Thank you, everyone, for your reviews! Please keep reviewing, and I'll try to keep updating as frequently as I can. This chapter is all Erik for a change.
Chapter 13 – From the Second Prison
Erik was determined to have a pleasant, quiet journey. It had certainly started out agreeably enough: he located the Sedan train without undue hassle and walked along the snake of the steel construction, searching for the right carriage. Passing the windows of the third class, he glanced up and had cause to remember with some gratitude the woman who had recommended that he take second: through the dim, grimy glass, he could make out rows of wooden seats being taken up by a somewhat raggedy crowd, like a Montmartre street being squashed into a tiny space. People sat down shoulder-to-shoulder, so close together and so hemmed in by all their boxes, bottles, bags, children, parcels and the like that there seemed scarcely room to breathe among them.
The second class was far more to his liking.
Erik took his seat in an empty compartment and stowed his bag under the padded bench. He opened the curtains on the window – then shut them at once: some people on the platform had looked inside, just as he had looked into the other carriages. The sensation of being on display for every curious pair of eyes, powerless to direct their attention or control their response, was nothing to relish. He unclenched his fists, taking a few moments to chase thoughts of freak-shows back into the deep well of the past. The horror slid back, obedient.
Really, this was almost simple. Certainly simpler than putting up with the bright daylight of the draughting office while he focused on his work. Here, the compartment was his alone: the two facing benches and the little table by the window that could be folded out of the way, all of it smelling faintly of wood-polish and dust. Not exactly lavish interior decoration, but a vast improvement on the crush of the third-class carriage. He could get used to this.
Erik seated himself more comfortably and took out his copy of La Lanterne, the most recent. The magazine had been imposed on him by Jean from the day he took up residence in Montmartre, apparently in the interests of fostering his political and social enlightenment. Erik had to admit there really were some interesting things to be learned. He flipped over to the article he had been reading – a scathing indictment of the disorganised French military, written with vicious, brilliant sarcasm – and prepared for a peaceable journey.
In the space of two minutes, his compartment was invaded by three other men of various ages and body shapes, all with bags, and a young woman in possession of a peacock-feather hat, which took up the rest of the room. Erik felt very much like the French military was currently feeling, if La Lanterne was to be trusted: entirely unprepared.
He tried to reach for his bag, thinking to make a strategic retreat, but a glance out to the corridor assured him that his chances of another empty compartment were non-existent: people were hurrying and calling out things like, "I say, here's an empty one!", doors banged, and a loud whistle outside only added a new urgency to the pandemonium.
It appeared to be the normal state of affairs for a train due to depart, and none of the other passengers shared Erik's discomfort. The men had seated themselves in as dignified a manner as could be accomplished in so small a space, while the lone woman perched elegantly across from him, by the window. Naturally, she then felt the need to draw the curtains wide open.
Erik moved back from the window as far as he could; not very, considering the wall at his back. This entire arrangement was beginning to grate on his nerves. He tried to engross himself in his reading; it was difficult, to say the least, when he considered spending the next several hours penned up in a steel box with all these creatures.
"Rather stuffy in here, isn't it?" said the young lady, fanning herself with yet another peacock construction, perhaps the hapless bird's tail. "May I open the window, monsieurs?"
"Certainly," said one of the men, "Let us have some air."
The upper pane of the window was duly opened, without regard for Erik's unvoiced protest. Then another whistle sounded – and something began to happen to the train. At first Erik thought he was dizzy, and the platform seemed to move before his eyes; a second later he realised the train had started to move very slowly, in a peculiarly gentle fashion. It gathered speed, the platform with all the hurrying people moving past and some station official in a red cap waving a flag – then quite suddenly they left the station behind and sunlight blazed in the compartment.
From that moment on, Erik was glued to the window.
He forgot all about the other passengers, his reading, about being stuck in a minuscule cramped space. First there were other trains, hurtling past in a tremendous blur of windows and rattling steel – then houses and trees and lamp-posts and smaller houses flashed by as Paris melted into suburbs. They passed the fortifications and Erik felt the breath lodge painfully in his throat: he had not been past these walls since he first came to the Opéra. A prison – a second prison he had never even suspected, and now he was out. Before his ravenous eyes, the view opened out all the way to the horizon, searing him with the staggering, alien immensity of the countryside.
They passed vineyards, then yellow and ochre fields like cloth of gold, but with the texture of velvet, rippling and suffused with light. He had seen paintings, but no canvas could possibly have done justice to this light, to the way it seemed to fill the very air. Rows of cypresses separated fields, spear-like and almost black against the sky. The train crested a rise, and it was like being lifted above the land, offered everything at once: from the precise edges of the fields and orchards that fitted together like a puzzle, down to the tousled trees sloping from the field to the gravel of the railroad, the whole world lit by a brilliant whiteness in a sky so vividly blue that it hurt to look – and yet it was not harsh, this daylight, but joyous. The occasional cloud cast shadows on the land, and in the distance small dark shapes moved peacefully: cows or perhaps horses. A glittering river, sister to the black canals he had loved. The supports of a bridge in the distance. The steel ribs of the bridge they were crossing, blurring in and out of phase, like two pieces of lace rubbed together against the light. The train shrieked and applauded with its wheels in the crazy elated symphony of freedom. More fields again, the river vanished.
He must have seen all this as a child, Erik knew, but all he could remember were vague shapes through slits in a sack. A pain welled up in his chest, such anger – to have been deprived of all this! – but he could not seem to make the thoughts real; it was too important that he look now and remember. Remember everything, everything. A few isolated cottages appeared, then hills with a church spire in the distance that suggested an invisible town nestled in a valley.
The train plunged into blackness. Before Erik could blink it was suddenly out – a tunnel. He was speechless at the speed of it, the suddenness with which everything happened and was left behind. He had felt the stale breath of the darkness through the window, a scent of earth, and now they were in the open again. He pressed his fingertips to the glass, and the vibration became music.
"I say! Monsieur! Hello?"
Erik became aware that someone was addressing him. He turned quite slowly, keeping his hand to the window, unwilling to be parted from it, feeling as a man woken up from a pleasant dream to a less-than-stellar reality.
"What is it?" he demanded of the intruder, an anxious-looking young man in a cap and buttoned-up jacket.
"Your ticket, sir," the conductor gulped, with the earnestness that suggested it was his first day on the job. "You do have one?"
Erik produced the little paper, at which the young man looked visibly relieved.
Duty completed, he looked around the compartment: "We'll be stopping at Reims to change engines around six thirty, so there should be plenty of time for a stroll."
"What a nuisance!" complained the big-bellied gentleman next to Erik, folding his paper to a new page. "Do you suppose they'll keep us waiting long?"
"Shouldn't think so, sir," replied the conductor cheerfully. "Half an hour at most. We'll be in Sedan before you know it."
The gentleman's only response to this was a long-suffering look, which the other passengers around Erik echoed variously with, "As usual!" or "Ah well, it is to be expected with this war." The young conductor departed, courteously shutting the door behind him.
"Every month I travel this way," Erik's neighbour told him. "And each time they say, 'oh, we'll be there at nine on the dot!' – you wait and see if we're there before ten! And now, what with all these troop movements, you can be sure they'll be taking the engines down to Châlons and who knows what that's going to do to the schedules."
Erik made an inarticulate sound of irritation, which the other man took for assent. He longed to return to gazing out the window, but he was fast coming to the conclusion that this would be considered strange behaviour, and it would be folly to give these people cause to spend the next few hours staring at him. Keeping his head turned away so as to keep as much of the bandage to the wall as possible, Erik finally said:
"I doubt they would be taking engines from here. They're crossing the border down towards Saarbrücken."
This was an unwise move; the red-cheeked gentleman fairly blossomed with the apparent offer of a political discussion.
"Oh, you have the new Lanterne!" he exclaimed in pleasure, spying Erik's neglected magazine on the table. "So, you think there's some truth to what they say about Bavaria then? Could they really have a secret alliance with Bismarck? Because if they were to push against us from the South, that'd catch us in a fine old trap—"
It was shocking, still, to be spoken to this way, but Erik found the role was starting to grow on him. At any rate, he experienced no great difficulty in parrying the man's entirely nearsighted arguments about the war, and from there it was only a short step to opinions of a general nature, about soldiers and the government and the indolence of the so-called working class. To his own puzzlement, Erik felt some displeasure at such blanket condemnation of the people he had come to know in Montmartre, and before long he was tied up in an argument on the subject of fair pay and all sorts of other nonsense, with which he had evidently been filling his own head all unknowing throughout his stay above the Gandons' store. Not without irony, he reflected that Jean would be gratified to hear him now.
It took a full hour before he managed to extricate himself from the conversation and return to the window; by which point Erik decided he had done all the social duty expected of any gentleman, and if anyone else felt the desire to talk to him, they could damn well talk to his back. This did not seem likely, however, as the two younger gentlemen had in the meantime identified a mutual acquaintance whose political views they were now discussing in some detail, and the lady had spent the entire trip engrossed in some novel. Erik turned his attention back to the sunlit vineyards outside. The music came back to him, this time with a clear, simple melody. He watched, and listened.
The train stopped fairly often, mostly at small stations that seemed to rise out of nowhere; each time accompanied by scuffing boots and muffled voices from the corridor as new passengers boarded or alighted. At one such station, Erik took out a pencil and began to scribble idle notes on the inside back page of the magazine, where there was hardly any type. By the time the train pulled into the next station, he realised what it was he was composing. Not just a song – a voice. Her voice. Christine's clear, aching voice weaving into melody all the fields, the vineyards, the sky, even the rhythmic comforting rattle of the wheels. He traced the staff with a fingertip, hearing her, feeling her soar. So beautiful...
So wrong.
The realisation jolted him. He was putting words into Christine's mouth, again. He had promised himself, promised!
Erik tore the page from the magazine and scrunched it up, stuffing it into his pocket. The woman sitting across from him looked up curiously from her novel; Erik ignored her. He stared out the window, pulse racing, trying to shed the disgust at his own weakness, trying to forget Christine's song in his soul. He could as well have stopped his own heart from beating; the song lived. It was fortunate that just then the train began to slow once again, this time bringing them into Reims.
Erik had never felt more grateful to be outside, or more genially inclined towards the random buzzing of a crowd. The platform took the song from him at last, and at length he was able to buy some indescribable fried thing from a vendor, wrapped in brown paper, and consume this in a fairly unpopulated corner of the station. While he ate, he watched another train being assembled at a siding, two third-class carriages being coupled to a locomotive. A large group of men dressed identically in red trousers and navy-blue jackets loitered around, and Erik realised these were soldiers, waiting for their transport.
Food seemed to help. By the time the train resumed its journey, Erik felt more human, and thankfully there was no more music in his head. This cheered him enough that he did not mind too much that the stop stretched well past the promised half-hour, and even condescended to join in the general grumbling on the subject with the other passengers, once the five of them were again assembled in their compartment. The train pulled out at last just as the light turned softer, edging from afternoon into a fine summer evening.
"Cards, perhaps?" suggested Lenoir, one of the two younger gentlemen, when the lamps were lit inside.
The young lady declined, offering laughingly to keep score while the gentlemen played.
It was only when Lenoir began to deal that Erik realised they were including him.