The Night Bus

After midnight the number eleven bus carries only what is left of the city: nurses going home from the hospital, laundry bags, drunk students, and people who simply cannot sleep.

Kelemen sat on the back seat, by the left window, because from there you can see the bridge.

The woman got on two stops later. She was small, in a dark coat, and she sat down in the middle of the long bench as if marking out her place: not by the window, not by the door. All the way she looked outward, though at that hour on a bus window a person only sees their own reflection.

At Margaret Bridge Kelemen stood up, because his stop was the third. And that was when he noticed the glove.

It lay on the seat where the woman had been sitting: a thin, dark brown leather glove, for the left hand. The kind a person does not lose by accident — the kind a person puts down.

Kelemen picked it up. The bus slowed before the stop, and he called after her:

“Excuse me! Is this yours?”

The woman turned. She was young, perhaps thirty, and under her eyes were the kind of dark circles that are not made by one night.

Then she said:

“It isn’t mine. But I know whose it is.”

The bus doors opened. The driver watched them in the mirror. Kelemen held the glove in his hand, and suddenly felt that if he got off now, he would never find out what had happened.

He did not get off.

He sat down beside her, two seats away — because in this city that distance is decency — and asked:

“Whose is it?”

“My sister’s,” said the woman. “She died two months ago.”

The bus started moving. The bridge lamps slid past the window one after another, and Kelemen very slowly put the glove back down on the seat, exactly where he had found it.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Everyone says that.” The woman looked at him properly for the first time. “Why did you get on this bus?”

“Because I can’t sleep.”

“Since when?”

“No.” Kelemen looked at his hands. “Nine years. Since my wife left. Not died. Left. That’s different.”

The woman nodded, and the nod was both sympathy and recognition.

“My sister came home on this bus every Thursday after her shift,” she said. “Every Thursday I came to meet her at the second stop. I haven’t come for two months. Tonight I got on anyway.”

“Why tonight?”

“Because tonight is Thursday.” The woman smiled, but not happily. “And because this week they gave me her glove at the office, and I didn’t know what to do with it. I can’t throw it away. I can’t wear it. I can’t keep it in a drawer.”

Kelemen looked at the glove. It lay on the seat, motionless, the way objects do when they no longer belong to anyone.

“I have a suggestion,” he said. “But it’s foolish.”

“Tonight, everything foolish fits.”

“Leave it here. Every Thursday, on this bus, on this seat. It doesn’t have to belong to anyone. It just has to be somewhere your sister used to be.”

The woman was silent for a long time. The bus crossed the bridge, and the Danube was black, and along the bank the lamps burned yellow, like someone keeping watch.

“That isn’t foolish,” she said at last. “That’s… practical.”

“I am the saddest kind of practical man.”

The woman laughed. It was a short, surprised laugh, the kind that makes a person forget it is night.

At the second stop the woman stood up. Kelemen did too.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Nowhere. I’m just walking the glove.”

They got off. The stop was empty, only a lamp burning and a dog watching them from behind a gate. The woman laid the glove on the bench — the bench at the stop, not the bus — and took one step back, as if setting down something heavy.

“That’s good,” she said.

“That’s good,” said Kelemen.

Then they stood there, the two of them, at half past midnight in an empty bus stop, and neither of them moved to leave.

“If you get on this bus again next Thursday,” said the woman, “then we’ll meet.”

“I might not get on.”

“I know.” She started towards the corner. “But the glove will be here.”

Kelemen stayed another minute. Then he reached for the glove — not to pick it up, only to straighten it so it lay neatly — and set off home across the bridge.

The following Thursday the glove was no longer there.

But the woman was.