It was about four in the afternoon but the sky was already a dark, steely, grey colour. Our train was heading South through the Austrian countryside and I kept thinking that the scenery that flew past the window looked like a painted backdrop from a Cary Grant movie. It was all black hills and green fields and white snowy mountains with goats perched on sharp peaks and farmers in olive green capes.
Marty and I had been travelling together for more than two weeks and I was already bored with the limited selection of tapes we’d brought for our Walkman. He leaned against the window and shut his eyes as he listened to the music. I watched the veins on the back of his hands dancing to the beat and I could tell he was listening to ‘The The’.
Looking up I met the eyes of the woman sitting opposite me.
She was about sixty years old and her soft brown hair was pulled back in a bun at the back of her neck. She was neatly dressed in a brown wool suit that looked like she’d just taken it out of the box. I watched her anxiously rubbing her hands together and I smiled. She asked me if I spoke German and looked terribly disappointed when I shook my head. She spoke no English but we discovered that we both spoke French.
Marty took one of the plugs out of his ears for a minute and nodded while she and I introduced ourselves. When he went back to ‘The The’ she leaned a little closer to me. She spoke softly and carefully and she never took her eyes off mine as she began to recount the events of her life. Her French was eloquent and practiced as if she’d been telling the same story over and over in her mind for years.
She told me she’d always lived in the small village – she was born there, had married there and had had four children there. Her life would have ended without being remarkable in any way, she told me, if it wasn’t for the war. Her husband and sons had gone off to fight and the village had been occupied by the Germans.
She and the other women of the village hated the Germans and risked their lives by showing support for the foreign prisoners who were being held in the town jail. They brought them food and blankets and spent as long as they were permitted chatting to the men about their homes and families. In the course of these visits she met a handsome young, French soldier. Her face shone as she described his broad shoulders and deep blue eyes. Little by little, she told me, she had fallen in love with him. When the other women had gone, she would sneak back to the jail and bribe the guards to spend precious minutes alone with her soldier. He told her he loved her and that some day, when he was free, he’d take her back to France with him.
But when the war ended he had gone back to France and her husband and sons returned from fighting. Her life resumed its pre-war routine but she never stopped dreaming of her French soldier, the only man she had ever, or would ever love.
They corresponded over the years. He wrote at first to say that he missed her and then the letters stopped for a bit. Then he wrote to say he was getting married. Then he wrote to say that he was working on such and such a thing or going to this place or that and then he wrote that his wife had died.
Then, she told me, two weeks ago he had written to say he would be in Salzburg. For three days she hadn’t slept or eaten. She had dreamt of him her whole life long and now she had the chance to see him. She had answered his letter, lied to her family, and left her village for the first time in her life.
“You know,” she said softly sobbing, “he was just an old man”.
In her heart he had been a tall, handsome French soldier with broad shoulders and deep blue eyes and now he was just an old man shrunken with age and her dream, and the only love of her life were gone.
She would go home now, she told me, and wait to die. Her eyes filled with tears and she leaned back in her chair, she said that in more than thirty years she had never mentioned any of this story to anyone.
Marty looked up and asked me the time as the train pulled into the next station. The woman rose silently and took my hand, she held it for a moment and then left the train.