Summary
Cobbled streets glisten like obsidian beneath a Budapest moon as two lovers—she, a dancer whose limbs remember every revolution of 1919, he, a railway engineer who can recite timetables the way poets recite sonnets—discover that Compartment 111 of the night express is less a carriage than a purgatorial confession booth. Their assignation, arranged by coded telegrams, collides with a smuggler’s cache of monarchist gold and with the spectral presence of a third passenger: a countess in furs who may be the dancer’s future self come to audit her own remorse. What follows is a hurtling montage of steam, thighs, and iron—cross-cuts between velvet-lined coupés and the locomotive’s roaring steel heart—until identities detach like overheated rivets: the engineer pretends to be a defector, the dancer feigns amnesia, the countess keeps producing passports the way magicians produce doves. When the train is sidelined at a foggy border station, the trio must decide whether to disembark into a new republic or stay aboard the hurtling myth they have co-authored. The final image—three silhouettes framed against the furnace glow, their clasped hands forming a human coupling—freezes into a single, vibrating frame that refuses to resolve, as though history itself were holding its breath.
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