These Dreams of You

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Zan wonders if they should get off the Eurostar at Brussels and change trains there for Germany. But the disadvantage of changing in Brussels is that it would involve yet another change of trains in Cologne; if the father and son continue another hour south onto Paris, they can catch a direct overnight train heading to Berlin. Zan was planning to get a couchette for his son on the Paris-Berlin train but the boy insists he doesn’t want to be in one part of the train while his father is in another, and Zan remembers years before when he went to Berlin, during his breakup with Viv before Parker was born, learning the hard way that european trains subdivide in the night while you sleep, whisking you off, if you’re on the wrong car, to somewhere else.

The flaw of Zan’s Paris-connection plan is that there’s only half an hour between the Eurostar’s arrival at the Gare du Nord and the departure of the train to Berlin from the nearby Gare de l’Est. Counting too much on the newly teutonic timeliness of London trains, including the sleek Eurostar, and the ease of maneuvering the ten-minute walk between stations, Zan leaves his plan behind him in the dark of the Chunnel, once the express finally begins to move.