

“But there’s no money in this country. My sister says that we’ve been robbed by our bigwigs and heroes.”

“Then they’ve got the money,” says Mrs. 0.

The engine could be heard puffing like a sportsman before the start of a race.

“Have we met somewhere before?” I ask.

“No. People often ask me that. I seem familiar,” says 0.

She’s blushing, I observe. You don’t expect a person of such poise to blush.

I turn my head away and pretend to be watching the railway coming back to life, the strikers getting increasingly tiny and the views changing. I observe the town as though it’s unfamiliar, and the more success I have with looking through the eyes of an unknown man or woman, the more alien the town is to me—the more I like it. The more I like it, the less I care about it. And the other way around.

“This town cannot be conquered in any familiar way, it is inherited like an illness,” said Herr Professor. “That’s what Vrdovđek and those like him cannot grasp,” he said. “The town will devour their brain and soul, far more quickly than they will destroy it.”

I wouldn’t be so sure, I reflect.

The train rumbles over the rocky ground. I shield my eyes from the sun with my hands so as to see the prairie in the distance, the infertile Majurina and the house of my old enemies and friends from my childhood, the Iroquois Brothers. And I look also, into the distance, so as not to miss the place where I had briefly, but fundamentally, fallen for Angelo. Colpo di fulmine, said my great-grandma, the insatiable one. It lasts an instant and the picture is lost. We are emerging from the urban catacombs and before us the plain begins to stretch out, with its fields and trees, a few houses and the hill in the distance. Soon one can no longer see the suburbs, the Old Settlement, or the sea.