“Who are you?’ The gentleman had demanded abruptly. He appeared as though he could have been framed forever with one hand in his suit pocket, a pipe balanced between his lips.
Not having expected to be addressed so directly, Kaya looked around, assuming it was a case of a mistaken identity.
Looking at him again he asked, “You! Boy! Who are you?”
Stumbling on his words he blurted, “I’m Kaya. Who are you?”
“I’m the train manager.” He calmly replied.
“Why are you sitting in third class then?”
“Don’t you know it is rude to ask questions like that! But since you ask, I am hiding from my wife. She wouldn’t dare step foot in a 3rd class carriage, so she’ll never think to look in here. Perhaps she will even assume that I’ve alighted the train at an earlier stop and try to pursue me, or someone like me, through the streets of Kayseri!” He chuckled at the thought.
“What do you mean, someone like me?” he gently inquired.
“Ah well, aren’t we all so similar in the end, does it really matter if it is me, she is chasing after? Or just someone like me?”
Kaya thought hard about the question.
“You see, I can try my hardest to convince myself that I am me. Me.” He pointed at himself with the newspaper.
“I can say ‘This is November! Not yesterday, or tomorrow! This is I, not Mehmet or Orhan! I am here on this train, not on the moon!’” He gestured to the moon outside, faintly visible in the purple smoky dusk above the plain.
“I have a scar on my hand, a mole on my chest. I can look at my watch and tell you it is four in the evening.”
“Is that the time already?”
“No, boy! Aren’t you listening! Don’t you feel it as well? The uneasiness?”
Kaya asked all his senses one by one to see if he could find the uneasiness, the lie.
“Don’t you see! After all that, I am Mehmet! I am Orhan! I am the train manager. I’m that girl over there, flicking the ash from her cigarette out the window with the thoughts from her mind. I’m that man over there, sweetly dreaming about his first love as his nostrils flare.”
“Don’t you feel it, as we hurtle from one place to the next? This strange place where we are nowhere at all? Where time doesn’t exist? Not until we arrive at the next station anyhow, at 16:46 exactly. We are nowhere my friend, apart from in an elastic moment, stretching from one infinity to another.”
Time had taken on a different quality on his journey, it was true. Though twenty hours had already passed, it felt more like two.
Just when Kaya was preparing to announce his agreement, the man abruptly got up from his seat and hurried along the carriage.
Hannah Katerina is a writer based in Palermo, Italy.