“Next stop, Saplings!”
They used to make wooden soldiers of the same shape as this day’s conductor. Tall, willowy, striped red and black. Broad shoulders and arms stuck to the both sides. Rigid, but towering, and oh so frail. How old could he be? Maybe twenty?
At twenty, Emilia had still been working at the factory. Horrible years, albeit only three of them. They said old people ought to daydream about their youth, but Emilia wouldn’t have chosen to relive those years for all the gold in the world. For all the flowers.
She drew her gaze away from the conductor and let it fall back on the moth-eaten coat of the man who sat in the corner of the wagon. Arms crossed, leant against the side of the car, his face had slid deep into the window’s short drapes. He’d been there since before Emilia got on the train, and had yet to show any signs of waking.
“Are we there yet?”
Two rows away, facing the back of the train, there were two parents and a child. The child swung from left and right in his seat, like one of the toys Emilia had once seen on the desk of a music teacher, the movement even and continuous. He seemed not to have discovered what tiredness was yet. He hadn’t stopped moving since they’d found their places, an hour before.
“Are we there yet? How much longer?”
Enthusiasm was easy to pick up. Like a flu at the beginning of spring. Emilia pulled her shawl closer around her and looked out the window. Were they there yet? And how much longer?
Nobody sat beside her. The carriage was almost empty, anyway. Aside from the sleeping man and the family with the child, there were also two twin women of middle age, in red crepe dresses and green moccasins. Another man, with the air of a professor or a librarian, sat near the front. Three teenagers with ragged backpacks, staring out the window with the wonder of people who should not have been there.
Emilia followed their example.
She remembered when she’d seen these hills through thinner glasses. She remembered how they’d all sat here in this very train, six people on four seats, playing cards and crumpling sandwiches between them. The end of the last year of high school, a few weeks to catch their breath. Emilia could almost see them before her. Colleagues, friends, tired and happy, their trousers scuffed at the knees and their cheeks already sunburnt. A few hours listening to everyone else and trying not to fall off the quarter of the seat assigned to her.
The train drew to a stop, swaying like a boat. Its waves were the morning light outside the window.
“Saplings!”
Carefully, Emilia stood up and left the train car with everyone else. The sleeping man remained inside.
The cool air washed over her like a song, smelling like dew and grapevine flowers, and wood creaked mutely under their feet.
The platform was suffused in a rosy light. There was nothing here but for a couple kiosks, their papers and magazines unchanged for years, and the endless horizon of hills covered in grapevine saplings. At one point, the people around here had made enough wine that the smell of grapes could have soaked their clothes.
Emilia went slowly to one of the postcard stands at the edge of the platform and looked over them. None of them were any different from the ones she’d seen so long before. They even seemed discolored by the sun, as if they’d been waiting there for her since her youth.
She decided to take the same ones she’d taken then. Children at the seaside, sunburnt shoulders. Two women bowing over a basket of grapes. A white flower with yellow hills behind it. It took so long for her to find them all that, after leaving a few coins on the abandoned counter, she was the last one to climb back up.
When the train started moving again, Emilia took the postcards out of her pocket, turned them over, and was almost surprised not to find her own words scribbled on the back.
Dear mum, today I went to—
But her mind would not be still, and instead it showed her again their group of six, going to the seaside.
Silviu had been there too, stuck between two people and held tightly so as not to fall under the small table, a jack of hearts balanced on his knee. They’d only known each other from afar until that summer, friends of a friend. But he’d looked at her once, during that train ride, and Emilia had almost let herself fall in front of the conductor. Eighteen years old that summer. A lifetime ago.
Back then, Emilia still had short hair, although she was trying to grow it out, and she still wore boys’ clothes for her parents’ sake. Yet this wasn’t what bothered her most. What bothered her was what she saw in the eyes of all those who looked at her and didn’t seem to see anything wrong there.
That summer, Silviu would buy her a hat, and each day, he would add to it a flower, a feather, a leaf.
“First stop, The House Down Below!”
“How many do we have left?”
The mother whispered a secret number in his ear.
“That many? Why?”
“Because that’s how many we have left. We’re going farther, today.”
“But why?”
Emilia set the postcards carefully in the pocket of the folded coat at her side. She smoothed out a sleeve and felt two separate places where the thread had split. Her dad used to have a coat like this too, she thought.
Silviu hadn’t seemed the type to ask you why incessantly. To nudge you to tell him this and that. To poke your shoulder so that you’d show him a corner of the paper sheet of your soul. And yet, he’d been the one who made her talk about her folks. With a single kind look, beside the sea, after seeing her unsent postcards.
What could she have told him? We’re not close. We live in the same house and don’t even know each other by name. During the holidays, we talk to anyone else except between ourselves. I don’t think my parents ever loved each other. For a few years, I was afraid they didn’t want me, but then I realized they’re too indifferent for that. We live in a house at the bottom of an alley that climbs abruptly over a hill. We have chrysanthemum in the garden. I always wished for a brother that could take my place.
She did tell him all this and more, but in time. In that moment, when they’d only known each other for a handful of days, when they were still only dipping their toes in the waters of their friendship, Emilia had only told him, We live in a house down below. The one with green walls. We don’t like each other very much, but it’s all right.
“The House Down Below!”
Emilia climbed down along with everyone else, and everything was just as she remembered.
The narrow street that twisted abruptly through strings of old houses and crowded gardens. There she’d crashed her bike into the street lamp. There she’d gone caroling without knowing the old woman had died two days before. There had once lived a girl who’d given her a sconce from Lebedivka.
The platform was a boat, a plank that kept her from drowning. From where she stood, Emilia couldn’t see her own home, hidden behind a garden with a grapevine bower, where once had lived an old man who only spoke Albanese. That would come later.
Instead, Emilia gazed around her. The high schoolers were struggling to read a poster stuck to an age-worn fence. The librarian was checking the train timetable that had appeared in the middle of the street. The child’s father was trying to pick a bundle of grapes that hung above the window of the closest house to the platform.
He succeeded, but the grapes were withered, and they all climbed back into the train.
“It was a poster for a play at the state high school,” Emilia told the teenagers before getting back to her seat.
The train started moving again. She kept her eyes closed until the hills returned outside the window. Already she could see a sliver of the sea, a teary smear in the distance.
“First stop, A Play at the State High School!”
She and Silviu had a game once, whenever one of them was sad. You looked around, and thought of the loveliest thing you could’ve said to whichever stranger you saw. It was a diversion from their own worries. It was an exercise in optimism. It was a competition.
How strange, Emilia thought now. To make themselves feel better even as they were increasing the distance between them and the rest of the world. Alone together. Emilia smiled, one hand on the coat. What odd people we two have been.
She wondered what Silviu would’ve chosen to say to the professor, or to the high schoolers, or to the twins. Emilia turned her gaze on the sleeping man in the corner of the wagon, and thought, Even when you’re not doing a thing, you can still leave a memory behind you.
“A Play at the State High School!”
The platform was just one row in a sea of chairs that spread downwards over the hill. The curtains were a powdered indigo, the stage smaller than a classroom. Emilia had been working for almost two years at the factory when she’d gone to see the play, having missed everything from her early life, down to the smell of the high school floor.
Some of them wandered now through the seats, looking at the handwritten programs. Others sat down on the platform’s carpet, looking at the trees and at the sliver of sea in the distance. Emilia sat down in the same seat she’d had sixty years before, and now she could at last see everything before her.
She’d never been very tall, not like Silviu, and the seats they’d found were at the very back of the theatre. She’d watched the play through slumped shoulders and bowed heads. Sorry, sorry, Silviu said whenever he saw her leaning one way or the other, because the rest of the hall had filled while she’d waited for him. Emilia calmed him with a touch on his wrist each time, trying not to laugh when he did not cease.
She didn’t feel like laughing when, during the last act, Silviu said sorry with a large smile on his face, and when Emilia tried to touch his wrist once more, he turned his hand and clasped their fingers together.
The conductor rang the signal again, and the curtains were called while they went back inside.
“So what was the play about?” the mother of the child asked her, turning in her seat.
Emilia thought on it a little, but even as the memories were like sparks in her soul, the plot escaped her mind. She shook her head.
“I can’t remember, it was a long time ago. Something about unusual families.”
The mother nodded, and the train kept swaying. Emilia gazed at orchards washed in the golden afternoon sun, at the few grey clouds gathered over the sea.
What she could remember all too well from that night was the way in which the lamplight had touched Silviu’s hair when they’d stopped at the upper end of Emilia’s street. The rest of her life had seemed reflected in the steep descent that awaited her next.
I’m going to ask you something you might think odd, she’d told him then. Hands pulled into fists in the pockets of her too-big man coat, gaze welded to the asphalt of the empty street. Call me Emilia.
To this day, she didn’t know where she’d got the courage to look at Silviu then. But she’d been rewarded thoroughly, because Silviu was only thoughtful for a moment, before holding out his hand, shaking hers a little, and saying, with a smile Emilia would have engraved on her heart, Pleasure to meet you at last.
She’d never looked at someone and seen an entire life’s worth of possibilities spread out in front of them before. She’d never understood someone so fully that she would not doubt that, together, they would get somewhere. Even then.
Are we there yet? Emilia had wondered since that first lamplit embrace. How much longer?
“First stop, A Question.”
The twins had a Turist radio nestled beside the window. It wasn’t playing very loudly, but the train was so quiet and empty that the sound was clear anyway. An old song about hills and daisies. Warm water on tired shoulders.
Emilia glanced at the family and saw that the boy was now asleep, mouth open, head on his father’s shoulder. This explained the silence. She hoped that he could also hear a bit of the melody, there in his dreams.
During her last year at the factory, music had been the only thing that had kept her from crumbling to pieces. There was a bar there, right by the bus station, and the old radio that reached out its window had always brushed off some of the dust that gathered in her soul with each passing day.
We should move to a village where they only have a single school and two teachers, there they surely won’t complain, Silviu would tell her as he worked salve into her callouses.
And you’d care for cattle instead of city children’s puppies? she would ask him.
And this was enough to soften his frown. Give me a herd and I’m a happy man.
“A Question.”
They stepped out of the wagon and onto the moth-eaten carpet of a one-room apartment smaller than the stage that had preceded it. Silviu had inherited it from an aunt, and he had long wanted to sell it, only he hadn’t known where to go afterwards. He hadn’t even taken down the doilies hung over the television and the windowsill. Through every window, they could still see the hills following the train tracks.
Please don’t laugh at me, Silviu told her the last time she’d been in this room. He’d waited for her to untie her hair and change into a borrowed dress beforehand, brewed a cup of tea and waited with jittery feet for her to finish it too. I traipsed through twenty flea markets for this, but I couldn’t find anything better.
Then, out of the pocket of his vest, he pulled out a silver ring, thin and a little worn, woven around an oval citrine stone. Emilia smiled at the memory of how she’d burst first into laughter, then into tears. The tears had only overtaken her when Silviu shook himself out of the initial surprise and started laughing too. For only then had she realized this was truly happening.
The ring fit her finger perfectly, callouses and all.
And yours?
I admit, it took me longer to find mine than yours, Silviu said with a large smile, taking another ring out of his pocket, with another yellow stone. I’m pickier than you.
Emilia chocked on her laughter again as she put the ring on his finger too.
The twin women were now looking out the window, pointing out to each other various hills and houses in the distance. With their son freshly awakened, the family was inspecting the books Silviu had gathered on his shelves during college. Little by little, they all turned back to the train.
When she glanced back, Emilia saw that the librarian had started to cry.
The conductor closed the door behind them, but didn’t announce the next stop, so they all went back to what they were doing before. Every now and then, the radio lost its signal. The sleeping man kept sleeping. The professor kept wiping his tears, the high schoolers kept giggling, and the family kept whispering together. All of them in the same place, all of them in another world, at once a step and a lifetime away from each other.
The train stopped suddenly, and when they all glanced outside the window, the world outside was a blue murky darkness beneath thick trees. But when Emilia looked closer, she saw there, in the darkest shadow, the lime-washed walls of her childhood home.
The conductor set himself before the door and kept it closed.
“The stop where we don’t climb down.”
Here was the night when her dad had thrown her suitcase in the street, while her mom had looked at her like a stranger. The chill of a February night. The curious light at the neighbors’ windows. Yelling, saying that this was not the son they’d raised and that from then on she would have nothing more to do with them.
And they were right. She wasn’t, and she wouldn’t.
Emilia tore her eyes away from the window and, while the train picked up speed again, stared at the ring on her left hand instead, unchanged after all these years.
“First stop, Two Rooms and a Garden.”
In the end, they didn’t move to a village, but to a smaller town, with a seafront so steep that it was nearly a gulf. They bought a small house with a garden, where they would grow pumpkins in autumn and daisies in spring.
There wasn’t just one school, but two, and Emilia had talked beforehand to someone there and they did, indeed, need any help they could get. There weren’t too many apartment buildings, but there were enough pets, so Silviu wasn’t going to get bored either.
Nobody will know us. This doesn’t belong to them, he told her on the train ride from one life to another. I can come to the school, tell them there was some problem with the papers, that they printed them wrong thousands of times, that we didn’t have the money to change them again and again. They’ll write your name right before the year starts. It doesn’t matter what they’ll think, let them. We’ll always know ourselves better than any of them. You’ll see, we’ll be fine.
And he’d been right. They had.
“Two Rooms and a Garden.”
This time, the platform was cluttered with the twisted vines of every kind of pumpkin, stems a little dry because at the time they’d just passed through their first winter in their new home. They’d painted the walls a lilac that in summer nearly disappeared behind a blanket of ivy that rose up to the yellowish shingles of the roof.
The others started looking for dried pumpkins through vines and leaves. Emilia stood with her hands in her shawl, gazing at the house of her soul, looking just the way it had when they’d first moved in. All their acquaintances had told them it was too small, too old, but it had never bothered them. It had been enough to shelter two big hearts, and so dear.
The conductor was looking pensively at her. Emilia smiled at him and shook her head.
“Not yet, you leave me here on the way back.”
He nodded and, together, they turned their eyes back to the house. Emilia fixed her glasses, sighed, and slowly made her way off the platform and into the garden. The daisies under the window reached up to the windowsill, and not a year passed when they didn’t flower.
She smiled and bent down to pick a few while reminiscing the care with which Silviu had planted them that late spring. Piece by piece, muddy knees and a few leaves in his hair, while Emilia had sat with her chin in her hands on the front steps, close enough to offer him a strawberry from time to time.
Among many other things, these daisies had been Silviu’s pride and joy. Emilia gazed at the bunch in her hands with the same pleasure she’d seen on his face every time they blossomed.
Once, after years and years, she’d asked him, Do you think we could have been this happy if we didn’t have daisies?
Us? Silviu stared a bit at her, then shook his head, going back to weeding the soil. No, no way. We would have eaten each other alive. Thank God we have daisies.
Emilia smiled, then and now. How much, how absurdly much she’d been able to love him. How much she’d been loved in return.
When she got back on the train, everyone had a small pumpkin in their laps. Somebody had set one even beside the sleeping man’s seat. The conductor closed the door with a single hand, for in the other he had a small gourd. Emilia grinned into her daisies.
“First stop, last stop.”
Next stop was the sea. She could already smell it on every gust of wind that slithered into the wagon. Even if she hadn’t, it filled the whole horizon outside the window, grey and blue and turned steadily golden by the sun that was slowly rocking itself to sleep. It wouldn’t disappear into the waves, but in the hills they’d passed before, but every now and then a ray slipped into the water.
Emilia thought about that first and last group holiday here at the seaside. They’d wanted to see the sunrise every morning. They’d stood so long in the sun that they’d run through all the yogurt they could find at the corner shop soothing their burns. They’d found enough shells and sconces to build a house.
Silviu had bought her a hat and given her their first daisy, and Emilia had thought, for the first time, deep within her soul, Where are we going? And when are we getting there?
“Are we there yet?”
“Almost.”
When she saw the station getting near, Emilia got up and went to the sleeping man. She patted him softly on the shoulder, and he woke more easily than she’d expected, although he rubbed his hands over his face for a long while before looking at her.
“What is it?”
“Last stop,” Emilia told him.
The man looked out the window, analyzing the growing steeples and railways with suspicion.
“I’d never been able to stay awake during this route,” he admitted.
“All in its time,” she said.
She let him climb down before her when they got to the station, along with all the others. And when the wagon was completely empty, Emilia took her flowers and her borrowed coat and climbed down too.
The sun had already hid behind the station building. There were a few people on the platform, waiting to go in. Emilia looked back at the conductor.
“Wait for me, I’ll come back.”
The conductor nodded, straight as a wooden soldier, young as she too had once been.
With the coat on her shoulders, Emilia went to scatter another bouquet of daisies over the sea, for whoever gathered them on the other side. Some were pickier than her, after all. But they would be happy even there, whenever and wherever they would see each other again.
She was almost there.
| Adriana C. Grigore is a writer from the windswept plains of Romania. They have a degree in literature and linguistics, a penchant for folklore, and a tendency to overwater houseplants. You can find their fiction in Clarkesworld, Escape Pod, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and others. You can also find them online at www.adrianacgrigore.com. |  |