The Night Train

The 22:15 to Vienna departed precisely on time, as Austrian trains invariably do. Marta settled into her compartment, pulled off her shoes, and tucked her feet beneath her on the narrow seat. Outside, the lights of the city gave way to darkness, and the rhythm of the wheels settled into its familiar, almost hypnotic pattern.

She had taken this journey many times, but always by day. Travelling at night felt different — more intimate, somehow, and slightly outside of ordinary time. The usual pressures of arrival and departure seemed suspended, replaced by a sense of being temporarily exempt from the demands of the waking world.

Her compartment companion was an elderly man with a paperback novel and a thermos of tea. He nodded politely when she entered but showed no particular desire for conversation. Marta appreciated this. She was not in the mood for the kind of forced sociability that confined spaces sometimes produced.

She had left a difficult situation behind her. Not a crisis, precisely, but one of those prolonged periods of low-level unhappiness that are harder to address than outright catastrophe. She had been in the same job for seven years and had recently begun to suspect that the person she had become in that time was not entirely the person she wanted to be.

Around midnight, the train stopped briefly at a small station. The platform was empty and dimly lit. A single lamp cast orange light onto the wet stone. Nobody got on. Nobody got off. The train moved on.

By the time the outskirts of Vienna appeared through the window, Marta had not reached any conclusions. But something had shifted slightly. The distance, the darkness, and the motion had given her thoughts a different quality — less urgent, more spacious. Sometimes, she reflected, that is the most you can ask of a journey.