Departure
Aureliusz Malinowski stands against the wind that threatens to freeze him in place, watching the headlight of a train come down its distant path towards him. He has a jar of honey in his pocket, from home in Poland, with the oaty flavour he loves. Buckwheat honey. His son Dobromił loves it too, and Aureliusz can’t wait to give it to him, to see that heartwarming smile. Warm enough to keep him toasty even here.
Aureliusz went ahead of his family to Montreal while they stayed in Quebec for a time, but they will soon be reunited. If Canada doesn’t have buckwheat honey, maybe Aureliusz will be the first to bring it here. Maybe he will rebuild his childhood farm, and with his wife Irena, they would all picnic in long, tickly, summer grass once more. Sharing honey sandwiches. He wants to put one of the new flowers that he has seen in Irena’s hair—there’s one that looks like lavender, but comes in white and pink too.
The train crosses a river-spanning bridge, a skeletal metal frame with concrete legs. Aureliusz can see it better now, as he paces to end of the empty station. A steamer ship, tall mast piercing the morning-night sky, approaches the structure. Its mast must exceed the height of the bridge by at least a step, Aureliusz reckons. Maybe the train operator would call it a metre, a word he only learned when he left Poland for the first time.
When he reaches the end of the platform, he can see that the steamer is one of a handful of vessels being allowed passage under the bridge. They disturb the water in long, trailing lines that echo out on the surface of the river. Atop the tracks, a red bulb on a signpost lights up, glaring in the direction of the train.
Aureliusz’s inhale halts in his throat, and his heart beats louder in the absence of his breath. The headlight of the train isn’t all that he can see now, as the carriages begin to come into clarity. The coupling rods on the wheels flash up and down with haste. Steam billows from the chimney, the only clouds in the black sky. The train speeds past the signal to stop. Aureliusz slips his hands out of his pockets.
‘Stop!’ he screams.
In his best French, ‘Arrêt!’.
The words seem to rip through his throat, and his lungs sting with frozen air.
‘Stop the train!’
Aureliusz’s hands shoot into the air and he jumps, hollering, almost slipping off the platform. The train driver will hear him, and he will stop—he mustn’t have seen the signal along the tracks. The procession of cars hurtles forwards.
The engine reaches the gap in the bridge. Somebody jumps from the locomotive. Not a passenger, Aureliusz reasons; that is the engineer. The train hurdles on without him, and the engine plunges down. Towards the water, blanketing the barge below in darkness. Aureliusz falls into a sprint towards the tracks, off the platform and into the scrub. The base of the car impacts the ship and splinters explode in every direction as it passes through the vessel. People standing on the deck are instantly annihilated as though they were tricks of the light, blinked away. A cannon boom shocks the air as the carriage collides with the river, pushing Aureliusz’s heart out through his back. Water falls with a ripping sound back down on itself and the bridge.
The two halves of the boat turn upright and point to the sky, pouring scrambling passengers into the carnage. Aureliusz loses his feet from under him and his chest slams into the ground, crushing the air out from his lungs. He tumbles into a roll that slams him down the embankment, alternatingly in the air and flattened to the earth. He lands on his back, in shallow, frigid water. With his head to the side, he watches from the water level as the second carriage pulverises passengers that were clawing at the torrent to escape. All the debris, human and artificial, is wrenched down into the depths by the vacuum. A third carriage falls on top of the second, bursting on impact, the mass of passengers exploding outwards.
He scrambles to his feet and pushes himself towards the water as bodies begin floating towards the bank. Wading in, the cold immediately begins to sap the warmth from his body, but the adrenaline keeps a fire burning hot inside him.
Aureliusz works through the debris in the water with a practiced vigour, honed in the corridors of collapsing mines during his career. His arms move quickly, lifting, sifting, and his gaze roves in an arc that repeats with each step. There isn’t time to focus on the bodies that don’t move, only to grab the hands of those that do and heave them from the rocks. He searches for hands reaching out of the water, but finds hand after hand floating, unmoving.
There is yellow and purple painted all up the limbs, and spiderwebbing veins of broken blood vessels where it hasn’t breached the skin and leeched into the water. He is drawn forward into the mass, until he is up to his waist. He has never seen a mine so full of women and children.
He doesn’t want to see their faces. In the mines, he had friends … had lost friends. The times they had needed to evacuate, he just grabbed whoever he could see. He didn’t look at their faces, not yet, in case he made the leap in his mind to conclude who was left under the rubble. Until he saw his family, he could know that they were safe. He wouldn’t see his … his boy, or his wife. Not here.
He doesn’t want to find them. It wouldn’t just be another miner, but his blood. He imagines turning over a floating body, to see the glassy eyes of his son, frozen blue lips, limbs hanging limply from broken sockets—he scrambles backwards splashing frantically in the water to drag himself onto land, and upright.
He heaves breaths into his shuddering chest, and tries falteringly to exhale smoothly. He coughs on the air, wheezing, eyes watering. He tries to dry his eyes, but his hands are wet. When he thinks he spots a figure on the bank near him, he tries to rub that out of his eyes too, but it remains.
Moonlight softly illuminates the ruffles of a dress, and a long veil that covers the face of the woman wearing it. She holds her hands in front of her, clasped together. She’s not wearing shoes, and she must be freezing cold as the river water rolls up to her.
‘So much,’ she says. ‘So many.’
Aureliusz’s mind turns over, trying to find the words.
‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ he says, in accordance with her mourning attire.
‘I’m sorry for yours, young man.’
Aureliusz has been to two funerals in his life. He’s not sure if this counts. There are no flowers, there is no music.
‘I tried to find anyone … anyone who I could bring back,’ he says.
The woman takes a deep breath before responding.
‘Others have tried too.’
Aureliusz glances up and down the bank, and does glimpse the headlight of a car closer to the station, and shadows of people descending to the water—but nobody yet alongside them.
‘Have you seen a little boy?’ he says, rising to his feet, head turned towards her. ‘With a little wooden train set? He has hair like mine, he should be with his mother.’
Aureliusz reaches for his hair and tilts his head towards her, before taking a few steps closer. He tries to read her expression, but the veil provides him only a shadow with which to plead. He almost goes to lay a hand on her shoulder, but she seems further away than before, which gives him a moment to decide against it.
The woman still stands, facing the river.
‘The rescue effort will begin soon. They’ll need your hands,’ she says.
Aureliusz looks back to the river, too. He feels his forehead strain as his expression tightens. He grasps at his face with his hands, and grips his hair tight at the roots. He feels a hand on his shoulder, and for a moment he wonders why he isn’t surprised. It’s her. He feels some of the tension in his upper body melt away. Her hand is cold but it doesn’t bother him.
‘I don’t want to find them,’ Aureliusz says, ‘ … in the water.’
He can hear her sighing, and her hand slides down to squeeze his arm.
‘I know.’
Her imperceptible face turns its heavy gaze on Aureliusz’s eyes—he can feel it, without being able to see her pupils, like music coming from the next room.
‘You cannot stop now. Not here,’ she says.
She gestures with a gloved hand to the commencing rescue effort, and then the water.
‘They need you,’ she says, before grasping both of his hands in hers.
For the first time, Aureliusz feels some warmth from her.
‘You don’t yet know how much strength you truly have.’
The veiled woman steps away from him, and lets his hands drop to his sides. She turns, dress trailing an arc behind her, and starts walking away from the river.
Aureliusz remembers this feeling, from long ago, as if he is being left at school by his mother, and will see her again when she comes to collect him at the end of the day. He knows he will see her again. He is not afraid.
He watches her leave, until she becomes indistinguishable from the darkness around her. He turns to face the distant recovery effort. Aureliusz begins walking, and as resolve solidifies within him, he breaks into a sprint.
