As the sardonically smiling conductor was preparing to leave, Szygon sensed that he had already seen that face, twisted in a similar grimace, a few times before. Some fury tore him from his place, and he threw out a warning:

‘Mr. Wings, watch out for the draft!’

‘Please be quiet; I’m closing the door.’

‘Watch out for the draft,’ he stubbornly repeated. ‘One can sometimes break one’s neck.’

The conductor was already in the corridor.

‘He’s either crazy or drunk,’ he remarked under his breath, passing into the next car.

Szygon remained alone.

He was in one of his famous ‘flight’ phases. On any given day, this strange person found himself, quite unexpectedly, several hundred miles from his native Warsaw and somewhere at the other end of Europe – in Paris, in London, or in some third-rate little town in Italy. He would wake up, to his extreme surprise, in some unknown hotel which he looked at for the first time in his life. How he came to be in such strange surroundings, he was never able to explain. The hotel staff, when questioned, generally measured the tall gentleman with a curious, sometimes sarcastic glance and informed him about the obvious state of things – that he had arrived the day before on the evening or morning train, had eaten supper and had ordered a room. One time some wit asked him if he also needed to be reminded under what name he had arrived. The malicious question was completely legitimate: a person who could forget what had occurred the previous day could also forget his own name. In any event, there was in Tadeusz Szygon’s improvised rides a certain mysterious and unexplained feature: their aimlessness, which entailed a strange amnesia toward everything that had occurred from the moment of departure to the moment of arrival at an unknown location. This emphatically attested to the phenomenon being, at the very least, puzzling.

After his return from these adventurous excursions, life would go on as usual. As before, he would frequent the casino, lose his money at bridge and make his famous bets at horse races. Everything went along as it always had – normal, routine and ordinary … .

Then, on a certain morning, Szygon would disappear once again, vanishing without a trace … .

The reason for these flights was never made clear. In the opinion of some, one had to look for its source in an atavistic element inherent in the nature of this eccentric; in Szygon’s veins there apparently flowed gypsy blood. It seemed he had inherited from his perpetually roaming ancestors a craving for constant roving. One example given as proof of this ‘nomadism’ was the fact that Szygon could never reside long in any one place: he was continually changing his living quarters, moving from one section of town to the other.

Whatever impulses prompted his aimless romantic travels, he certainly didn’t glorify in them after his return. He would come back – likewise unexpectedly – angry, exhausted and sullen. For the next few days he would lock himself in his home, clearly avoiding people, before whom he felt shame and embarrassment.

Most interesting of all was Szygon’s state during these ‘flights’ – a state almost completely dominated by subconscious elements.

Some dark force tore him from his home, propelled him to the railway station, pushed him into a carriage – some overpowering command impelled him, frequently in the middle of night, to leave his cosy bed, leading him like a condemned man through the labyrinth of streets, removing from his way a thousand obstacles, to place him in a compartment and send him out into the world. Then came a blindfolded, random journey, changing trains without any destination in mind, and a stop at a foreign city, or an out-of-the-way town or village, not knowing why precisely there and not some other place – and finally a terrible awakening in completely unfamiliar surroundings … .

Szygon never arrived at the same place: the train always put him off at a different destination. During his ride he never ‘woke up,’ i.e., he never became aware of the aimlessness of what he was doing – his full psychic faculties returned only after his departure from the train, and this frequently only after a deep, fortifying sleep in a hotel or a roadside shed or inn … .

At the present moment he was in an almost trance-like state. The train now carrying him had departed yesterday morning from Paris. Whether he got on at the French capital or at some station along the route, he didn’t know. He had departed from somewhere and was now heading somewhere else – that’s all he could say … .

He adjusted himself on the cushions, stretched out his legs, and lit a cigar. He felt distaste, almost repugnance. He always experienced similar feelings at the sight of a conductor or, for that matter, any railwayman. These people were a symbol of certain deficiencies or of an underdevelopment, and personified the imperfection that he saw in the railway system. Szygon understood that he made his unusual journeys under the influence of cosmic and elemental forces, and that train travel was a childish compromise caused by the circumstances of his earthly environment. He realized only too well that if it weren’t for the sad fact that he was chained to the Earth and its laws, his travels, casting off the usual pattern and method, would take on an exceedingly more active and beautiful form.

It was precisely the railway and its employees that embodied for him that rigid formula, that vicious circle from which he, a man, a poor son of the Earth, tried vainly to break out of.

That is why he despised these people; sometimes, he even hated them. This aversion to ‘servants of a charter for leisurely rambling,’ as he contemptuously called them, increased in direct proportion to his fantastic ‘flights,’ of which he was ashamed not so much for their aimlessness, but rather because they were conceived on such a pitiful scale.

This feeling of detestation was augmented by the little incidents and quarrels with the train authorities that were inevitable due to his unnatural state.