The Night Train North

Part One · Cloud

The night train north departed from the city at seven in the evening and would not reach Harrowmere, at the very end of the line, until eight the following morning, and Ivo had been counting down to it since October. He was eleven and had never slept on a train. He had also never witnessed the northern lights, which his grandfather had been describing in letters for as long as Ivo had been able to read them. Grandpa Emil lived in solitary contentment in a red timber house beside a lake that froze solid every winter, and his most recent letter had arrived with a forecast clipped from the regional newspaper. Tonight, it predicted, the lights would be unusually strong. Around midnight the train would cross the uninhabited wilderness of the far north, where there were no towns at all. Ivo was determined to be awake for it.

The letter also contained instructions, written in Grandpa Emil's careful capital letters, and Ivo had consulted them so often that he knew them by heart. Switch off every light. Give your eyes twenty minutes to adjust to the dark, because they genuinely need it. Look north, and low, over the trees. And do not be disappointed if it begins as something gray, like a cloud that cannot make up its mind, because at first it frequently does. His aunt Liesl, who was accompanying him, read the letter on the platform and remarked that her father had been issuing those identical instructions since she was a little girl. Their compartment contained two narrow bunks, a miniature sink that folded down out of the wall, and a window with a blind, and Ivo claimed the top bunk before Aunt Liesl had set her bag down.

His first attempt at looking went badly. At nine o'clock, somewhere among the last scattered towns, he pressed his face to the glass and saw nothing but his own reflection, illuminated from behind by the compartment light, gazing back at him with an expression of enormous hope. When Aunt Liesl switched the light off, the reflection vanished, and behind it there was only a low, featureless sky, the kind that meant cloud from one horizon to the other. Then, at half past ten, the train slowed and halted in a forest with no station in it. The attendant, a cheerful man named Mr. Haugen, knocked on every door. A freight train had broken down on the line ahead, he explained, and they would wait on a siding until it was cleared, which might take three hours or might take five.

Ivo understood what that meant before Aunt Liesl had finished calculating it aloud. The strongest lights were forecast for midnight, and at midnight they would be stationary in a forest, under cloud, surrounded by trees in every direction. He retreated into the top bunk and lay facing the wall. He was too old to cry about it, and he did not, quite, but he thought about the clipping in Grandpa Emil's letter, and about the red house, and about how extraordinarily far it was to travel for nothing. Aunt Liesl rested a hand on the edge of his bunk and left it there for a while without speaking, which was precisely the appropriate thing to do. That was when he heard the crying on the other side of the wall, the hiccuping, exhausted kind that sounds as if it has been going on for a long time and cannot discover how to stop.

Part Two · The Next Compartment

In the corridor they found a weary man in socks, holding the door of the next compartment half open and apologizing to everybody. His daughter Pia was six, he explained, and they were relocating to Harrowmere for his new job. She missed her grandmother, and her own bed, and the cat they had been obliged to leave behind, and now the train had stopped in the middle of nowhere, which was the final straw. He apologized again. Behind him, Ivo could see a small girl sitting bolt upright on the lower bunk in pajamas decorated with rabbits, clutching a pillow against her stomach. Ivo glanced at Aunt Liesl, and then he asked Pia's father whether Pia might like to hear about the northern lights, because he had a letter that explained them, and he had nothing else to do for five hours.

Pia's father looked at Aunt Liesl, who nodded, and so Ivo sat on the floor of the next compartment with the letter on his knees and the door open to the corridor. He explained it the way his grandfather had explained it to him. The sun, he said, is perpetually flinging out tiny particles of itself, far too small to see, and they stream across space for a few days until some of them reach the earth. Most are deflected, but near the top and bottom of the world some get through, and they collide with the air extremely high up, higher than any airplane ever flies. When they strike oxygen up there, it glows green, and that glow is what scientists call the aurora. Pia wanted to know whether the green was hot, and Ivo said he did not believe so, and that it was much too far away to matter anyway.

She listened with the pillow still clutched against her, and when he had finished she asked the question that Ivo had been asking himself all evening, which was whether they were going to see it. He told her the truth, which was probably not, because of the clouds. Then, because she looked as though the crying might return, he told her about Grandpa Emil's instructions instead, and about the twenty minutes of darkness that eyes require before they can perceive faint things. He proposed that they could try it anyway, as an experiment, simply to discover what real darkness was like. Pia's father observed, doubtfully, that it was nearly eleven. Aunt Liesl pointed out that it was a train, on a siding, in a forest, and that nobody aboard was going anywhere, and Pia's father laughed for what Ivo suspected was the first time all day.

There was one obstacle to the experiment, and it was the corridor. Its lights remained on all night, and they shone through the open door and turned the window into a pale mirror, exactly the way the compartment light had at nine o'clock. Ivo remembered Mr. Haugen mentioning, when they boarded, that he dimmed the corridor at one in the morning so that passengers could sleep. With Aunt Liesl beside him, Ivo walked down to the attendant's little cabin at the end of the carriage and inquired, as courteously as he knew how, whether one o'clock could possibly happen early tonight, because there was a homesick six-year-old next door and they were attempting something. Mr. Haugen considered this seriously. Then he said that he had worked on this line for nineteen years, and that he believed it could.

Part Three · Twenty Minutes

So they switched off every light. Pia's father raised the blind, and the four of them sat in a row on the lower bunk with a blanket across their knees, facing north, and waited for their eyes. At first there was nothing but black glass and the blacker silhouettes of trees, until gradually the forest emerged out of the darkness, every spruce with snow along its branches, and beyond the trees lay a wide, flat, white emptiness that could only be a frozen lake. Pia counted the minutes on her fingers, with assistance, and lost track somewhere around the ninth. Ivo thought she might have fallen asleep, but he did not dare check. The cloud was still there, but it had begun to come apart in places, and through the gaps, very faintly, there were stars.

It began low over the far side of the lake, exactly where the letter said to look, and exactly as gray as the letter had promised: a pale band, like a scrap of cloud that had lost its way, so uncertain that Ivo nearly said nothing at all. Then the band brightened. It stretched across the lake and folded over on itself like a curtain in a draft, and the gray intensified, as if somebody were turning a dial very slowly, into a cold and astonishing green. Pia, who had not been asleep at all, said a single word, which was oh. The curtain rippled, and a second one rose behind it. Out in the corridor Ivo heard a door open, and then another, and then Mr. Haugen's voice traveling softly from compartment to compartment, telling people to look north.

It lasted nearly an hour, flaring and fading as the clouds allowed, and by the end half the carriage was crowded into the darkened corridor with their faces against the windows. Somebody had produced a thermos of cocoa and a packet of ginger cookies. Pia's father lifted her up to the glass and later held her against his shoulder, and at some point during the second curtain she did fall asleep, properly this time, with her mouth open and one hand pressed flat against the window as if she were trying to keep it. Ivo stayed at the glass with Aunt Liesl until the green dwindled back into gray and the gray into cloud. Just before two o'clock the freight train ahead was cleared, the carriage gave a long shudder, and the night train north began to move again through the trees.

They reached Harrowmere at half past eleven the following morning, more than three hours late, and Grandpa Emil was waiting on the platform in an enormous fur hat with his hands in his pockets, looking as though he had been standing there since eight. He began immediately to apologize for the weather and the freight train, as if he were personally responsible for both, and to promise that there would be other nights. Ivo let him finish. Then he told him about the siding, and the frozen lake, and the twenty minutes, and the gray that had ripened into green exactly as the letter had said it would. Behind them Pia was waving from the carriage steps, holding her father's hand, the rabbit pajamas visible under her coat. Grandpa Emil looked at her, and then at Ivo, and requested the entire account again, slowly, from the beginning.