Synaptic

Writing Objective: Wite something that explores your understanding of the cross cultural experience.

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Relaxation. Finally. After hurrying through the Venice train station searching for the right train, finding out whether we needed reservations or not, finding which part of the train went to Milano, which part goes all the way to Paris, crowding past people in the small passageway of the train with a 38 pound backpack and watching even the sweet leather-faced old women choose to limbo under me rather than squeeze past. Trying to find a coach lacking potential rapists. Then the ritual and painful hauling of my pack far above my head to the luggage rack and then collapse. Breathe. Stretch my neck, take off my boots, stuff my third odorous layer of socks in the boots and stuff the boots under my seat. Prop my feet up just to the right of Niici who is curled up like a small cat in the seat across from me, her gigantic blue pack looming above her on the rack, never quite fitting and looking ready to fall and bash her on the head. Experience tells me it won’t.

That part is always the ordeal. Then the train begins to move. It usually excites me, but not tonight, not tonight when I slept in the cold train station last night and spent the day in one of the most magically beautiful cities in the world freezing my ass off and I know that tomorrow I will wake up sore and stiff from sleeping on the train in some ridiculous position.

Two men enter our coach and sit down across from each other. There is one seat between each of us. They are old; they are easily identified as “not dangerous.”

Niici and I get our handbags down and begin supper. Today we have no surprises, she is thinking. Bread and cheese again. The bread is hard and it hurts my jaw to chew it, the cheese is soft and warm but I’m beginning to appreciate cheese that way. We wash it down with water that we hope is clean and I pull out a surprise to make us happy—a chocolate bar from Prague that I’ve been saving. We break it in half and try to eat it slowly but we’re both giggling and warm now and the chocolate goes fast. We offer the last bits to the two old men. They decline in German.

“Oh no. They don’t speak English.” says Niici. I agree that it’s too bad. It’s much better to be able to communicate. But then we begin one of our wild conversations—the obnoxious kind that only takes place in the safe confidence of no one being able to understand you. There’s something really freeing about that and whenever it happens Niici and I like to use it to our full advantage—being rude to each other and cursing a great deal. After one particularly ribald exchange, the old man to my left begins chuckling softly, trying hard to hold it back until he laughs so hard I think he will cry.

“You…girls!” he says and smiles at me, laughing hard.

“You!” I screech back while Niici howls in embarrassment, “You DO know English! You…you…” and I sock him in the arm like a buddy that’s just told me a dirty joke in a bar and the old man laughs even harder at this. The other fellow looks on in amazement, wearing the contagious smile, but obviously not faking his language barrier.

I can’t believe I haven’t noticed either of them before this. My people watching skills have been on overkill lately or perhaps I’m just tired, but I notice them now. The English speaking one to my left, who is introducing himself as Claus, is tall, white haired with clear blue eyes. He must be 65 or so. He is finely dressed in a dark business suit and overcoat; he is a handsome man. He has one of those faces that is full of stories. The other man is probably 50—he wears jeans and a short jacket and I notice that his right arm is cut off below the elbow. He has no right hand, but he does have a moustache.

Claus and Niici and I exchange all the usual questions and then Niici fades out. The train is dark and rhythmic tonight and she is very tired. We sit for awhile, silent in the dark.

“This is your first time out in the world?”

I say yes.

He is looking right in my eyes, even in the dark. “I remember that. How wonderful everything is. How grand and big. You must be very tired.”

I say that I am and ask him many questions and he answers them all. He tells me about his time in the army, lonely and proud and waiting for letters, his first rampage on Paris and about one lost night in New York with no money and little English. He has been to China and Japan—he has been to Thailand flocked by children begging for money and I ask for vivid accounts of each and he gives them. I nod and nod and fall in love with him in about two minutes.

He asks me about the farm I live on in Iowa. I say that there is a house that my father built and a pond with fish and a small wood and cows and horses and he is very quiet and serious.

“Heaven,” he says. “That is heaven to me. I wish for that, to live in a place like that, in peace until I die. But I still must travel for my job.”

He looks away from me.

“My wife died last year and I must travel and keep busy, you know? But that is what I wanted for us. You are very lucky to have such a place.” He speaks slowly and accurately and straight to me now. “It is good to see the world, yes? But good to have such a place to come home to.”

I want to smile at him but I don’t because he doesn’t have a home now and I imagine he and his dead wife, young and pretty and I say “Yes. I am lucky.”

He laughs a little now; he is embarrassed. “It’s easy to talk in the dark on a train, yes?” I say that it is and then we are silent. Niici is snoring lightly now—she does that sometimes.

I don’t like the quiet, so I tell him that my father also has a keg on tap on the porch so he can have a cold beer all the time. He laughs and says that my father is a damn wise man.

A knock comes at the sliding coach door. It is the conductor. He opens the door and flicks on the light, asking for our tickets and passports. Niici sits up and rubs her eyes with her fist like a child; the other man fumbles in his pocket for his ticket. The conductor tells Niici and I that we must go to the other end of the train because the train is splitting and this car will not stop in Paris. Claus remarks that he had suspected this.

Niici and I gather our things and haul down the backpacks. We strap them on and Niici says good-bye to them and waits in the passageway. I shake Claus’s hand, he holds mine tightly and says, “Take care. Take care.” he smiles. I turn to the other fellow and reach out to shake his right hand. I have forgotten about the stump and I shake it. He is pleased and embarrassed and I’m happy that I forgot about it.

We’re in the dark passsageway, trying to find a sleeping spot until Paris. Niici is weaving—her pack is heavy and she’s still half asleep. All I can think is that somewhere, sometime, in Germany or France or Alaska even he will die. He will die wise, unremarkable to most, and alone. I’ll never know.