Here's an old tale (almost 30 years now, yikes) that I posted on
another board. The topic title was "The Kindness of Strangers."
***
We were traveling from Amsterdam to the south of France, via the sleeper train from Brussels to Nice etc. When we got to our compartment in Brussels, the conductor told us that the last supper sitting was about to happen, so if we wanted dinner we should hustle forward to the dining car or else have to live on “snack bar” food or worse till morning. We left everything in the compartment, which he said he would lock.
At dinner we shared a table with a fascinating Canadian man who was working with an international agriculture agency (NGO) headquartered in The Hague. He was traveling to Paris that evening. We were intrigued by his stories – he had worked all over the world and had witnessed things like the fall of Saigon, Tehran during the hostage crisis, things like that. I absentmindedly noticed during dinner that the train had stopped somewhere in western Belgium or eastern France; somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. But then it started again and all was fine.
Dinner lasted through dessert, then coffee, then a brandy, and we were swapping stories and having a fine old time, until the dining car people started ahem-ing rather loudly, so we bid our adieus and we headed back to our compartment.
We didn’t make it all the way. I looked through the little window in the door between the last seating coach and the first sleeper, and saw…tracks, receding into the dusk. Evidently the stop during dinner had been when they’d disconnected the sleeping cars and attached them to a different train, which was now headed south to the Cote d’Azur, while we were standing in the remains of the train that was now barreling toward Paris. Oops.
When I say we left everything in the sleeping compartment, I mean everything – plane tickets, bags, passports, coats, cameras, toothbrushes, everything. My wife, bless her, had taken her handbag to dinner, in it her wallet, in that her credit and cash cards and drivers license, and maybe 100 Belgian Francs and a couple of Guilder. No FF.
We went a-searching for a conductor or anyone in a uniform, and found nobody, except our Canadian dinner companion. We explained what had happened, and he offered to help as best he could, which none of us knew how to define.
We ended up back in the dining car, where the only person present was the headwaiter, counting and sorting the various banknotes left for tabs and tips. By this point my and my wife’s French had well and truly given out (“Please, how do you say imbecile?”) but our Canadian friend came to the rescue, explained our plight, and the waiter grudgingly agreed to call the conductor, who he knew was up in the locomotive schmoozing with the drivers (at least I hope that was all.)
The conductor arrives, our friend explains, and we receive a world-class series of Gallic shrugs. Can he see our tickets? Geez, no, they’re on the OTHER TRAIN.
Well, you’ll have to wait until we get to Paris, which is now an hour or so away, and maybe someone there can sort you out. I ask (through our new interpreter) what happens if the sleeper train arrives at its terminus (Ventimiglia, just over the Italian border) and nobody’s in our compartment. Well, he said, your stuff is piled on the station platform. Okey-dokey.
We arrive at the station in Paris (Gare de l’Est I think) and it’s late and everything’s shut. The conductor points the 3 of us toward the station manager’s office, shrugs, and vanishes. We march up to the office and our friend talks our way into the office, where we meet the SNCF station manager, a chain-smoking woman in a pixy cut and a black-on-black outfit. Our friend tells our story to her, and (I kid you not) she looks at us, grimaces, and says, “Oo la la..” In my many days and nights in France I have never had this said to me before or since.
The three of us stand there, two of us sheepish, while she goes through a couple more Gauloises. She says something to our Canadian savior, and he tells us he’s been dismissed. He’s now a couple of hours overdue for his hotel (early meeting the next day) so we thank him for the hundredth time and he goes.
The station manager asks us (French, but I’m managing, sort of) if we have any French money. No. Do we have an ATM card? Yes. Okay, you will need around 500F (around $80 at that time), get it from the ATM in the main concourse. Why? You’ll see.
She picks up the phone and barks words, and presently a smallish Algerian or Tunisian man appears. She writes a note on a slip of paper, shows him, and hands it to me. It says “Valenton.” More barking at the guy, then okay, she says, go with him, via the ATM. Bon chance (Gringos.)
I use my wife’s cash card at the ATM, trying with partial success to keep the guy from seeing the PIN. He leads us out into the night (pretty chilly and us with no coats) to his – aha – taxi.
We then roar through the night, up on to the Peripherique, making like a Mirage, out of town to the south.
Half an hour later he pulls off the Autoroute and onto a side road, then another turn and we are on a dirt road, deep in the dark boondocks. My wife is contemplating swallowing her wedding ring at this point. We bump along for a couple of minutes until we come to a lone house with a light on. Our driver goes to the door and knocks on it; a man in an undershirt appears (PO’d possibly?) and indicates no, you idiot, not here. More bumping and we come to another identical building. Another knock, this time the guy’s in a shirt. Yes, this is it. Get out, go in. It is about 2 AM.
We gladly fork over the 300F cab fare and add another 100F for not killing us. Off the cab goes, and upstairs we go with the new guy. We emerge into… the war room. On all four walls are enormous computer screens and diagrams of the French railway system for the Paris region, with crawling, blinking lights, numbers on readouts, colored shapes on black. The room is occupied with four or five people sitting at consoles. One console starts making a beeping noise and the attendant pushes a button and the beeping stops. All look up at the big board, where no doubt tragedy has just been averted.
We are told to sit over there and be quiet (except for our teeth chattering, which we could not control) and we do so for half an hour. Then one of the men gets up and motions for us to follow him outside. He grabs an old-fashioned railway lantern, and proceeds to lead us across dozens of sets of railway tracks, waving the lantern as he goes, no doubt so the TGV traveling at 300 kph will have time to stop.
Finally we arrive at a cement pad, where we wait for about two minutes. A train pulls up, slides forward until we are opposite a door in one of the coaches, stops. Our sleeping car conductor looks down on us and says, “Oh there you are.”
A few hours later we raise the curtain and look out on the Mediterranean in the morning sun’s glare, and we start to process how lucky we were to have been befriended, and saved, by two or three strangers. A night to remember, full of kind people.
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