The Same River Twice Read Free

listening,” she said.
    “When we fill out the customs declarations, why not have one of us claim all five bags, the other just personal effects. We tell them we are traveling separately, for baggage inspection we split up. So in the event—the very unlikely event—that something goes wrong, they have only one of us to execute.”
    Odile flared her lips unhappily. “This is new. I don’t like it.”
    “If you don’t like it, we won’t do it. But you do see the logic?”
    “No,” she said. “Which one of us claims the bags?”
    His eyebrows raised, Thierry drew deeply on his cigarette and flipped it away. “Obviously a man is better suited to the situation, so by good sense and natural law I am selected.”
    She had to conceal her surprise. Five days with him had led her to the opinion that Thierry rarely strayed far from the precincts of self-interest.Where he could, she believed, he avoided his share of hazard, and Odile now grew wary of both him and his proposal. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Are you going to get all the money, too, since you’re taking all the risk?”
    “Don’t insult the hero, my dear. Duty requires concentration.” He seemed to be taunting her, and laughed. The train slid into a curve that sent him staggering, but he caught himself on the handrail. “We’ll split the money as before, naturally.”
    “Macho posturing. That’s all this is.”
    “I told you: if you don’t like it, we won’t do it.” Bracing himself against the door to the next carriage, he suddenly grew formal. “Now,” he said, “a toast.”
    “No more toasts, Thierry. Come on.”
    “To the bear!” he proposed, lifting his bottle to her. “To the bear and not the shit!”
    In the end, Odile had to enlist the help of the Russian vocalists in getting him back to the cabin, where, with a final declamatory snort, he toppled onto his couchette and passed decisively from consciousness.
    THE TRAIN MADE STOPS irregularly throughout the rest of the night, sometimes at stations attached to towns but also at others set seemingly alone amid low, rolling hills. Later the terrain flattened out into floodplain laced with streams, luminous in moonlight, and later still the plain gave way to marshland.
    At daybreak, wide awake in her seat by the window, Odile washed her face with bottled water, brushed her hair and pinned it up. Watching Thierry sleep made her own wakefulness painfully acute, and she examined him now with the pinpoint attention of someone given only minutes to construct a life-saving device from common kitchen utensils. In fact, her husband’s first feature film contained exactly such a scene, flashes of which now fired off unbidden in her mind. Her earlier episode of déjà vu, riding between cars with Thierry, had left her unpleasantly quickened.
    When the train entered the outskirts of Brest, she woke him up. He was wretched and poisoned, ill-disposed to talk. She put on lipstick and perfume. He changed his socks. Ten minutes later they rolled to a grinding stop at the Brest station, just a river’s width from Poland, and they descended with their bags and all their fellow passengers into the frigid morning.
    Built in the Stalinist style of the 1950s, the station was more mausoleumthan depot, with a big arched entryway and a cavernous hall into which they now passed unspeaking. Here was ruin. The chandeliers that had once lit the hall today hung twisted and dark from the blistered ceiling. Plaster peeled away from the walls in sheets, doorways were boarded up. But as their eyes adjusted to the dim light, Odile and Thierry saw that the hall also held a large crowd of would-be passengers, elbowing one another and pushing forward in quiet struggle while militiamen with pistols looked on.
    “Stay here with the bags,” she told him. “I’ll be right back.” He shook his head in disgust and seated himself on the suitcases, now grouped in shadow just inside the hall.
    Edging into the crowd,