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It is that kind of
November morning that transforms individual breaths into a communal fog that
continually and systematically replenishes itself. At 7:15am, in a
grey-skied Geneva, Switzerland, the train platform is flooded with patrons shifting
their weight from foot to foot in a futile attempt to stay warm. The
pea-coated crowd looks down the track in eager anticipation for the
train enroute for Lyon to arrive. If it arrives.
Most of the bleary-eyed
ticket holders attempted to leave Geneva the previous evening, but were denied
due to an unanticipated train-employee strike that canceled locomotives for the
day. Several furrow-browed individuals hyperbolize on the personal inconvenience
they experienced as a result, spinning a narrative akin to a Shakespearean
tragedy. But the train does arrive, to the convenience of all, and it's
whistle hushes the complaints.
The crowd impatiently
boards the train, filling every seat. An older man with a full head of
white, well-trimmed hair asks a slightly anxious looking girl if the seat
next to her is taken. She doesn't speak any French, but the man doesn't
know that. But, she nods in admission since the question is communicated
clear enough through hand motions, and immediately returns her attention
to a book held open on her lap. The man takes his seat near the window as
the train races from the station, as if in an attempt to make up for lost
time.
The older gentleman
notices her fingers and cheeks are flushed red, and comments instinctually on
the observations. She looks up from her half-read page in confusion and
stammers in whispered English, "I'm sorry...I...I don't speak any
French," shamed by her incompetence.
He doesn't speak much
English, but he strains back through his cobwebbed memories in a desperate
attempt to dust off some vocabulary from his grammar school lessons. With
gusto and a bit of chivalrous flair, he utters: "Hands...cold?"
She smiles at his obvious
effort to communicate and nods. They know there was nothing else to say
in the absence of common language, so they simply settle into an agreed silence
as the train clacks on the rails in the steady rhythm of kilometers
passing by.
Later in the ride, the
man looks over at the young girl again, and is unexpectantly swept into a
bitter-sweet recollection of his own daughter. She had once looked very
much like this young woman seated next to him, but he had failed her as a
single father. His daughter had fallen into a bad way, due to the
influence of friends and the absence of a mother's intuition, and had overdosed
on some drug he couldn't remember the name of. He enforced solitude sense
then, as penance for outliving his progeny.
Suddenly the ache of
melancholy floods him, and he doesn't see a stranger, he sees his daughter,
innocent and healthy - and alive - seated beside him. Reflexively, he
reaches out to hold her hand, as if he could trap the memory of a better time
in place between their palms.
The contrast of
temperatures and textures - his warm, work-callused hand and her half-frozen,
work-ignorant hand becomes a tangible thing. The young girl starts and
looks up confused, but the old man isn't looking at her. He is lost in
nostalgia, staring out the window, as individual tears danced down his
emotion-worn face.
The girl at first thinks
to pull her hand away from his gentle grasp, but then she sees his damp cheek,
noting the glisten of a tear's wayward trail painted there, and she
changes her mind. She longs to say something sympathetic, but she doesn't
speak any French.
Instead, she speaks in
the only language they have in common: a simple holding of hands. Even a
cold hand can be warming in the attempt of wordless comfort. So they
remain just so, without a word, for the rest of the train ride.
The Lyon station sign
glides past the window, and as the girl is sorry to get up, to break the
enchantment of silent sympathy . The man releases her hand at her first
stirring, and their eyes meet in a brief farewell as she steps off the train,
in France at last.
The train pulls away,
carrying the old man on to a destination unknown to the girl. She ponders
on the trajectory of loneliness, which weaves you into the unknown lives of others
without warning. And in that moment, she discovers loneliness as the
necessary condition to speak the deepest language of comfort, all without any
words at all.
Then, quite suddenly, her
hands are cold again.
