I ducked into an independent bookstore in Roseville, Michigan this week, en route to the airport after a day at the middle schools in nearby Grosse Pointe, and after hunting around for something good to read on the plane I decided on Jim Lehrer’s Super. The novel’s cover shows the speeding Super Chief, the old Santa Fe Railway's streamlined flagship that was, Lehrer writes, “America’s most luxurious all-sleeper train.” His story unfolds on board in 1956, en route from Chicago to LA. And by midnight, when our cramped US Air jet landed in Burlington, Vermont, I had read the whole novel — and I’d been remembering train journeys that blended with other books in my past.
I was reading something, though I can’t remember what, the night in 1973 when, as a college kid spending my junior year in Vienna, I was on an overnight express that had crossed, late at night, from Holland into West Germany. I had a couchette, a padded bench of a berth that hung from the compartment wall, one of four in two facing rows — and I was on the top berth reading as two older passengers began trying hard, down on the passenger seats, to help an older woman understand how much she needed to pay the conductor for her ticket.
The passengers were Dutch, but the conductor was German — and as the older woman grew more flustered and anxious, the others sought to explain that she needed a certain number of Reichsmarks. How many Reichsmarks? She was confused; she opened her purse. Were these many Reichsmarks enough? She still wasn’t sure — and I, my book laid down, just watching and listening now, was mesmerised.