1975, Gare d’Austerlitz, Paris, France

By Allan M. Lees

Albert Einstein famously dismissed the implications of quantum mechanics with the quip, “God does not play dice.” Unfortunately for Einstein and in fact for anyone trying to understand the deepest implications of physics, it really does seem as if chance rules at the sub-atomic level. And if it rules at the sub-atomic level, does it really rule less at the scale of supermarket aisles and upscale nightclubs?

Chance is the name we give to events that aren’t pre-planned, that just happen while, in the words of John Lennon, we’re making other plans. Mostly we don’t notice these chance encounters because they don’t mean much to us. That old street person who tried to talk to me yesterday afternoon will quickly fade from my memory because it didn’t add up to anything in my life. Today I remember his wiry beard and the pungent smell of his worn clothes and unwashed skin; next month I’ll probably read these words and struggle to find any trace of him in my memory.

We’re all pretty terrible at understanding chance. We like to ascribe meaning to what happens to us, otherwise the universe seems awfully vast and empty and we feel awfully alone.

I suppose I was feeling pretty alone all those years ago when, at 16, I found myself standing on the platform of the Gare du Austerlitz in Paris watching my train pulling out of the station, utterly beyond my reach and therefore utterly without hope. I had the equivalent of $7 in my pocket and I knew no one in Paris and I spoke only the most rudimentary French which, at that time, genuine French people took delight in pretending not to understand. I was, in short, screwed.

After standing and staring at the empty tracks for five long and lonely minutes I realized I had to find somewhere to sleep, because it was late and dark and cold on that platform. Fortunately, in those far-off days before terrorist bombings and psychotic vagrants and people-smugglers, the waiting rooms were large and warm and open 24 hours a day.

Inside the waiting room were four long wooden benches, one against each wall. Two elderly but fat nuns sat on one bench, a large picnic hamper between them and a half-empty bottle of cheap red wine by their feet. On the bench to the left of the door, seemingly asleep, lay a young woman. I looked at her because that’s what 16-year-old boys do: They look at pretty girls and wonder, “What if…?”

I sat down on the bench to the right of the door and thought about my options. My family was in Spain and I knew my mother was too unreliable to check the rural station subsequent to the arrival and departure of the train I should have been on. So even if I took the next day’s train I’d just be compounding my problem, getting stuck somewhere in the dry Spanish plains without money or much Spanish to fall back on.

But with only $7 and no return ticket I couldn’t get back to England, either. In addition I was hungry, not having eaten since early that morning. And in those distant days the station café closed at 10 p.m. It was now 10:47 p.m. and so I was stuck with being hungry until tomorrow morning. I sat and tried not to think about croque-monsieurs and café au lait and jus d’orange pressé.

Some time after midnight the girl on the bench sat up. She looked around and then, for reasons I still don’t fathom even after more than four decades have passed, she got up and came over and sat down right next to me. She smiled and even with all the cumulative experiences of the intervening years I can honestly say I’ve never again seen such an open and radiant smile. As though she’d known me all her life she initiated our first conversation.

She wasn’t like the mad people who sit next to you on public transport and cause you to get off before your intended destination, simply to avoid their monomaniacal attentions. No, she was unique. She was light and charm and optimism and grace and ease and hope rolled into one small perfect package.

And yet she was more: She was also a mischievous sprite who thought nothing of tip-toeing barefoot across the tiled waiting room floor to purloin the half-empty bottle of wine that rested in the space between the two now-snoring nuns. She turned to smile at me as she delicately inserted one slender hand into the picnic basket and extracted both bread and cheese. And she smiled again as she fed me with morsels from her fingertips, teasing my open mouth and seducing me with her light-hearted abandon.

Her name was Ethne and she was a runaway. Her adoptive parents lived in Lausanne but her birth mother had been Irish. She was just my age but a world more experienced. She’d been living off her wits for weeks and was now making her way to Padua, where she knew a girl who would take her into the family home for an indefinite period of time. So she had to slip onto a train to Rome and then from Rome head north and then it would all be accomplished and she could rest for a while – and no doubt conduct extensive anthropological research into the inner workings of the Northern Italian Male.

All that night we whispered secrets and confidences to each other. She told me of her many lovers and I told her of my own three very modest experiences. She told me about dodging train inspectors and I told her about learning to sky-dive. By 3 a.m. I had fallen hopelessly in love with Ethne and by 4:07 a.m. she had invited me to go with her to Padua.

And so began my five weeks of earthly heaven and hell.

Ethne and I, though bleary with tiredness, made our way onto the Rome Express a few minutes after it pulled up at the platform. Only the perpetually bored Moroccan cleaners were around at that time of the morning and they didn’t care about two tired European teenagers climbing onto the train without tickets. So we had plenty of time to search the carriages for a place where we could hide and we eventually found a small storage cupboard that could be jammed shut once we were squeezed tightly inside.

The only way we could fit in was for me to go first, my back against the metal wall, then for Ethne to back in against me and pull the door shut with her hands. And so it was that we subsided into darkness, pressed so firmly against each other that, as she giggled, we could feel each other’s heartbeat.

I remember how painfully excited I was and how my swollen penis pressed into the crevice of Ethne’s firm butt. And yet, despite all that, the next thing I remember is waking up to the rocking motion of the train and the all-penetrating clickety-clack as the train rattled down the rails towards its destination. We’d done it! We were on our way to Rome.

Of course we were both young and therefore it wasn’t any surprise that we soon consummated our nascent relationship in that tiny dark storage cupboard. Through efforts worthy of a professional contortionist, Ethne removed her lower clothing and made herself accessible to my insistent phallus. And so it was that for the next several hours we conjoined blissfully in the most inauspicious environment imaginable, exceeding all my thoughts of what was possible until we were both utterly sated. And then we fell asleep.

There’s a kind of optimism about youth that can exist simply because the inevitable disappointments of life have not yet over-written our natural enthusiasms. And so it was for the next two weeks. We spent two days in Rome as underground tourists, sneaking into the classical sites and stealing food wherever we could find it. When we arrived in Padua we smelled terrible and probably looked worse, but that didn’t stop us enjoying each other five glorious times during the trip up from Rome. By then Ethne smelled of me and I smelled of her. We were commingled in every way. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.

But Ethne was an untamed soul and I was too young to understand that. Equally I was much too young and vulnerable to accept her adventures with the dark-eyed Italian boys of Padua. I raged at her, I committed all the follies a naïve young man can commit, and eventually I left Padua with a broken heart to return, alone, to the damp and rainy shores of England. I thought the terrible ache in my heart was all I would ever have left of Ethne.

But we are often wrong. I have been wrong many times since and I was likewise wrong then. Chance may create situations but character develops them. Life is improvisation transformed by determination. In mathematical terms, life is stochastic. And so it was for me.

Several months after my return to England I received a letter from Ethne. It was a long, passionate letter telling me all about herself and her experiences. She did not apologize or allude to the manner of our parting. She wrote as one old friend to another, sharing confidences and encouraging reciprocation. I held out for a few days, nursing my amour-propre, and then replied.

That set the tone for the next ten years in which we exchanged dozens of letters but somehow never managed to meet up in person. As the years passed I think we each realized that during those short intense weeks we had exchanged some vital part with one another; henceforth we were, in some inexplicable way, coupled as tightly as any long-married pair.

And so it went on. Ethne and I did meet again. The next time was 16 years later, at which time I was married and she was newly divorced. I wanted her badly but did not want to break my marriage vows so our meeting was cordial, with the necessary restraint creating a kind of barrier between us. Three years later I was divorced and she was remarried but she was always wiser than I so this time we did fall into bed almost immediately and then there was no restraint. I enjoyed her as a mature man enjoys an experienced woman. I count those days as the best of my life and I shall recall them with joyful clarity in my dying moments.

Since then Ethne and I have continued our correspondence from all parts of the globe. I have remarried and she has experienced many and varied relationships with both men and women. We have shared the best parts of ourselves in our letters and we have gained succor from the knowledge that there is one person in the world who will always understand, always sympathize, and always hold on to love everlasting.

The last time we met we were both, I think, surprised at how time and age have imposed their inevitable scourges on us. For she remembers me as that innocent young man sitting alone on the wooden bench, and I remember her as that vibrant nymph tiptoeing barefoot across the waiting room floor. Now we are wrinkled and our children are older by far than we ourselves were back then in those distant days.

But we are still playing, Ethne and I, the eternal game we began in the waiting room of the Gare du Austerlitz, when the dice of chance threw us together at the same moment in time and space.

Allan M. Lees has been creating stories for his children since they were very little and he will continue to do so until they are old enough to steal a car and escape. His day job comprises (in descending order of difficulty) working with humans, computers, and biologically active molecules; his evening job comprises being regularly humbled by his aforementioned children. Allan’s very modest literary success to date includes several published stories, a now-deservedly-out-of-print novel, a radio play, and many megabytes of wasted hard drive space.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 | Email This Post

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