It begins once you awake from that heavy night of sleep, when you slip out from the warmth of the covers and rest your feet on the compartment floor until the cold runs up through your legs. You rise and wipe the sleep from your eyes, open the curtain. Apart from a shadow of reflection, there is nothing to see but darkness.
You are seated, patiently waiting. A faint outline, resembling a set of hills, appears in the distance, but nothing can be confirmed as closer and more prominent sights also pass by the window: namely, masses of shadows, shapes, and various figures that suddenly appear and almost as quickly vanish, only present long enough to distort somewhat any other sights that may or may not be seen.
You approach the glass and look for something to fix upon, something in approximate line with your eyes. The reflection of your pupils, the whites of your eyes and your eyebrows, and the lower part of your forehead, together of course with the darkness, prevent any chance of a clearer view. Look for something in line with your nose, or ears, your mouth, chin or neck, shoulders, chest or stomach: not one angle has a view better than any other.
You return to the bed and sit on the edge and immediately feel the cold bedspring through the thin mattress. You close your eyes and listen closely to the wind outside speed past and in through the small opening at the top of the window, the one and same wind earlier keeping the compartment cool and fresh all the while you were sleeping, completely dressed, snug under the covers. The curtain rings make the exact same sound each time as they slide back and forth on the railing. Soon other sounds fall within reach, bits and pieces that vary in loudness and clarity. You concentrate on them, follow them, but it is not long before you want to stop and move on to something else, as it grows harder to distinguish the sounds you can hear from the sounds you imagine you can hear so as to further pass the time.
Your eyes open. One hand rests on the other, knees not far apart. You try to fix upon a thought but fail to do so, the different images pass back and forth too quickly, and then only leave to be replaced by something else just as fleeting. Some snippets from letters or conversations may appear, or perhaps some colours, distinctive smells, different sights, different settings. You wonder how long it will take before you dismiss all distracting images from your mind for something more substantial.
Your eyes slowly fall and settle on the hills that are now a little clearer in the distance. The shapes, figures, and shadows still appear but they no longer cluster in such a mass, and, although the darkness remains, some of the shadows are a shade lighter than others, and others seem lighter than ever before. Looking up at the sky, albeit sure you are facing the east, there is still no sign of the sun.
Straighten your back. Press your feet flat on the floor. Sit and wait for the break of day. Briefly rise to pull down the window a little further. The figures and shadows and shapes soon disband to reveal a long empty plain stretching to the foot of the hills. A faint but notable orangecoloured glow appears, flickering momentarily, quickly vanishing. Press your face against the glass. The hills overlap behind one another, fold after fold. Since the darkness remains and there is no sign of it changing, you return to the edge of the bed again, and watch the window again, and then rise and see again, somewhere in the darkness between the ground, hills and sky, a similar faint orangecoloured glow. But still nothing happens afterwards, the glow still vanishes, not once does it grow even a little in size.
Your eyes fall and fix on the stopped watch still strapped to your wrist. There is nothing but silence. An old wooden chair from the corner of your room appears, and it captures your attention, along with the question how cold the chair would be if it were the only seat available in a damp, abandoned room, situated somewhere in the countryside, where outside there is one empty plain after another, leading away to where the ground meets the sky, where the sky hardly changes colour from the ground, a pale bluish grey. There is nothing but silence.
You close the curtain and return to bed. You prop your head higher up with the coat on the pillow. Then you pull the covers to the bridge of your nose and close your eyes. Amid the masses of shadows, shapes, and various figures that suddenly appear and almost as quickly vanish (the kind so associated with the darkness behind the eyelids), the gradual image of a train appears, until finally the train station from the night before comes to mind. The clock high up on the station wall is about to strike the hour. You board the nearest carriage and pass empty compartment after compartment, only catching a glimpse of the occasional face with tired eyes looking forward to a quiet night of undisturbed rest. The compartment corresponding to the number on your ticket is also empty, and nothing changes from the moment you first close your eyes and once you awake from that heavy night of sleep.
You unstrap the watch and slide it to the furthest corner under the bed. Then you return to a comfortable position, this time on top of the covers, still facing the window, in particular the small part in the top lefthand corner, where the curtain begins and a small section of glass remains visible. When your feet rise underneath the curtain, resting flat against the glass, the cold is not long in numbing the thickened skin of your soles. The skin of your wrist is soft and white, with little sprouting hairs initially pleasing to the touch. Still the silence remains. Focus on your breathing. Count to ten, then back down to zero. Then count to what you think is a minute, two minutes, three, four, five and six and so on, until you reach another apparent hour, and you open the curtain, and you pull down the remaining window, and you position yourself so you can lean the whole of your head and part of your body out in the early morning air. You begin to see through the darkness a wood. You can smell the pines and the bark and the animals hidden inside the wood. The hills, as if in a dream, are more or less covering the sky, and small flickering patches of faint orangecoloured light break through the leaves and branches of the trees and onto the side of the train. As the train arches round to the right of the nearest hill, and through the remaining wood, you begin to see the sun shine down through the trees and onto the tracks laid out before you.
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