From the Dust Returned

And at last she smiled, for she heard the right answer fall from her lips:

“I have never in my life had a lark.”

“Lark!?”

“My life was that of a stuffed owl. I was not a nun, yet never married. Treating an invalid mother and a half-blind father, I gave myself to hospitals, tombstone beds, cries at night, and medicines that are not perfume to passing men. So, I am something of a ghost myself, yes? And now, tonight, sixty-six years on, I have at last found in you a patient! Magnificently different, fresh, absolutely new. Oh, Lord, what a challenge. I will pace you, to face people off the train, through the crowds in Paris, then the trip to the sea, off the train, onto the ferry! It will indeed be a—”

“Lark!” cried the ghastly passenger. Spasms of laughter shook him. “Larks? Yes, that is what we are!”

“But,” she said, “in Paris, do they not eat larks even while they roast priests?”

He shut his eyes and whispered, “Paris? Ah, yes.”

The train wailed. The night passed.

And they arrived in Paris.

And even as they arrived, a boy, no more than six, ran past and froze. He stared at the ghastly passenger and the ghastly passenger shot back a remembrance of Antarctic ice floes. The boy gave a cry and fled. The old nurse flung the door wide to peer out.

The boy was gibbering to his father at the far end of the corridor. The father charged along the corridor, crying:

“What goes on here? Who has frightened my—?”

The man stopped. Outside the door he now fixed his gaze on this bleak occupant on the slowing braking Orient Express. He braked his own tongue. “—my son.”

The ghastly passenger looked at him quietly with fog-gray eyes.

“I—” The Frenchman drew back, sucking his teeth in disbelief. “Forgive me!” he gasped. “Regrets!”

And turned to shove at his son. “Troublemaker. Get!” Their door slammed.

“Paris!” echoed through the train.

“Hush and hurry!” advised Minerva Halliday as she bustled her ancient friend out onto a platform milling with bad tempers and misplaced luggage.

“I am melting!” cried the ghastly passenger.

“Not where I’m taking you!” She displayed a picnic hamper and flung him forth to the miracle of a single remaining taxicab. And they arrived under a stormy sky at the Père Lachaise cemetery. The great gates were swinging shut. The nurse waved a handful of francs. The gate froze.

Inside, they wandered off-balance but at peace amongst ten thousand monuments. So much cold marble was there, and so many hidden souls, that the old nurse felt a sudden dizziness, a pain in one wrist, and a swift coldness on the left side of her face. She shook her head, refusing this. And they stumbled on among the stones.

“Where do we picnic?” he said.

“Anywhere,” she said. “But carefully! For this is a French cemetery! Packed with disbelief. Armées of egotists who burned people for their faith one year only to be burned for their faith the next! Pick! Choose!” They walked. The ghastly passenger nodded. “This first stone. Beneath it: nothing. Death final, not a whisper of time. The second stone: a woman, a secret believer because she loved her husband and hoped to see him again in eternity … a murmur of spirit here, the turning of a heart. Better. Now this third gravestone: a writer of thrillers for a French magazine. But he loved his nights, his fogs, his castles. This stone is a proper temperature, like a good wine. Here we shall sit, dear lady, as you decant the champagne and we wait to catch our train.”

She offered a glass. “Can you drink?”

“One can try.” He took it. “One can only try.”

The ghastly passenger almost “died” as they left Paris. A group of intellectuals, fresh from seminars about

Sartre’s “nausea,” and hot-air-ballooning about Simone de Beauvoir, streamed through the corridors, leaving the air behind them boiled and empty.

The pale passenger became paler.

The second stop beyond Paris, another invasion! A group of Germans surged aboard, loud in their disbelief of ancestral spirits, doubtful of politics, some even carrying books titled Was God Ever Home?

The Orient ghost sank deeper in his X-ray-image bones.