NIGHT TRAIN TO LISBON

Grove Press

Chapter One

Gregorius looked ahead at the pointed towers of the Historical Museum of the City of Bern, up to the Gurten and down to the Aare with its glacier green water. A gusty wind drove low-lying clouds over him, turned his umbrella inside out and whipped the rain in his face. Now he noticed the woman in the middle of the bridge. She had leaned her elbows on the railing and was reading in the pouring rain what looked like a letter. She must have been holding the sheet with both hands. As Gregorius came closer, she suddenly crumpled the paper, kneaded it into a ball and threw the ball into space with a violent movement. Instinctively, Gregorius had walked faster and was now only a few steps away from her. He saw the rage in her pale, rain-wet face. It wasn't a rage that could be dumped into words and then blow over. It was a grim rage turned inward that must have been smoldering in her for a long time. Now the woman leaned on the railing with outstretched arms, and her heels slipped out of her shoes. Now she jumps. Gregorius left the umbrella to a gust of wind that drove it over the railing, threw his briefcase full of school notebooks to the ground and uttered a string of curses that weren't part of his usual vocabulary. The briefcase opened up and the notebooks slid onto the wet pavement. The woman turned around. For a few moments, she watched unmoving as the notebooks darkened with the water. Then she pulled a felt-tipped pen from her coat pocket, took two steps, leaned down to Gregorius and wrote a line of numbers on his forehead.

"Forgive me," she said in French, breathless and with a foreign accent. "But I mustn't forget this phone number and I don't have any paper with me."

Now she looked at her hands as if she were seeing them for the first time.

"Naturally, I could have ..." And now, looking back and forth between Gregorius's forehead and her hand, she wrote the numbers on the back of the hand. "I ... I didn't want to keep it, I wanted to forget everything, but when I saw the letter fall ... I had to hold onto it."

The rain on the thick eyeglasses muddied Gregorius's sight, and he groped awkwardly for the wet notebooks. The tip of the felt pen seemed to slide over his forehead again. But then he realized it was now the fingers of the woman, who was trying to wipe away the numbers with a handkerchief.

"It is out of line, I know ..." And now she started helping Gregorius gather up the notebooks. He touched her hand and grazed her knee, and when the two of them reached for the last notebook, they bumped heads.

"Thank you very much," he said when they stood facing each other. He pointed to her head. "Did it hurt?"

Absently, looking down, she shook her head. The rain beat down on her hair and ran over her face.

"Can I walk a few steps with you?"

"Ah ... yes, of course," Gregorius stammered.

Silently they walked together to the end of the bridge and on toward the school. The sense of time told Gregorius that it was after eight and the first hour had already begun. How far was "a few steps"? The woman had adjusted to his pace and plodded along beside him as if she would go on like that all day. She had pulled the wide collar of her coat so high that, from the side, Gregorius saw only her forehead.

"I have to go in here, into the Gymnasium," he said and stood still. "I'm a teacher."

"Can I come along?" she asked softly.

Gregorius hesitated and ran his sleeve over his wet glasses. "In any case, it's dry there," he said at last.

She went up the stairs, Gregorius held the door open for her, and then they stood in the hall, which seemed especially empty and quiet now that classes had started. Her coat was dripping.

"Wait here," said Gregorius and went to the bathroom to get a towel.

At the mirror, he dried the glasses and wiped off his face. The numbers could still be seen on his forehead. He held a corner of the towel under the warm water and wanted to start rubbing when he stopped in the middle of the movement. That was the moment that decided everything, he thought when he recalled the event hours later. That is, all of a sudden, he realized that he really didn't want to wipe away the trace of his encounter with the enigmatic woman.

He imagined appearing before the class afterward with a phone number on his face, he, Mundus, the most reliable and predictable person in this building and probably in the whole history of the school, working here for more than thirty years, impeccable in his profession, a pillar of the institution, a little boring perhaps, but respected and even feared in the university for his astounding knowledge of ancient languages, mocked lovingly by his students who put him to the test every year by calling him in the middle of the night and asking about the conjecture for a remote passage in an ancient text, only to get every time off the top of his head information that was both dry and exhaustive, including a critical commentary with other possible meanings, all of it presented perfectly and calmly without a soupon of anger at the disturbance-Mundus, a man with an impossibly old-fashioned, even archaic first name you simply had to abbreviate, and couldn't abbreviate any other way, an abbreviation that revealed the character of this man as no other word could have, for what he carried around in him as a philologist was in fact no less than a whole world, or rather several whole worlds, since along with those Latin and Greek passages, his head also held the Hebrew that had amazed several Old Testament scholars. If you want to see a true scholar, the Rector would say when he introduced him to a new class, here he is.

And this scholar, Gregorius thought now, this dry man who seemed to some to consist only of dead words, and who was spitefully called the Papyrus by colleagues who envied him his popularity -this scholar would enter the room with a telephone number painted on his forehead by a desperate woman apparently torn between rage and love, a woman in a red leather coat with a fabulously soft, southern voice, that sounded like an endless hesitant drawl that drew you in merely by hearing it.

When Gregorius had brought her the towel, the woman clamped a comb between her teeth and used the towel to rub the long black hair lying in the coat collar as in a bowl. The janitor entered the hall and, when he saw Gregorius, cast an amazed look at the clock over the exit and then at his watch. Gregorius nodded to him, as he always did. A student hurried past, turned around twice and went on.

"I teach up there," Gregorius said to the...