Some of the bigger stations are like miniature cities, but this one is just a large landing, a half-shuttered window to an unmanned ticket counter, and two escalators, one going up and the other down, and between them a stairway. We hurry down the escalator. Even though it’s a long way down, you know if a train is there or not, and now there is no train, so we slow down. The platform is a grey slab dotted with pillars, purple and pearly. The tiles are small and square, like the tiles you find in showers. The benches are chrome. The ceiling is the colour of coal, and so are the tunnels on either side of the platform. The monitor says our train is going to arrive in two minutes, and I can already hear it. Trains come every nine minutes on weekends and every six minutes on weekdays, no matter what time of day, except perhaps for very late, and in rush hour they are always full. You have to push your way on and throw yourself off. Nobody shows you any generosity, nor forgiveness. Though I do not travel at these times, I sometimes stand in stations and watch. Now our train has arrived. It’s a green train, and it’s lit orange. It’s not too crowded. Saskia grabs the latch, pulls sharply, and the doors open automatically the rest of the way. We step in. Saskia and Manuela sit beside each other, facing two empty seats. I stand and look up at the chart that plots the courses of the various underground lines. One day, when I feel I know the inner city well enough, I shall begin a slow exploration of the rest of the city by underground stops, and it may take a few years or it may take my whole life, or it may not even be possible, since I am not going to rush. I’m going to take the underground to each and every station, walk up to the surface, find a place to have a coffee, talk to somebody behind a counter for a while, ask them how they are, stroll around, find something odd, and go back home.
How many stops do we have? I ask Saskia. Four, she says. Manuela says something to Saskia. Saskia responds. They have momentarily abandoned English, and I feel guilty for forgetting that they’d been speaking English since we met. It cannot be easy, so I give them some time alone. Every once in a while there is a bright electric spark that lights up the tunnel, but apart from that, all you see in the window is your own reflection. My reflection looks at me with equanimity, but that equanimity is not in me. Saskia and Manuela are trying to figure something out. There’s a disagreement, but it’s not heated. Finally Saskia nods, and snaps her fingers. The train slows down. I sit. Saskia says, Manuela knows a better way, but we must go an extra stop. Are we going to be on time? I ask. Maybe five minutes late, she says. Manuela is reading a financial paper that someone left behind on a seat. It’s orange-pink, like the Financial Times, and it’s one I’d regularly buy and sit down with at my little café and imperfectly translate with the Italian waiter. Saskia tells her not to depress herself. The economy, here, like everywhere else, is in bad shape. Every time I read a gloomy prognosis in the paper, I feel a little thrill, Saskia says. It’s shameful, really, she adds. Everyone’s like that, said Manuela. Everyone feels a thrill when they see disaster in the news. Manuela looks at me. Don’t you? she asks. I suppose, I say. Manuela goes back to reading her paper, and Saskia looks over her shoulder. She says, I hate the rich. Manuela gives her a quizzical look. I find that I suddenly don’t know what to do with my hands. I say, because I feel a nervous need to change the subject slightly, that I remember an interview with a woman in Thailand after the 2006 tsunami. The reporter – this was, I think, BBC World or CNN; it was playing in a hotel room – sat down with the woman on some steps outside her house, which had been demolished, and they spoke about the woman’s daughter. The woman told the reporter she’d held tightly onto her daughter, who was eight, until the force of the water was too great and she lost her grip. She hoped the daughter was alive, she said. She held up a photograph of the daughter, and instantly they cut to another story. I was half-sickened by the way the story had been presented not as a piece of news but as a confession, not so that we would learn about the suffering taking place in Thailand, but in order that we might hate and then decide to forgive a woman who couldn’t save her daughter, who let her daughter go, probably to save herself from drowning, a decision that was for her no more deliberate than the decision to breathe. But of all the things that disturbed me, what disturbed me most was the daughter’s photograph, which had been presented very much, I felt, in the manner of a photograph of a lost dog you find stapled to telephone poles, as though the story were not at all the prostitution of human suffering but a public service announcement. Saskia says, I read, once, about a woman who lived in an apartment with three children. For no apparent reason, she began to throw her children out the window, a five-storey drop. First she threw the baby, then the toddler, then a six-year-old boy. The baby and toddler died on impact, but the older boy lived for a few minutes. Then the mother threw herself off and died. The older boy, while lying on the ground and dying, was interviewed by three journalists. Is that true? I ask. It is, says Saskia, except that it’s an old story.