The Quiet Car

Ola

Archivist from Kraków in berth 1 of the overnight sleeper to Budapest, carrying an unopened shoe box to a funeral where nobody knows her name

Ola Marczak is thirty-three, an archivist in Kraków, and the daughter of the man being buried on Wednesday in the tenth district of Budapest — or has been told so her whole life. She boarded the 20:40 sleeper with a shoe box off the top of his wardrobe that she has carried since Tuesday and not opened, and somewhere past Katowice found a stranger holding the same funeral notice with a different name printed across the top of it.

Bence

Kitchen-fitter from Budapest in berth 2 of the overnight sleeper home, carrying three keys and a photograph to a funeral he is one of six to carry

Bence Varga is forty-one, from Budapest, and fits kitchens for a living. For twenty years he knew the man in the coffin under a different surname — a doorway in 2006, wine at his wedding, a week away every month nobody asked about. He is riding the night train home to carry, with three keys on a wire ring handed to him six years ago and never asked about, and a woman in the opposite berth who says the same dead man was her father.