Hello, my dear Ekaterina Sergeyevna.
I’m sitting at a railway station from which no train will ever depart again, beside a train that will never go anywhere again, reminiscing about our village that stands on the Great Railway.
As a child, I loved watching trains and thought: one day I’ll grow up and leave. Of all the entertainment our village had, there was only one thing to do—place coins on the tracks and watch the trains rushing past every day. Do you remember how we used to wave at them together from the embankment by the station when we were children?
I thought I’d grow up, board a train, and set off to discover new stations. I remember my first train journey to the capital, counting the cars of every passing train and reading the names of the stops through the window on those identical little station buildings. Back then, they all seemed so alluring, so full of promise. I wanted to get off and wander around places like Zarayskoye or Khrustalnoye, always expecting to find unimaginable wonders there.
After I moved to the capital to study, I began traveling across our homeland by train in search of those wonders. And wherever my adult life happened to take me, I always knew how to look for them. Look around, see how people live, wander aimlessly up and down the streets, admiring the houses and town squares. Visit the little church, the ruins, the monuments and sculptures, marvel at the pieces of contemporary art. Sit on a hill overlooking the river. Then buy a return ticket at the same station and pass the time before the train arrived in the station buffet with a bologna sandwich and tea served in a metal glass holder.
In time, though, all those stations and terminals with their wonderful names merged into one, and I no longer had any desire to see them. It was as if I had already seen everything, and every Zarayskoye or Khrustalnoye was exactly the same as some forgotten little Sinyakovo. The same rows of yellow houses, carved window frames, green front gardens, Lenin monuments, bell towers rising above the town, and a little river with a rich history. All those charming details were flattened beneath the relentless weight of life’s experience on the rails of existence, losing all their appeal.
And now, once again, fate has brought me to some station with the beautiful name of Carmen. Had I been twenty years younger, I would have gone looking for cobbled streets, single-story stone houses with wooden shutters, and front gardens blooming with bright red flowers, hoping to see where all these Carmens lived. Or I would have found the little eatery by the station—with its red plastic chairs beneath a flimsy awning—to ease the long wait for the next train with a milanesa sandwich and a cup of mate cocido.
But what about me? I sit alone on the railway platform beneath a closed ticket office with neither a timetable nor opening hours, wondering—what could possibly be waiting for me here that I haven’t already seen in my Latin American life? And what is there to do here when all that surrounds me is grass, a river, and owls wandering alongside lapwings? Nothing but sink to the bottom and wonder at which of my stations I went so terribly wrong, boarded the wrong train, and ended up precisely here. And what am I supposed to do with that now?
