The Stowaway by Robert Hough Page A

and black vans and shoutings in the night
and this time he sees it all over again, as though it happened yesterday, the black vans screeching into town and the red lights swirling crimson, and as they speed through narrow streets there comes the wail of sirens and the footfalls of villagers
and then, without realizing it, Daniel is yelling in his sleep, his feet kicking at the ribbed metal floor. Gheorghe is above him, calling for him to waken, and when this fails he grips Daniel by the forearms and says, “Hey, Dani. Hey, boy! Wake up! You’re having some kind of nightmare!”
    Daniel’s eyes pop open. He suddenly feels cold all over.
    “What were you yelling?” Gheorghe asks. “Something about black vans? About the Securitate?”
    “Yes,” Daniel says, though when he realizes he’s been dreaming about the old Romania, he pushes the knowledge away.
    “Well, don’t,” Gheorghe says. “You don’t have to; those days are over.”
    Daniel sits up and looks around the rail car. It is still, a wedge of light coming through the opened siding. The potatoes havesettled from their original mounds, more or less covering the floor in an even blanket. He is still breathing hard, and finding it difficult to talk, for the thought that maybe this trip will be too much for him—that maybe he’s not as tough as he needs to be—is crossing his mind for the first time. He finds the vodka bottle at his side, and takes two or three large swallows. The liquor hits his nervous stomach and burns, a sensation that immediately causes Daniel to relax and feel more hopeful.
    “Where are we?” he asks.
    “Italy, I think. We’ve been stopped here for an hour, more or less.”
    Daniel crawls to the side of the car and peers out. In the distance are cows, lazily chewing in a pasture, and somewhere far beyond that are mountains, looking hazy and brown. Every few minutes one of the cows raspily moos, a sound that makes Daniel think of home. Suddenly, he realizes that the last thing he ate was a fish sandwich, bought in the Zagreb train station, and that he’s ravenous. With his back against the rail-car siding, he bites into a potato, glumly choking down its cloying flesh.
    The rail car shudders, and shunts backward—for a moment Daniel worries that the train has, for some reason, decided to head back from where it came from. He can see exhaust and dust rising outside the opened siding; the wedge of sun cast over the floor of the car looks speckled. The train lurches in the wrong direction, stops, and then shuttles forward again. For the next ten minutes or so, it jumps forward in hesitant, irregular sprints, like a child learning to broad jump. Finally, the train settles into a constant, slow, forward motion, its velocity no more than five or ten kilometres per hour. As Daniel bites into his second potato, Gheorghe leans out of the car, the remaining hairs on the top of his head streaming in the breeze.
    “There it is,” he says, “the big city—take a look …”
    Daniel leans out as well, his hands holding tight on to siding rails. He can see squat buildings up ahead.
    “Well, Dani. Who first?”
    Daniel looks at the hard ground sliding purposefully beyond the bank of the rail bed, and he thinks that anything is better than being stuck in this rail car filled with rotting potatos. With a quick curse he throws himself into the air. For a second he hovers over moving ground, and then he is rolling, a thudding pain in his side and shoulder. He comes to a stop and looks up. A little ways behind him, Gheorghe is sitting in the pasture, reaching for his fallen duffel. He stands and brushes dust from his pants and coat.
    They spend the rest of that day walking into a little town somewhere near Milan. Though the weather is warmer than it was in Yugoslavia, they find that a chill has seeped into their bones, causing their teeth to chatter and their bodies to shiver. Slowly, the walk warms them, and when Gheorghe comments that he’s not