At the train station in Zurich, on platform number three, there is a woman who has been waiting, every day for fifteen years, with a bouquet in her hand.
In the beginning, I didn’t want to believe it. I had already made several journeys to see Egon Ammann, my German language publisher, before I noticed her; then it took me a long time to formulate my surprise, because the elderly lady looked so normal, so dignified, so noble, that you paid her no attention whatsoever. She was dressed in a black woolen suit with a long skirt, and wore flat shoes and dark stockings; an umbrella with a knob sculpted in the shape of a duck’s beak emerged from her handbag of cuir-bouilli; a mother of pearl barrette held her hair in a chignon against her head, while a modest bouquet of wildflowers, with a dominant orange note, made a small splash of color in her gloved hands. There was nothing that suggested she might be a madwoman or an eccentric, so I had attributed my encounters with her to chance.
One spring, however, Ulla, one of Ammann’s colleagues, met me on the platform by my carriage, so I pointed out the strange woman.
“It’s very odd, I think I’ve seen this woman more than once. What a coincidence! She must be waiting for my double, someone who always takes the same train that I do and at the same time.”
“Not at all,” exclaimed Ulla, “she stands there every day and she waits.”
“Who for?”
“Someone who doesn’t come . . . because she goes away again every evening, alone, and comes back again the following day.”
“Really! How long has this been going on?”
“Well, I’ve been seeing her for five years but I spoke with a stationmaster who says he noticed her at least fifteen years ago!”
“Are you making fun of me, Ulla? This sounds like a novel!”
Ulla blushed—the slightest emotion turned her crimson—then she stammered, laughed in confusion, and shook her head.
“I swear, it’s true. Every day. For fifteen years. In fact, it must be more than fifteen years, because each of us has taken years to notice her presence . . . So the stationmaster must have as well . . . For example, you’ve been coming to Zurich for three years and you’ve only mentioned her today. Maybe she’s been waiting for twenty or thirty years . . . She’s never replied to anyone who asked what she was waiting for.”
“She’s right,” I concluded. “Besides, who could answer such a question?”
We could not elucidate the matter any further, because we had to turn our attention to a series of interviews with the press.
I didn’t think about it again until my next trip. The moment “Zurich” was announced over the train’s loudspeakers, I recalled the woman with the bouquet and wondered, will she, yet again . . .
She was there, vigilant, on platform number three.
I looked at her closely. Light eyes, almost the color of mercury, on the verge of fading away. Pale but healthy skin, marked by the expressive claw of time. A thin body, still in good shape, that must once have been nimble and vigorous. The stationmaster was exchanging a few words with her, and she was nodding, smiling amiably, and then she went on her way, imperturbably, staring at the railroad lines. I was able to note only one eccentricity: a folding canvas seat, that she carried with her. Or was that the sign, rather, of a practical nature?
As soon as I arrived at the Ammann Verlag, after changing trams several times, I decided to conduct an investigation.
“Ulla, if you please, I must find out more about the woman with the bouquet.”
Her cheeks went raspberry.
“As I was sure you would ask me again, I’ve come prepared. I went to the station and chatted with a few members of the staff, and now I’ve become very friendly with the man who runs the left luggage.”
Well aware myself of how easy it was to like Ulla, I had no doubt that she had managed to extract as much information as possible. Although she can be abrupt, and slightly authoritarian, with a piercing gaze as she looks at her interlocutors, she offsets her rather strict approach with an explosive sense of humor, and the sort of joviality one would not expect from someone with such dark features. If she befriends everybody easily, it is because she is basically well-disposed toward people—and irrepressibly curious as well.
“Even though she spends her days outside on the platform, the woman with the bouquet is anything but a tramp. She lives in a fine bourgeois house, in a leafy street. She lives alone, with the daily help of a Turkish woman in her fifties. Her name is Frau Steinmetz.”
“Frau Steinmetz? Will the Turkish woman tell us who she’s waiting for at the station?”
“The Turkish woman hurries away the minute you go up to her. This I found out from a friend who lives in a neighboring street: the maid speaks neither German, French, nor Italian.”
“Then how does she communicate with her mistress?”
“In Russian.”
“The Turkish woman speaks Russian?”
“As does Frau Steinmetz.”
“This is all very intriguing, Ulla. Were you able to find out this Frau Steinmetz’s marital status?”
“I tried. I wasn’t able to find anything.”
“A husband? Children? Parents?”
“Nothing. Let me be precise: I can’t swear she doesn’t or didn’t have a husband, or children, I only am saying that I don’t know.”
At teatime, over some macarons, the employees and the publisher Egon Ammann himself came to join us, and I brought up the subject once again.
“In your opinion, who is she waiting for, the woman with the bouquet?”
“Her son,” answered Claudia. “A mother is always hoping that her son will come.”
“Why her son?” asked Nelly, annoyed, “Why not her daughter!”
“Her husband,” said Doris.
“Her lover,” amended Rita.
“Her sister?” suggested Mathias.
In actual fact each of them, in their answer, was telling their own story. Claudia suffered from not seeing her son, who was a professor in Berlin; Nelly’s daughter was married to a New Zealander; Doris was pining for her husband, a sales representative constantly away on business; Rita changed her lover as often as her underwear; as for young Mathias, he was a pacifist and a conscientious objector, doing his civil service by working rather than serving in the army, and clearly he was nostalgic for his family cocoon.
Ulla looked at her colleagues as if they were all mentally retarded.
“None of that, she’s waiting for someone who died and she can’t accept the fact.”
“That doesn’t change a thing,” exclaimed Claudia. “It can still be her son.”
“Her daughter.”
“Her husband.”
“Her lover.”
“Her sister.”
“Or a twin brother who died at birth,” suggested the laconic, solitary Romy.
We looked at her: was this her own secret she was entrusting us with, if not that of the lady with the bouquet? She always seemed so sad.
To try another tack, I turned to Egon Ammann.
“And you, Egon, who do you think she is waiting for?”
Even though he kept company with us, Egon never said a great deal during these breaks, which he must have found childish. He is a passionate man, with intelligent eyebrows, a distinguished nose, he’s read everything, and deciphered everything for sixty years, getting up at five o’clock in the morning to light his first cigarette and attack his pile of manuscripts, plowing through novels, devouring essays. It is as if his very long white hair were carrying the traces of an adventurous life—the wind from the countries he has seen, the smoke from the tons of tobacco he has burned, the dreams contained in the books he’s published. So although he professes nothing, and does not moralize, he impresses me with his constant curiosity, his appetite for discovery, his gift for languages; next to him I feel like an amateur.
Egon shrugged, looking out the window at the great tits fluttering on the blossoming linden tree, and said, “Her first love?”
Then, embarrassed by his confession, furious at such a slip, he frowned and gave me a harsh stare.
“And what’s your theory, Eric?”
“A first love who will never return,” I murmured.
There was a silence in the room. We had all understood the trap. Through this unknown woman, we had divulged our most private wishes, confessing the very thing that we were waiting for, or could wait for, in our deepest soul. How I would have liked to be able to get inside their skulls, to know them better. And yet, how greatly I appreciated the fact that they did not get into mine. What a painful place it is, this brain of mine, this enclosure of unvoiced words, this dark sanctuary guarded by my temples! There are certain words I could not utter without collapsing. How much better to keep silent. Do we not all find our depth in our silence?
Back at home, I went on thinking about the woman with the bouquet. On subsequent trips to Zurich I traveled by car or plane, and I did not have the opportunity to go through the station.
A year or two went by.
What was odd about that woman with the bouquet was that I forgot her without forgetting her, or rather I thought about her at times when I felt somewhat lonely, at times when it was impossible to question anyone . . . Her image haunted only those moments of helplessness. Nevertheless, I did manage, one day when I was talking to Ulla on the telephone, to bring her up again.
“Yes, yes, I assure you: she’s still there. Every day. Platform number three. To be sure, she’s beginning to look tired; from time to time, she dozes off, sitting on her seat, but then she gets a hold of herself, and she picks up her bouquet and looks up and down the platform.”
“She fascinates me.”
“I can’t see why. Although she doesn’t look it, she is surely just out of her mind, an unfortunate madwoman. Besides, nowadays, with cell phones and the Internet, you don’t go and greet someone on a station platform, do you?”
“What interests me, it’s not why she’s waiting on the platform, but who she’s waiting for. Who can you be waiting for like that, for years, or even your entire life?”
“Beckett, waiting for Godot.”
“A sham! For him, the point was to show that the world is absurd, that there’s no God, and that we are wrong to promise ourselves anything in this life. Beckett’s a street cleaner, he’ll sweep earth and sky and send all your hope—stinking refuse—to the dump. What I find interesting about the woman with the bouquet is that there are two questions she inspires. The first one: who are we waiting for? The second: is it right or wrong to wait?”
“Here, I’m going to hand the receiver to the boss, he’s been listening to our conversation. He’s got something to read to you.”
“Eric? Just one sentence for you. ‘What is interesting in an enigma is not the truth that it hides, but the mystery that it contains.’”
“Thank you for the quotation, Egon.”
I hung up, fully suspecting that on the other end of the line they must be laughing at me.
Last spring, I went once again by train to Zurich to give a lecture. Obviously, the moment I climbed into the carriage, I could think of no one but her. I was looking forward to seeing her again, peaceful, smiling, faithful, indifferent to everyone, attentive to something we knew nothing about. She was a woman we had only glimpsed for a few seconds, and yet we spoke about her for hours, as if she were a sphinx hiding a secret, an inexhaustible ferment for our imagination.
As we came into Zurich, I mused that there was one certain thing we knew: she was not waiting for any of us. Could it be that our silence, our disinclination to probe further, our intermittent forgetfulness were all rooted there, in that humiliation, the fact that she looked right through us as if we were all invisible?
“Zurich!”
As I stepped down on the platform I noticed her absence at once. A few bystanders had just left platform number three behind them—a spotless, empty space.
What had happened to her?
As I went through Zurich on the tram, I refused to indulge in hypotheses. Ulla must know, Ulla knew, Ulla would tell me. So I concentrated on looking out at this unusual city, both rich and modest, a grandmother’s dream, where buildings seem to have been constructed for the sake of the geraniums beaming down from windowsills, a peaceful town as sleepy as the lake resting against its side; while behind its thick walls, deals are being made with powerful economic consequences. Zurich has always seemed mysterious to me because of its absence of mystery: while we Latins think that anything that is dirty, meandering and profuse is adventurous, Zurich is well behaved, clean, and neatly ordered, yet it becomes strange for its very—extreme—lack of strangeness. It has the charm of an elegant lover, wearing a bow tie and tux, the exemplary son, the ideal son-in-law, yet it is capable of committing the worst debauchery the moment the door is closed.
At the Ammann Verlag, I got my chores out of the way—discussions, program—then I made the most of a break to go and speak to Ulla between two doors.
“What happened to the woman with the bouquet?”
She rolled her eyes, aghast.
“As soon as we get a minute, I’ll tell you.”
In the evening, after the lecture, book signing, and dinner, we went back to the hotel, exhausted. Without saying a word, we sat down at the bar and pointed to the cocktails we wanted, then I switched off my cell phone while Ulla lit a cigarette.
“Well?” I asked.
I had no need to be more specific. She knew what I was waiting for.
“The woman with the bouquet was waiting for something, and whatever that something was, it came. That’s why she isn’t there anymore.”
“What happened?”
“My friend at the left luggage told me everything. Three weeks ago, the woman with the bouquet suddenly got up, radiant, her eyes full of wonder. She waved in the direction of a man getting out of the carriage, and he saw her right away. She threw her arms around him. They embraced for a long time. Even the baggage handlers were moved, she radiated so much happiness. The man was tall, wearing a long, dark coat, and no one recognized him because a felt hat partially hid his features; from what they were able to tell me about him, he didn’t seem at all surprised to see her there. They left the station arm in arm. At the last minute, she did something rather whimsical: she left her canvas seat on the ground, as if it didn’t belong to her. Oh, I nearly forgot the strangest detail: the man was traveling without a suitcase, and the only thing he had to carry was the orange bouquet she had given him.”
“And then?”
“My friend who’s a neighbor told me the rest. Did I mention him? He lives one street over from Frau Steinmetz.”
“Yes, yes. Go on, please.”
“That evening, the man went with her into the house. She ordered her maid to go out and to only come back the next day. An order which the Turkish woman duly obeyed.”
“And?”
“She didn’t come back until the next day.”
“And?”
“When she came in, the lady with the bouquet was dead.”
“Pardon?”
“Dead. A natural death. Her heart had stopped.”
“It couldn’t have been the man . . .”
“No. There was no doubt about it. The doctors confirmed she’d had a heart attack. He is completely innocent. Particularly as he—”
“Yes?”
“He had disappeared.”
“What?”
“Whoosh. Gone! As if he had never been in the house at all. The Turkish woman claims she never saw him.”
“And yet you just—”
“Yes. My neighbor friend testified that the man went in the house but the maid denies it, totally. In any case, the police aren’t interested one way or the other, because there’s nothing suspicious about her death. My friend is keeping quiet now because the more he insisted, the more the neighborhood took him for a cretin.”
We sank further into our leather armchairs and started on our cocktails. We thought for a moment.
“So there’s no trace of him? No information about him?”
“None at all.”
“Where did his train come from?”
“No one could tell me that.”
We asked the barman for a second round, as if the alcohol might tame the mystery.
“Where is the Turkish woman?”
“Gone. Back to her country.”
“And who inherited the villa?”
“The city.”
So no motive of foul play could provide an explanation. A third round definitely was called for. The barman began to look at us with a worried air.
We were silent.
Ulla and I could make nothing more of the story, but we still enjoyed thinking about it. Ordinarily, life kills off stories like this: there are mornings when you feel that something is about to begin, something pure and rich and unique, then the telephone rings and it’s all over. Life chops us up and scatters us, leaves us in fragments, refuses the clean brushstroke. What was special about the woman with the bouquet was that life took a certain shape again: her fate had all the purity of literature, the economy of a work of art.
At two o’clock, we left each other to go off to sleep, but sleep was slow in coming: until morning I sought to know who the woman with the bouquet was waiting for on platform number three at Zurich station.
And I think that until my very last day, I will wonder whether it was death, or love, that alighted from the train.