Of Trains and Tribulations

Hermannstadt was still sleeping the sleep of the well-fed and well-sozzled when I set off for the railway station early that morning. Even at the hotel, where twenty euros had bought me a room offering the comforts of a German three-star establishment, the absence of any smell of coffee suggested that nobody had yet begun preparing the breakfast buffet.

I had shared my bed with a mosquito and left it without saying goodbye, and without having had much sleep, but what is a stay in Transylvania without a little loss of blood?

Grateful for my light luggage, a medium-sized trekking rucksack, I hoped to find some caffeine along the way, perhaps accompanied by a lángos if I was lucky. I had known these savoury discs of yeast dough, fried in hot fat, since childhood, thanks to my Hungarian grandmother, and knew that in her homeland they were a staple food, available on practically every street corner at almost any hour of the day or night. This was no longer Hungary here, admittedly, but perhaps the delicacy lived on in a bakery called The Early Bird, or whatever they might call it here?

And indeed, shortly before the station, delicious steam was already rising from a bakery at this early hour. Those were no chocolate croissants scenting the street. That was hot pork lard, beyond any doubt!

„Gogoşi“ was what they called the golden-yellow rings of dough here. They hung from a metal rack in the bakery window, draining, and looked like a mild attack of biliary colic, so absolutely perfect. As I grabbed a thick stack of paper napkins to make the purchase safe to transport and laid a few coins left over from the previous evening’s festivities on the counter, I was suddenly reminded of Grandma’s enormous pastry board, which hung from two hooks on her kitchen wall. Whenever she asked her husband to take it down for her, everybody knew it was going to be a special day.

The gogoşi the baker handed me was somewhat thicker than a lángos, but tasted every bit as good and also respected the tradition that demanded one burn one’s lips on the first bite. Normally, relief came in the form of cooling sour cream, which in Hungary is slapped onto a lángos along with grated cheese and a few dozen crushed cloves of garlic in sunflower oil. Here, however, there was only the crisp, salted article in its purest form.

I was not the only person enjoying a Transylvanian breakfast at that hour. In the nearby station bar, where I hoped to find some coffee, I encountered a group of construction workers who were also eating gogoşi. Theirs appeared to have no topping either, but they did have a filling. It might have been some egg-based mixture containing bacon, glistening reddish-yellow, but I couldn’t get close enough to say for certain. There were indications that the filling was even fattier than the dough around it, for they were drinking schnapps from water glasses to accompany it and, rather as a token gesture, an espresso.

This fitted in with observations I made later, which I shall anticipate a little here. Romanians, you see, drink schnapps not only at breakfast but practically all the time, while the beverage accompanying the schnapps changes according to the hour: before nine it is coffee, after that beer or wine. At lunchtime a cola may occasionally slip in, though more by accident than design, but by early evening at the latest the balance is restored by having a large extra schnapps with one’s schnapps. All this takes place with astonishing normality, and in general I gained the impression that drinking in this country followed different rules from those at home. Nowhere did I see a lone individual walking about with a bottle of beer in his hand, a sight long since familiar on German streets. When people drink in Transylvania, they do so like the guests at Count Kroloc’s ball in Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers: always in groups, and the drinks are shared.

On the train, too, there were five or six men passing an unusually large bottle of beer around. Evidently on their way to work, they were in excellent spirits and yet behaved considerably more quietly and civilly than a comparable number of teenagers, half as drunk, returning from the Oktoberfest to Rosenheim.

The train itself, meanwhile, did not look as though it had been designed for a journey of this length. A dented plate in a brass holder informed me that the carriage I was sitting in had been in service in Alsace when my grandfather first went to school.

As a glance across the tracks revealed, this meant I was travelling in one of the comparatively modern trains. Most of the others looked as though they had come from a military training ground. They seemed to be used mainly on long-distance routes, where they were less frequently exposed to the adventure of starting and stopping.

A group of English-speaking youngsters had made themselves comfortable in one of the wrecks and, with the optimism of adolescence, trusted it to deliver them safely to Bucharest. That, at least, was the word occasionally flickering faintly into life on an early attempt at a digital destination display above the driver’s cab.

Silently I wished them luck – and promptly my own conveyance began to move. After some ten minutes of acceleration we had attained the pace of a determined old gentleman with a walking frame. High time to stop at the next station.

I could see why one could hardly charge ambitious fares for a service of this kind. Nevertheless, when I had been told the price at the ticket window, I had assumed there must have been a mistake to the disadvantage of the Romanian railway company. Now I understood the logic: if the difference between having a ticket and not having one was so negligible as to be of no consequence, one could dispense with checking the passengers altogether. Sure enough, a conductor ignored me shortly afterwards and preferred to join in with the bottle circulating among the merry gentlemen, all of whom he seemed to know well. Afterwards he could no longer find his ticket punch.

This relaxed atmosphere reached new heights at the next station, when two men and a woman, all somewhat advanced in years, boarded and occupied the three seats around me. The men wore enormous, extravagantly wide-brimmed black hats, which they did not remove, obliging them to sit opposite one another. Beneath the hats grew magnificent moustaches. Further down, everything was enveloped in extraordinarily generously cut, equally black pinstriped suits. Thus attired, they were ready for whatever might come: a cattle market or a board meeting.

To round off her ample figure, the woman had wrapped herself in several layers of colourful skirts and contrasting greyish-brown cardigans, the outermost layer consisting of a leather waistcoat with numerous pockets. On her head she wore an equally colourful scarf. She gave me a brief, smiling nod, displaying the splendour of her gold teeth, then turned to the men to resume an argument that had evidently begun before the train journey.

Although I couldn’t understand a word, the tone and duration of the speeches made it clear that a female victory was approaching, one the men had no intention of waiting for. They soon withdrew from the battlefield into the connecting area between the carriages, where they lit themselves a little smoke.

The woman, now deprived of occupation, turned her attention to me. In heavily accented but perfectly comprehensible German, she asked:

„You have chocolate? Little chocolate?“

„What? Er, no. Sorry.“

How stupid of me. How could this have happened? Why was it that I, who never carried chocolate, had chosen this particular day to have none with me? Should I blame the heat, or simply claim that I had already eaten my supply myself? And how the devil did she know I spoke German?

But the woman had no wish to hear an apology.

„No chocolate? No problem. You give money, I buy.“

My answer to this was also negative, which did not impress her in the slightest. Well practised in rejection and psychologically highly trained, she had no intention of vacating her seat to beg from another passenger, but trusted that I might yet change my mind. She remained stubbornly seated without asking a second time. Her imperturbable persistence considerably lengthened the journey as I experienced it. Then, at the next stop, she got off – taking both men with her – but not without giving me a friendly wave.

The relief was short-lived. A young man in a black suit, the trousers and sleeves a little too short, burst into the carriage through the door behind me, laden with several plastic bags. Sweating, repeatedly tucking a lock of hair behind his right ear, and carrying on an uninterrupted conversation with himself, he began emptying the bags in a flustered frenzy. Within seconds the seats around me were covered with all manner of objects, a wild assortment of gleamingly new and utterly unnecessary utensils, which he spread out and hastily attempted to arrange in some sort of order. I recognised a miniature folding tool kit, a perfume bottle shaped like a jukebox, sequinned ballpoint pens glittering like a disco ball, plastic neckties, chewing-gum dispensers made of chrome-plated plastic (with a crank handle!), and a pair of ladies‘ tights with a pearl-studded seam. No sooner had everything been unpacked than the man hurried into the next carriage to empty the remaining bags, without wasting so much as a second producing some little explanatory card from which it might have emerged that he was deaf and mute, or otherwise some poor devil obliged to earn his living by selling these things.

Firmly resolved to give the young fellow cash rather than buy any of the stuff, I took care not to touch a single item. Somewhere, at some time, I had read that under Balkan legal principles the mere act of touching such an object constituted an irrevocable declaration of intent to purchase the artefact on the spot!

Sure enough, the jukebox fell victim to the train’s jolting and landed on the floor, though without breaking. Thank God! The well-brought-up German in me was already bending down to retrieve the work of art – when, just in time, my Hungarian genes intervened. I must at all costs roll the bottle beneath the next seat, removing it from my area of responsibility. Whoever picked it up would then have to see how he got himself out of the predicament. As I straightened up again, however, I noticed that other passengers were quite happy to examine the treasures with their hands. Evidently they were attempting to estimate their possible value and appropriate price by judging their weight. With a swift movement I reached for the jukebox and put it back on the seat beside me.

A few minutes later the proprietor of this exclusive assortment returned, once again slightly harassed, and indeed through the very door by which he had left. It would not have surprised me altogether if it had been the one through which he had entered in the first place.

Without a word, a complaint or a gesture, he packed everything away again. Two rows further along he paused briefly. A man bought a cigarette lighter (I couldn’t see how much he paid), which he threw out of the window as soon as the salesman had left the carriage again.

Then, at last, peace returned.

For some time now the railway had been following the valley of a river that still meandered quite naturally, crossing it again and again. I had no idea that it flowed down from the very place I was heading towards, but simply enjoyed the landscape, which seemed to belong to another age. Gentle hills followed one another, often almost bare, covered only with grass. Small woods crowned some of them, but on the whole the country remained open. Every few kilometres a village nestled between the hills, always looking as though it had grown there by chance, because it could not have flourished anywhere else. Nothing seemed to have been crudely forced upon nature; everything appeared to have been scattered playfully from above. And nowhere was the view disturbed by an electricity pylon, a wind turbine or a mobile-phone mast.

And so we reached Mediasch. A sister of my grandfather’s had often written to him from here. She had not left after the war, but had stayed and endured whatever followed. I had never read any of her letters, and yet I felt as though I knew what they contained.

Regina Schwarz, Mediasch. The slightly trembling handwriting of an old woman on a cheap, matt-white envelope.

I read the town’s name on the station sign; in my imagination, hers stood directly beside it. There was a slight jolt as we set off again, and it did not come from the train.

Much later, just eight kilometres west of Schässburg, we reached the penultimate station of the journey, Seleuş. A long block of concrete served as a platform in a broad, green valley. To the left, a little higher up and half concealed by trees, a white church tower marked the position of the village.

So this was what Dénes’s dining table looked like in real life, for Seleuş was the Romanian name for Nagyszőllős, or Gross-Alisch.

Involuntarily, the dogskin came to mind, and although I knew the answer, I found myself wondering once again why it had had to be a dog.

„Think of Hermannstadt,“ whispered an irreverent voice inside me as the train rounded the next bend.

„Everything else was already on the grill…!“