As long
as Hyushik could remember, the old steam engine had stood opposite his uncle’s
house. It was visible from anywhere in the living room; all you had to do was
look out of the window.
Hryushik visited his uncle every summer,
because that was when his mother stopped trying to pretend that she could stand
him, and took off somewhere or other after dumping him at his uncle’s. Hryushik
didn’t mind all that much. He didn’t like his mother any more than she liked
him, and his uncle’s house was fun.
For one thing, it was quite far out of
town, and you could see stoats and other small animals scurry across the
overgrown garden in the early morning or evening. For another, his uncle had
worked all his life for the railways, and the house was near the old, abandoned
little station where no trains ever stopped any longer. And the steam engine
was there.
It was a very large old engine, with a huge
black boiler and a chimney stack which still bore a band in faded yellow. It
stood on a short section of track which was closed off at both ends with mounds
of wood and earth, the rails sinking into the ground and weeds growing over the
bottoms of the wheels. It wasn’t all by itself; there was a small freight
wagon, little more than a rust-red box on wheels, on the track behind it,
coupled to the engine with hooks and fraying hoses. Hryushik didn’t really care
much about the wagon, since all it had inside was what looked like decades of
accumulated trash and dust. He was only interested in the engine.
Hryushik had always been fascinated by
trains, ever since he’d been just old enough to know what one was. He’d loved
to watch the old movies on television, where the chuffing iron monsters pulled
out of stations trailing dense clouds of smoke and steam. And though his mother
had said that the old steam engines were noisy, dirty and sent cinders back
down the train to burn holes in your new clothes, he’d been fascinated by them
most of all. He’d been bitterly disappointed when he’d discovered that they had
all been retired, and the only trains these days were pulled by what looked
like shoeboxes on wheels without any character whatsoever. So he thrilled
through and through when he saw this real engine at last. That it was a dead,
cold husk meant nothing at all.
Fortunately, Hryushik’s uncle, Utkonos,
didn’t really care what his nephew got up to, and left him to himself. “Just
don’t go cutting yourself open on rusted cans or something,” he’d warned the
boy once, long ago, and that was all. Hryushik had mostly obeyed, and the few
scrapes he’d acquired had never been bad enough that he’d needed to go to
anyone for bandaging.
Utkonos wasn’t a bad man, but he had other
things on his mind than his sister and her tendency to dump her kid on him
every year. He was a widower, so he didn’t have a family to worry about, and
could afford to concentrate on his job. When during the summer the boy was with
him, he’d give him a packed lunch before leaving for work in the morning and
trust that he’d find him in one piece on returning in the evening. And,
unlikely as it seemed, that was how it happened always.
The reason for this was, of course, that
Hryushik didn’t go roaming all over the countryside; he always went straight to
the old platform, and to the old steam engine. Earlier, he’d been too small to
climb up the iron steps into the cab of the engine, but last year he’d become
tall enough. And the very first day of his stay with his uncle, he’d rushed off
to climb into the engine.
And it was so fascinating! Even the very
first time Hryushik peeked into the cabin, still holding on to the handrail
alongside the steps, he knew that this was the most interesting thing he’d ever
seen. All those pipes and levers and gauges, and the wheels just asking to be
turned round and round; that large, squared hole in the middle, with a metal
lid hanging half open! Those curved oval windows to left and right, so much
more interesting than the windscreen of his mother’s car, stained by bird
droppings as they were! And there were the two seats, one on each side, the
upholstery torn and the stuffing spilling out, but still grander than a throne
to Hryushik. When he pulled himself on the left hand side one, he could imagine
himself leaning out of the window, like the engine drivers in the pictures he’d
seen, watching the track as the train he was pulling roared round a bend. The
glass tubes in their holders were broken and the faces of the dials cracked, and
the big levers, when he tried to move them, were stuck fast in place with dirt
and rust; but to him they were all his to do with as he wanted, and he was
driving the train off to the journey of his life.
That night he went to his uncle’s little
library, and after poking around he found a book on steam engines. It wasn’t a
children’s book, so he didn’t understand much, but there were plenty of
pictures of various types of engines, and once he found the sort that looked
like the one at the station, he spent his time avidly looking at all the
pictures of its parts, and the cabin, and he read what he could understand of
which was what lever and gauge, and what it was supposed to do.
It was the next day when he was sitting in
the engine’s cab that it first happened. He’d leaned as far out of the window
as he could, his right hand on what he’d read was the regulator lever, and his
mind’s eye was filled with smoke blowing overhead and scenery rushing past. When
a voice said, “Slow down!”, he, therefore, took a moment to understand that it
wasn’t something he’d just imagined. A voice had actually spoken to him.
“It’s been a long time I’ve been waiting
for you,” it said.
Hryushik turned so fast that he almost fell
off the seat. There was a man standing beside him; a man in dark blue overalls
and a battered, shapeless cap. The man looked at him and shook his head.
“Don’t jump like that,” he said, “or you’ll
hurt yourself. It’s easy to hurt yourself in here, what with all these things.”
He patted a wheel to demonstrate.
Hryushik’s mouth opened and closed several
times before he could speak. “I wasn’t doing any harm,” he said. “I didn’t do
any damage to the engine. I was just playing, that’s all!”
“No, no,” the man said, shaking his head
and smiling. “You don’t need to worry. I wasn’t trying to chase you away. I was
just wondering how much longer I’d have to wait until you got in at last.”
“You’ve been waiting for me?” Hryushik
asked uncertainly.
“Waiting and waiting,” the man said with a
sigh. “I’ve been waiting for you since the first time I saw you standing by the
platform looking up at the engine, Hryushik. That was years ago.”
“You know my name?”
“Oh, I know everything about you.” The man sat down on the right hand side
seat, and leaned toward Hryushik, resting his elbows on his knees. “I knew
you’d come up here sometime, only not when.”
Seen close up, he was quite an old man. His
short beard was white and white hair straggled out from under his cap. The skin
of his face and hands was wrinkled and spotted, but his eyes were sharp and
clear.
“Where were you watching me from?” Hryushik
asked. “I’ve never seen anyone here, and I’ve come so many times.”
The man grinned and pointed down at the
metal floor of the cab. “Here,” he said. “I’ve been right here all along. And
you didn’t see me because I couldn’t show myself to you.”
“You mean...” Hryushik frowned, disbelievingly.
“You mean you’re a ghost?”
The man shook his head impatiently. “No,
no. There’s no such thing as a ghost, young man. Do I look like a ghost,
whatever that might be?” He didn’t. His clothes, the strands of his rough white
hair, the spots on his hands, all looked perfectly real. “Here,” he said,
holding his hand out. “Feel.”
Hryushik felt his hand. It was warm, dry
and utterly solid. “So who are you?” he asked.
The old man looked at him silently for a
while. “Think,” he said at last. “You know it already, just allow yourself to
say it out loud.”
Hryushik blinked, and suddenly he knew.
“You’re the...this engine?”
The man nodded, smiling. “That’s right. And
now you’re wondering how I can be here, talking to you like this. Well...” He
turned for a moment to look past Hryushik out of the side of the cab, and for
an instant the landscape outside blurred again, and the boy felt wind rush
through his hair. “Well,” the man continued, “you’re the one who made me.”
“What?”
“All these years you’ve been yearning,
haven’t you? Some other boys, they might do it for a day or a week, but nobody
else has ever done it like you, on and on, year after year. Sometimes...when
you want something enough...it comes into being. It becomes alive.”
Hryushik blinked at him in confusion.
“Each time when you came, when you stood
there looking up at me, I became a little more alive. Before that, I’d merely
been a mass of cold iron. But then you came, when you warmed me to life with
your longing. I began to relive the memories, the vibrations of my wheels on
the rails, the blaze roaring in my firebox, the superheated water in my boiler,
the smoke rushing through the tubes and out through my chimney. And I began to
remember, too, the things I’d seen, that I’d done and been through during all those
years when I was steaming along the tracks, not rusting here by a crumbling
platform in a station that no longer even has a name.
“When you went away, even though it was
only to that little white house across the field there, I began losing my
identity, to forget who I was and slip back into cold, dead iron. But this was
the thing – I never fully forgot,
never completely went away. I was
mostly gone, but enough of me was left that when you came back, I wouldn’t have
to start over again from the very beginning.
“So each time you came, I grew a little
stronger, just a little. I became more alive, more able to take a shape that
you could relate to. And today, the final little thing happened, when you came
up here, and brought me fully alive. And,” he said, “there you are.”
Hryushik hadn’t understood everything the
man had said, but he’d managed to get the idea. “You’ll be here always?” he
asked.
The engine-man shrugged. “How can I say?
The moment you go back, I may vanish again. But I think I’ll be here if you
keep coming.”
“I’ll keep coming,” Hryushik said. “You can
depend on it that I’ll keep coming.”
**************************************
Over the
next days, Hryushik discovered a world he hadn’t known existed.
The train man - “Call me Engine if you want,” he said – showed him the
controls, taught him which wheel and lever did what, what the gauges and tubes
would have shown if they hadn’t been cracked and jammed. He took the boy down
to the track and, crouching next to the giant iron wheels, told him about rods
and pistons, and how the flow of steam could drive the engine in one direction
or the other. He told him about the mechanics of fire and steam and vapour, and
how they powered the entire engine, allowing it to drag along a train weighing
hundreds of tons at a hundred kilometres an hour. And for a wonder, Hryushik,
who found it difficult even to thread a shoelace into his sneakers without
missing a hole here and there, somehow found no difficulty in understanding it
at all.
But his favourite time was when Engine sat
with him in the cab, which he knew now to call a “footplate”, and talked about
his experiences, and all the places he’d been, and how it was often difficult
to get there.
“Hills,” Engine said once. “I like hills,
to look at. They’re nice from a distance. But it’s bloody murder to climb them,
I tell you. Each slope needs a different steam pressure, and the fireman has to
slave like a machine to keep the fire loaded properly, because the heat and the
pressure have to be just right. If there’s too much steam pressure you have to
blow off the extra, and that wastes coal and water. But that’s still better
than if there’s too little. One time there was this new fireman, thought he
knew it all, he loaded too little coal while we were climbing up a long slope.”
He raised an eyebrow at Hryushik. “So, from what I told you, can you tell me
what happened next?”
“The engine stalled,” Hryushik said
promptly. “You were stuck till you could raise steam.”
“That’s right,” Engine nodded. “Exactly.
You know it, but that idiot fireman, who was supposed to have been trained,
didn’t. We had to stay there on the slope until we could raise steam pressure
again. Bloody embarrassing, I can tell you, apart from throwing the whole schedule
off. That’s why I said hills were bloody murder. Give me deserts any day – the track
straight as a ruler, and you never saw anything as pretty as a desert at night,
I’ll bet.”
“I’ve never seen a desert,” Hryushik said.
“You’ve missed something. The red desert up
north, that’s the best. Especially at night, when the moon’s shining down, and
when you’re passing the old ruins – that desert is full of old ruined forts –
you can almost see the camel caravans going through the gates, can imagine
princesses sitting in tower rooms looking out over the desert, waiting for
their lovers. And then the bridges across the great rivers – some of them are
so long they look like they’re merging into the sky, and you feel as though you’re
driving up into the stars, on a bridge spanning the Milky Way.” Engine sighed. “Of
course it didn’t last.”
“My mother says steam engines were dirty
and noisy,” Hryushik replied.
Engine nodded. “There are lots who said
that, and they weren’t all wrong. In any case, we did a lot of work, and it
wasn’t all just routine pulling around of people and goods either.” He paused,
his fingers tapping on his knee. “There was the time we went to evacuate the
people during the riots down south.” He snorted. “They called it ‘rioting’, but
it was nothing less than organised mass murder. We went down there taking loads
of relief supplies – food and clothes, old blankets and mattresses that people
had donated. But even as we were pulling into the station, we saw it was
crammed with people. The platforms were stuffed with them, they were spilling
on to the tracks, and as soon as we had finally managed to get to the platform
that they rushed the train. There were people literally hanging on to the
handrails by the sides of the boiler and sitting on the fenders on the front.
When we left the station we had to go at less than half speed to make sure
nobody fell off. And, really, you don’t want to know the things they had been
through, those poor people. But,” he added, “we saved them all. Not one was
lost on the way back.”
“It was a wonderful thing you did,”
Hruyshik said, looking around at the engine and imagining the people hanging on
desperately, the men and women and the little children. For a moment he could
almost glimpse them, hanging on to the sides of the engine. “A great thing.”
Engine shrugged. “Humans. They made me, so I did as they told me to. I could
never imagine why they hated themselves so much, though.”
************************************************
That was
last year.
This year, things had gone wrong even
before they’d started.
“Your uncle’s being transferred,” Hryushik’s
mother said, the day she dropped him off. “He’ll be leaving this autumn for
another place. So make sure you don’t make trouble for him. He’s busy getting
his work in order.”
Hryushik felt a fist catch hold in his gut with
cold fingers and twist. “You’re too old to come here anyway,” his mother said. “Next
year I’ll see if I can find a summer camp or something for you.”
Hryushik didn’t want a summer camp. He didn’t
want anything but Engine. But his mother had already driven off, without a
backward glance, leaving him standing by his suitcase.
The second thing that went wrong was when
he arrived at his uncle’s place was the sight of huge yellow machines hulking
around the old station.
“Oh, those,” Utkonos said casually. “They’re
planning to tear down the old place. The railway is going to build storage sheds
there. They should have done it long ago. Criminal, really, to let this
valuable property lie idle for so long.”
“The engine,” Hryushik asked. “What about
the engine?”
“They’ll scrap it, as far as I know,” his
uncle said. “I think they’re taking it away tomorrow.” He poured a glass of
soft drink for his nephew. “I take it you’d like to rest?”
Hryushik did not want to rest. It was
already late afternoon, but he slipped out at the earliest and ran out to the
old station. The construction crew had put up some tin sheets as barriers, but
there were plenty of gaps, and he squeezed between them and on to the platform.
It seemed a totally different place. The demolition
work hadn’t really started yet, but the ancient brick station house which had
stood, silent and abandoned, at one end was already mostly gone. The metal
shelter that had kept rain off the heads of waiting passengers had vanished too.
What was left looked as though it was waiting to be eaten by the hungry yellow
jaws of the waiting machinery.
It was Sunday, and therefore there was
nobody except Hryushik on the platform. He ran to the engine, for once not
looking where he was going, uncaring of his own safety. The engine and the lone
wagon were still there, but they looked as though they were diminished,
somehow, awaiting their own turn to be ripped apart and consumed.
“Engine,” he called, desperately,
scrambling up the steps to the footplate, certain that there would be no reply.
“Engine.”
But Engine was there, holding out a hand to
pull him up. “Hryushik. How tall you’ve grown!”
“Engine,” Hryushik said, desperately. “They’re
going to take you away and...scrap
you. My uncle said so.”
Engine shrugged. “I suppose it had to come
sooner or later. I’m just lucky I had the chance to be alive, and for that I
have to thank you.”
“But they’re going to kill you!”
“Well, they haven’t yet, have they? We
still have some time together – this evening, if you want.” He slapped the
fireman’s seat. “It’s been waiting for you impatiently.”
Hryushik got on to the seat. He’d gained a
lot of height during the year, and it was no longer as high for him as it had
been. Nor did the levers and wheels seem quite as outsized as before.
“It feels good to be back, doesn’t it?”
Engine said. He grinned. “You’re looking as though you just got back home after
a long, long journey.”
“That’s right,” Hryushik said. “And I don’t
want to go away again.”
“You never did,” Engine said. Dusk was
falling fast, and he hummed, moving around the footplate, doing things which
the boy couldn’t see clearly. “Right from the start you never did, Hryushik.
That’s why this is happening now.”
“Happening now? What do you mean?” Hryushik
looked around. Suddenly, it was as though things were wavering and shifting. There
was something strange, something that wasn’t quite as it had been before. And
whatever it was had nothing to do with the hulking yellow metal predators all
around. “Engine?”
“You don’t get it?” Engine pointed. “Look
at the glass of the windows, the dials. Can you see it?”
And Hryushik suddenly realised what it was.
The dust-opaqued windows were now clear; he could see the glimmer of a star through
one. The glass of the dials was no longer cracked. Even the glass tube that showed
the water level, which Engine had only told him about, was back in its holder.
It was as though the engine was being readied for a place in the museum,
instead of the scrapyard. He glanced quickly across at the blue-overalled man
with the white beard.
Engine nodded. “You’re bringing it all
alive again, boy. First it was me, and now it’s the whole engine. And it’s not
just the looks, either. Try the firebox door and see. Be careful that you don’t
burn yourself though.”
“Burn myself?” But even as Hryushik moved
the lever that opened the firebox – it moved easily, when he’d never been able
to shift it before – he saw the dull red glow of a fire inside.
“Care to go for a trip?” Engine asked. “All
I need is a fireman, and you know enough about the job now to make a fair
apprentice. There’s the shovel behind you, and the tender’s filled with coal.”
He touched the long regulator lever with his mottled old hand. “Get off that
chair and get to work. We’ve got steam to raise.”
Hryushik turned and picked up the shovel.
The load of coal was light in his arms, so light.
*************************************************
Nobody
ever saw Hryushik again. The police was told, but after a perfunctory search
gave up. After all, his uncle really had other things on his mind, and his
mother was glad enough to have the burden of taking care of him removed from
her life. They all finally decided he’d simply run way, and reminded themselves
that this wasn’t the first time something like that had happened, either, and
it wouldn’t be the last.
The railway authorities never found the little train - a steam engine and an old goods wagon - that had been slated to be scrapped, and had
mysteriously disappeared the night before it was due to be taken away. It was
impossible for anyone to have stolen it, because it was a huge, heavy engine and a big enough wagon,
and because the track was closed off at both ends. The police searched much
more thoroughly for it, but they didn’t find anything, either. It was sometimes
mentioned as a footnote in books of modern mystery.
But sometimes, people say, when you’re in
the red northern desert, you can hear the sound of an old steam engine roaring
along, and you can even see it, the blaze of its light carving a tunnel through
the darkness, as it hurtles past the old forts where camel caravans pass, and
in whose towers princesses sigh for absent lovers. You can, even, sometimes see
the red glow of the firebox, and the sparks that come out along with the smoke
from the chimney. It’s not a ghost, they say, this train of an engine and a wagon,
but you will never catch it, because it’s on a trip which will never stop,
never end.
And, sometimes, they say, if you look up at
the night sky, you’ll see it there, leaping across the Milky Way, crossing the
bridge to the stars.
Perhaps they tell the truth. Perhaps they lie.
Perhaps they are just mistaken.
Copyright B Purkayastha 2016
