The Secret Divorce

Every morning the young man stowed his backpack in the locker and crossed the ink-black river to the train station. The predawn city was almost silent in cold and heavy fog and he found that, as he crossed the footbridge, the labyrinth of the Old Town disappeared in the gray shroud behind him before the orderly New Town emerged ahead of him, so that in the middle of the bridge he could imagine it was endless, that it came from nowhere and led nowhere, and that it didn’t matter which direction he walked.

Every morning he bought coffee and sat facing the platform and waited for her. He waited all the gray mornings and into the afternoons. He missed her, but the cold and the fog, which hardly lifted, seemed to dull all his senses, and his longing was muted, not urgent. She seemed remote. In any event, he waited.

The trains eased out of the fog, sluicing water, their groaning attenuated and dull, and returned into the submarine gray as though going out of focus. The passengers drifted, silent.

One day a full train arrived, and, after the dark-coated passengers dispersed, one man remained. At first he stood by the doors and peered out into the rain. Then he paced and checked his phone. Then he settled into a bench to wait. Finally, he slept with one hand on his suitcase.

When the young man returned the next morning the man was still there. They avoided each other in the echoing hall. The next day, too, the man waited. Every so often, he went to the curb and looked out into the gray. His hair became oily and his shirt wrinkled.

One morning the young man bought two coffees and approached the man and gave him one. The man smiled and said something in the local language. They raised their cups to each other in the universal gesture of thanks and conviviality.

The last train from the west arrived, and she was not on it. The young man went to the waiting traveler and said, You should come with me. I have a room and supper. The man did not understand the words, but he stood and followed the young man out into the night.

They stopped mid-bridge, between the diffuse blue lights of the New Town and the lights of the Old Town, dim and candle-yellow. Off in the fog and dark, at either end of the bridge, they heard raised voices and the scrape of iron on iron, the clank of heavy chains, and the creak of timber. The bridge drifted free of the embankments, shedding ice. The fog-blurred lights slowly spun and fell away behind them as they floated downriver. Very late, they came to where the harbor widened and the air smelled of brine and diesel. In the deep below them a vast pod of trains groaned out to sea, their hydraulic flukes thrusting, their windows glowing yellow, their passengers breathing ink.