Chapter 72 The Attendant's Ledger

Morning on the express arrived as a grey rectangle that widened by degrees until it contained Poland: flat, white, stitched with black poplars, patient as a proof sheet waiting for its text. The tea came at seven in glasses with silver holders, carried on a tray by hands that did not tremble on a swaying floor, and the attendant set Viktor's down last and stayed, standing in the doorway with the tray balanced on one arm, looking at nothing with the professional completeness of a man who has decided to be looked at. He was perhaps seventy. His uniform was thirty years out of fashion and pressed as if the decade might come back for it. His name badge said only a single letter, S., and under the letter the cloth was worn shiny, as badges get when thumbs rub them idly for years. "You slept badly," the attendant said, in Czech. Not accented; merely exact, the Czech of someone who had decided which century of it to keep. "Your light burned till four and your shadow crossed it eleven times. The gentleman across the passage slept beautifully. He could sleep in a falling lift, that one. I have carried his tea since before you were published, master Orlov." Viktor did not move from the window. In the reflection he watched the old man's face and the old man watched his, two mirrors angled to catch the same empty corridor. "You know my name." "I know the road's names." The attendant shifted the tray to the other arm with a small economy that managed to be a bow. "Thirty-one years I have kept the passenger lists of this service, the true ones, underneath the printed ones. Every second Thursday once, whenever the work travelled, always in the cold months. Your handler drank his tea bitter and signed his mark with a flat palm first, always, danger before anything, even before breakfast. When the marks stopped coming, I entered the date in my ledger and left the column open. Columns should be left open for a decent interval. It is how the road mourns." "The acquaintance on the river," Viktor said. "The one who books both seats." "Books yours, books his, books theirs." A shrug travelled down the uniform like water down a pipe. "A booking is a promise with a number attached, and promises are my trade, not railways'. Railways are only where I keep them." He set the tray on the fold-out table, precisely centred, and from the breast of his jacket drew, without flourish, a railway timetable of the current week, folded to a column dense with abbreviations. "Now. Business, before Brest takes your morning away. There was a correction in yesterday's international edition, page nineteen, fourth item from the bottom. You will want your key." "We don't have the eastern key," Hana said from her seat, level, watching his hands. "You have half of one; the Frau has the other half in her pocket, and I will thank her not to reach for it on a moving train." He unfolded the timetable and rotated it to face them: departures, connections, a lattice of small type in which certain station abbreviations carried tiny superior figures. "Station codes. The Line's eastern grammar ran through the timetable supplements from 1961 onward, because timetables are printed in the millions, mailed openly, and read by no one. Your corrections column gives the position; my supplement gives the letters; the page reads itself." His thumbnail indicated a sequence: 4-11-7-3-19. Then he waited, hands folded, a man attending a recital he has heard rehearsed. Sorokina took out her pencil — then stopped, remembering, and read the numbers instead, lips moving, matching code to abbreviation to letter. When she finished she sat back, and the colour had gone out of her cheeks in the way colour goes when arithmetic confirms dread. "TERMINUS EXPECTS," she read aloud. "NINTH COURSE. COME BY DARK." "Ninth course," Viktor repeated. "The ninth brick course," Nikolai said from the doorway behind them, still dressed, architectural annual under his arm like a breviary. He had been awake since five with the skyline of the negative pinned inside his eyelids. "On the annex wall in the photograph, the signature course sits ninth from the ground. I measured the brick heights off the shadow angles last night — crude, but within a course either way. Ninth from the ground, painter. The correction isn't arranging a meeting place." His young face had the grey look of a man who has checked someone else's homework and found it correct. "It is telling us the wall has already been found. By the people who wrote the correction. They are standing next to it, and they are asking us to come and read it before dark — their dark, their clock, their ground." The attendant collected the timetable, folded it along its worn creases, and returned it to his jacket, and for a moment his thumbs rubbed the badge with its single letter, and the shine on it explained itself. "There is a further item," he said. "Brest, tonight, small hours. The gauge change. Everything comes off the train and goes back on; everything is lifted, weighed, looked at. Procedure, not malice — procedure is how borders think. They will separate you. Paper travels one window, persons another, and tools a third. Cooperate exactly; resist nothing; carry nothing that writes." His eyes rested for half a second on the brush box at Viktor's feet, no longer than politeness required, and moved on. "The road will carry your marks for you, if your marks are honest. It has carried mine since 1971." "And if they are not honest?" Hana asked. "Then the road carries them anyway." The old man gathered the tray. "Roads do not judge cargo. Roads deliver. Judgment is what happens at the far end, among readers." At the door he paused, back still turned, and delivered the last of it to the corridor rather than the compartment, which somehow made it heavier. "One more entry you should have, since you are family of the road now, whatever that proves to mean. The gentleman across the passage — the beautiful sleeper — he boarded at Prague with one suitcase. At the frontier he will board the broad-gauge car with none. His luggage travelled separately, in the postal van, sealed, and the manifest calls it exhibition equipment. Sixty-one by eighty-six, if anyone should ask me why I mention it." The door sighed shut on its felt seal. Down the corridor, unhurried, the tray's small music faded toward the kitchen, and the train ran on into the white morning carrying, among everything else, a frame built to a dead studio's measurements, bound for a city where three separate appointments were now converging on one wall.