A letter from Romania

“We’re taking the train from Timișoara to Cluj,” I said, “And then the next day another train from Cluj to Suceava.” He grimaced and offered, “oh, the hunger train.” I looked puzzled so he helped with “there’s no food service on the Suceava train and its seven hours.” “Uh huh, yeah, COVID, of course,” I replied. “The fast trains?” he asked. I smiled, “no, the slow ones,” and added weakly, “the fast trains don’t seem too much faster than the slow trains and we plan to fly back to Timișoara.” My Romanian barber finished my trim and after I paid said “good luck on the slow train to Suceava.”

For a couple of weeks we had told our Romanian friends, acquaintances, students, and my barber, about our plan to take the slow trains to Cluj and then on to Suceava, to see the painted churches of Bucovina and to do a little hiking in the Rarau Mountains in northeast Romania. Each person gave us some version of my barber’s reaction.

On Monday, train 1832 was scheduled to depart from Cluj-Napoca at 9:34 am. It included five cars of passengers. Car number four, our car, was about a quarter full, around 15 people. Our tickets said we had seats 31 & 33 but these were taken by a young woman and her son. Neither worse masks. Most passengers had masks, some, like mine, draped below their noses. We’ve gotten lazy. With rapidly-improving-spoken Romanian, Rebecca asked another passenger about our ticketed seats. He said we could sit wherever we wanted, “no problem.”

We felt the forward lurch at a Swiss-like 9:34 am.

Suceava (Soo cha v’ah) is 322 train-track kilometers (200 miles) from Cluj Napoca. Train 1832 was scheduled to stop at 19 villages along the way. Most of the stops were for 1 or 2 minutes, enough time for a few passengers to get on and off. At every stop I noticed one thing. As the train departed, a local train official, in a blue suit, would stand erect outside the door of the small station building holding a small pole with a circle end piece, green on one side and red on the other. We saw mostly men but Rebecca pointed to one woman, with a uniform of black tights and a black skirt. Most wielding this pole were young. Rebecca suggested that “maybe this was a good, stable job in the village.”

About an hour into our Cluj to Suceava trip we noticed the conductor coming down the aisle toward us talking to a couple of passengers. It turns out car #4 had lost its heating and he was trying to find a passenger who could tell us this and that we could change cars if we wanted. Our car would be replaced in Suceava so if we wanted we could stay. All of this was done with no drama with two passengers explaining the situation to us.

About an hour from Suceava, a middle-aged scruffy looking man gently pulled my aisle seat tray down and placed a worn, typed note on it. Rebecca quickly translated it to say “I am deaf and dumb and could use the help of one lei or 10 lei. Thank you for your kindness.” Lei or Ron is the Romanian currency and is roughly a quarter of an American dollar. So he was asking for 25 cents or $2.50. I watched him walk up the aisle and sit down. I also noticed the conductor followed a few minutes later. We have seen this scene many times in Romania. In a restaurant or in this case a train car, apparently with the tolerance of officials, people who need are allowed to ask or to sell something.

My notes tell me that it was somewhere around the village of Frasin, about 50 kilometers from Suceava, that I had this insight. Romanian trains, even the fast ones, are slow because many Romanians still live in these little villages we passed through from Cluj to Suceava. Many of these places, like many of the small towns in Iowa, where we live, are dying. They are the left behind in our increasingly calloused world.

Slow trains are a humane way to minister to this phenomenon.

1832 pulled into Suceava at 4:28 pm. Five minutes late.