The Ninth Berth – Tractate 1: Night
1/N
Starting to write is easy; finishing is not.
I didn’t intend to serialize The Ninth Berth but after months of work and countless iterations on every chapter I still can’t finish it. Despite pages of notes for the last two chapters, the closer I get to the end the more I rewrite the beginning. A chapter that feels final and polished one week looks wrong the next. I had to do something about it.
In the 19th century, serialization was the default mode of publication for fiction. Newspapers and magazines printed chapters weekly and often before the work was complete. Long novels of Dickens or Dostoyevski as well as shorter works like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Inspired by this tradition, later carried on by comics and manga, I’ll publish The Ninth Berth as a series of posts, one per chapter—or tractate, as I call them.
It took me more than a decade to become a passable technical writer. I don't expect fiction to require less patience. Like in any novice work this one has flaws: excess, pacing issues, plot holes. With the help of test readers I’ve tried to reduce them but it’s hard to fix flaws you don’t see. And writing that sounds natural with strong words and a consistent voice is slow and often excruciating, especially in a second language. When that feels discouraging I think of Joseph Conrad, born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski. Long before digitally searchable dictionaries and thesauruses, he produced some of the most elaborate and enduring English prose. He makes a guest appearance in The Ninth Berth.
My previous novella, Cripto, was largely plot-driven and an attempt to implement storytelling recipes, while exploring themes of justice, moral ambiguity, and materialism. Readers described it as cinematic and sensorial. The Ninth Berth preserved these qualities but is otherwise different: it’s character-driven, unconcerned with narrative formulas, more contemplative, and slower-paced. It won’t work for everyone, but I like it more. Its themes are survival, redemption, and humanity.
Unlike the short stories in Glitches that came straight out of my dreams, The Ninth Berth is grounded in reality: in places I visited in Poland, Ukraine, Portugal; in films, like Tarkovski’s Stalker; in writers, in particular the late Cormac McCarthy, whose final work shaped two of my characters; and in foundational Jewish texts like the Talmud and the Zohar, whose presence and symbolism are sometimes explicit and sometimes deliberately hidden.
This is the first tractate:
Tractate 1: Night
22:04 – 23:06
You can get there if you find a driver willing to take you from the strip they call an airport. Or you can walk for an hour along a dead-straight road lined with rye and potato fields, like those poor souls I saw from the backseat dragging their bags into the night. The road was narrow and potholed. When vehicles passed us, the woman driving muttered words I didn’t decipher. Her car was clunky and built in another era. Its single wiper dispersed the rainwater with a squealing sound and paused three seconds at every stop. Colder raindrops hit my right cheek and shoulder, as the nauseous gas smell inside forced us to slide the windows open—probably also kept us from carbon monoxide.
We made it to Skhodresk, a town in one of those countries no one can place on a map. We drove through streets lined with lifeless red-brick houses and after a roundabout with a statue of a hatted horseman we reached a parking lot and stopped.
Train station, yes? You go, she said. It sounded like she’d learned the words phonetically. I got out and looked around.
Nothing here resembled a train station. Just sparse lampposts and their meaningless light. The gravel lot extended on one side to the wall of a brutalist edifice, like a post office or administration. On the opposite end was a dimly lit convenience store. Couldn’t tell if it was open. Facing me, between the store and building, stood a wall of raw grey bricks with tasteless graffiti. Parallel to the wall, a narrow path cut across a patch of dead grass littered with food wrappers and rusted cans. It led farther on the left to a low makeshift building.
You sure this is the station? I asked.
Yes. Train there, she said with a shooing motion. You go. Goodbye.
She shut the window and drove off. I’d already paid her. That left me with an hour to find the station and the train.
I set out to the small building. The walkway was made of concrete squares laid out randomly. Some were missing, some were submerged in gray-green puddles, and none was aligned. I followed the path with my duffel bag in one hand when a shape appeared across the facade, a human figure through the sodium lamps. The man wheeled a suitcase, unbothered by the rain. We reached the building’s canopy at the same time.
Good eve-a-ning, the man said.
Chinese, maybe, mid-fifties, average height. Black suit pants and jacket, the build of a man who sat too much. Rimless glasses covered in raindrops. Messy black hair, freshly shaved. A smirk at one side of his mouth betrayed an air of gravity. A scar ran along his right cheek.
Hi, I said.
Do you have the time?
I raised my wrist to check. It’s ten past ten.
Ten ten? He looked like I’d announced a good news.
Yeah, what about it?
Nothing, a Japanese thing. My name is Kagami, nice to meet you.
Sure. I’m Miles. You here for the train?
Of course. The train.
So this is the station?
Yes. Over there is the train. He glanced behind him.
I followed his gaze. A somber metal frame stood beyond tangled trees and bushes like a pathway hovering in the air.
You walk there, he said, gesturing toward the structure.
Thank you, I’ll head that way then, I said, hoisting my bag. He went the opposite way.
I pushed through the bushes and found the Skhodresk station: two platforms with two tracks adjacent to each. The metal walkway stretched above the tracks but had no stairs, like a bridge connecting two invisible towers. On my right, the second track disappeared under a dark emerald locomotive and its same-colored cars, each marked with a yellow stripe and a faded railway logo. I checked my ticket: car 3, berth 8. I stepped onto the platform. Orange lamps flickered over the concrete as if scanning the area.
Shapes resolved through the mist: passengers boarding, others smoking, a few walking aimless. Car six. I kept walking. A man was peeing on the empty track across the platform. I reach the carriage door, number three painted above. Four people there: a woman with a violin case and an elderly couple talking to someone small. Not a child but a man, a short man in an oversized navy-blue uniform. When he saw me he raised the palm of his hand.
The line, sir! The line! Do not reverse the order! he shouted.
It sounded like a matter of life or death. I didn’t answer and walked behind the woman.
She was young, between twenty-five and thirty. Slim, almost gaunt. She wore a beige trench coat and tight black jeans that weren’t really jeans, I think they’re called chinos. Her brown hair was just past the shoulders and tied back with a crimson band. Her face was delicate and cold except for a small round mouth. Little make-up, if any. I didn’t see her eyes up close but they looked dark, not just in color. She looked as if she didn’t smile easily.
The short uniformed man let the couple aboard. She stepped forward and handed over her ticket. She let his greeting unanswered. He glanced at her ticket and said something inaudible and then she climbed aboard, the violin in one hand and a small leather travel bag in the other. She vanished into the corridor.
Cricket ticket, please sir! he yapped at me.
I unfolded the paper and showed it. The man was barely 4’7’‘. Asymmetrical lips jutted beneath a black moustache too thin for his face. When those pales eyes locked onto you he wasn’t looking anywhere else. His sharp cheekbones tightened the stare but his misaligned eyebrows made it hard to take him seriously. He wasn’t bald but nearly. There was a gold name tag with black lettering on his chest: Wiktor Czerny.
He waved the ticket above his head like he expected it to hatch something and he stared at me.
Sir, what’s your favorite color?
It didn’t compute. I must have frowned.
Favorite color, he repeated, dearest hue?
Uh, why?
Security reasons.
I’m sorry? Whatever, blue. He must have been drinking, not uncommon here.
Color tells direction, he said, still not looking at my ticket. Color tells truth.
He stamped the ticket and handed it back. His English was fine but he rolled the R’s like a Scotsman.
You have what you have, he said. Go ahead.
He motioned me through and I walked past him and towards the carriage door.
I climbed rusted stairs and stepped onto dusty burgundy carpet. Overhead lamps reflected against walls yellowed by smoke and time. I entered the corridor. The floor was that soulless pale-green linoleum you see in hospitals. On the right, old wooden window trim clashed with modern compartments on the left and their clinic-gray plastic. Each door had numbers in minimalist black frames. 1 2 3 4 read the first one. I heard voices from inside and walked past it and to the next: 5 6 7 8 9.
My free hand slid the door open and I entered a square compartment with two berths stacked on each side. The bedframes were of sleek composite material, the bedside walls paneled in faux walnut wood that drank the lamplight. The large uncurtained window looked out onto the brush I’d passed earlier. The black violin case rested on the upper berth to my left. She was sat against the opposite wall.
The air inside felt stale and alkaline. I left the door open. Berth numbers were stamped onto the white bed frames. Number 8 was on the top right. I climbed up and tossed my jacket at the foot of the bed. I settled in and pulled out *Lord Jim*, a book I’d already read, a seaman’s redemption story. It felt appropriate. I started reading, the compartment soundless save for the rain pattering on the window glass.
Twenty minutes before departure a man stepped into the compartment. He carried a worn-out caramel suitcase that looked heavy. At least sixty, maybe closer to seventy, slightly overweight. His messy eyebrows loomed over small non-trivial eyes. He had the premeditated smile that wise men wear whatever the circumstances. His skin was pale yet almost Mediterranean, with olive undertones, and under smooth lips a silvery beard fell to his chest with straight strands like brushed silk.
He scanned the room and saw us.
Good evening, how are you?
Hi, good and you? I replied.
I’m very well thank you. It’s a beautiful night, a beautiful train, don’t you think?
I didn’t pin down his accent. It had oriental intonations but the vowels bent European.
The woman didn’t react.
The man shrugged off a grey wool coat and revealed a stocky frame squeezed in a beige corduroy jacket too tight at the chest. His right wrist bore a bracelet made of dark wooden beads and his right hand a golden ring. His left hand wore nothing, as there was no left hand, just his forearm holding the sleeve.
He turned over himself a few times in the narrow space then found a hook to hang his jacket and placed his suitcase on the berth below mine. When he stopped moving things in and out of it, the compartment fell quiet again.
I checked my watch: three minutes to departure. Three of us in that box of a room. I let myself relax. But voices resonated in the corridor. A door opened and closed, luggage bumping into the walls.
Then he appeared in our doorway.
Sorry, is number five here?
It was the Japanese man, Kagami, carrying his case and a brown paper shopping bag.
A voice answered below me.
Yes my friend... number five? This one here. He gestured at the empty berth opposite his.
Kagami saw me and nodded without a smile and I waved back. In less time than it took me to climb onto my berth he had arranged his space with pillow, thermos bottle, snacks, a book slid in the interstice between the mattress and frame. He’d fixed his hair and wipe his glasses,. With his white polo this gave him a different air.
It all seemed out of place. The pristine compartment in this antiquated carriage. These dissonant companions. This would be a memorable journey.