Compartment 4

I took the night train because I'm fifty-four and I've reached the age where flying feels like being posted. Vienna to Venice. A compartment for two, which I'd booked entirely for myself and then, at the platform, discovered I would be sharing with a woman called Ilse, who was roughly seventy, had a suitcase the size of a fridge, and had already claimed the bottom bunk. "You are younger," she said, by way of explanation. "You climb." I climbed. We didn't speak much for the first hour. The train pulled out through the suburbs and then through the dark, and I lay on the top bunk reading the same page of a novel four times. Below me Ilse unpacked with the efficiency of a woman who had done this before: slippers, a flask, a small cushion she'd brought from home, a paperback in German with a cracked spine. Around ten she said, to the ceiling, "You are going to Venice for a reason?" "My daughter's getting married there." "Ah." A pause. "You do not sound happy." "I'm very happy. I'm just..." I didn't know how to finish it. "It's a long way to go to watch someone leave." "Hm," said Ilse. She told me, then, about her own trip. She was going to Venice because her husband had died in March and they'd gone there every October for thirty-one years, the same pensione, the same table at the same bar in the same square, and she'd decided she was going to go and sit at the table on her own and see what happened. "That's very brave," I said. "It is not brave. It is a train ticket." She turned a page. "Brave would be staying home." The train stopped somewhere in the mountains for a long time. Nobody announced why. Ilse produced a second cup from her bag, poured me something from the flask that turned out to be strong tea with something stronger in it, and passed it up to me without asking if I wanted it. "You climb down. Sit. I cannot talk to feet." I climbed down. We sat on the bottom bunk with our knees touching, two women in their nightclothes on a stopped train in the dark, and she asked about my daughter and I told her. About Rosa, who is thirty and marrying a man I like and moving to a country I can't spell the address in. About how the house is very quiet. About how I'd cried in the car park at the station and then felt stupid.

"Stupid why?" "She's not dying. She's getting married." "So." Ilse shrugged. "You cry at the wrong things. Everyone does. I did not cry at my husband's funeral. I cried in the supermarket a month later because they had moved the mustard." The train started again. She went to sleep almost immediately, the way people can who have decided to. I climbed back up and lay there and watched the mountains turn from black to grey. At Venice she was up and packed before I'd found my shoes. She shook my hand on the platform, formally. "The table," she said, "is at the bar on the corner of Campo Santa Margherita. Left side, under the awning. If you are there on Thursday morning I will be there. You can tell me about the wedding." I was there on Thursday. So was she. But that's a different story, and it's hers.