Obabakoak by Bernardo Atxaga Page B

of the window. One day it didn’t turn up until eight in the morning and I was in tears and everything because I felt sure there’d been an accident. Later I learned that the delay had been caused by nothing more serious than a landslide, or so I read in the paper.
    The train usually has about twenty carriages and its destination is Hamburg. I don’t know if it always carries the same cargo but the day I traveled on it, it was carrying horses. I was told they were bound for America and that was why they were unloading them at the port. What will have become of those horses? I don’t know and the truth is I’d rather not. It might be that after that long journey all that awaited them was the butcher.
    The train reduces speed when it crosses the bridge and that’s the most important moment of the night. That’s when I light the cigarette I usually keep on the bedside table; and that’s when I start imagining.
    First I imagine the two drivers at the engine. I imagine them both silent, each one immersed in his own thoughts. At first, when they started working together, I’m sure they had loads of things to tell each other, but once that first stage was over, after they’d talked about their family and their friends, they’d find it difficult to come up with new topics of conversation. Of course they could talk about football and stupid things like that, but I don’t think so. People do talk about those things but not at four o’clock in the morning, not when they’ve been working for five hours.
    I imagine, then, that they’re both silent, watching the lights on the control panel or looking ahead at the rails. Especially looking at the rails. Or at least that’s what I did that day. The horses in the wagons kept neighing and neighing, they were frightened and the truth is so was I until I got used to the speed, because it seemed to me that at any moment the rails were going to fly apart. But when I got over my fear I kept looking straight ahead, because the same thing happened to me as when I go to the sea, I was sort of hypnotized, I couldn’t take my eyes off those rails continually coming together and moving apart, because that’s what happens when you travel in a train at a hundred miles an hour, that’s what the railway lines do.
    And the rails aren’t the only frightening thing when you travel in the engine of a train, because you suddenly realize that another train could emerge out of the darkness, coming from the opposite direction, I mean, and crash into you. But engine drivers aren’t like me. They’re not afraid. Perhaps they were on their first journey, but not now, now they’re used to it, and I imagine them feeling bored, looking indifferently out at the villages that appear along the way.
    Each of them immersed in his own thoughts, that’s how I imagine them. One of them is married and has two children and thinks of them whenever he sees the lighted windows of a house because he assumes there must be some child in the house who’s ill or who won’t go to sleep. And then he feels like phoning his wife to find out how his children are, because, of course, they too could be ill or be having trouble sleeping, and he probably will do that, phone home I mean, as soon as he gets to Hamburg, and even if he doesn’t it won’t matter, at least he thought of it.
    And I stop thinking about the first driver and I start imagining what the second one, Sebastian, is doing, what’s going on inside his head. And then I imagine that he’s thinking of me, that he’d like to come to this room where I lie smoking my cigarette, and that it grieves him not to have his wish.
    But in imagining these things, I’m only fooling myself. Sebastian’s forgotten about me. If he hadn’t he’d blow the train whistle three times, two short blasts followed by one long one, as soon as he crossed the iron bridge, the way he used to do night after night for the forty-four days that followed our journey together with the