all letters like that. The study of medicine inducted me into medicine so fast that I completely disregarded the imbalance. People say I’m “getting on well.” My parents are pleased that I’m making something of my life. But what am I making of my life? A doctor? That would be too peculiar.
• • •
Once it was already dark, I paced back and forth at the station, as far as the single-story barracks with the sign “Railwaymen’s Hostel.” There I saw men without their shirts, bending down over dirty basins, rubbing themselves dry with gray towels, then looking at their reflections in the mirror, shaving, sitting down on their bunk beds in their underpants and eating their dinners. Black railwaymen’s caps hanging on the walls, and from hooks on the doors coats, jackets, and shoulder bags with papers spilling out of them. Knives flashed through big hunks of bread, and beer bottles stood there, reflected in the mirrors over the basins.
I took a few strides back and forth, purely so as not to attract notice, but wherever there was a light I looked up. What if it was you in there, standing in front of a mirror, and chatting to others, and they didn’t realize that it was you, because you were like them? What if you had changed in such a way that brought you nearer to them? If I wasn’t me, I would be like them; that’s where those thoughts tended. I walked along between a couple of freight trains, to the end of the station area, and then back, counting the wheels, and imagined being crushed between a couple of bumpers and squeezing into a paragraph at the bottom of the next to last page of the newspaper, the place where they itemize fatalities of slight but morbid interest. And then the men again, some already in their army-style bunks. The windows have double glazing, everything is sealed shut. So they don’t freeze. There’s an alarm clock which will go off with an infernal rattle at four in the morning. Then they’ll crawl out of bed and slip theirpants on, because it’s colder than it’s supposed to be, and they should already be in the train, looking to see that all the barriers are down. And then there are the first schoolkids in the front carriage, sleepy and frightened, because they’re not sure that what awaits them at school isn’t going to be terrible after all.
I walked down to the station alone, it just takes me fifteen or twenty minutes at a rapid clip, I promised the painter I’d pick up a newspaper for him, but the kiosk was already shut. Also, it was a day on which not too many trains passed—in the time I was down there, there wasn’t a single one, apart from the freight trains thundering through. Facing the railwaymen’s hostel is a sheer cliff face, there are pines and firs, shrubbery, but you can’t see much of it in the dark. The river was raging, and filled everything with its roar. From the houses built on its banks, I could hear laughter, and then the sounds of an argument, but it didn’t develop, but became more and more subdued, and finally stopped altogether. The lights went out in the odd bedroom, until there was only a single one left illuminated, where I saw an elderly man sitting, raising his tattooed arm to turn off the light. By now I was shivering, and I walked as fast as I could, over the bridge and up to the inn.
“Every stone here has a human story to tell me,” says the painter. “You understand, I’ve fallen prey to this place. Everything, every smell, is chained to a crime of some sort, an abuse, the war, some piece of infamy or other … Even if it’s all buried under the snow just now,” he says. “Hundreds andthousands of ulcers, continually swelling up. Voices incessantly screaming. You’re lucky to be as young and inexperienced as you are. The war was finished by the time you were ready to think. You know nothing about the war. You know nothing, period. And these people, all of them on the lowest level, often the lowest level of
• • •
Once it was already dark, I paced back and forth at the station, as far as the single-story barracks with the sign “Railwaymen’s Hostel.” There I saw men without their shirts, bending down over dirty basins, rubbing themselves dry with gray towels, then looking at their reflections in the mirror, shaving, sitting down on their bunk beds in their underpants and eating their dinners. Black railwaymen’s caps hanging on the walls, and from hooks on the doors coats, jackets, and shoulder bags with papers spilling out of them. Knives flashed through big hunks of bread, and beer bottles stood there, reflected in the mirrors over the basins.
I took a few strides back and forth, purely so as not to attract notice, but wherever there was a light I looked up. What if it was you in there, standing in front of a mirror, and chatting to others, and they didn’t realize that it was you, because you were like them? What if you had changed in such a way that brought you nearer to them? If I wasn’t me, I would be like them; that’s where those thoughts tended. I walked along between a couple of freight trains, to the end of the station area, and then back, counting the wheels, and imagined being crushed between a couple of bumpers and squeezing into a paragraph at the bottom of the next to last page of the newspaper, the place where they itemize fatalities of slight but morbid interest. And then the men again, some already in their army-style bunks. The windows have double glazing, everything is sealed shut. So they don’t freeze. There’s an alarm clock which will go off with an infernal rattle at four in the morning. Then they’ll crawl out of bed and slip theirpants on, because it’s colder than it’s supposed to be, and they should already be in the train, looking to see that all the barriers are down. And then there are the first schoolkids in the front carriage, sleepy and frightened, because they’re not sure that what awaits them at school isn’t going to be terrible after all.
I walked down to the station alone, it just takes me fifteen or twenty minutes at a rapid clip, I promised the painter I’d pick up a newspaper for him, but the kiosk was already shut. Also, it was a day on which not too many trains passed—in the time I was down there, there wasn’t a single one, apart from the freight trains thundering through. Facing the railwaymen’s hostel is a sheer cliff face, there are pines and firs, shrubbery, but you can’t see much of it in the dark. The river was raging, and filled everything with its roar. From the houses built on its banks, I could hear laughter, and then the sounds of an argument, but it didn’t develop, but became more and more subdued, and finally stopped altogether. The lights went out in the odd bedroom, until there was only a single one left illuminated, where I saw an elderly man sitting, raising his tattooed arm to turn off the light. By now I was shivering, and I walked as fast as I could, over the bridge and up to the inn.
“Every stone here has a human story to tell me,” says the painter. “You understand, I’ve fallen prey to this place. Everything, every smell, is chained to a crime of some sort, an abuse, the war, some piece of infamy or other … Even if it’s all buried under the snow just now,” he says. “Hundreds andthousands of ulcers, continually swelling up. Voices incessantly screaming. You’re lucky to be as young and inexperienced as you are. The war was finished by the time you were ready to think. You know nothing about the war. You know nothing, period. And these people, all of them on the lowest level, often the lowest level of
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