Эд Макбейн - Mothers and Daughters

They ate lunch in the town of Brig. Everyone spoke German. The ladies’ room was filthy. There was one towel on the roller mechanism, and it had been used repeatedly, and fat women in flowered house dresses rolled the towel and dried their hands on the same smudged material over and over again. There were young men singing and marching in the streets, knapsacks on their backs. They loaded the car onto the train, and made certain they asked for first-class tickets. The ride was fairly comfortable. A man sitting next to them was eating bread and cheese, and for the first time in her life, Julia felt like an American. The man knew what she was, and his knowledge touched something inside her, so that being an American suddenly became something of which to be very proud. She was a tourist, true, and she had heard all about the terrible Tourist and the impression he created abroad, the fat Texas oil millionaire with his Leica camera around his neck and his cigar in his mouth, desecrating the cathedrals of the old world, treating Europeans like foreigners on their own soil, generally playing the stereotyped role of the fat American capitalist boor. She had heard the stories, and she was a tourist, yes, but she felt completely and utterly American, and the feeling was a good one. She did not know whether the man sitting across the aisle eating bread and cheese liked Americans or disliked them or was indifferent to them. Nor did she particularly care. Being American was enough. She had never been farther west than Pennsylvania nor farther north than Massachusetts, nor farther south than Washington, D.C. But sitting in a first-class coach on a train racing through tunnels toward the Italian border, she suddenly felt the overwhelming geographic length and breadth of her country, was suddenly intimate with grain fields and mountains and seashores and deserts and canyons and cities and towns. All of America, all of its people and places, suddenly surged into her and became a part of her, giving her an existence separate from her own — and yet indistinguishable from it. She was an American. The title gave her pleasure.

She wondered all at once if she were getting homesick.

Domodossola lay in intense sunshine, a town carved out of the base of a mountain, a town of white walls and tiled roofs, a border town with a temporary border feel. The train had stopped at Berisal on the Swiss side, and the Swiss customs officials had come through and made a cursory check of passports, and then the train had stopped again at a small depot just over the Italian border. The Italian customs men had marched through the compartments with a greater sense of duty and purpose, asking Millie to open one of her bags, which embarrassed her because she had packed all her underclothing on top, never expecting a thorough customs inspection, spoiled by the French and Swiss border men. The Italian who’d been eating his lunch got into a voluble argument concerning his passport, which, from what Julia could gather, had not been properly stamped or validated or something, and the Italian customs officials in their green uniforms with their revolvers strapped to their sides seemed in favor of shooting the man on the spot if it would facilitate getting the train into Domodossola. They finally straightened it out. When the customs men left, the lunch eater muttered “ Fetenti! ” under his breath, and Julia smiled and looked through the window as the train picked up speed again and came into the broiling border town.

DOMODOSSOLA, the signs read.

Domodossola.

She rolled the name on her tongue, savoring it. She knew instantly that she would love Italy. She tried her Italian on one of the trainmen, asking him where the car would be unloaded, and the man pointed across the tracks to where a lone shed stood in the sunshine. He told her to wait there. The flatcars carrying the automobiles would be uncoupled, he said, and attached to another engine, and then brought to the unloading platform near the shed. She understood perhaps one-third of his monologue, but she understood his pointing finger completely, and she and Millie went through the station and walked to the shed. Two men and a woman were already standing there, waiting for their cars. There was no shade anywhere. There was no overhang on the roof of the shed, and the shadow it cast was a meager one, adequate if one were sitting — but unfortunately, there was nothing to sit on. The sun was intense. A leaking water spout trickled drops onto a flat shining rock. The sun glistened along the railroad tracks, gleamed from the harsh white walls of the buildings.

“I wonder how long this will take,” Millie said.

Julia wiped perspiration from her upper lip and nodded briefly. The Italians had struck up a conversation with each other. She eavesdropped, trying to catch the flow of language, trying to adapt her ear to the sound. She had learned Italian a long time ago, in college, and she’d been only a fairly good student. But she was certain she would learn to speak it fluently now that she was here. Already, she was beginning to pick up the musical cadence.

The wait became interminable. The waterdrops ticked off time on the flat rock. No one seemed to know what had happened to the flat-cars carrying the automobiles. Every time a new engine appeared in the distance, one of the Italians would say “ Eccola! ” and a feeling of relief would sweep over the small band standing in the sunshine near the shed. But the engine was never the one hauling the flat-cars, and the relief was instantly followed by disappointment, and finally by suspicion. From what Julia could gather, one of the Italians was certain the cars had been sent back to Switzerland. “ Queste porche ferrovie! ” he muttered darkly, and she gathered his opinion of Italy’s railroads was not very high, despite il Duce’s ability to get trains in and out of stations on time. The flatcars did not appear until an hour later. When the engine pulled into view, a spontaneous cheer went up from the little group. The Italians began nodding and smiling. One of the men, standing in his shirt sleeves, was perspiring profusely, giant wet blots under his arms and across his chest. He fanned himself with a straw hat and turned his free hand to Julia in a gesture of helplessness and apology, nodding his head. Julia smiled. The train pulled in, and a platform man yanked the chocks out from under the wheels of the automobiles and adjusted the unloading platform to meet the deck of the flatcar. The three Italians unloaded their automobiles first. Julia drove the Simca off the platform and Millie got into the car and sighed deeply.

“Thank God,” she said. “I’m exhausted.”

Julia looked through the windshield. A border official in a green uniform was stopping each car. The owners of the automobiles were showing him some sort of identification. Passports, she supposed, and watched as the cars ahead of her were waved on. As she approached the official, he shouted “ Alt! ” and she put on the brake and waited for him to come over to the window on her side.

“ Carnet ,” he said. He extended one gloved hand, palm up.

“What is it you want?” Julia asked, and then quickly translated in halting Italian, “ Che cosa vuole? ”

“ Carnet ,” the man said. His hand remained extended.

“What does he want, Julia?” Millie said.

“I don’t know. My driver’s license, I suppose.” She opened her bag, found her wallet, took out her Connecticut driver’s license and handed it through the window.

The man shook his head. “ Carnet, carnet ,” he said.

“He must want the registration,” Millie said. “All the papers are in the glove compartment, Julia. Give him those.”

Julia sighed, opened the glove compartment, took out the papers the Paris auto rental agency had given them, and handed them through the window. The border official leafed through the various papers, shaking his head as he studied each one. Then he handed them back to Julia.