Seven Italian Postcards
Card 4: Whistles in the Night
Trundling across
the plains of Lombardia, our train tracks the landscape
due south toward the sea. Ahead lie maritime mountains and
our goal of Liguria, but before then we have a few hours
to enjoy the narcolepsy that night travel by rail fosters,
of gentle motion and the ceaseless metronome of the wheels.
Crossing the flatland there is little to see - just highway
lights and an occasional distant town - so the mind invents
people and lives, those who dwell out there in the passing
darkland as we pummel forward in our great machine, bound
for the coast. The ride is comfortable and our wine is fruity,
but train travel in Europe was not always so pleasant, I
know.
Each time our
coach briefly stops at greenish night stations and I hear
the shrill plaintive whistle of a platform conductor signaling
the engineer, then the answering locomotive whistle, sonorous
and final, only one word comes to mind and it chills me:
Gestapo. Aren't I hearing the same sounds from those nighttime
roundups (even though I only know them from old movies and
newsreels)?
Didn't such
whistles once herald a voyage to oblivion? Maybe history
makes its own noise to attract and remind us, like an echo
that never fades, so just when you think you can outrun
the past it finds you anyway, and you begin to understand,
don't you?
Card 5:
Moonbeams at the Columbarium
