When the Journey’s Over
An angel appears in the night on the train from Venice to Nice.
When the journey’s over, there’ll be time enough to sleep.
—A. E. Housman
I left Venice in the night, which is the best time to leave Venice because the city’s luminous and melancholic beauty continues to ripple through your mind like the long shimmering reflections of lights on the lagoon. You can fall asleep without really feeling you have left, and you are saved the worst agitation of parting by this prolonged dream of Venice. But, as it turned out, I was not to sleep nor to dream on the night I left and I was not to be the romantic traveller swathed in her silk scarf, dreaming her diaphanous dreams in the corner of the first class carriage of the night train to Nice.
At Padua a young woman hauled her backpack into the carriage and dumped it at my feet as she turned around to say something to a bulky shadow in the corridor. The bulk shifted. The dim corridor light appeared at his shoulder and I could see the hunched figure of a man, hunched because he was shouldering a large plastic shopping bag stuffed to overflowing (all his worldly possessions, as it turned out) and hunched because of some inner defeat, some blackness that followed him into the carriage. I felt uneasy. I looked at the girl for reassurance and she was obliging, overly so. She did not stop talking. Words bubbled out of her impossibly small mouth like water from some secret spring that is the unlikely source of a great river. She loved Italy. She loved France. She loved the world. She loved God. Didn’t I? She didn’t give me a chance to answer, which was possibly a good thing. She was a pilgrim and she was overwhelmed with the messianic desire to make herself heard above the indifferent noises of the speeding train and through the heavy darkness of the carriage. She stopped only to make signs at her silent traveling companion who got the message and wearily put his shoulder to her backpack, heaving it painfully into the rack above my seat.
“I picked him up at Padua,” she explained breezily, as if the man was an inanimate souvenir she’d acquired at one of the booths outside the Giotto-frescoed Capella degli Scrovegni. “I can’t work out what language he speaks. I’ve tried everything, but he seems happy enough to tag along. It’s handy for the luggage.” She smiled. Then she went on at length about the miracles of Lourdes and the sightings at Fatima and the Black Madonna of . . . I didn’t quite catch the location of the Black Madonna because I found myself wishing, uncharitably, that the slick Italian ticket inspector would do his rounds and send them to second class where they obviously belonged.
Where they obviously belonged! My own line of thinking appalled me. Only a few days ago I had declared adamantly that the worst people traveled first class. I had an international rail pass, which made me a first-class traveler and, since my first trip from Switzerland to France, I had seen enough of the petulant first class to tempt me back to second class, where, by the way, I belonged, despite what the ticket said. But the sight of the fabulously comfortable first-class seats weakened my resolve time and time again, especially at night when the prospect of comfort fell in so easily with the prospect of sleep. So here I was again, in first class and, appallingly quickly, making myself a first-class passenger with all the misguided arrogance and ignorant intolerance I had observed in my first-class fellow travelers.
However, when the slick conductor insinuated himself into the carriage to check the tickets of my new companions, I woke up to myself and pleaded their case. The carriage was empty, I said. I didn’t mind, I said, convinced, out of a sense of guilt that I could listen to some more about the Black Madonna. But the man who had come in with the girl was already on his feet, frightened and defeated. It seemed to me that he was ready to run. I felt that something was required of me, as the girl also got up, perturbed perhaps by her friend’s alarm. I was soothing. I suggested that they leave their luggage with me, at least while they looked for a seat in the crowded second class. It was summer and the height of the season. The rest of the train was full. The girl took up my offer quickly. The man hesitated, looked at me with sad eyes, and then nodded. They left. The conductor smiled at me triumphantly. I turned to the window where the lights and yellowish facades of earth-bound Italian cities swam in the darkness and made me think of Venice again.
At Milan I was disturbed by a great commotion, the sort of Italian commotion you get used to after a while in Italy. Loud voices, dramatic exclamations, flights of curses and any number of Madonnas. Madonna this and Madonna that! Someone wasn’t happy. The door of the carriage crashed open and the light went on. I blinked to see a bad-tempered Adonis who stood in the doorway insolently waiting to be admired and feared. While I am enchanted with Italy and the Italians, there is a type that leaves me cold. This is the type whose sultry droop of the eyelid is just that bit too sultry, whose mink eyelashes are that much too thick and long, whose crushed-grape mouth is that much too full-lipped, and whose expression is entirely self-absorbed. I suddenly felt very cold. Behind Adonis, in the narrow corridor, a jostling, wiggling, giggling group of black girls (Black Madonnas? The thought was tempting.) Or at least they were dressed like girls. Les Girls. Hot volatile stuff. Pink mini, spangled top, midriff as black as night. Lime green shorts, gelato bra, hair as high as a cloud. Amid screams and curses and whistles and laughter, he sent them packing to the second class. There was no sign of the ticket inspector. There was no longer any hint of Venice in the night.
The Adonis closed the door, switched off the light and took up a position opposite me, stretching his legs across the carriage to the other seat and smiled, insolently, waiting for a sign of nerves or perhaps even fear. I wanted to grab my handbag on the seat beside me and leave the carriage, but I would not give him the satisfaction. Instead, I continued to look out of the window into the warm summer night but my breathing was shallow and I was alert to any movement in the carriage. It was unpleasant. I cursed the inspector and my first-class ticket and the pride that would not let me make a run for it. Then the door opened. It was the pilgrim’s traveling companion, the silent man. He’d come for their luggage, his and the pilgrim’s. I felt relieved. His bulk made light work of Adonis whose legs came down to the floor in a flash. I heard the newcomer utter his first words, a guttural curse. “Bloody Italian!” he muttered in Russian. I didn’t quite make the connection. It was three A.M. I hadn’t slept but the darkness and the motion of the train had given me the occasional sense of being asleep and dreaming. I was momentarily confused and then he said it again. “Bloody Italian!” In Russian. In my language, or should I say, the language of my parents. Before I could make myself known to him as this new person, this person who could understand him, he had taken up the seat next to mine, making it very clear that he was not going to leave me alone with Adonis. I was grateful.
It didn’t take long for the Adonis to make his exit. He saved face by studying his showy watch for a long time, as if he was worried he’d miss some appointment. Then he sighed loudly and stood up stretching. The smell of some expensive spice-laden aftershave lotion flooded the carriage as he slithered out. My companion smiled at me. It was a weary smile but a smile nonetheless.
“Thanks,” I said in Russian. For a moment he was confused.
“Thanks,” I said again and followed up by telling him who I was. He was still confused.
“Are you a dream?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Then you must be an angel.” This made me laugh. No one had ever mistaken me for an angel. I told him this. He told me his story.
He was from Moldova. He had been a music teacher, but times were so tough that he’d been reduced to playing his fiddle in the streets. His wife, also educated, was unemployed. His child was sick.
“All children are sick in Moldova now,” he said ominously as the train lurched, giving his statement an edge of unreality, like something in the theatre or in a dream. Even I was beginning to wonder if we were in a dream, the desperate man and the holidaymaker thrown into the same dark carriage of someone’s imagination. He was on his way to Lisbon where he told me many of his compatriots had gone in search of work.
Of course, they were “illegals.” He’d paid “some people” $4,000 that his family and friends had managed to put together after selling their instruments, their furniture, their wedding rings. The “some people” gave him a visa that had him down as a sports trainer and then smuggled him across borders in a truck along with several other single men. “We did not speak to each other,” he said sadly. “We might have been able to help each other but it’s a dangerous business and it’s better if you don’t speak.” He was left with a railway ticket, no money and no help in some back room of a dive in Padua. He thought he was going to die. He hadn’t eaten or slept in days. After forty-eight hours he was kicked out of the room and he made his way, somehow, to the station where he met the pilgrim. The pilgrim! I suddenly saw her in a different light. Thank God for the pilgrim! His words were beginning to slur. I could see he was exhausted. I gave him some fruit that I had in my bag and ordered him to eat though, as he said, he was beyond the point of hunger. “You are an angel,” he kept saying, not as a compliment to me but as a way of explanation. It was, I had to admit, an amazing thing that he had chanced upon me here, in the first-class carriage of the night train to Nice, the smart train of European travelers, the Riviera train, the romantic train from Venice. I told him to stretch out and go to sleep.
“You are safe,” I repeated more than once, “You are safe and I will watch over you.” Like an angel. I grimaced at the thought. He gave me his passport and his rail ticket.
He was worried about the inspector.
“I’ll sort him out,” I said.
“You have got to be an angel,” he murmured and fell asleep instantly, the dead sleep of total exhaustion. While he slept I wrestled with a whole battalion of thoughts. How to help this man? The inspector was easy. If necessary, I’d pay the difference. But what about afterward? What about getting him safely to Lisbon? I switched on the small light above my seat and studied his ticket because I suddenly had a terrible thought that he’d been duped again by “those people.” I compared the ticket to my own. It looked legitimate enough. I could see that there were two more changes of train he had to make after Nice. I remembered the pilgrim saying she was on her way to Spain. I wondered if I could count on her. I rummaged in my bag and found a pen and a rather decent envelope containing the account from a hotel in Singapore. I screwed up the account and threw it back into my bag. And then I wrote on the envelope, first in English and then in French, a “please can you help this traveler” set of directions that I figured he could show to people if he got into trouble on his journey to Lisbon. This feverish burst of activity made me feel better, as if I had somehow managed, by my inadequate scribbling, to stave off the strange sense of panic and gloom that had suddenly filled my night. I took a look at the “illegal” who was dead to the world and I switched off the light.
The train was skirting the coast. In rapid succession the window was black or filled with the lights of some coastal town. Occasionally there was the sea, blue-black in the night, chopping between the two colors, flecked with lights whose source was invisible but might have been the moon. At one point the train seemed to move through a beach party like an invisible guest. I saw people dancing on well-lit sand, I heard loud music and voices, and I saw the shore dotted with figures of partygoers who’d been hard at it all night. Summer nights on the Riviera. It must have been five o’clock in the morning and, like the people on the beach, I had not slept. When the light began to stream into the carriage, the Moldovan woke with a deep shudder. He looked around confused for a moment but he recognized me and remembered who I was.
“An angel!” he exclaimed and gave a real smile.
“Like hell!” I said and we both laughed. There wasn’t much time left until Nice. I gave him the envelope, which, in the light of day, revealed itself as a fragile and shabby piece of armor against the world. Nevertheless, I translated it for him. After his sleep, he was a different person, quick on the uptake, humorous and almost optimistic. He told me that his friends would be waiting for him in Lisbon.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“You can always rely on friends,” he said. And I didn’t doubt that someone would be waiting for him in Lisbon, no matter when he arrived. My own family, after all, had been refugees in some distant past that had never been thrown in quite the same relief as it was now. I felt I had to help him. I did not consider the implications of his being an “illegal.” Up close, like this, you don’t worry about the status of a person. Legal. Illegal. Here was a man in a state of desperation. The worry was to get him to Lisbon. I left him in charge of the luggage and went in search of the pilgrim. I found her sprawled on the floor of a carriage full of backpackers. It was a cheerful unruly scene. Normal. I wondered why I’d ever gone into first-class. The pilgrim followed me into the corridor where I told her his story.
“Oh!” she sighed, full of compassion, her tiny mouth forming a perfect circle.
“He’s a good man, you have nothing to fear from him,” I said. She nodded.
“A good Christian man.” I was shameless. She was convinced.
“I will look after him until Spain and then I will put him on the train to Lisbon,” she said with righteous zeal. I was very encouraging. Together, we made our way to first class, our mission clear and our mutual admiration at a high point. The trolley came around. I bought everyone breakfast. We were cheerful. I acted as an interpreter, establishing some communication between the pilgrim and her charge that I thought would make their ongoing journey easier, or at least their silences more comfortable.
In the station at Nice, we parted ways. I gave him some American dollars. Dollars speak all languages. He gave me a telephone number of a relative in St. Petersburg so that I could ring to say I’d seen him and so that I could find out if he made it to Lisbon. Presumably, word would get back to his wife in Moldova. I watched him hoisting his plastic bag and the pilgrim’s large backpack over his broad shoulders. The sun was already hot and the platform was crowded with holidaymakers. My own train to Les Arcs Draguignan and the village in Provence where I was staying with a friend was already at the station. I pushed my way through the crowd moving farther and farther away from the point where I had said goodbye to the music teacher, farther and farther away from the point where my dreams of Venice had collided with his flight. I looked for a second-class carriage and threw myself in with the holiday throng.
Olga Pavlinova Olenich is a widely published Australian writer who lives in Melbourne.