Train stories

Moving through

We were on our way to Brakpan from Pretoria in the train, my mother and I. I was three or four. We pulled in at a station along the way. We were in the last carriage so when the double doors opened, it was not on to the platform, but on to a patch of grass at the end of it, where a single pink rose was blossoming in a small flower bed in the early morning light.

I started towards the doors and the rose but my mother pulled me back with a jerk. She wanted to know what I was doing. I said: ‘Die roos!’ and pointed. Then the doors closed.

Why do some memories stick so hard?

We were on a train, my mother and I, and there was a rose so pink and so perfect, it made more sense than sense.

I’ve often thought perhaps this memory clung to me so hard because of the strength of the magnetism of the thing drawing me away from my mother and the sickening realisation, when the doors closed, that I might have been separated from her that day.

In Zagreb, a very belated memorial was installed in 2022 to honour the 800 Jews who were transported to Auschwitz in August 1942. The symbolic wall of suitcases taken from the 800 stands outside the train station. PICTURE: Karin Schimke

Memories of public transport from my childhood floated up to me in all the many hours I spent on trains in the past two weeks. I remembered that the toilets on the trains were all stainless steel with a horseshoe-shaped wooden toilet seat and a little foot pedal for flushing. The flushing was a sucking sound that emanated from deep inside the toilet and climaxed as a sudden opening of the steely throat to dramatically swallow down the contents while the bowl was washed out with a swirl of water.

As I hovered my bum over the seat on the trains here in Europe – which were for the most part reasonably okay as far as public toilets go – I remembered my mother holding me over a toilet on a train and teaching me how you never sit down on a toilet seat that’s not in a private home.

I remember taking the train from Pretoria in high school with my friends to go to the flea market at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg on Saturday mornings. There weren’t that many people on the trains. But the definition of ‘people’ then was ‘humans with white skins’. When we arrived at Joburg station, we had to walk through a bus depot and taxi rank for black people. I was astonished that so many black people existed, that they were all thronging to get places in crammed transport. Demand was clearly much higher than supply. I only found out later that quality, reliability and safety on public transport were reserved for white people.

The effects of segregated transport are evident still.

Last week it almost brought Cape Town to its knees.

At its best, public transport is an elegant expression of democratic and social values of equality and dignity. Rail travel, the first evidence of which dates from the sixth century BC, became less popular after World War II because of the ubiquity of cars and planes. It’s having a revival now because of road congestion, rising fuel costs and government investment. Responsible citizens prefer trains because the carbon emissions from trains are substantially less than those from cars and planes.

It’s not cheap (only feet are cheap transport) and it’s not as quick as air travel, but being borne along in a train carriage is feels civilised and meditative.

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Trouble on the track

I found it hard to read on the long distances I travelled by train in the past two weeks. Sam and I sat gazing out of windows at breathtaking landscapes, insensible to our tiredness. But it turns out I was alone in my insensibility. Coming back yesterday, just as we crossed the Austrian Alps, he surprised me by saying that he didn’t think he would want to do this again. He’d found it quite tiring.

I had absolutely not found it tiring, even though it was 36 hours from Berlin to Split and sleep had hardly featured, and the same back. I had been contented every kilometre we covered. But then I was not the one doing the logistics. All I had done was trail around in Sam’s wake. I’ve become one of those people who, when someone shows competence in an area, I just switch off my brain and let them do all the thinking. We had agreed beforehand that he’d be taking the reins. This left me the luxury of forgetting that holding the reins is mentally exhausting.

Then we got stranded in Salzburg. It’s Monday morning and I am writing to you from a traveller hotel while Sam tries to work out how to get to Berlin if the tracks to Munich are out of use. Last night’s poking around in the dark in a city we didn’t know with zero information is a story for another day.

The upside is: a squishy, clean hotel bed and a breakfast buffet.

Travel insurance for the win.

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People on the train (I)

In Zagreb, waiting on a bench for the train to Villach in Austria, a woman addressed me.

‘Are you German?’ she asked. No, I said, South African. ‘Ah. I was trying to place your husband’s accent. I thought it was German.’ I didn’t correct her about him not being my husband. I said, no, it was probably Afrikaans she was hearing in his accent. Did she know about Afrikaans? Yes, she said, she knew about it because of Charlize Theron.

I asked her what she spoke to her children. I’d heard her speaking softly to them, but not in English. ‘Spanish,’ she told me. ‘But we’re from the States.

‘We’ was a boy of about one in a pram, and a girl of about four sitting beside me in her little pink leggings, her hair in a ponytail, tiny earrings glinting in her lobes. I asked the girl what city in the States she was from. Las Vegas, she told me.

‘Are you having a holiday?’ She nodded. ‘Are you?’ she asked me. I nodded.

‘We went to the sea,’ I told her. ‘Did you?’ No, she said, but she loved the sea. Then we spoke about thunderstorms and how scared they made her. I told her about the thunderstorm we had witnessed here just over a week ago, with the rain drumming hard on the platform roof. It was the noisiest thunderstorm I’d ever heard, I told her. ‘Was there lightning?’ Her eyes were big. I told her there was so much lightning and lots of thunder.

Her mother told me her daughter had been to 18 countries in her short life. ‘Wow,’ I said, ‘that’s more than me,’ I told the girl. She smiled proudly with her chin up. Her brother, being younger, was less well travelled. And Covid had driven a spoke in their travelling wheels. The mother had a backpack and a single fat bag squashed into the pram’s basket beneath the seat.

The train pulled in and we said goodbye, so I will never know why a young Spanish-speaking American mother travels the world alone with her two small children, a pram and a fat bag.

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People on the train (II)

Somewhere between Zagreb and Ljubljana in Slovenia a couple got on and joined me and Sam and two young French sisters in our compartment.

Until then, things had been very quiet. Sam snoozed. I was listening to a podcast. One sister watched out the window. She and I were the only ones to witness a tiny beach along the Saja river where a naked man, arms akimbo, watched the train go by while his not insubstantial tackle hung heavily towards the milky turquoise of the river. She turned wide-eyed towards her sister, who had her nose stuck in a book called La Fin de la Démocratie by Jean-Claude Kaufmann and so had missed this incongruous sight.

The newcomers sat opposite one another. They had a double sheen of beauty: youth and infatuation.

She took a whole cucumber out and twisted it to break it and gave half to him. They ate salted cashews and a banana each. He pulled her tanned legs into his lap and touched her knees. ‘Your knees are very sensitive,’ he said when she squirmed a little. ‘Like your stomach and your thighs.’

They spoke softly in German.

She asked about his relationship with his sister. He asked her about the children she teaches. I could see her reflection in the window. She smiled all the time. She looked entirely blissed out. He spoke softly and tickled her shins. Later she sat forwards and they whispered about how she had stolen the sheets in the night, and about how lucky they both felt to have found one another, and how embarrassed he’d felt when he first told her how much he liked her.

They filled the compartment with the smell of cucumber and sweet affection. You couldn’t help but feel invested in their love. They may have found The One.

For the first half of their adult lives.

The second half often offers a New One.

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Train soundtracks

Only now and again, maybe around a little bend at high speed, the train makes that gada-gadak sound I associate with train travel. Electrified trains whoosh rather than clack.

A whistle still blows to warn that the doors are closing.

In Slovenia, the train drivers hoot as they pass little stations they’re not stopping at. Invariably, a smart looking railways official stands outside some tiny railway building in a red cap, navy trousers and a short-sleeve button-up shirt and waves at the driver. The driver of the first train we took through Slovenia loved his hooter. Pa-beeee-ba! Sometimes it was pa-beeeeeeeeeeee-ba. Sometimes it was just pa-bee-ba.

I grew up in the suburb of Queenswood in Pretoria, one block from the rail tracks my father crossed illegally through a hole in the fence to walk to work at Siemens every day. A certain train at a certain time of day would whistle gaily as it passed through. The story was that the driver lived in Queenswood and was saying hi to his wife.

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Train things

Here are some train things I can recommend:

The podcast I was listening to was a reading and discussion of a poem by Stanley Plumly called ‘In Passing’. If how poems work interests you, I can highly recommend this discussion.

South African photographer Eric Miller, with Laurine Platzky, made a moving documentary about the the effects of the demise of the South African railways on a small Karoo community. I wrote about it here and you can watch the trailer here. The music is by Gert Vlok Nel, an Afrikaans singer-songwriter who penned one of the most poignant love songs ever, and one of the most beautiful songs ever written in Afrikaans. The song features trains.

Ernst Cole’s pictures of SA during apartheid gives an idea of what trains were like for black people during apartheid .

I’m reading, quite incidentally, a brilliant book by Colson Whitehead called John Henry Days. The toll the tunnelling of tracks through mountains took on black bodies, when the east and west coasts of the US were being joined by the railways, is one of the things documents in this eventful, entertaining novel.

A favourite song of mine from the past few years is Rabbit by Amy LaVere. If you ever thought of running away from home when you were a child, this is a song for you. Again, the song features trains.

And entirely unrelated to trains in any way, I an highly recommend my most blissful discovery of the year: the singer Benjamin Clementine whose album And I Have Been I listened to five times in four days, something I have not done since I was a teenager.

It’s close to ten on Monday night. We made it home quite easily after our delay, but wifi was patchy and my charger was in my suitcase so I am only sending today’s Love Letter out now, ten hours late.

Goodnight from Berlin.

Love,

K.