A soft, warm wind blows down the platform and is the first sign that a train is approaching. Moments later you can hear the rattling rush of noise and the light at the front, just beneath the driver’s cabin, illuminates the last stretch of track before the whole length of the train escapes the confines of darkness to brake and screech to a standstill along the entire length of the platform. The man at the end where the train emerges from the tunnel can feel the first whisper of breeze – he is ideally positioned to do so, standing so close to the entrance. As the wind travels along the passengers, and the sound of the approaching train becomes audible, all eyes turn to the mouth of the tunnel, in the expectation of a normal train arriving on a normal afternoon in the normal way. But today at this hour on this day is not normal. The man jumps onto the track and calmly sits down between the twin rails, his back to the already breaking locomotive. The nape of his neck is at the precise height on the driver’s cabin where a nine inch long metal bar protrudes ahead of the rest of the front of the train. It is a nice calculation. It is a deliberate piece of positioning. It is a planned and precisely executed act by this hopeless soul. It is a suicide.
My sixth sense was triggered the moment the man moved towards the edge of the platform. As he casually hopped down onto the track another man tried to grasp for his arm and shouted something in Russian. I buried my wife’s face in my shoulder and ushered her round the pillar and out of sight from the carnage that was a second and a half away. “It’s a suicide”, I said, as we hurriedly made for the up escalator. Once these events happen there is the bland bureaucracy of delay as the station is shut down, the remains of the body are retrieved from underneath the train like instalments in a horror story and witnesses are interviewed. We made for the open air and street level. No one down there on the Metro was going anywhere soon.
The Moscow Metro. It is deep. It is magnificent. It is scary to navigate. It is a museum underground. The oldest stations on the Ring are monuments to Sovietism. Each one is unique. They are all testament to the boast that nothing is too good for the Proletariat. In winter, the warmth provides comfort to the homeless and the police tend to leave them alone to ride, hunched in their seats but comfortable and safe against the minus temperatures above ground. The police patrol most stations, often with dogs and always in groups, but there were none in evidence on the day of the suicide.
Suicide is a problem for all major city underground systems. And overground systems, too. As a regular train user, I have several times experienced my intercity express train screech to an abrupt stop, usually near a crossing. The passengers know something is awry and there are usually three doleful notes played over the intercom asking for the Train Manager to contact the driver. The passenger announcement that ensues is replete with euphemism, usually along the lines of “an incident involving a pedestrian”. We the passengers, all know that a passenger versus a locomotive travelling at 125mph is a one sided contest. Somewhere underneath our seats will be the scraped remains of a fellow human being. Instead of dwelling collectively on the tragic sequence of perceptions on life’s events that drove the person now prone along the underside of the train, we tut and shake our heads at the inconvenience. A suicide, in my experience, delays a service by at least a couple of hours. Regular train goers know this and settle in for the duration in a resigned silence whilst the emergency services attend to the scene, the driver is interviewed and then offered counselling for the post traumatic shock and the appeal for witnesses goes out. A suicide is a selfish act – it inconveniences so many people. It has consequences for others: missed meetings, worried loved ones waiting on platforms for people who don’t arrive; the knock on effect of the line being blocked and other trains being delayed or re-routed. This is possibly the most amount of attention the suicide will have been paid in their miserable state. And here is the tragedy. In dying so flamboyantly, in choosing the certainty of an almost instantaneous death offered by an eight or 12 carriage train colliding brutally with a flimsy human body, the suicide is at once negating her own existence and also bringing it to the world’s attention more forcibly than in an entire lifetime of endeavour. Is this calculation a factor in the choice of despatch chosen by the suicide or are they so beyond reason and so plunged into despair that none of this plays through their mind?
All I know for sure is that anyone placing themselves in the way of some two thousand tons of train travelling at speed is serious about committing suicide. This is not a cry for help. There is precious little left of the person to help. This method is the choice of those who mean it. That it is so inconvenient for all those of us just getting on with the day to day business of living, those for whom life still has at least some flavour and interest, is a side effect. We are but extras in the fleeting moment when another life had brief meaning to us all. Though it is often quickly forgotten as we move along. Train suicides do not go gentle into that good night. They burn brightest when they are at the end, brighter than magnesium as their souls are released at last from whatever torment they have endured here on Earth.
I remember the man on the tracks in the Metro station back in Moscow. I could not bear to look. But I bear witness to another human’s existence and am sad that he was so sad he chose such a means of self-execution.