I entered Poland and I entered Night

notes and photos from 14 hours on trains

I entered Poland and I entered Night. It was the bleak month of February, and the sun set early. My transfer in Berlin had gone well, the infamously disappointing Deutsche Bahn had gotten me from Amsterdam to Berlin with no complaints. My train stumbled eastward out of the industrial caverns of the Oostbahnhof and I watched the strangled sky. I would arrive in Krakow in about seven hours, just after midnight. Dusk arrived in asphyxiated blues and purples, squeezing raindrops onto the windows, mourning the day.

Time and movement were one clean track. A deep night settled on the landscape as we moved and we weary travelers learned where the dark lives.

1-

The land rose to loom over us in dark, cloaked mounds. Encountering elevated ground is not normally a particularly frightening or surprising thing for inhabitants of most of the world, but if you spend enough time in the flattest country on earth, a hill begins to seem like an unlikely wonder. A mountain a fantasy. The leafless late-winter skeletons of bushes and trees peppered the swelling ground, gnarled fingers reaching to the empty sky above

2-

Within and between the shadowed landscape lurked distant red lights, spread out sparsely in the distance. Sometimes solitary, sometimes in great, buzzing clusters. Some came close enough to the tracks I could see what they were: cell towers, wind towers, industrial architectural clusterfucks. But others stayed on the horizon, staying in step as we sped through the dark, seeming never to blink until I’d look again and suddenly—

3-

A garbled voice on the loudspeaker, first a stranger, then a friend. In the hour we spent stopped on the tracks in Frankfurt, each announcement of 20, 30, 45, 60 minutes of delay came with an increasingly weary tone of apology. I didn't need to speak Polish to know immediately when the problem had been resolved. The voice was smiling.

4-

Old, weathered speedboats perched on stands and tipped on one side appeared beneath the yellow lights lining the train tracks. Their curved hulls looked funny when you put them on grass, like a toy that can't stand upright. All that elegant engineering for what? Behind them, the grass stretched into murky darkness. Where was the water? What voyage were these meant for?

5-

I have never been on a train that galloped before. Four hours from my destination we hit a piece of track that sent the carriage into a rhythmic dance. After it continued for a while, my fear that we were about to derail abated and I leaned back into my seat. I felt at sea, without any of the serenity or buoyancy. A very metal sea.

6-

I liked having the window seat because I could look to either side of me and see the entirety of the six-person compartment. The lights were off, so the only illumination came from the hallway, giving a ghostly silhouette effect to whoever happened to be walking by. If I looked to my left out the window, this silhouette would reflect transposed onto the illuminated train tracks outside. A spirit wandering the tracks before slipping out of view.

7-

You may have noticed I have not described any of my fellow travelers. Perhaps it is because their description is more difficult than the shapes and shadows I have outlined here. Most remain anonymous, all distinguishing and interesting features obscured by the dim light. But there is one I can describe. He was a sharply dressed man who sat across from me, at the other window. He wore shiny black oxfords, well-tailored light blue dress pants, and a sharp but (business) casual shirt and blazer combination. His salt-and-pepper hair was neatly groomed and accented by a pair of glasses someone probably sold as "sophisticated". Mr. Businessman and I are in a wordless battle for leg space, and I am losing. It could be resolved if we both simply extended our legs to fit into the other's floor, but the act feels too intimate for this setting, for our strangeness. I wait until he concedes the battle at Wrocław and departs with the rest of my compart-mates. He wishes me a pleasant trip. In the light of the hallway, his clothes don't look as fancy, and there's a small bald spot visible on the back of his head. Two and a half hours more until I reach the center of night. I stretch deeply in the privacy of the dark, empty room.

Love from Krakow 15 months later. Summer this time.

Clara Maine | June 2025