Venice lagoon city of noble rot and rickety palaces, I never went back there, even when I was filling my suitcase in Trieste or Udine I carefully avoided it, I changed trains in Mestre so as not to be tempted to leave the Santa Lucia train station and return to the Ghetto, return to the Square of the Two Moors or to the well-named Quay of Oblivion where I knocked myself out on alcohol with Ghassan, you don’t forget much in the end, the wrinkled hands of Harmen Gerbens the Cairo Batavian, his trembling mustache, the faces of Islamists tortured in the Qanatar Prison, the photograph of the severed heads of the Tibhirine monks, the reflections on the cupolas in Jerusalem, Marianne naked facing the sea, the squeals of Andrija’s pig, the bodies piled up in the gas trucks of Chełmno, Stéphanie the sorrowful in front of Hagia Sophia, Sashka with her brushes and paints in Rome, my mother at the piano in Madrid, her Bach fugue in front of an audience of Croatian and Spanish patriots, so many images linked by an uninterrupted thread that snakes like a railroad bypassing a city, the possible connections between trains in a station: back from my investigation in Prague not long ago I take the night train for Paris via Frankfurt, last car, last compartment, a man in his fifties is already sitting there, he’s eating a sandwich, it is eight o’clock at night, his head is round and bald, he’s wearing a grey suit he looks like an accountant, he greets me politely in Czech between two mouthfuls, I reply just as politely, I settle in, the train leaves the Prague station on time, I mechanically play with a little crystal star prettily wrapped in red tissue paper, souvenir of Bohemia—once he’s finished his sandwich my companion extracts a thick paperback volume from his luggage, a kind of catalogue he begins consulting feverishly, jumping from one page to the other, one finger on columns of numbers, then back to the previous page, he looks at his watch before looking angrily out the window, it’s dark out, he can’t see anything, he goes back to his book, he often looks at me, questioningly, he’s burning to ask me a question, he asks me do you know if the train is stopping in Tetschen? or at least that’s what I understand him to say, I jabber in German that I have no idea, but it probably will, that’s the last Czech city before the border, on the Elbe, the man speaks German, he agrees with me, the train must stop in Tetschen, even if it doesn’t take on any passengers there, wissen Sie , he says, if we got out in Tetschen, we could get on the freight train that left Brno this afternoon a little before five o’clock, it would leave us in Dresden around two in the morning and we could catch this very train which isn’t supposed to leave before 2:45, it’s incredible, don’t you agree—I agree, the man continues, his catalogue is actually a giant railroad timetable, there are all the trains here, do you understand, all , it’s a little complicated to use but when you get the hang of it it’s practical, it’s for railroad professionals, for instance we’ve just passed a train going in the other direction it’s 9:23 well I can tell you where it’s coming from and where it’s going, if it’s a passenger train or a freight train, with such a book you never get bored when you travel in a train, he says seeming very happy, how come he doesn’t know if the train is stopping in Tetschen, well it’s very simple, very simple, see, the stop is in parentheses, which means it’s optional, but the stop is indicated, so we have the possibility of stopping in Tetschen, we had another possibility for a stop a few minutes ago and you never realized a thing, you didn’t even notice that we could have stopped there, wir hatten die Gelegenheit , you see this book is wonderful, it allows you to know what we could have done, what we could do in a few minutes, in the next few hours, even more, the little Czech man’s eyes light up,
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