النص
The Last Train Home
هذا نص أدبي: الشخصيات والأحداث من نسج الخيال.
The last train from the city left at 23:40, and Nadia caught it with seconds to spare. She dropped into a seat, breathing hard, her violin case on her knees. The carriage was almost empty: three students asleep against the window, a woman talking quietly on her phone, and, opposite Nadia, an elderly man in a grey coat and hat who was doing a crossword with a pencil.
For twenty minutes, nobody spoke. Then the train slowed, shuddered and stopped in the middle of nowhere. The lights flickered. A voice announced that there was a fault on the line ahead and that passengers should expect a delay of at least an hour.
The man sighed and put down his pencil. “Well,” he said, nodding at the violin case, “I don't suppose you'd consider playing something? It might be the only good thing about tonight.”
Nadia hesitated. She had just come from an audition for a music college, and it had gone badly. Her hands had been shaking so much that she had stopped halfway through the piece and started again. She hadn't planned to touch the violin for days. But the man was looking at her so hopefully that she found herself opening the case.
She played a slow folk tune her grandmother used to hum. The students woke up. The woman at the far end of the carriage ended her call. When Nadia finished, there was a short silence, then a round of applause from her audience of five, which somehow sounded louder than any applause she had heard in a concert hall.
“You know,” the man said, “I taught music for forty years. The ones who shake are usually the ones who care.” He told her about a student of his who had failed three auditions before being accepted, and who now played in an orchestra abroad. He didn't say whether the story was true. Nadia decided it didn't matter.
The train started moving again just after one in the morning. At her station, the man raised his hat as she stepped onto the platform. Two weeks later, a letter arrived offering her a second audition. She never found out his name, but that day, just before she walked into the room, she played the folk tune again.