Train to Gdansk

Abstract

They had gotten on the wrong train. One of those small, seemingly insignificant mistakes that usually amounts to a simple annoyance, "running between platforms." But not this time. That morning they had departed from Gdansk: mother and son. She, in her fifties, radiated the energy of a twenty-something; he, barely over twenty, was a curious and skeptical young man, his mind leaping effortlessly from philosophical podcasts to world politics debates. They had planned a stop in Warsaw, but the intercity train they boarded wasn't headed there. A mistake in the platform, the schedule, a hurried reading. Be that as it may, they ended up getting off at Tczew: a rural station lost in the emptiness of northern Poland, surrounded by a group of Chinese students and golden fields swaying in the midday sun.