as the train came in | fiction

short story

Come dark there was little movement.

Fog flooded the valley town. Poured in like a tsunami until evergreen trees that shed pine needles through winter were consumed, disappeared as though a submarine entering water. Daylight departed like a train come afternoon. And once dark, workers that rose before dawn vanished from sight so quickly, it felt like a magic trick. The absence of life reflected a need for spring bloom, a return of children playing, floral growth, scents of mud and grass. Factory chimneys and high-rise buildings dotted a landscape where towns and villages nestled between hills full of sinkholes. In the bitterness of winter men and women went to work.

Lamplights carried by working poor bobbed through empty streets. They were carried by men with swollen hands and guts that made them look pregnant. They each wore soot-covered overalls and winter jackets, oil-streaked denim and army boots. These worker men shuffled over cracked concrete lit up a butter yellow by lanterns. Once away from factories or mines, each returned home to a wooden hut or high-rise, places where tired wives waited in rooms so cold, they felt cruel to enter. The women, some with spines bent like spoons, patiently waited like shadows: often unnoticed by the husbands, yet ever present.

On entering their home, the men’s blood-red faces were covered in frown lines, indentations. Each of them in their own way looked to be in mourning. Once having taken off boots and sat at a modest table, a woman dressed in apron would serve a plate: floured potatoes dipped in fat, fried pork, sauerkraut. If lucky there would be a slice of hard cheese or mustard. The men would go to work on their meal with an assembly line focus. Little words were shared until they had fed bellies and wet lips. Held in cannonball hands, a knife and fork looked like toothpicks.

Once finished, few words would be exchanged.

‘More potatoes?’

‘Why not. Tomorrow supervisor demands increase load of fifty pounds every one hour.’

‘He is being difficult?’

‘When are they not? Fucking commies.’

‘We have fresh bread for tomorrow.’

A head nod.

‘Lucie gave three grams of coffee.’

‘Real coffee?’

A head nod. ‘I stitched her son’s football shirt back together and washed some sheets in exchange.’

‘Her boy plays football like he is at war with the opposition.’

‘Did you hear what happened to his father down the mine.’

A hand wave as though swatting away a fly. ‘The same thing that happened to my own and many others.’

For dessert there would be plum šljivovica made on a potbelly stove, fuelled by coal dug with pickaxe. A bottle of pilsner would accompany each stiff drink. Then another and another until bloated and swollen the men would rise. Once vacant eyes had turned rheumy, the woman who had sat and watched their man eat took off their apron in preparation of what was expected next. Unable to express with words, they would grab at their woman as though a needy child. Sometimes the men would give eye contact and share a few words: it’s a good time, come here, we can go next door.

Actions were as silent as winter. This form of intimacy became marriage rituals learned through years of coexistence. Children who had met at a school with crumbling walls and an education captured by government. Now adults, they got by on industrial labour pay, grew into state responsibilities with few complaints. Duties given by a government that lacked the will to provide opportunities beyond what was known as necessary, became the sole purpose for residents of the valley town.

‘Come now.’

‘I can take off the apron first?’

‘If you must.’

‘There is no hurry.’

‘Tell me this in six hours when I wake for double shift.’

Sometimes the women would be taken by a calloused hand to a bedroom with few objects. Or it would be done over the modest square table they had ate at. Moans and grunts until the man climaxed and released their grip from the woman’s thighs.

‘Shall I make tea?’ she would ask once over.

‘Not tonight.’

Finished, the man would toss a pile of clothes into a corner and fall onto a mattress. Once the woman could hear his heavy breath they would dress. Then they would turn off a bedroom lantern and begin to clean plates in a sink illuminated by candle. Once the kitchen was clean, she would wrap rags stitched into a body scarf across her shoulders. Leaving the home as a bitter wind ripped through the valley, the woman gripped a wicker basket as flush cheeks paled ghost white. In darkness, she shuffled over snow towards a chicken coop to see if there were eggs. The coop, a mixture of scrap wood and wire mesh, contained the permitted amount: two chickens. The coop was located on a square patch of yellow grass that acted as a centrepiece among brutalist high-rise apartments. A style reflective of a town where function devoured form. Every concrete exterior was redundant of architectural flair. A word spoken of in banned books but rarely, if ever, witnessed in the valley town outside of a religious celebration.

At midnight, as men slept and women lay in silence clutching a cross around their neck, a train carrying metals weaved through the valley. The sound of whistle and hiss. A five-pointed red star mounted emblem attached to the circular front of a locomotive train. The glow of amber lamplight revealed thick smoke that poured from a smokestack chimney made from red brick until lost to fog. The station appeared to be a dilapidated shack. It shook as tons of steel rolled along the tracks as though freezing to death.

On taking up his role decades earlier, the Station Master had first considered as a young man if earthquakes had arrived in the valley town. Once the train with 50 metres of cars came to a halt he appeared on a platform from a small wooden door. He was an old and toned and red cheeked man. His feather grey moustache and white hair reminded locals of Albert Einstein, gave him a Socratic nature. Dressed in cap, trousers and jacket, he took a strapless watch from the breast pocket of a waistcoat that sagged from his bony frame, checked time.

‘As is usual,’ he said.

It was a shrieking train halt. Dense smoke continued to be swallowed by fog. The Station Master tipped his hat at a driver who showed his cap out a window, counted the cars. Once finished, the Station Master took a thin pocket size notepad and wrote down time, date, serial number, returning the notepad to a pocket. Holding up a green paddle beneath amber light, his gloved hand began to shake. Then the driver pulled on a train whistle cord. Loud honks, pistons powered by steam until steel wheels began to turn. Axels as tough forged by factory hands, craftsman who hammered red-hot metals and pressed them into shape, went to work.

The train gathered motion. The Station Master continued to hold up the green paddle beneath the lone glow of a bare bulb that hung above a wooden door. He looked like a referee giving a player a red card. The train pulled away and gathered speed. Moved into a blackness that spread like ink between valley hills dotted with brown pine trees that stood tall as though saluting soldiers. The train disappeared through a tunnel into night. Then the Station Master lowered his hand and began to consider the bloodied hands that would be spared the task of moving tons of steel along a factory line come morning.

‘Small blessings,’ he said.

He returned inside to his desk where he would sit to update a logbook used to track movement and smoke cigarettes in a booth with little air.

Come dawn the men would wake cold and thirsty. The women would already be dressed and watered. They prepared slices of bread with a pot of butter if fortunate. Black coffee would be made if available and if not, hot water or tea. If there were eggs, they boiled them over the stove. If plum jam they placed a jar and spoon on the table. A basin with water and soap would be placed in the sink. Once the grunts of men subsided and they had dressed in overalls neatly folded and placed on a stool, they staggered into a kitchen the size of a cupboard, pulled on boots. Then they would wet soap and scrub black fingernails, splash their face in cold water and wipe down with a cloth. Then they would sit to eat their morning meal.

‘More bread or coffee?’ the women would ask.

‘No time,’ the men often responded.

At a square window by the sink, they would look out to see if it had snowed overnight. If it had, the men would complain about the extra work duties and work delays. If no snow the men would nod, as if realising the answer to a complex question was far simpler than first imagined.

‘I brushed your winter coat.’

The men would look towards a functional padded green coat that hung from a nail on the wall. Then at the concrete floor beneath the coat to see if soot or lint or metal fragments had formed a pile. If not, they would nod.

‘You could brush it daily for one year and it would never be clean.’

‘Once a week helps.’

‘With what?’

The severity of the men’s hangover determined if the women would answer questions related to duties. Once dressed in winter coat the men would pick up a tin lunchbox by its handle. Held in their hand, it looked like a box of matches. Some men would kiss the cheek of their woman, others would simply nod and turn, open a door and make their way through pre-dawn morning fog that often-broke bones on the way to work and caused still drunk men to near freeze as they climbed valley hills, suspicious as to where wild boar hid in winter.

Once at work, duties considered of national importance began. In the valley town, collective control was reflected by the presence of worker men who looked the same. In the name of the state, economic drive belonged as much to national subordination as a promise to remove class in favour of equal opportunity. As the men worked heavy machinery that could slice off an arm, crush bones, other men stood along factory lines. Others bent hot metal or broke coal that blackened lungs.

At midday the men took a break. Pockets of red appeared like pimples in the foggy valley skyline above them. Distant bomb sounds, a low rumble followed by explosions that moved the earth. Iron and copper, rare-earth minerals the leader promised would restore glory to a nation, presented local boys who would one day become worker men future duties that would spare them from a conscription that had led to population decline.