The heavy air burst. It shattered into thousands of pieces. Between them sprouted icicles of frost — the temperature changed in the blink of an eye. The sun hid behind the clouds, and the wind picked up. I felt that I could breathe. Oxygen began circulating in my veins again; it filled my lungs. My body stopped on the verge of implosion. I slowly raised my gaze to the sky. It had darkened. Dense clouds covered the blue towering above the damp, heavy atmosphere, hovering heedlessly over sweat-covered heads. I looked around, searching the faces of those around me for fragments of thoughts scattered across focused expressions, buried deep in frowning foreheads. Facial muscles slowly relaxed. I saw my eyes open, absorbing the newly created darkness. The storm was approaching, creeping across the sky, sneaking in between us.
We stood under the roof of a small platform, overgrown with weeds poking out of cracks in the concrete. The train was already an hour late. The loudspeaker hanging above us had been silent since I had arrived in that place. Not a trace of an announcement. The station seemed abandoned. Entering, I saw no one — the cash registers stood empty, abandoned in a hurry or in the simple flurry of carelessness. The few stores surrounding the station, isolated from the rest of the town, shone empty. I could see the doors slammed shut, and behind the cloudy surfaces of the dusty windows I could not discern a sliver of anyone's movement. We were the only ones left; me and a strange crowd on the only platform.
I heard thunder roll across the sky, reminding me of the inexorable rush of time. I looked at the clock hanging above our heads. Fifteen minutes had passed since I had last turned my impatient gaze toward it, just to occupy my thoughts with something for a few seconds — not to wonder what awaited me at the end of my journey, when in seven hours I would disembark at a familiar, much larger station and see how much the place that was slowly beginning to blur in my memory had changed. With my eyes, I saw it as I had left it. Each time, a few details were lost. What was across the street, in front of the train station? I remembered the sign; its shape, the color of the letters, but the word escaped somewhere with the increasing wind.
I didn't even notice when I started walking around, passing luggage scattered around the platform. People were sitting on the ground. They swept their eyes over the shapes of the surrounding trees, avoiding each other's gazes. Passing them, I felt transparent. I manoeuvred between the legs, backpacks, suitcases and leashes of dogs panting in the heat. Before the bursting of the suffocating bubble of summer air came like salvation, I managed to walk along the platform eight times, each time counting my steps. Seventy-four, seventy-six, seventy-four again.
When I felt the first drops of rain on me, I paused, snapped out of hypnosis. The meditative effect of the steady steps put me to sleep for a while. I looked at the clock. Not even a minute had passed. I looked again. Five had passed. I had the impression that the clock was showing the hours haphazardly — reversing, speeding up and slowing down time. I decided not to take my eyes off it. I carefully followed the smallest pointer, moving smoothly around the large white dial with ornate black numerals. It staggered in circles, drawing a loop of the stationary moment. The longest pointer twitched. For a moment it reached a different position; I could have sworn. An instant later, it returned to its previous position and jumped one dash further. I looked away for a moment, then looked again. I laughed, having realized how funny I must have looked trying to catch the clock cheating. None of the people gathered seemed interested in what I was doing.
Raindrops dripped on light clothes, on hair damp with sweat. Bodies scattered around the platform regained their ability to move. People moved away, crowding under a roof that did not reach the very end of the concrete platform. They were pushing against each other, feeling the coming chill. I raised my head and closed my eyes. I began to count the drops hitting my skin with increasing momentum. I listened to the noise of the rain — it sounded like the gap between the stations on the radio, as if I were about to hear distorted words gaining clarity as the frequency of the signal shifted. I heard a whisper; a trailing sound, as if someone was trying to say a long, complex word in an unknown language on one breath. The noise grew thicker, changed. Water drummed on the roof, hit the concrete under my feet and rustled among the leaves of the trees. The rain slowly cut the space I was in from the world. An enclave formed, a temporary island, forcibly plucked from reality, to which the incoming train was supposed to take me. The rain, like a thick, cold wall, separated me from what awaited me after I got off the train and took my first steps. A chasm grew between me and the ground I was afraid to walk on, knowing where the familiar, long-lost roads would take me, a static sound, a white noise filling my thoughts. It violently tore into the inside of my skull like the deafening rumbling of a bell in the middle of a small town. A rumble that permeated the walls, uniting everyone in a sonic community. I stood immersed in the rainy reverberation, trying to find my place behind the newly formed wall.
The world has shrunk to microscopic size. We were the only ones left — on an island in the middle of nowhere. The forest around us and the buildings of the city hidden behind a wall of dense, body-smothering rain seemed unreal, as if someone had scattered life-size props everywhere, preparing the stage for a play in which we would involuntarily act. The world rolled up around us. The rain absorbed other sounds. I could hear individual words. They cut through the noise. I saw some figures moving their lips, trying to kill the time jumping from moment to moment. I realized that I was the only one not standing under the roof. Trembling bodies crowded together, trying to hide their uneasiness with expressions on their faces. People were clutching their suitcases and backpacks. They adjusted their clothes, trying to keep out the sudden, penetrating chill of the unexpected rain. The weather forecast did not predict an inch of precipitation. The entire day was to shine over us with nothing but unobstructed sun. No clouds. No wind. No possibility of escape. And yet, against the certainty and invulnerability of the measuring equipment, cold water began to pour from the sky in streams. My clothes, completely soaked, clung to my body. I felt the weight of them on me. I felt like taking them off and standing naked under the source of the rain that was engulfing whole stretches of the world. Instead, I took a step toward the gathering, gesturing to those crowding closest to me that I would like to join them and take shelter from the sudden downpour. I heard distorted sounds, single words hanging in the air, the rustling of jackets and feet on the concrete where water was creeping, taking over the increasingly small dry space. Several people made room for me. I sat down, looking around at the faces, which immediately returned to staring into the indefinite space in front of me, as if my appearance was a vague episode from the distant past, irrelevant to the present moment. Slurred conversations fell silent. The lips stopped moving. I felt an overwhelming urge to speak. I longed to join them, to no longer stand outside. I touched their bodies with my body, crowding under a roof that could barely hide us all — those closest to the edge pushed against those inside as soon as the rain reached their protruding limbs. I skipped from face to face with my gaze. I wondered if I had seen any of them in the years I had spent there. Every look seemed foreign to me, as if I had never passed its owner in a small town. I thought I should know at least one person. With this thought, I began to look around even more intensely, squirming in place, until my eyes met the stern gaze of the person sitting closest to me. At first I looked away, but immediately looked at her again. Her lips caught my attention — unnaturally pale; they looked like they were made of thin white tissue paper, under which someone had stretched a pale pink imitation of flesh. The strong outline made them appear larger than they really were; fuller. A dark, almost black, line separated them from the rest of the face, creating an island in the midst of emptiness. Their pallor made the face look nothing like a living person, although the eyes, closely following my every move, curiously stalked my gaze, trying to capture it, to focus on it, as if they were asking me to hold on to them.
— You are looking at me — the woman said. Her white lips moved. The outline changed shape. The emptiness filling the contour lines gained a moment of life. I couldn't stop looking at the subtle shapes her lips were forming into as one by one words slipped out from between them, the meaning of which reached me only after a while. — Why? — She added. Not a trace of a smile. Just a rippling, gentle movement of muscles. Wrinkled eyebrows; lines on the white, dead surface.
— Sorry. I got lost in thought. — I wanted to explain why, but no explanation came to mind. What attracted my attention in her mouth and face? There was something missing from them that I couldn't pinpoint. Desperately, I began to search my mind for words. She waited for them, carefully following my movements, the trembling of my hands, which I tried to hide by clasping them around my knees. We both sat on the ground, surrounded on all sides by bodies. No one looked at us. The gaze of everyone waiting was stuck in a space where a late train could appear at any moment. We were stuck in the middle of the crowd, looking at each other suspiciously, as if we were both waiting for an impending attack.
— What were you thinking about? — she asked.
— You look... you remind me of... — I started, but the rest of the sentence did not follow the beginning.
— Who?
— Not who. Sketch. You remind me of a sketch. — I looked at the thin tissue paper of her lips, at the rough, pale skin on her face, and realized I couldn't see the blood vessels underneath. I could see movement, I could see curiosity in her eyes, but there was nothing hidden under the surface of her face.
— A sketch? I haven't heard that one before. — She seemed sad. Her face relaxed for a moment. I noticed that her hands, as unnaturally white as the rest of her visible body, were clutching a small purse tightly. I fixed my gaze on her, unable to either turn away or gather the courage to look her in the eye again.
We sat silently side by side, arm in arm, looking at the empty, overgrown tracks. I could hear thunder in the distance. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a flash, resembling a bony finger. Someone stretched it toward us, as if to indicate — they are sitting here. They won't go anywhere from here. The platform, covered by stormy darkness, seemed like a trap. Murmurs of conversation echoed past me, mixing with the sound of rain. At one point I heard a rustling whisper right next to my ear.
— Why did you say that? — the woman asked. She spat out the question as if she had been mashing it in her mouth for the past several minutes. I lifted my gaze. Only then did I notice that her entire body resembled a skeleton clad in paper. Her bony chest rose and fell under a loose dress whose former colors I couldn't guess. It looked old, washed many times until it had lost what it was supposed to represent. It had turned gray. It had turned into a canvas for abstract art of passing time. I saw my neighbor's ribs. They shone through where the fabric touched the surface of the thin white skin. Her silhouette resembled an outline, the beginning of a drawing that the artist had forgotten to complete. He had abandoned her before he had given her body color and before he had shaped the outline of her muscles on it. I had no idea how a person so extremely thin could hold herself upright. She seemed to drift through the air, wobbling slightly in the relentless wind blowing. Her rough, rugged skin looked cold, but the woman was not trembling. She was looking straight at me. Her small, slightly slanted eyes carefully studied the expression on my face. I forced myself to look at her.
— I don't know. I said the first thing that came to my mind. Never mind — I chuckled, trying to hide my embarrassment. However, I immediately spoke up again. — Have you been here long?
I thought that while waiting for the train, I might as well talk to her. To learn something from a figure that did not resemble any of the people gathered on the platform. I felt that I couldn't just leave her. I was afraid that if I turned around, she would disappear.
— The train is already several hours late — I added, without waiting for an answer to the previous question.
— It's been late much longer — she said, looking around with the same curious and simultaneously sad gaze. Behind her glazed stare there was an indefinable melancholy, the source of which I could not yet pinpoint.
— What do you mean?
— I don't think the train will ever come. I have never seen it.
— Someday it must. This is the platform. There's a schedule hanging right next to us. It must come eventually, regardless of how late it is.
— I've never seen it — the woman reiterated. I looked at the clock. It showed that four hours had passed since the rain started. I had no idea where the time had disappeared. — You noticed — she added, following my eyes.
— The clock is going crazy.
— Everything is fine with the clock. It works as it always has.
— How long have you been here? — I repeated the question, this time more clearly and louder. One of the people gathered under the roof threw me a curious look.
— I hardly remember when I wasn't here — she replied after a moment's thought.
I digested her words for a while. I felt the sting of panic that had been nesting inside me all along, erupting at moments of greatest tension. Shallow breathing robbed me of oxygen. I forced myself to take several deep breaths. I had the feeling that I was in a dream from which I could not wake up. The trees came closer, tightening an impassable rim around the platform along with the rain, which smeared traces of the world outside the tiny station. I began to notice that I was forgetting the contours of the buildings, forgetting what had happened that day, as if I had woken up on the platform, surrounded by people, with only the thought of where I was going in my head. The woman continued talking, but I couldn't focus. I could feel the world melting away; dissolving under the cool drops and seeping into the ground, disappearing into it forever and leaving behind only wet ruins to which I would never return. I grew into the concrete platform. I could feel myself becoming one with that place, memories merging and turning into one caricatured image. They fused together, crushed by their own weight. I sat in the middle of a withering, shrinking world, surrounded by a wall of rain, and couldn't get a word out.
— My name is Ruta — I heard. Ruta. I repeated the name. I clutched at it as if it were a lifeline and, with tremendous effort, came back to reality. Ruta was sitting next to me, looking with concern at my sweat-slicked face. — I have been here for months. Or maybe years already? For a while I tried to measure time, to remember the days, but I remember very little. I remember almost nothing, only excerpts, except what I came here to do. And why I came to do it here. I don't know why I'm still here. I don't think I've made a final decision yet. The train hasn't come once.
I sat next to her, chained to the ground by the weight of my own breathing. The people around us seemed to ignore her presence. I could only watch her white, paper lips expose her graying teeth as she spoke.
Ruta remembered a sound. An ear-piercing weeping noise, coming from the depths of the forest, as she moved at a breakneck pace through its dark, damp bowels, consumed with fear and cold. The sound repeated over and over; something was approaching her. The scream was growing in her throat, but it couldn't come out, as if the time for its birth was yet to come. She delved farther and farther — she said she remembered wet bedding and soaked, thin boots. Trouser legs soiled with mud. And a howl filling her ears, sounding almost human, as if something living between the trees, a mischievous, bored echo, was playing with her senses, watching her fear, toying with the way she thrashed around in the woods, looking for a way out and for the figure with which she had seen enter between the trees. The silhouette disappeared from her sight as soon as she decided to follow it. She noticed the shuffling gait, the dark skin, the complete opposite of her morbid pallor. In the faint moonlight, the whites of his eyes flashed from time to time as the man looked around — maybe he was trying to estimate his location, maybe he felt her presence, or maybe he knew that those he was running from were still nearby. Ruta saw sweat covering his face. Before she lost sight of him, she stood close, motionless, observing and silent. She waited for the right moment. She wanted to make sure she didn't run into the military patrolling the area near the border.
The man looked ill. He was shaking. He clutched his stomach area. Ruta wanted to approach him, to grab his arm, to pull him towards safety, as she had done dozens of times before, looking for people lost like him and taking them with her. Together with them, she sneaked through the forest. She knew the paths to get around places where she could usually meet the soldiers. Until then, no one had caught her. Like a pale ghost, she sneaked through the forest, becoming one with the darkness — like a contrasting center of light. She moved in the dark. Her vision sharpened, her silhouette assumed a position of perpetual hunch; ready to leap, to flee, to hide between the branches. The people she brought with her stayed with her for a little while. Some for longer. She fed them with what she had.
She said she remembered her home as if through a fog. She remembered moments that broke through the wall of rain and placed her in time, even as the clock hanging above showed a chaotic loop, skipping unpredictably from hour to hour. She remembered warmth and voices. Many languages whose recurring elements she tried to remember. She said a few words in Arabic and smiled to herself. She did not look at me. Her gaze drilled through me and slid across the space somewhere behind me. She remembered the clatter of dishes and the quiet, steady breathing when everyone was asleep. She strolled among the strangers, watching them dream about home. She could almost see what was going on in their heads. She imagined where they were going in their own thoughts, when they could go anywhere. She would go to bed last, making sure everyone had a place and no one was left without a blanket.
Ruta paused for a moment. A grimace of fear ran across her face, previously absent from her melancholic, calm face. She shook her head, as if to push away the thought of home. She frowned. She looked as if she was intensely thinking about something. I listened to the sound of rain and conversation. I began to get used to the fact that I could not understand a word spoken between the people sitting next to me. The storm approached, rolling across the sky, crushing the atmosphere with its weight. Ruta, a frail figure, looking as if she was about to break in half in a moment, moved violently. She looked at me. I returned the gaze without saying a word. With a nod, I let her know that I was still listening. I watched as the previous calm expression returned to her face. Her face relaxed, though I could still see the shadow of fear on her papery face, coloring her words.
That night, things went differently. Ruta heard a screech, a rough, prolonged howl of a stripped throat. It sounded like a man in distress, like a man on the verge of death, terrified and alone. The figure she was following disappeared from her sight. Was it him who was screaming? How far could he have gone? Earlier, he had walked slowly. It seemed to her that she followed him step by step, but the longer she looked around, the more certain she became — he disappeared as suddenly as he appeared. When she first saw him, she followed him without hesitation, even though the sun was setting. She heard the sounds of one of the military cars. Its powerful wheels were tearing the damp ground to shreds. She knew that they were approaching; that the stranger would be within their sight in a moment. She stepped into the forest. She wanted to make it in time before them. She followed him until he disappeared, and a scream filled her ears, a repetitive, broken howl, arranged in an almost rhythmic pattern. The forest grew quieter each time the howl returned, taking all other sounds with it, capturing the air and becoming the only noise in the leaves. Ruta couldn't remember how she found the man lying on the ground. The moment she reached him imprinted itself in her memory most clearly, weighing on her like a guilt she couldn't get rid of.
With every word, Ruta seemed to recall more and more details, as if life was coming back to her, hidden under the weight of silence, under the rotting, stagnant time, whose noose tightened around her hour after hour, month after month, as she waited for something — for what? I didn't understand how she had ended up on the platform, how she was stuck between an uninviting train and an abandoned life, but I wasn't about to ask additional questions, swept along by the torrent of words carrying me beyond my own body, beyond thoughts of the place I was headed, beyond the part of my mind asking if the thing I was seeing really existed, and was not the product of my tired mind, lulled to sleep by the steady hum of the rain, drifting somewhere among the trees surrounding the platform and constructing the events taking place amidst the darkness they greedily concealed, keeping it from the eye of the outside observer. I surrendered to Ruta, surrendered my every thought to her; my whole body sitting on the hard, cold ground, forgetting discomfort, ridding myself of disbelief. I sank into her circling, uncertain, enveloping words, not looking for a way out. The moment absorbed me completely. Ruta was glowing, focused. She spoke, stumbling over her own words as if they were obstacles she hadn't had to go through in a long time; as if she had kept them with her until they clung to her limbs, turning into extra ballast preventing her from moving freely, chaining her to the dirty gray concrete of a platform forgotten by time. Her gaze scanned over me, searching for a foothold in me as her mind wandered from blurred memory to blurred memory, reconnecting the fragments of a fractured life.
Her time stood still at one point. It began to slow down when she found the man she had been following lying on the ground, in a puddle of his own vomit, spitting on the cold ground in disgust, with fever inscribed on his face, marked by wandering eyes looking around for something they couldn't reach at night, in the woods, on the Polish-Belarusian border, amid patrols and screams, deafening shouts, echoing through the forest and drilling into Ruta's brain as she tried to get the man's attention, to help him get up, to bring him back to consciousness enough to follow her to a safe place, a large house where others would take care of him. Others? Ruta hesitated, thinking of the bodies filling the house, the outline of which slowly returned to her, along with the color of the walls and fence, along with the neighboring houses. The others — her adopted family, a group of mothers and children, a group moving silently between the trees, a group collecting lost bodies, snatching them from the embrace of the forest before they are found by someone who tells them to go back, to spend another night in the bone-penetrating cold, merely doing his duty, because that's all his uniform obliged him to do — to send those he finds, sick and hungry, to certain death.
Ruta clenched her fists around the bag, which she had been mashing in her hands the whole time. I noticed a stain on it. She strenuously tried to cover it with strategically placed fingers. She seemed to do it subconsciously, as if it had already become a habit. Ruta lived with ten people — sometimes there were more, sometimes fewer, but the house never fell silent, almost never slept. Even the nightly silence was filled with tense anticipation, the restless breaths of the shallow-sleeping residents. Ruta couldn't remember their names. The faces blended into one. How could this be? — she wondered, searching her mind for images that would allow her to continue the story. Unable to recall the people she lived with, she returned to the forest, and her words sped up again. They spilled in front of me, forming a puddle in which I could see details slowly emerging from the depths of Ruta's memory. I could see how she began tugging at the inert arm of the lying man. How another trickle of vomit erupted from between his lips. How chills ran through his entire body. Ruta picked him up and threw one arm over his shoulders. With an almost inhuman effort, she lifted him up. I saw her frail body bearing the weight of a grown man. She felt his sour breath and heard him talking to himself, panting — sick or poisoned by something he found in the forest. Maybe both. She pulled him along, half dragging him on the ground, half letting his legs take unsteady steps. The limbs immediately yielded, hauling both figures toward the ground. Ruta could hear the rustling of crumpled twigs nearby, but she couldn't abandon the suffering man; she couldn't withdraw from the mission to which she had devoted herself over the past years, raising her child amidst all the turmoil, at the border, among the soldiers walking between observation posts, among the incoming people to whom the spontaneously formed collective was providing assistance. She could not imagine a different life. That's why she strove forward, hearing the laughter of drunken border guard members echoing through the forest. She was already familiar with these sounds. She knew that despite her dulled senses, they could still spot her. She walked as carefully as she could with the extra weight. When she reached the border of the forest, she took a deep breath and listened to the sounds around her. The howling sound, whose presence she had grown accustomed to, was increasing. At one point, something ran past her, almost hitting her and the man, immersed in a feverish half-sleep. Ruta's heart pounded harder — a split second before she noticed the dark fur and elongated muzzle of a deer. The scream emanating from its mouth indicated a fear it carried that it would never share. Ruta pulled the man further away. When she reached the house, they both collapsed on the floor — she, exhausted from the walk, he, unconscious and mumbling to himself, with scraps of saliva rolling from his mouth.