The Man Who Shared My Compartment to Vienna and Stole My Window Seat

He arrived at the compartment door just as the train began to move, which meant he had to catch the frame with one hand and apologize with the rest of his face. Grey coat, damp at the shoulders, a paper bag that smelled of pears. I had claimed the window seat at the platform in Salzburg and arranged my blanket over it like a flag on a small, soft island.

By ten o'clock the island was no longer mine. I had gone to find water, and when I came back he was sitting in my place with the blind half raised, watching the dark hills go by with an expression of such innocent concentration that I could not bring myself to be furious. I stood in the doorway holding two plastic cups. He looked up and said, in careful English, that the view was better from here. It was.

We negotiated, as strangers do, in small gestures. He offered a pear and I offered the blanket's far corner, and somewhere past Linz our knees stopped apologizing to each other. He told me he restored clocks for a living, and that he never trusted a train that kept perfect time. I told him I trusted nothing that arrived without a delay and a good story. Neither of us gave a surname.

By ten o'clock the island was no longer mine.

The corridor light dimmed itself to amber around midnight. He had gone quiet, and I let the quiet stand, because the quiet was doing more than either of us could have managed in words. His hand lay on the seat between us, palm up, like something left behind. I did not take it. I did not move it away either. That is a particular skill, and I have practiced it across a great many borders.

Near dawn the Danube appeared in the window, wide and pewter, and he finally said my seat had been very comfortable. I told him it had been rented, not given. He laughed, low, and the sound stayed in the compartment long after he had gathered his coat and stepped out at Vienna Westbahnhof, pear paper folded neatly on the cushion where he had been.

I kept the paper. It is pressed in the notebook between a Grüner Veltliner label and a ticket stub, and it still smells faintly of fruit. If you want to know what I said to him on the platform, I will tell you, but not here. On TheFriend I am easier to persuade, and the compartment door is always a little open.

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