Walking Adventure

The overnight express out of Kolozsvár is a gilt and velvet box hurtling through a black Carpathian winter, and everything inside it is warm — the burgundy banquettes, the marquetry tables, the brass lantern swinging its slow bars of light down the panelled corridor. Outside, the mountains slide past like something patient. The train takes each iron viaduct with a sound like a held breath. Nine strangers file past an open compartment door, and nine silver coins are counted into a neat row beside a deck of cards.

Then the snow beats the train, and the moving house becomes a stopped one. Wolves cross the drifts below the trestles. A face appears in the frost. A woman walks through a door locked from the inside, and the word for such things travels the third-class car faster than the cold. Everyone aboard would like very much to believe in prophecy — because a prophecy means no one on this train is to blame.

But every ghost leaves a fingerprint. Mud on a carpet. A scratch of brass. Soot on glass. A thumbnail’s crimp in one gilt corner. Somewhere between here and Brașov, the omens will be taken apart one by one, and each coin slid away as a stranger is cleared.

Nine coins. Ten cards. One of them is already hanging.