No Stopping Train. Les Plesko

novelist David Francis—a former Plesko student and protégé—seated me next to an editor from Counterpoint at a PEN USA dinner. David knew that the story of our colleague’s death and the tragedy of No Stopping Train soon would arise in conversation, and so it did. The editor, Dan Smetanka, was eager to see the manuscript. Who had the book? When could he read it?

      Word went out. Les, a great letter-writer, had sent various incarnations of the book to his correspondents over the years, notably to Julianne Cohen, to his former fiancée Eireene Nealand, and to his devoted student Jamie Schaffner. All of them were able to produce incarnations of the manuscript. Soon Les’s younger brother, George, received an offer to publish.

      So comes the end of a very long journey for one small jewel of a book. It is with a profound and bittersweet pleasure that I now hold this volume in my hands. How proud Les would have been if he had lived to see this day, how happy he would be for you to turn the first page.

      I wish you good reading.

      JANET FITCH

       Los Angeles, California

       April 21, 2014

You are the man who sang “God Bless the Magyar” after we lost the war. I watched you sway by a bullet-pocked door, heard you testing the national anthem’s loose notes, a lost war’s afterthoughts. I hadn’t heard it since school, and then school was called off. All up and down Saint Matyas Street, wind chased your song among tattered banners and placards and flags. Elms cast their shadows on smashed cobblestones, windowsills lined with wash. A corpse swayed against a streetlight in accompaniment, its belt buckle clinking the pole, red-checked shirt cheery against the dull sky. Its urgent clogged smell permeated the air, the sad clothes on clotheslines.

      I was twenty and blond, black hair showing through at the roots. I thought I could love you, perhaps, but I wanted to know: would it last? You wiped your nose on your sleeve as you sang. You didn’t see me but, Sandor, you would have been proud: I wiped tears from my eyes as I whistled along. When you looked up I stopped, I was shy. You scanned the sills for my face but I hid in the curtain’s torn lace, my feet crushing glass and mousedust. There was nobody left to accompany you but the dead; you did not seem to mind.

      These haystacks bundled with twine remind me of our bed. These men playing cards on this train, they remind me of you with your hair in your face, but then everything does. Torn clouds are your tattered pant cuffs. Scarecrows by the tracks guarding dirt wear your fish-patterned shirt. My palms on the train window’s glass scratched with lovers’ initials like ours are the same size as yours in my hair, in my mouth.

      You used to say if wishes were horses beggars would ride. I’ve begged, now I ride, yet I still haven’t figured that out. My pale hands in this dicey Hungarian light, my finger’s indent where my wedding band used to rest, I hope you understand about that. If I had tears left, if you had hands that could help, I’d let you wipe them away from my eyes. Sandor, if I found my voice, I’d sing along with you now.

She had needle and thread, they had fish. They had torn clothes, Margit knew how to mend. Erzsébet poked a raw chunk of fish in a fire of mattress guts, newspaper scraps. Remnants of older fires littered the steps down the Danube’s steep bank. Sandor stoked char that smoked more than burned, there was ash on his lips. One drifty eye swam behind black-framed lenses, his other eye studied her, then they switched. Margit turned away, blushed.

      Erzsébet laughed out loud. “You never know if he’s looking at you or some glorified future,” she said.

      Margit kept her gaze on the shore where thin ice abutted the bank. Opaque as the sky, it gave the illusion of firm. “Maybe he sees the past,” Margit said.

      “So you’re a philosopher,” Erzsi said.

      The river encrusted two pigeons, a stump. Waves lapped a corpse, licked its face of split teeth and raw bone. Margit swallowed against its sweetness, like ice cream left out in which the vanilla has spoiled. It seemed almost to breathe, Margit thought. She wondered how it would be if hers was the body half sunk, what if she grew gills? Her hair casually turning aquamarine, the water’s chlorine in her lungs. Under the panel of ice, there’d be no thinking of food, only the hiss of her own body’s fumes, its bubbles escaped into green. If she stayed underneath long enough, she’d forget there had been a war, even land.

      “Where’d you find fish?” Margit asked. She made herself turn from the corpse, its burst checkered shirt, its red-white-green boutonniere.

      “Swapped a kiss,” Erzsi said.

      Margit looked at her mouth, then Sandor’s.

      “Not with him, he has nothing worth trading for it,” Erzsi said.

      Sandor did not take offense. He offered Margit the stick with the fish. Margit burned her lips and her tongue and the roof of her mouth but she managed swallowing it.

      “Blow on it first,” Sandor said. His glasses were mended with tape. Margit had an urge to tamp its loose ends but she was too shy and her fingers were greasy with fish.

      “What are you, DPs?” she asked.

      Sandor grinned. “Who isn’t?” he said. “In a philosophical sense.”

      “He’s back from the front,” Erzsi said. She patted his shoulder like this might excuse whatever came out of his mouth.

      Sandor leaned into her touch. “I found her all rags and bones in a camp.”

      Erzsébet narrowed her eyes. “I told you, don’t talk about that.”

      Sandor shrugged, poked the fish. Erzsébet pulled out a strand of her hair seemingly without noticing it.

      “My father died at the front,” Margit said. She couldn’t say why but she wanted a way to get close, she felt anxious and nervous for them. “He said war was inevitable, that it couldn’t be helped,” Margit said.

      “Nothing helps,” Erzsi said.

      Margit watched her to gauge if this was just typical after-war cynicism. “Some things can,” she replied, though she couldn’t have said what these were.

      Erzsébet took a lipstick from her coat. She twisted the tube, made a pout, smeared a round O on her lips, licked the edge of her mouth, her gestures flamboyant, outsized. “You haven’t fucked anyone just so you won’t have to starve, I can tell,” Erzsi said.

      Margit tried not to show she felt slapped.

      “Leave her alone,” Sandor said.

      Erzsébet smiled. Her lipstick gleamed reckless against her wan cheeks, her orangy hair appeared perishable in the light. “You done that lately? Fucked to eat?”

      Margit hugged herself. Behind her, pigeons beat wings on the steps. Someone swept, scrubbed red stains, stacked smashed bricks. On the opposite shore, boys played soldier with limbs torn from trees. The sun almost broke through the clouds, its porous warmth miserly across her shoulders and legs. What she had done or not done: it was wartime, after all. “Fucking’s not such a big deal,” Margit said, nonchalant.

      Erzsébet bit a mouthful of fish, wiped its grease on her sleeve. “For you it’s abstract because you had a choice,” Erzsi said.

      Sandor flapped his cuffs. “We’ve all become philosophers from the war.”

      Margit took out her needle and thread. “I’m a seamstress,” she said. “I believe in the practical use of my hands.” She was making it up as she went.

      Across the water, a boy raised his stick like a gun. Bang, you’re dead. Margit shivered, tugged Sandor’s crease straight, licked the thread carefully, more slow than was necessary, threaded it.

      “Careful you don’t stick him,” Erzsi said.

      Margit inhaled fish and fire, the body floating