And Miles to Go Before I Sleep Read online

  It was 1:30 when Frank Smarz phoned the Englehart dispatcher. It took the dispatcher a while to understand (‘more minutes ticking by’). He sent the message by radio to the conductor of the Northlander, Sydney Adams, who confirmed that Gladys had boarded at Swastika, but he had no more to say because there had been a crew change in North Bay. The conductor who took over in North Bay was Edward Murphy. When he received the message, Edward Murphy had just noticed, in checking his documents, that he was missing a passenger.

  This message would be relayed from train to train over more than 3,000 kilometres without anyone being able to stop the course of time. Gladys was covering her tracks. Whether it was deliberate or not, they still wonder.

  Conductors are important witnesses. They make the same trip year in and year out, and they often know their passengers by their first names, regulars who board and disembark in a small town, a village like Swastika, or a clearing in the forest. They are in the heat of the travel action, and they are stones to be turned over to trace Gladys’s journey.

  The first stone to be turned is Sydney Adams, conductor on the Northlander. A number of conductors will make an appearance in this tale, but Sydney Adams will be the first – as chronology demands – even though I only met him two years after these events.

  At the time, he was in forced retirement, the Cochrane–Toronto line having been eliminated on September 28, 2012, four days after Gladys was spotted on it. The Northlander and Gladys Comeau disappeared almost at the same time. Some believed it was a cruel twist of fate. Indeed, it seems that the tracks of destiny opened and shut in perfect synchronicity for Gladys to continue her getaway.

  Sydney Adams’s wife had taken advantage of her husband’s retirement to plan long trips to Florida until, unable to stand any more sun, golden beaches, or daiquiris, the husband fled the idleness that was weighing on him. He was a workhorse, as he liked to say, a man who believed that life’s salvation is in work, wherever it can be found. So he had built a relatively prosperous life from his job on the rails and what he called his hobby (houses he bought, lived in, renovated, and sold at a profit – one that was ‘reasonable’, he took pains to point out; ‘I’m not a money-grubber’).

  The meeting took place at his home in Cochrane, a house that was a construction site, walls knocked down to create an open space (‘It’s what people like these days’). His wife, a scurrying little mouse, kept darting between the construction area and the tea and little cakes throughout our conversation.

  He was surprised to learn that anyone was still interested in the story and somewhat reluctant to tell what little he knew. He blamed himself for not realizing what was happening on board and for letting Gladys slip away. But sitting there for two hours, with no riveter or nail gun in his hands, nothing to do but chat, he was even more talkative than I had hoped. I know men who are so locked in their thoughts that they don’t know themselves or what torments them. With too many cares about today, the next hour, right now, they don’t let thought disrupt the series of tasks to accomplish. A hard-working life doesn’t lend itself to introspection or outpourings. During our conversation, they were few moments when Sydney Adams indulged in personal reflection.

  He is a man cut from one piece, not very tall but stocky, with bushy eyebrows and a piercing gaze, and he radiates an energy focused on the present moment. In this he is like my father, my uncles, all the men of my childhood. Train men, they used to say among themselves, as did Sydney Adams. His voice had the smell of sludge, the hammering of tools, the heavy gait of the giants of my childhood, coming and going between the trains in our station in Senneterre. I was in familiar territory.

  When he realized that I too was a lover of trains, the conversation took a turn. I was treated to stories of the glory days of the Northlander and to hardy ‘buddy’s, which he would have punctuated with just as hardy and friendly claps to the shoulder if I hadn’t been out of reach in my armchair.

  ‘Gladys loved trains too,’ he told me. Despite their lack of comfort, their slowness, their unreliability, and the fact that almost no one depended on them anymore. ‘Gladys was born on the train, in fact, a long time ago. She was seventy years old, but she was still strong, strong enough to make the trip on our trains. Always with her daughter, Lisana, the poor thing.’

  He had known them for as long as he could remember. During the glory days of the Northlander, they were often on board. They went to Toronto, to Montreal, had travelled to Nova Scotia, to Winnipeg; they had seen almost all of Canada by train. Lisana, as a little girl, and then a little older, colouring in her colouring book, reading romances, while her mother went seat to seat, chatting, laughing, kidding around. Then there were the incidents that Sydney Adams couldn’t explain (‘such a sweet kid, so cheerful’), and Gladys would bring the poor thing back from Toronto. Lisana would watch the scenery go by while her mother, spilling over with cheer, would try to drag out of her even just a glance. In those moments, Sydney Adams sometimes took the time for a bit of the conversation Gladys’s daughter wouldn’t offer her.

  He liked having Gladys aboard. ‘She was chatty; she could talk about anything and everything for hours.’ It is a long trip from Swastika to Toronto. You have to allow around ten hours, not counting the delays, which were many, because freight trains take priority over passenger trains, which regularly have to pull into a siding. Having on board someone like Gladys, who goes seat to seat and livens things up, as if the car were a village street, was a blessing for both the passengers and for the conductor.

  But on her last trip on the Northlander, not a word, not a move, ‘didn’t even go to the bathroom.’ She sat there with her nose glued to the window the whole trip.

  He might have worried, but his attention had drifted to ‘the man with the scarf,’ which he said with a sidelong glance, knowing I too was from the North. We were compatriots, so to speak.

  ‘It’s not like I haven’t seen plenty of weirdos on the train.’

  That’s what he blames himself for. Letting himself be so distracted by the weirdo that he forgot Gladys. Even on the platform, waiting for the Northlander with Gladys and another traveller, the man had intrigued him. It was the scarf that caught his attention, although it was not particularly remarkable, ‘a striped grey scarf.’ And I offered up the little laugh he expected. A scarf is an unusual affectation for a Northern man, something a bit laughable that does not pass unnoticed.

  ‘A stranger, I thought. Not someone from around here.’ (And I was treated to another heartfelt ‘buddy’).

  So two men and one woman were waiting for the Northlander that September morning. The stranger in the scarf who would absorb his attention, and a second traveller squatting near a canvas bag and Gladys. Sydney Adams immediately recognized the second traveller: he had been on board just two days before. ‘A Ukrainian who spoke nothing but Ukrainian. I don’t know how he had managed to get around without a word of English.’ As for Gladys, he recognized her immediately but was surprised to see her without her daughter.

  My quest had long moved beyond factual reconstruction when I met Sydney Adams. I had already gathered enough information to piece together Gladys’s itinerary. I had moved on to wondering about her motivations, about what she knew of her own intentions when she climbed aboard the Northlander.

  Did she give the impression of a woman on the run or on a suicide mission?

  ‘Gladys wasn’t in the mood to talk that morning.’

  She barely offered a perfunctory thank you when he helped her aboard. She went to her seat without greeting the other passengers. Then, nothing. She didn’t move from her seat. As still as a stone. He wasn’t terribly surprised. He figured Lisana had run off and Gladys had to go get her yet again. If he had taken the time, he would have wondered about Gladys’s behaviour, because it had been a long time since she had had to drag her daughter back from the underbelly of Toronto – years, in fact – but his attention had already drifted to the man with the scarf.

  ‘A weir
do … For a while I thought he was a train buff.’

  Sydney Adams wasn’t speaking a foreign language. I know train buffs. They are fanatical about trains. They ride the rails of the world in search of an old locomotive still in service, a line that is on its last wheels; they take huge risks for a photo of a trestle bridge from below, venture where they are unwelcome just to check the year a locomotive or a caboose was made. They are American, European, Australian – not a woman among them. For conductors, they are a nuisance or a source of amusement, depending on whether they are meddlesome or entertaining.

  When the Northlander was still running, it connected to the Polar Bear Express, a northern line that runs from Cochrane to the shores of James Bay, the land of the Cree, and because of this, it attracted its share of enthusiasts. Tourists, journalists asking a lot of questions, anthropologists who had sometimes come from far away, and, from time to time, a train buff who had also come from far away with a list of questions. Sydney Adams thought for a moment that the man in the scarf was one of them. But there was too much refinement in his manner of dress (the scarf, a well-cut jacket, and a saffron yellow shirt … saffron yellow!) and no questions about the Northlander, the Polar Bear Express, or the Cree community of James Bay.

  ‘But asking questions, yes. Bothering everyone with his goddamn questions.’

  He had met a lot of passengers, and they all had bad things to say about him. The man was nervous, jumpy, intrusive, irritating, a pain. He kept going from passenger to passenger the whole trip. It wasn’t his manner of dress that was off-putting, or the way he had of bending over you as if he were going to shower you in compliments (‘any more polite, and he’d have to erase himself from the planet’), but rather his insistent questions, which inevitably went unanswered, because no one knew the Trotsky to whom he referred.

  They had nothing to say about Gladys, except that she didn’t move from her seat and didn’t have any luggage.

  There weren’t that many of them, ten at the most, gathered in a single car, the Northlander not being what it used to be. It was a chugging milk-run train, just three cars long (passengers, baggage, and snack bar), that drew only people who enjoy a leisurely pace, its swaying, the squeal of steel on steel, the whistles of a powerful beast, and those who have no choice but to go slow.

  In addition to the three passengers who came aboard at Swastika, there was a mother with her three young children; a young Cree man from Moosonee; a few seniors, mainly women; a welder who was heading to a job in North Bay; and a retiree from the Ontario Northland Railway, who as such got to travel for free. While he didn’t know all the passengers by name, Sydney Adams knows how to spot the purpose of a trip. In the case of the old women, no need to overthink it, they were going to visit family or see a doctor in Toronto. They had with them a soft-sided cooler, to save money or because they didn’t trust the food in the snack bar. Others also had a cooler and had already started unwrapping sandwiches when Sydney Adams saw the man with the questions sidle toward the seat of the young Cree man.

  ‘Indigenous people keep to themselves.’ They travel as if they were still in the forest, silent, hushed. Even in groups sitting in double-facing seats, they can make the whole trip without exchanging a word. Sydney Adams, convinced the questioner would come up against age-old Indigenous stolidity, watched the man’s manoeuvring.

  That’s when Gladys got away from him, or at least that’s what he thinks.

  ‘We were coming into North Bay, and she probably slipped into the gangway connection while I was watching what would happen next.’

  What happened next was curious. As he had previously done with the other travellers, the man bent over the young Cree man (no more than twenty, according to Sydney Adams) and spoke to him at length. To the conductor’s great surprise, the young man’s face lit up; he almost smiled. The stranger felt permitted to sit down near him, and they started a conversation that Sydney Adams, try as he might, couldn’t hear from where he was.

  ‘I was blown away. I had never seen anything like it. Normally the Cree don’t let themselves be bamboozled by someone who talks a good game.’

  This explains why he didn’t see Gladys get off the train in North Bay. He was so busy watching what was going on that he got behind in his work, and his passengers were already getting off, helped by the relief crew that was waiting on the platform.

  ‘I wouldn’t have let her leave like that, without a word, if it hadn’t been for that damn guy with all the questions.’

  An unfortunate series of events. Things had taken a bad turn. Gladys had given her pursuers the slip, and somewhere, someone was filled with regret.

  The name of the damn guy with all the questions was Léonard Mostin. He is French and a writer but was thought to be a Jewish historian, red herrings that meant it took me a while to track him down. My story already has its share of digressions and departures, so I won’t get into how I managed to find him on Rue de l’Éperon in Paris.

  I set out on the man’s trail because of his inquisitiveness. I knew from Sydney Adams that he had had no contact with Gladys on the Northlander, except for a quick look as he passed by her to pester passengers with unwanted questions. But alone with her on the platform (leaving aside the other traveller, the Ukrainian who spoke only Ukrainian), hadn’t he had ample time to ask her where she was going and what she was going to do there? Who knows what she might have told him. I was banking on the man’s insatiable curiosity and on the conversations people sometimes have with fellow travellers.

  Léonard Mostin is indeed a prolific asker of questions. The man I met in his tiny Paris apartment jibed in every respect with the picture that had been painted of him. Jumpy, nervous, fidgety, and churning with questions. But not intrusive, not a muckraker, nothing unpleasant. Quite the contrary. He had a deep, sincere desire to reach out to others in order to escape, I thought, his own inner agitation. He wanted to know everything about me. Where I was from, what I did there, whether I was happy there, and how many more years I would spend in my little town before I would grow weary of it.

  He knew what had brought me to see him. We had met on Facebook and kept in touch via email. But he was finding it hard to understand how he came to be associated with something that in no way concerned him and of which he knew very little when we met in his little mouse hole (I can’t imagine living in such cramped quarters) in Paris.

  He definitely remembered Gladys. It was the absence of luggage that piqued his curiosity. ‘All she had was a bag on her shoulder, not a purse, more like a tote bag.’ And her immobility. ‘She was staring blankly, not making the slightest gesture, motionless in a dense shadow, as if she didn’t belong to this world.’

  ‘Gladys. Is that really her name?’

  His English was limited, minimal, but good enough to be surprised at such a cheerful name for a woman who to him seemed so sombre and uncommunicative. His French, on the other hand, was lively and bubbly, like champagne. I never got tired of hearing it. He made no comment on mine.

  I can easily imagine the thousand and one questions that emerged from this man in search of the humanity of others when he saw this older woman who, like him and the other traveller, was there for the 09:40 train. But he told me she wasn’t moving, like a statue, with no luggage, and she never looked in the direction the train would be coming from. He approached her, greeted her with a nod. ‘Nothing, she didn’t move, didn’t even look at me.’ He grew bolder, offering the most charming hello he could, ‘and still, nothing, not a word, as if I didn’t exist.’ He didn’t insist, moved along the platform, and his thoughts got lost in the foaming of the river.

  He too was lost, as he tried to explain, involved in a quest that consumed him.

  ‘My thoughts deserted me as quickly as they came to me.’

  It was an elegant way of saying that he felt completely lost in this village at the end of the earth where he found himself alone and without bearings among people who were almost openly mocking him.

&n
bsp; He spent four days in Swastika on a quest that makes mine look perfectly reasonable.

  Léonard Mostin is not a man for travel. Born in Paris, he has spent years in the same apartment in the 6e Arrondissement. The little cafés on Rue Buci, the large bookstores on Boulevard Saint-Germain, the street life, the chance encounters, the fellow writers, the publishers wandering along Rue Saint-André-des-Arts, Rue de Seine, Rue Mazarine, a bustle particular to Paris that kept him from looking any further. And all it took was one word, just one, entered in Google, for him to cross the Atlantic.

  It was in googling the word swastika that he discovered that there existed, lost in the great Canadian expanse, a place that had ‘the impudence – the heedlessness – the arrogance’ to go by such a name and, even more impudent-heedless-arrogant, to fight to keep it. The battle of the Swastikans was reported in detail on Google, along with their battle cry: To hell with Hitler; it was our name first.

  I too searched on Google, and I felt the same scandalized surprise when I read the story that came up on several sites.

  In 1940, there was a sign war in Swastika. At the time, the name had the stench of blood and destruction, and the Ontario government wanted to change it to the name of the celebrated cigar smoker who was waging war against horror in Europe. But for the people of Swastika, their place name was good luck. The community had been established with that name decades earlier around the Swastika Gold Mine. And for months, Winston and Swastika were at war at the village limits, signs ripped out, then planted again, then ripped out again, until the government retreated from its engagement with the local army. To hell with Hitler: it was our swastika first.