The Motion Demon (8 page)

The calmed crewmen returned to their cars to await the all-clear signal. Something riveted Boron in place. With a wandering gaze he looked at the blood-red signal, as if stupefied he listened to the grating sound of the rails shifting.

‘At the last minute they discovered the problem! At almost the very last minute, some 300 metres before the station! So, was the Sloven lying?’

Suddenly he understood his role. He quickly advanced to the signal operator, who was now changing the colour of the signal to green.

One had to divert this person from the switch at all cost and force him to leave his post.

Meanwhile, his comrades were already giving signs for movement. From the end of the train passed from lips to lips the cry: ‘All aboard!’

The signal operator, conquered by the power of the voice, the particular strength of the command, dashed towards the tower. Boron, taking advantage of this, grabbed the switch control and reversed it, connecting the rails to the first track.

The accomplished manoeuvre was deft, swift, and quiet. No one noticed.

‘All aboard!’ he shouted, withdrawing into the shadows.

The train moved, making up for time lost. In a moment the last car was already slipping into the semi-darkness, dragging after it a long trail of red lights….

After a while, the confused signal operator ran up from the tower and looked carefully at the position of the switch control. He didn’t like something. He raised a whistle to his lips and gave a three-tooted distress signal.

Too late! For a terrible crash from the station shook the air, a deafening, hollow boom of detonation, then a hellish racket, turmoil, and whining; wails, weeping, and screams were interwoven into a single wild chaos with the clash of chains, the cracking of shattering wheels, and the battering of mercilessly crushed cars.

‘Collision!’ murmured pale lips. ‘Collision!’

THE PERPETUAL PASSENGER

A SMALL, NERVOUS MAN in a threadbare coat, travelling suitcase in hand, forced his way through the crowds filling the station hall at Snowa. He seemed in a great hurry, elbowing roughly the peasant herds and throwing himself like a diver into the whirl of human bodies, as, from time to time, he fixed an uneasy glance at the clock reigning over the sea of heads.

It was already a quarter to four in the afternoon; in ten minutes the train for K. would be leaving. High time to buy a ticket and find a seat.

Finally, after superhuman exertions, Mr Agapit Kluczka forced his way through to the cashier area to stand in line and patiently wait his turn. But the slow movement forward, a step per minute, made him most restless, and soon those around him noticed a distressing tendency on his part to rush the travellers. Eventually, breathless, red like a beet, with drops of sweat covering his face, Kluczka reached the desired window. At this point, however, something unusual occurred. Instead of ordering a ticket, Kluczka opened his wallet, explored its interior, muttered something under his nose, and departed through the exit passage from the cashier.

One of the travellers, whose toe Kluczka had stepped on quite heavily during his trip to the window, noticed with no small indignation the whole puzzling manoeuvre and did not fail to berate him as he was leaving:

‘You’re crowding and pushing forward like a madman. One would think, God knows, that you’re in a great hurry—and yet you leave the cashier without a ticket! Pooh! Crazy, crazy! Perhaps you left your house without taking any money?’

But Kluczka’s mind was elsewhere. Having symbolically ‘acquired’ a ticket, he rushed with a nervous step through the waiting room to the platform. Here, a throng of passengers was already awaiting the arrival of the train. Kluczka walked impatiently back and forth along the platform a couple of times, and then, offering an open cigarette case to a porter, asked:

‘Is the train late?’

‘Only by a quarter of an hour,’ the railwayman informed him, taking out with a smile a cigarette from the row offered him. ‘It should arrive in two minutes. So, sir, are you finally going to take your train ride to Kostrzan?’ he asked, winking his eye playfully.

Kluczka became somewhat confused; his face reddened, and, turning on his heel, he trotted lightly beyond the second track. The porter, who knew him well, shook his head indulgently, waved his hand, and, taking his spot by the entrance to the waiting room, began to drag at his cigarette with pleasure.

Meanwhile, the train arrived. The wave of travellers swayed with unanimous rhythm, hurrying to the cars. So began a typical
bousculade
, the tripping over packages, the squeezing through the throngs—a crush, a hubbub, a tumult.

With the wild energy of an experienced player, Kluczka threw himself into the midst of the first line of attackers; along the way he knocked down a grey-haired old woman making her way to a compartment with two huge bundles; he toppled a nanny with an infant, and gave a black eye to some elegantly dressed gentleman. Unperturbed by the downpour of curses that fell upon him from the direction of his victims, Kluczka triumphantly entered onto the steps leading to a second-class car, and in one sprightly spring found himself in a long, narrow corridor. He wiped the sweat from his forehead, smiled victoriously, and glanced maliciously at the surging flocks of passengers below. But after five minutes of delight at being in an ‘occupied’ space, he heard the whistle for departure and on his face a sudden transformation occurred: Kluczka became alarmed. And before the final response from a bugle, signalling departure, he grabbed his suitcase from the net, flashed like lightning by the backs of the amazed travellers, and got out through the back door facing the warehouses opposite the station.

At that moment, the train moved. Above Mr Kluczka’s head the windows and the dark-green and black torsos of the cars began to pass by at an ever greater tempo; from one of the compartments the malicious head of some rascal leaned out, who, sighting the helpless standing man below, thumbed his nose derisively at him. Finally, the last car went by, and closing off the chain of its comrades with its wide, black back, it quickly slid out into the world. Kluczka looked for a moment with a plaintive glance at the disappearing train and lowered his suitcase sluggishly, in an intense image of resignation and grief. Then, under the crossfire of the ironical glances of the railroad functionaries, he dragged himself back to the waiting room.

Here the rows of waiting customers were dissipated; the main contingent had flowed out with train; the remaining passengers were waiting for a locomotive that ran on a side line, going south, in the direction of the mountains. There was plenty of time left: the next train was leaving after six in the evening.

Kluczka took a comfortable seat in the corner of the hall, blocked himself in with his suitcase, which he placed on the table opposite him, and taking out of his pocket a small packet, he started to partake of his modest afternoon snack. He felt comfortable in this snug nook, hidden in the darkness that was beginning to reach feebly into the hall here and there. He lazily straightened out his legs, leaned against the arm of the plush settee, and with complete pleasure gave himself over to absorbing the atmosphere of the waiting room and the station.

Mr Agapit Kluczka, by profession a judiciary clerk, was a passionate devotee of the railroad and travel. The environment of the railroad acted like a narcotic upon him, thrilling his entire being. The smell of smoke, locomotives, the sour scent of gas light, the specific stuffiness of the smoke and soot spilling out to the station corridors turned his head deliciously, dazed his consciousness and the clarity of his thinking. Had it not been for the wretched state of his health, he would have become a conductor so that he could ride continually from one end of the country to the other. He was immensely jealous of the constant vigour of railroad functionaries, that never-ending jumping from the train to the ground, from the ground to the train, riding and riding without a break until the day a wooden coffin would come. Unfortunately fate had rooted him to a little green table, tied him with a cord of boredom to piles of dust-covered deeds and papers. A law clerk….

He glanced once again in the depths of his wallet and with a bitter smile slipped it back to his pocket.

‘Thirty zlotys,’ he whispered out with a sigh, ‘and today is just the 5th. If it weren’t for this cursed money situation, I could have been at Kostrzan before the night arrived, together with all those lucky ones.’

The thought of such an occurrence transferred him in one leap to the noisy environment of the Kostrzan station, plunging him into the tumult of voices, the chaos of signals, and the shiver of bells. From under his closed eyelids rolled out slowly two large silent tears that fell onto his short reddish moustache. . . .

Suddenly he came to. He rubbed his eyes quickly, twirled up his moustache, and straightening himself in the settee, he looked about the waiting room. He was met by the usual boredom of stations yawning with the contemplative grey monotony of repeated occurrences. The quiet of the hall was maybe broken from time to time by the dry cough of a consumptive, the heavy, traversing gait of a bored passenger, or the murmur of well-behaved children by the window asking something of their parents. The figures of the functionaries moved at times beyond the windows of the waiting room, or the red stain of a railway official’s cap flitted by. Somewhere from a distance came the hysterical whistle of a soaring engine….

Kluczka focused his glance on the closest neighbour to his left, an old Jew—dozing in his gabardine for an hour in the same position.

‘So you’re going south, towards the mountains. I’m also going in that direction. Beautiful scenery! Just ravines, forests, foothills. But one has to be very vigilant during the ride,’ he added, changing from an enthusiastic to a cautionary tone.

‘And why is that?’ asked the perturbed Jew.

‘That region is a bit dangerous; you see, sir, there are always these forests, mountains, ravines. Apparently, from time to time, robbers turn up.’

‘
Aj, aj
,’ groaned out the Orthodox Jew.

‘Well—not frequently—but caution can never hurt,’ calmed Kluczka. ‘It’s best to ride in one of the middle cars and not inside a compartment but in the corridor.’

‘Why, sir?’

‘It’s easier to get out if something happens; a quicker means of escape. Through the window—hop!—into the fields, and you’re gone!’

Kluczka brightened up considerably and, eyes sparkling with gusto, he started to unfold before his fellow passenger images of the potential dangers that could threaten travellers in that area. Kluczka was passing through a ‘warning phase’, or, as he liked to call it, ‘a position as a danger signal’. It was the first interlude, as it were, which was always played out in the waiting room, to which he returned after carrying out the first symbolic ride to K. Usually the victim of this ominous constellation of Kluczka’s soul was the closest fellow traveller, male or female, who chanced to be in his proximity. Kluczka exerted himself into thinking of a thousand possible and impossible dangers, which he painted most artistically with the irresistible strength of his suggestion. And not just once would he get an unusual result; several times after such a conversation some terrified Honourable Lady would cancel her trip, delaying it until ‘more peaceful times’, or, if the ride was unavoidably necessary, with a devout sigh she would slip an envelope containing an offering inside the railway moneybox that bore the sign: ‘For a Safe Journey’….

The impulses that directed Kluczka in his warning phase were of a nature quite complex and unclear. Unquestionably, a certain role was played here by a desire of vengeance against the ‘lucky ones’, as he called those travellers who were riding ‘in truth’—a desire deeply latent in his heart, one to which he would reluctantly have admitted; at the same time, other feelings were called into play, giving the entire tangle a special atmosphere. In spreading out before his victims’ eyes the potential dangers of a train trip, Kluczka experienced together with them these intense experiences, attaining in this manner a surrogate perception of riding. Thus this warning phase was mixed in with his longings and impressions of travel, and train travel was his primary concern….

The station clock tolled the sixth hour. In the hall movement started. Sleepy passengers leaned out from corners and, shaking off their drowsiness, they nervously grabbed their luggage, making their way to the glass doors leading to the platform.

Kluczka broke off in the middle of his sentence, adjusted his coat, straightened up, and with a bouncy step neared the departure gate. The porter retreated under the onrush of impatient customers, withdrawing to the depths of the platform. The crowds poured outside, carrying with them the already-irritated Kluczka. Shoving his way through the doors, Kluczka was met by the ironic glance of a functionary, but he pretended to be too distracted to notice.

‘Damn it!’ he thought, overtaking some gentleman. The train had already ridden up with bravado before the station, throwing lengthy white funnels of steam off to the sides.