Train Can't Bring Me Home

By Andy Conway

1993. The former eastern bloc is open for business and a war is raging just over the border, but in a Hungarian campus town, a group of students and exiles escape into love and literature.

Dylan, a washed up American lecturer with a Tom Waits fixation, has an affair with Erzsi, his teenage Hungarian student, and a mixed group of students and teachers spend a crazy spring falling in love with their town and each other.

A postmodern campus novel that explores the limits of love, literature and language, Train Can't Bring Me Home is a dizzying, intellectual, comic, erotic clash of discourses that mimics a host of literary styles, from bad travel writing to music journalism to a relationship break-up written as a student essay, with an array of pastiches of literary greats like Joyce, Amis, BS Johnson, Calvino, Kundera, Bukowski, Burroughs, Beckett, Stoker, Nabokov, Marquez and more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andy Conway
• Release date: May 4, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458013255

Andy Conway

Andy Conway is a prolific novelist, screenwriter and self-publisher who secretly time travels to mine story ideas for his Touchstone series. His first feature film, Arjun & Alison, a campus revenge thriller, toured film festivals around the world and was released in UK cinemas in spring 2014. His second, Long Dead Road, another revenge thriller, is currently in pre-production and will be released as a novel in autumn 2014. Read more at www.andyconway.net

Book preview

Contents

PART ONE

1. Quaternity

2. Cukrászda

3. Par Avion

PART TWO

4. The Most Beautiful Girl in Town

5. Holy Mary

6. The Usual Wednesday Night Divine Tragicomedy

7. If The Road is Full Of Flowers

8. The Vampire Lovers

9. Soirée at the Knife-Throwers Arms

10. Crazy Spring

11. The Piano is Weeping

12. Eternal Night Over the Yellow Town

13. The Most Girlful Beauty in Town

14. The Depth of the Water

15. Bloody Mary

PART THREE

16. Exit Author Weeping

17. Train Can’t Bring Me Home

18. Nyugati Flood

Notes and glossary of Hungarian terms

Thank you…

About the Author

Train Can’t Bring Me Home

Published by Andy Conway at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 Andy Conway

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Pete Bradbury at Digit64 www.digit64.co.uk

Read more at andyconway.net

...

To the Breakfast Club

and the bricklayers

...

Acknowledgements

Train Can’t Bring Me Home was an unusual writing experience, in that so many people contributed and provided analysis of the novel as it was being composed, myself included.

Whereas most writers choose to compose a novel under the strictest secrecy until at least a first draft is ready for critical analysis, Train was initially drafted as part of an independent study module for my English Literature degree at Birmingham City University in 1993. It wasn’t the first novel I’d written. I was a mature student who’d spent the ten years between school and university working McJobs and writing five novels in my spare time, so I was happy to try something new and see if writing a novel under such rigorous academic scrutiny was possible.

The module was supervised by Dominic Head, an expert on modernism and the author of several studies on modern literature. This meant analysing my own work whilst simultaneously writing it — a schizophrenic experience that should be inimical to the very act of creativity and guaranteed to frighten away any muse that cared to drop by, let alone when the novel itself was following the rigid structure of James Joyce’s Ulysses, of which it attempts to be a postmodern pastiche.

I managed to lasso other courses I was taking in my final year into the project, so most of my tutors became involved in it: Peter Stockwell’s Reader Reception module allowed me to use the Par Avion chapter as an experiment on fellow students Bronwyn George and Csaba Farkas (who isBarnabás in the novel and had come to BCU on the same student exchange that had first taken me to Debrecen the previous year). Tim Parnell’s Sceptical Narrative course deepened my understanding of the philosophical link between Beckett, Calvino, Kundera and Sterne, which was invaluable when writing the Crazy Spring and Exit Author Weeping chapters and gave me the opportunity to test out Par Avion on a live audience. It was also a brilliant stroke of luck that Derek Littlewood and Eamon Grant were offering a module on Joyce and Beckett the same year, and Derek’s course on the Fantastic shaped the writing of the Eternal Night and Bloody Mary chapters and provided a creative environment in which to write a series of stories continuing the adventures of Dylan and Erzsi which may one day appear under the title of An Angel Flew Away Above Us. Thanks to the support of all those tutors, and Head of Department Phil Smallwood, I managed to bend the majority of my final year of study towards the composition of a single novel.

The bulk of the novel was written and a critical essay on it submitted as my final dissertation in 1994, whereupon I threw a few boxes full of clothes and books into the boot of Csaba’s Mitsubishi and we drove back to Debrecen where I fully intended to live out the rest of my life. I worked on completing Train over the next year using the computers of the English-American Institute of Kossuth Lajos University, where I was now teaching a course on James Joyce’s Ulysses.

The collaborative aspect of the composition continued. The novel was discussed openly with the many friends who had agreed to be characters in the novel and had even chosen their own names, provided memories, experiences, even diary entries, and answered constant questions on their lives and their language. The muse didn’t seem to mind at all, and it was completed on Sunday 28 May, 1995, my first anniversary of emigrating to Hungary.

I was already submitting samples to publishers and the responses were depressingly similar: very good but annoyingly clever and unmarketable. It did garner the greatest rejection letter I’d ever received, though: Liz Calder at Victor Gollancz called it very impressive, clever, brilliant even - but too erudite for us to find a mass market…’ I was perversely cheered by this and instantly regarded it as my very first publishable novel (the five that preceded it will never see the light of day). So it feels very liberating to finally publish it in 2011 where it can find the market, mass or not, that it deserves.

A great debt of gratitude is owed to Csaba Farkas, Fruzsina Szabo, Edit Végvári, Réka Görömbei, Tamás Benyei, Nóra Séllei, Zsuzsa Molnár, Agnes Balogh, Dan Price and Kim Willcocks, who all contributed and commented on numerous drafts of this story over many years, and of course the person who first introduced me to the wonders of Ulysses during that first crazy spring semester in Debrecen, Professor Donald E. Morse.

PART ONE

Quaternity

First you must select the opening of your choice for this novel from the three following options:

1. I found her first letter in the snow-topped mailbox on the fence last night; her off-white envelope covered in Burne-Jones blue maidens, telling me she’d cried briefly when I’d gone (when I'd ridden away in the taxi, thinking how strong she’d been). I walked out again, pumping ten and twenty forint pieces into the battered old call box outside the Poroszlay supermarket. She wanted to know if it was good here and what the town was like but all I wanted to say was I love you and I miss you. I walked back through the snow, feeling the ache in my throat I felt on the first night here. I've been here a week and already written four letters and made four phone calls.

2. Rory O’Cypher, weary of the torpidity of a Bachelor of Arts degree (with Honours) concurrent in the English city of his residence, upon a compunction, rare to one of his indecision, found himself committed to a semester-long exchange, which resulted in him agreeing to study in the Hungarian city of Debrecen, being the second city of that landlocked Central European country, 30 kilometres from the Romanian border, 100 kilometres from the Ukrainian, and 200 kilometres from Budapest itself.

3. Falteringly, the student came to the top of the stairwell, breathing hard, halting and glancing back down the stairs behind him. There were two doors there. He checked the number on the slip of paper in his hand. It was an apartment, like the others in the block.

The problem is that beginnings are so difficult. It’s because they don’t really exist. There are no real beginnings. But here he is, nevertheless: Rory. He begins. He finds himself born, standing outside a door on the fourth floor of an apartment block in a Hungarian city, a piece of paper in his hand.

Address was right. Yes. This was it. Brushed snow from his shoulders. Deep breath. Pushed bell. Rattle not chime. Four flights silent below. Trabants slithering past on Egyetem Sugárút below, the blackbrown sludge heaped in the gutters below. Weary traveller has trudged to sanctuary breathing grey clouds. Footsteps down the hallway. The door tugged inward. Would it be the one who spoke English?

Plump blonde in thick sweater, short hair.

He told her his name. A further sentence, unsounded, trailed off in his mind: a Hungarian sentence that he didn’t know the Hungarian for. He stood there: embarrassed mute.

—Ah yes, she said. Come inside. Wait in here, please.

She indicated the room to the left of the hallway. Bright apartment. Narrow L-shaped room that contained a washing machine, a stool and a young woman working at a desk in the shorter part, with a bed covered in plaid blankets along the longer part, which connected to the office beyond it, where his English speaking lifeline had disappeared. He sat on the stool — he rests, he has travelled — and watched the other woman working. Little Jack Horner. She had long auburn hair draping over her shoulders, a navy blue jacket with shoulder pads. It exposed her delicate wrists. Trousers with tights underneath. A young beauty. She smiled to him and then returned to her work. A woman’s voice called through to her from the office, something in Hungarian. He didn’t understand. The young beauty smiled and glanced at him.

A key rattled in the front door and a third woman entered the apartment. She was older, mid-forties, and wore brighter clothes than the other two — dayglo woollies, gold necklace, legwarmers. She flashed by the doorway, handbag under arm, caught a glimpse of him. He turned away. Then suddenly she was on him, leaning over him, talking rapidly he didn’t know what but with a smile like she’d found him under the Christmas tree. The Young Beauty smiled to herself at whatever it was the older woman was saying. Delighted mother brooding someone else’s baby. Her own too old. Older women always fawned over him; it must have been his face. Merry widow. She left him and headed for the office he hadn’t seen yet, chattering to the other woman in the same tone.

—You can sit on the bed if you like.

Her voice calling through. This was strange. Merry Widow delighted at Little Jack Horner.

—I’m okay, he said.

He stayed on the stool, folding unfolding the note, scribbled address. The Young Beauty worked on, her back to him. After ten minutes the Interpreter came and took him to the office at the end of the corridor. The Merry Widow was at her own desk eating an apple, smiling. He sat opposite The Interpreter. His lifeline.

—You don’t speak any Hungarian then? she asked.

I don’t speak any Hungarian now, he thought.

—No, I’m afraid not.

He shrugged. She seemed to be wondering why. Wasn’t it obvious? Because he was English.

—And you are from the university? Are you a lecturer?

—No. Student.

—And you will need this apartment by tonight?

—No, no. I already have an apartment, but I need one for myself. I share with a student, but it’s only one room.

—And you need it for tonight?

—No, he said. There’s no rush really. I want it later, after Easter because my… wife comes then to visit.

Why had he said wife? Because it was politically incorrect to say girlfriend and he thought they wouldn’t understand partner.

The Merry Widow said something to him in Hungarian. He looked to the Interpreter. She looked back at him as if she expected him to understand.

—I’m sorry, what did she say?

—She said we can get an apartment for tonight for you without problem.

Big problem.

—Well, I couldn’t move in straight away. You see, I have an arrangement with a Hungarian student. We’ve swapped accommodation. He’s now in England. But he’s paying my rent here. I’m paying his rent in England.

The Interpreter continued to look at him with glazed eyes.

—So… as you can see. I have to get in touch with him first to find out how much rent he’s prepared to pay…

His voice trailed off unconvincingly. The Interpreter still gazed through him.

—So, I couldn’t give you a definite decision if you showed me apartments now. You see?

Her gaze didn’t change. He had to explain to her again. She listened calmly, gave no expression, and then translated to the Merry Widow. The numbness of his face was thawing now. Every building seemed to be tropical inside. The Interpreter did some more paperwork. The Merry Widow’s eyes gleamed at him. She wanted to take him home and put him on her mantelpiece.

The room had been arranged for him at the last minute by the student now in England, at some point between his last exam and catching the plane. Bungalow, shared bedroom. Wallpaper a dull yellow, swirling shapes like Munch’s waves of air, sonorous vibrations of a frozen scream. Flatmate a young computing student called György who played computer games most afternoons and snored loudly. Every night the race to fall asleep before him. Then the sound of an outboard motor being tugged at repeatedly but never starting. Groaning in his narrow bed, wishing the motor would start and György’s bed would sail off into the night. All other times very polite and generous. Cakes, fruit and eggs from his mother in Kecskémet and a few English phrases shared. Once, homemade wine, cloudyyellow from a misty glass, poured like syrup from a used 7 Up bottle.

—You find it cold here?

He was surprised. Her first pleasantry, said with her head still bowed over the paperwork.

—Yes, he said. But we have bad winter’s in England too.

—Our summer’s are hot, she said. The town becomes brighter soon, with the spring. You are learning Hungarian here?

—No, English.

She looked up.

—You come to Debrecen to learn English? Why is this?

—It was really so that a Hungarian student here could go to my university.

—And you are not learning Hungarian here? she asked.

—Er, no. I’m hoping to pick some up. I’m here till June.

She continued writing, then she talked again with the Merry Widow. They debated something for a few minutes. How long had he been there? Longer than he’d planned. Give them your details and don’t be rushed into anything. The Irish poet, Bob, who’d come last week. Taken him for lunch in the university canteen and talked for an hour or more. The poet had managed to get his life story out of him. There is such a thing as culture shock, he’d said. But it passes. Bob had used him as an example of uncertain national identity in the seminar that followed: Polish father never met; English mother with an Irish name.

—We can show you an apartment now, she said. It is close. On Egyetem sugárút.

She was putting her coat on and so was the Merry Widow. He rose and zipped up his thick black jacket. They filed out and the Young Beauty came with them, draping a scarf round her neck and putting her thin wrists into her pockets. Merry Widow chatting excitedly, the Interpreter locking up the office. An outing. Down the flights of stairs past residents’ front doors, their names on brass or plastic plates, the whole stairwell bright from the huge windowfront.

Cold air a knifeblade to his badly shaven cheek. The street grey, late afternoon, wind hoarse and sharp, they trudged down the ice cobbled pavement along the row of apartment blocks. The face of the university should have been just visible far down the boulevard, but it had been spirited away, lost in mist. The Merry Widow was skipping and chattering gaily. She linked her arm in his, joking in Hungarian. All he could do was smile. Free air. He could run away from them now. But something held him; he was powerless. They entered an apartment block a hundred yards away and rang a bell on the first floor.

—This belongs to a professor from the university, said the Interpreter.

A woman in her late fifties answered, greyblonde hair thinning, spectacles dangling on heaving breast. They greeted each other warmly and stepped inside. The carpets talked to him when he entered, telling him all about the people who’d lived there before. The woman showed them round the apartment. A coffeebrown huddle of rooms; shabby, frayed, muted by the years. One living room with two of the usual bedsofas, a kitchen with a connecting box room as another bedroom.

Play a game. Look around at these people in this town, especially the older generation, and wonder which ones were involved in the old regime. Look hard at one person and picture them as a Stalinist bureaucrat now keeping their head down; then picture them as a former dissident who doesn’t need to look over their shoulder any more. They could all be either; it works both ways. They could all even be neither. Walk the corridors of the university and imagine what it felt like then, how different the air must have been that everyone breathed. Stroll the streets and imagine that ineluctable feeling of being observed, a quotidian oppression. Rory plays this game a lot. He’s been reading too many European novels. He’s been watching too many Cold War TV dramas. Eventually he will look around and just see people.

After the tour they sat in the living room. There was a lot of Hungarian talk. He sat and looked expectant.

—She is a Physics professor, said the Interpreter. So do you like it?

—It’s… okay, yes, but I couldn’t make a decision now.

—She says you can move in straight away.

He explained again the complications with his exchange student. The Interpreter translated to the Professor and the Merry Widow, who were sat together on one of the bedsofas. They seemed like old friends. The Young Beauty was on a wooden chair by the window which gave the only light as the afternoon dimmed. After more conversation the Merry Widow asked him a question. He looked to the Interpreter. She said nothing.

—I don’t understand what she said, he said.

—She asks how long before you know?

He explained he had to write to England asking how much rent his exchange student was willing to pay, and then await the reply. Five days each way.

—The post takes three days, she said.

They talked again and it seemed the Young Beauty was the subject, though she herself said nothing.

—She has been wanting to rent this apartment, said the Interpreter. She is looking for a place and she likes this one, but she needs someone to share the rent. This place is for two people.

He was surprised she was keen on the place. Couldn’t imagine her living in it. But what was going on? He saw himself, alone in this tired, dark room, waiting for her, his lover, to come to him, and the Young Beauty alone in the box room; the polite smiles in the kitchen; disturbing her in the bathroom. He mentioned again that there was no rush because he didn’t urgently need a place till Easter when his ‘wife’ was coming. He was in suspended animation without her. Slowly consumed by forgetfulness. Only ideas and sensations touched him. She would come and warm him through. At night he put on headphones and listened to Van Morrison speaking in tongues singing the love that loves to love the love that loves that… Aching pain in him that wasn’t yet the fear of loss.

The Merry Widow seemed to realise something and looked amused. She said something about the Young Beauty and about him. The Young Beauty blushed. The Interpreter kept asking him the same questions, prompted by the Merry Widow, and he kept giving her the same answers. He was through the looking glass.

Then the Merry Widow and the professor chatted cosily for a long time. It seemed to be the talk of a mother and daughter, discussing old times and family news. The other three watched them, only two of them understanding. The room grew slowly dimmer. He was uncertain of the time. Late afternoon. Getting dark. Why didn’t he leave the place?

—Could you not telephone England for this information?

—There’s no telephone there, he said.

When it seemed they could go no further with the questions they rose and left the professor with warm farewells, returning to