“And this is what they call a sleeper car? It stinks like a public toilet,” some woman complained in a neighboring compartment.

“Yes. No. Well, the price was good.”

Judging by the silence that followed, the woman was speaking on the phone.

“For that amount of money! Can you imagine that?”

I sniff the air. It’s not alpine meadows, but there’s no special stench, at least not the kind she’s talking about. What’s she getting at?

There was a good half hour until departure and it was making me depressed. I wished they would finally announce that all non-passengers must leave. Then, I'd grease the conductor's palm to put me in a different compartment. I really didn't want to see or hear anyone. When your work is all about constant business trips, flights, and transfers, your perception becomes somewhat blurred. People, cities, and hotels flash before your eyes day after day without stirring any emotions. And moments of silence and solitude are worth their weight in gold.

Usually the conductor is a magician who can pull a free compartment from his sleeve with an extravagant gesture and at a very reasonable price. It means that I can have my peace and quiet for the remaining fifteen hours of my monthly trip on the Bukovyna train from Chernivtsi to Kyiv.

In the meantime, I was standing in the corridor waiting for the train to depart and not letting the other passengers pass. I could hear the voices of people talking on the phone complaining about the stench or instructing someone about the medicine that someone had put into someone else’s side pocket.

I didn’t hurry into my compartment as, not long before, a stocky, crab-like old man recently went in. After that it took the old man just ten minutes to run around all the neighboring compartments, bringing the main issues that were bothering the old retiree to light. Words like parliament, thieves, pension, doctors, disabilities, and, of course, hooligans were being poured out in a flood. I had no desire to jump in and become part of that talk show, which is why I was holding back from entering the compartment until the very last second.

Finally, all the people who were not passengers were asked to leave and the train slowly set out, smoothly rolling eastward, leaving the Northern Bukovina winter behind. I reluctantly headed towards the source of the noise. I only had to wait a little longer for the conductor. Then I could ‘buy’ myself some extra silence.

The old man was sitting on the couch/bed, fiddling with a golden packet with the words “shoe wipes” on it. As I came closer, I saw that the old man looked much older, possibly around 80 years old, than it had first seemed.

Incredible. Is he still able to travel on his own? flashed through my mind.

“Hello,” I said as I took the seat opposite him.

He looked up from his mysterious packet and looked at me with his large, brown eyes.

“Good afternoon. Do you by any chance know what this is? Tea?” my neighbor asked, shaking the packet in my direction.

“Those are wipes to clean shoes.”

“What?” the old man asked again, turning his left ear towards me. “Can you say that again louder please? I can’t hear very well.”

The last thing I wanted to do was yell so that the entire car heard me, so I nodded at my shoes, made several wiping motions over them, and, with clear articulation, repeated, “wipes.”

“Ahhh, wipes,” he drawled. “To wipe my feet if they sweat? That’s a good thing!” he exclaimed, surprised. The satisfaction in his voice was like that of a man who had just reached the unfathomable boundary of human existence.

I shook my head.

“No, not feet. Shoes.”

“What?”

“Sho-o-o-es.” I pronounced it slowly.

Where the hell is that damn conductor? The old man realized he hadn’t understood something, and, no longer holding hope for me, plunged into the secret of the packet with renewed vigor.

“Shoe… wipes.” He read slowly, enunciating, in his own way, every single word.

No way! I thought sarcastically. He can still read such small letters without glasses!

"Ah! Shoe wipes!" The old man looked in my direction triumphantly. But, after seeing the look of disapproval in my eyes, he decided to get to the bottom of the issue. "Foo-o-o-r sho-o-o-o-es! Can you believe it!?" he exclaimed delightedly.

There was still no conductor.

Suddenly the old man asked, “Do you know where the snack bar is? I haven’t eaten since lunch.”

"It… should… be… in… the… dining… car… nearby," I said, emphasizing every single word, noting to myself that it was only six in the evening, and having eaten nothing since lunch is quite normal. Or does he mean snack time like in kindergarten?

“Yes, I understand that there must be a dining car somewhere,” my neighbor replied. “But where is it exactly?”

“You can ask the conductor,” I reassured the old man.

“I’m 84 years old. I’m going to a resort,” my fellow traveler said.

I automatically calculate the approximate year of birth for the old man. Either 1928 or 1927, so he most likely didn’t fight in the war…

In the corridor, I could finally hear footsteps approaching before the conductor appeared in the doorway.

“Good evening. Tickets, please,” the conductor stated.

We produced our tickets and I quietly asked, “Is it possible for me to change compartments? I’ll pay.”

She cast a quick, understanding glance at the old man muttering under his breath before replying in a regretful tone, “Sorry, no. There are no other compartments available.”

“How come? There always are!”

“Not today. All compartments are taken. It’s a busy day.”

Damn! Of course out of all the possible times, it had to be this one. I frantically pondered over my predicament. I was not too excited about listening to this senile crap and coughing all night. Maybe he’s not going all the way to Kyiv, but possibly to Ternopil? There should also be a resort town there. It’s about 170 kilometers from Chernivtsi. It’ll take the train about five hours to chug along till there, and then I’d be able to peacefully sleep the rest of the night.

“Are you going to Kyiv?” I asked cautiously.

“Huh? No,” the old man drawled, cheering me up on the inside. “Farther. To Myrgorod, to the resort, as I said. I have a transfer in Kyiv."

I fell despondent again, but there was nothing I could do except surrender myself to the fate my ticket revealed. My neighbor had already found out the location of the ‘snack bar’ and quickly retreated to get his afternoon snack.

I stretched out on my narrow bunk, took my laptop, and immersed myself in reading, hoping that the old man would settle down before long so that I could enjoy a calm couple of hours of reading before the battery completely died. The outlets for our compartment were located in the corridor.

The old man returned a half hour later, in quite high spirits, rapidly displacing the oxygen in the room with the sour stench of booze. I could physically sense his desire to have a chat and my expectations proved right. The cheery passenger gave his small audience a crazed look and then… he started speaking.

At first, I tried to politely engage in the conversation by nodding approvingly or commenting with neutral interjections. I continued to read in the hopes that the old man would quickly tire out. I even hinted that I was reading and I would like to continue, if he didn’t mind.

The old man didn’t mind at all. Yet his story about the abhorrent pension cuts continued as if I had said nothing. I was still struggling to concentrate on the plot of the novel, but his arguments mixed with alcohol kept invading my mind.

“So I was telling them, what do you mean my experience is invalid? Since 1982 it’s been valid, and now it’s not. Maybe the silicosis that I earned at their uranium mine is invalid as well?” His heavy breathing was getting even heavier as he kept talking. “So they check. I tell them, Dnipropetrovsk region, the city of Zhovti Vody, mine number…,”

Meanwhile, as time went on, my laptop battery was getting lower and I had to re-read the same sentences four times, forgetting what had happened at the beginning of the paragraph. Once the laptop had only fifteen minutes left, I gave up, slammed the lid shut and looked at the retiree.

“I knew blasting very well,” the old man continued, taking my surrender for granted. “And there he was, the chief engineer asking me, Migay, if I could blow it up. Did I mention my name is Migay? Of course I could blow it up. I could! And then he asked me how much I wanted for that job. It's a Romanian name. I'm Romanian. Others hide their nationality, but why should I hide it? Eventually, I say five thousand. He replies, 'Migay, that’s a lot.' At the time, a miner’s salary was 300 rubles. But what else could you expect, I asked him. I said that I might have no time to get out of the mine and survive! And he asked, ‘Did you let your family know?’ ‘Well, for sure!’ I said. But of course I didn't tell my wife anything about this. Why should she know? So then he thought and thought some more about it before he agreed. There wasn’t much of a choice for them, really. No one besides me could blow the place up. Then I told him that that wasn't all I wanted. A barrel of beer for the entire crew and half the money in advance. I wasn’t stupid. I knew I could be trapped down there. He agreed to that as well. He asked me how much time I needed. ‘A week,’ I replied. And I asked for thirty meters of Bickford fuse. He asked why I needed so much of that. I said I needed time to get out of there. He saw that I had a clear understanding of what I was going to do and he agreed again. So I got two thousand in advance and spent it all in a restaurant. And the work? I completed it within three days.”

Migay fell silent.

I imagined how it all must have happened fifty-odd years ago at some uranium mine in the region of Dnipropetrovsk and I felt a bit uneasy. I looked more closely at the old man. I had to admit, he was in excellent shape. An aquiline nose. A square chin. A round face that had not been spoiled by the deep wrinkles around his toothless mouth. Migay was small in stature, but his build was stout and well-balanced. His palms were like shovels. I think there was still a lot of strength in them and ten years earlier he was probably still chasing women.

My fellow traveler fidgeted around for another ten minutes before laying down on his bunk and falling silent, without even taking off his shoes. I switched off the light, reading from my phone since I had managed to download some of my reading material. What made it challenging was that the entire novel was posted online in a single full page and it wouldn’t format to fit on a mobile screen. Still, for at least an hour or two, I managed to entertain myself with reading.

The old man slept surprisingly quietly, almost silently. This led me to believe that maybe everything wouldn’t be so bad. As the clock approached midnight, the text ran out on the phone. I tried reloading the page but the novel would only partly load the part that I had already read. Due to the unstable connection, I decided to go to bed as well, despite it being quite early, half past eleven.

I woke up in the middle of the night with the vague feeling that something was wrong. I opened my eyes. In the cabin, tiny dots of lights marking lamp posts could be seen, and the occasional scream of oncoming trains shattered the methodical din of the wheels. The headlights of the huge iron bulldozer were confidently cutting through the darkness. The Bukovina was rushing over rivers and ravines, and roaring through the frightening night woodlands, warming hundreds of sleeping people in the depth of its stuffy dermatin intestines. For some reason, the surrounding sounds became deafened, and I perceived more through vibration than by hearing. I realized what was wrong. Somehow, I was lying not on my bunk, but rather the old man's.

The feeling of disorientation where you don’t remember where you are or which direction you’re going dissipated. The swaying space crashed into its place. However, the next question plagued me, asking what the hell I was doing on the old man’s bunk. For the time being, that question overshadowed a whole series of others that multiplied in my foggy head as I became increasingly alert. They hadn’t yet made it into my consciousness, but they were off tramping somewhere in the waiting room, impatiently waiting for their turn and reminding themselves of all the new sensations in my body. I looked at the second bunk and saw someone sleeping there. It must be the old man. Who else could it be? Why did we switch places, and more importantly, when? Why don’t I remember?

These questions were drowned out in the stream of sensations that poured into my consciousness from the waiting room. They had finally lined up in an orderly fashion only to break ranks, yelling, bellowing, and throwing a tantrum. Questions like, Why are you dressed and not changed before bedtime? Why is your head heavy like from a hangover? Why are you short of breath and where did this gurgling in your lungs come from?

I made an attempt to sit up. Reluctantly, the body obeyed, taking its revenge for the sudden change in position by inflecting a dull pain in my stiff joints. I slowly stood to my feet, my waist swelling and wooden, stiff legs holding. The hand reflexively held on to the edge of the table. I tried to look at the old man on the bunk in front of me, but the train continued just chugging along under a moonless sky. I could only guess that the silhouette lying in front of me was too long for the old man. I ran a rough tongue on the smooth gums. Another hysterical thought jumped out from the crowds of questions, screaming hysterically, Where are the teeth!? Where!?

There were no teeth, and the terrible thought that they had been blown out by a bomb that now was rising up like a giant nuclear mushroom cloud struck my subconscious, sweeping away everything in its path with its shock wave. I realized that I didn’t want to know who was lying on the bunk in front of me. What I really wanted was to get out of here.

Turning the light on in the compartment was out of the question. I suddenly froze, noticing how the body shifted on the bed, and I knew I would go crazy if I saw it. My numb hand clung to the table to keep from falling. My breath stopped. I stood in the other person's legs for what seemed to be several years until my body stopped moving. Then I took two steps towards the door. The handle in my palm felt unusually small and unexpectedly high. The door itself turned out to be much harder to open than I was used to. I couldn't move it from its place. But once there was a small budge, I cheered up. I yanked the cursed handle with all my might, pulling open the heavy door and escaped into the corridor, shutting the door behind me.

In the dim light, I gazed at my hands. They were an old miner's huge, scarred hands, which stuck out from the sleeves of an old gray flannel shirt. I came to a complete understanding at that moment. Now I wanted to open the curtains and see my reflection in the window, but a conductor entered the corridor, the one that had no compartment for me. Shit. It must have been written on my face, or rather, not quite on my… Hell!

“Sir, do you need something? Are you okay?” she deftly asked. I had to listen closely and read her lips. So this is what it was like not to hear very well.

“I’m okay," I mumbled and, in the manner that fit my age, I stumbled along the way to the toilet, trying to control disobedient feet, my shoulder painfully striking the railing. I remembered well how that evening I had hit my elbow on the same railing.

The toilet was vacant. I slammed the door shut and stared into the mirror. As I suspected, two large, unseeing, marsh-colored eyes under gray, bushy eyebrows were staring back at me. I began to feel around the rough dark face with brown spots. Now it was mine. The whole bundle, including the shortness of breath, silicosis, and, judging by the state of my well-being, much more.

With trembling fingers, I buttoned up the old man's trousers. It was surprising that it only now occurred to me that my current position, in terms of cinema and literature where such plots had been criticized and ridiculed many times over, was trite and banal. In reality however, not everything turned out to be so funny. I stood there, clinging to the sink, mindlessly gawking at my new or rather, old, reflection, fragments of thoughts languishing in my gray head. Now what? How can I live like this? I have a family and a job. Hell, I was only twenty-eight years old, and now I'm exactly three times older. Where could I go now? The old man had said his wife was paralyzed and in Chernivtsi…

Stop! How did I get into this state of doom and gloom? Did I really have to put up with this state of affairs? Must I really spend the remaining years of my life, or what’s left of me, in the body of a retired worker? What can I actually do?

Let’s think. How and when did this happen? Probably while I… we… slept… slept…

How had I not thought of that before? Suddenly it became quite clear who was sleeping soundly in my body. The retiree would be delighted to wake up. I was just hoping he wouldn’t go insane with joy.

And then it dawned on me. Maybe, just maybe... What if I went back to the compartment and went to bed as if nothing had happened? Truth be told, I saw no other option. All the same, it would be worth it if the old man and I had a chance to learn about what this… well, about getting to the crazy house together in the end. Who knows what kind of mistake could have happened. Maybe somehow everything could switch back?...

I left the toilet, breathing heavily from the damned silicosis, then situated myself in my compartment, sensing that my bladder wasn’t quite empty. Prostate.

The door yielded after much strain and effort, and the light from the corridor illuminated a body sprawled out on the bunk. He slept, his head wrapped in the blanket. I enjoy sleeping on my stomach, my face huddled in the corner. It meant that the old man in my body had not yet woken up, which meant I would need to lay the way he did, on his back, half-sitting, both pillows underneath my back to make breathing easier. It was in this position that I had woken up in his body half an hour earlier. The absurdity of this situation was already beginning to amuse me. Perhaps this was how my psyche tried to protect itself from insanity. It seemed to me that now it would have been better had the old man and I not met, but there was no longer any need for fear.

Okay now. The old man got to go on a short walk, but now it’s time to sleep. We’ll see in the morning. I shut the door from the inside, the door closing surprisingly loudly. Still, the person on my bed didn’t even stir. I myself am a very light sleeper. I would’ve already stirred long ago, but this one… Eh…

Naturally, I didn’t take my shoes off, so I laid down on the bunk and turned towards the wall. The train rolled onwards towards Kyiv, and several people close to me and to the old man did not know who they would meet at the station instead of their husband and father. I wondered though, who would they prefer? I honestly had no definitive answer. There were several options in my head that I thought about and pondered for a long time before gradually starting to fall asleep as the neighboring compartment began to stir. The noise made me tense. Judging by the sharp rustle of bedsheets, they were feverishly moving around. I choked on a laugh that began to manifest in the form of a cough that quietly faded. I understood everything, so I pulled myself together and lay motionless. An eternity passed, commensurate with how I stood at the table thirty minutes ago. There was that feeling again and a sharp movement followed by a thump. It was logical. The person would be two heads taller. He cursed and calmed down. I heroically choked back laughter, hoping the old man wouldn’t break my neck. I was more careful with him… For some reason, I remembered the film, Avatar and Jake’s first exit from the laboratory.

Finally, the old man went to the door and easily opened it. I would have given a lot to see myself from the outside. I was no longer afraid, but I knew that at that moment he was looking at me which is why I continued to feign sleep. The door closed. It would be interesting to see what he would do with my body. I hoped he wouldn't start chasing women around the car. It's good that it was night, because I had the feeling the old man would go on a spree. On the other hand, what would I do if he chose not to come back? Where could he go wearing just underpants?

I don’t know how it happened, but it was with one of these thoughts that I fell asleep for the second time and, I hoped, for the last time that night. I really wanted to wake up in the morning on the other bunk… and with my teeth.

***

It was hard to believe, but I even had a dream that was in no way connected with my adventure. That’s probably why I didn’t remember it well.

I woke up from the knock of the conductor, all as it should be on a train. I reflexively leapt up, opened the door, said ‘thank you,’ and fell back onto the bunk. Afterwards, the memory of the night’s adventures surged through me.

At such moments, reality is dumb-founded, as if some invisible director, or maybe the actors themselves, suddenly wave their arms, shouting into a megaphone, "Cut, cut, cut! Silence!" The entire area quiets obediently, and our hero is taken from the drama of his position only because at this moment nothing is clear to him, even though only a moment separates him from speaking his lines.

Consciousness has not yet had time to mentally look over the body. I haven’t taken my trial breath yet. The eyes aren’t open. The tiny distance separating the tongue from the answer – teeth or gums – has not passed. A tremendous moment. The director knows his business well and can hold this pause excruciatingly long, but not forever. Apparently, having taken pleasure in the moment and setting it somewhere opposite realization, he lets go of time.

Breath.

Eyes.

Movement.

Seems like we’ve switched back.

I sat up abruptly.

My lungs breathed freely and easily, my tongue resting against my teeth. Childish delight practically burst from my chest, but it was replaced by an escaping sigh of relief. I looked at the bunk next to mine. There was no old man. He had probably gone to breakfast – his typical morning routine. I no longer wanted to sleep, so I quickly got dressed and went to freshen up. I wanted to kiss the reflection with its brown eyes and shaggy hair from my childhood.

When I returned to my compartment, the old man was already back and, it seemed, under the influence. I don’t know how the old miner managed to get his hands on alcohol so early in the morning, but the evening smell once again warmed the air in the room.

In the light of day, what had happened at night seemed to be a figment of my imagination or even a dream. Yet, when I looked in the eyes of the old man, I saw that I had not dreamt it at all. Either that, or both of us had had the same dream.

Mornings usually keep people distant from one another and the old man and I didn't really chat. The thought that flashed through my mind, suggesting I should discuss the night's occurrences with him, seemed insane. The old man looked out the window, deep in thought, occasionally glancing my way.

As for myself, I looked at the old man in a different light. I now saw something dear in each of his wrinkles, as if I had left some part of myself in them and from the old man, I had received a touch of wisdom and patience.

The train came to a stop. Migay asked me to help him take out his suitcase, and I readily agreed. When I handed over the suitcase to the old man on the platform, he raised his khaki eyes at me with a mischievous twinkle. I mentally wished that this elixir of life would give him a dozen years of life. We bid our goodbyes, and I easily walked to the subway, unconsciously running my tongue along the row of strong front teeth.