The fast train 2244 left the station of Sibiu three minutes late. The ticket collector had talked to the engine driver and they both waited for Aurelian Gavrila. His friends put him into the goods wagon, feet ahead, in a six- board box made of fir wood. It’s his last journey. The station was now behind, with them standing on the platform and the two black glossy railways, covered with snow. But not too much snow, they were only sprinkled, the way his aunt used to sprinkle the pies with powdered sugar.

This happened years ago, when Aurelian Gavrila was still among the living. He would have liked the yellow reed

that was white iced. He always did. When he was still alive, Aurelian would kill his time in small stations where only the local trains stopped, or among the railways, at crossings. He was a switchman. Or at least this was what the state paid him for, yet all knew he had had his education in the capital. He used to say that nowhere did he feel more alive and freer than near the railroad. Nor did he feel anywhere else closer to death. As a toothless kid, with the seat of his panties patched, he would come to the crossing of the railroad tracks together with the kids from the town. They would hide in the reed on the edge and throw yellow plums at trains. He had planned to flee to Germany together with the Transylvanian German twins, hidden in the goods wagon, among the sheep skin bags full of cheese sent for export. When he got a little taller, so that he looked now like a weakling on stilts, he used to go alone to the footbridge. He literally devoured books from cover to cover, smoked cigarettes stolen from his uncles and watched trains passing underneath. He made drawings with a pencil stump on the inside of the books’ covers. Nobody minded for he was the only one who read Cioran, Sartre and Anatole France. Once he started to shave his down and his voice grew deeper he started taking girls to the footbridge. Girls dumber than the geese in aunt’s courtyard, nevertheless that was precisely why he loved them. Giggling on their high lacquered heels, they would blush and allow being touched under their crepe skirts.
One day he went to the footbridge with a girl older than him, a student of the fine arts. She had called him a ‘man’ and that’s why he worshiped her. He loved her face and her body, her hair and the way she smiled at him. At night he would dream about the three moles on her left thigh. He broke up with her in hatred. When he was not there, the student used come on the sly to the footbridge in order to paint the stationary wagons. On her canvas, the wagons looked greenish, gray, black and rusty, long and sweaty. Her best painting pictured the greenish, delicate wagons. When he found her paintings concealed in a red and abandoned wagon, Aurelian felt frustrated and betrayed. They belonged only to him, could she not get that much?? He threw to her face everything he had to say, slapped her and drove her away. He never saw her again since that winter day. But he kept looking for her in the face of all the women that got into his bed.
The fast train 2244 passed by the stationary red wagon. The engine driver did not slow down, nor did he whistle. From his box that was hidden in the goods wagon, Aurelian Gavrila did not feel anything unusual. As a matter of fact he felt nothing. His hair and nails had grown a few millimeters longer and his skin had gotten a little bluish. He would have liked to know that it was still winter, his favorite season, that the grass was snow iced, that he had passed by the red wagon and that he was now lying among boxes full of cheese sent for export. Delicious cheese, kept in fir bark, the kind that smells like rosin and is reddish-copper colored. Since this was his last journey, he should have been able to feel all these. He should have known that one of those foolish girls he used to meet at the footbridge was now by the railroad, a hundred meters away from the train. She is the brunette who married the priest and who always smiled to him on the street. Aurelian Gavrila will have passed through eight stations before the train loops and comes back in the station of Sibiu. He will be buried in the graveyard by the railroad and the brunette’s husband will be the one to perform the ceremony.

The End.