Shoplifting at Dracula's,
cont'd.
My first journey unsupervised by
adults took place when I was 14, and it came about quite
spontaneously. Early one ordinary Saturday morning I met Paul,
an Ecolint schoolmate, in downtown Geneva. We wandered about a bit, then took
the F bus across the French border to Ferney-Voltaire, quondam home town of the
eponymous philosophe, and wandered
about there for awhile, enjoying the French-small-town feeling and having a tartine or thé citron. Then, after we’d exhausted the attractions of Ferney,
and not wanting to go home just yet, one of us (aye, reader, ‘twas I)
impulsively stuck out a thumb; a car stopped; we got in; and before we could do
anything about it we were over the Jura and well on our way into the heart of
Burgundy. Deposited at the roadside by our first driver, we hitched a ride on a
tractor-drawn cart into a farming village, from where—as in a scene from a Tati film—two giggling
nuns in a 2CV drove us to a wayside station … and here I pause for station
identification. It was, as close study of maps later determined, Hauteville-lès-Dijon,
a commuter stop about four miles outside of Dijon itself, in then-leafy
semi-rural surroundings. The day was warm and sunny and the still air was
threaded with the buzzing of bees. Fagged out from hitching, we pooled our
coins and crumpled banknotes and discovered that our weekend allowance would be
just enough to allow us either to take the train back to Geneva or go on to
Paris. No prizes for guessing which destination we chose. So we settled in on
the platform of Hauteville-lès-Dijon station to wait the hour or so for the
train into Dijon, where we would catch the Paris express. At first I dozed in
the sun, lulled by the hum of the bees. Then, suddenly, chaos intervened: an alarm bell suddenly ripped through the torpor
and continued to ring ear-piercingly, with unwavering monotony, for small
eternities of five minutes …ten …fifteen. There was no visible emergency; no one appeared; no hand stilled
the din. The longer the bell rang, the crazier the episode became, and the
more deserted the place seemed. Whether it was a fire alarm, or part of a
security system, or an air raid warning left over from the war, we never knew;
it rang and rang and rang. Eventually, driven nearly deaf and mad, we ran
across the tracks and barged into the station in search of someone to complain
to. But, as in a Twilight Zone episode (which the whole incident closely
resembles in my mind), the waiting room was empty; the ticket counter was
unmanned; the WCs were locked; the platform was deserted; and through the hot
still afternoon air the alarm bell drilled remorselessly into our skulls. Then
we noticed a door behind the ticket counter marked “Chef de Gare”
(stationmaster). In the din of the bell, there was no point in knocking, so we
opened the door and stepped into a small unkempt office. Dusty sunlight leaked
through the sagging blinds. On a desk were unruly stacks of paper. There was a
lopsided calendar on the wall. On the far side of the room was a cot. On the
cot a body was lying on its side, facing the wall. We stared. The bell went on
ringing. The sun shone. Then, at that very moment, with cinematic timing, the train for Dijon pulled in and
before we knew it we’d flung ourselves out of that room, across the tracks and
onto the little suburban Micheline.
The alarm bell never stopped, and for all I know it may be ringing yet. But Paul
and I were and are grateful that we never saw the face that was turned away from us. It might have been, and probably would have been, no more than the
sour, crumpled countenance of a hungover stationmaster, but there was something
sinister about that body’s utter stillness throughout the cacophony of the bell
that had been ringing long and loudly enough to wake the….
Anyway, we made it to Paris in the end, and slept
on the banks of the Seine, where we were kicked awake by a drunken clochard. We pissed away the little
money we had left on ham-and-cheese sandwiches and cigarettes and bottles of
mineral water (ah, those pre-drinking days) and a book from the Seine-side
bookstalls on how to pick up girls (typical advice: enroll at a medical school
and you’ll meet lots), and slept on the floor of a cheap lodging house on the
Rue St. Roch; and after a couple of days’ aimless wandering and a series of
angry phone conversations with our justifiably aggrieved mothers, we boarded
the Geneva express at the Gare de Lyon and our adventure was over. But not
forgotten.
