Assuming he was asleep, the conductor came up and grasped him by the shoulder.

‘Pardon me, sir; ticket, please.’

With a faraway look in his eyes, the traveller glanced at the intruder.

‘Ticket?’ he yawned out casually. ‘I don’t have one yet.’

‘Why didn’t you buy it at the station?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You’re going to have to pay a fine.’

‘F-fine? Yes,’ he added, ‘I’ll pay it.’

‘Where did you get on? Paris?’

‘I don’t know.’

The conductor became indignant.

‘What do you mean you don’t know? You’re making fun of me, my dear sir. Who should know?’

‘It doesn’t matter. Let’s assume that I got on at Paris.’

‘And to what destination should I make the ticket out for?’

‘As far as possible.’

The conductor looked carefully at the passenger.

‘I can only give you a ticket as far as Madrid; from there you can transfer to any train you like.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ replied Szygon with a disregardful wave of his hand. ‘As long as I just keep on riding.’

‘I will have to give you your ticket later. I must first draw it up and estimate the fine with the price.’

‘As you wish.’

Szygon’s attention suddenly became riveted by the railway insignias on the conductor’s collar: several jagged little wings woven in a circle. 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 draught!’

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

‘Watch out for the draught,’ Szygon repeated stubbornly. ‘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 an unknown hotel that 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 of the obvious state of things—that he had arrived the day before on the evening or morning train, had eaten supper, and 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, after all, 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 towards 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 before. As before, he would ardently frequent the casino, lose his money at bridge, and make his renowned 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.