The evening, amusingly, was one cliche piled on top of another, separated only by disposable rain ponchos and wet paper tickets. It was also bizarre, enlightening and a little frightening.
First, the cliches
It really was a dark and stormy night.
We really were lost in a strange city.
We (thought we) were the only passengers on the last train.
We were at the end of the train line in a deserted station.
Second, the editorializing
We also were hungry, our feet hurt and we were bickering with each other over whose fault the lack of plan was, and whether lacking a plan was really a fault. As an adventurer with deep and unshakable wanderlust, to me, I do not find fault in lacking a plan. Just sayin’.
Now, the bizarre, enlightening and frightening
Literally, out of nowhere, The Visitor appeared. We had been alone on the train, and were on the last car, so he couldn’t have entered behind us.
He was completely dry, which, considering the weather, was nearly impossible. He toted neither jacket nor umbrella. All he had was a metal box. The box was also dry. He carried it freehand - no briefcase, plastic bag or backpack - just the box in his alopecia-riddled hands.
The box, like The Visitor, looked neither old nor new. It was pristine with nary a dent nor ding, had a lid but no lock. Wider and shorter than a shoebox, it held my attention as he asked, “is this the red line? Where is the Dermond stop?”
“We are the wrong folks to ask, sorry,” Kev responded kindly. Kev is an eye-contact kind of guy, but he was looking over The Visitor’s head while speaking to him, while I kept my eyes on the emergency button.
“Do you at least know if this is the red line?” The Visitor asked.
“I don’t know if it’s red or blue, but they all go the same place for the first 5 stops out of here,” my daughter, AJ, replied, pointing out the public transit map over the door on the opposite side of our train car.
Rather than going to look at the map, he sat down beside us. I instinctively edged closer to AJ as the train finally started to move. Kev was looking over The Visitor’s head again. I was in hyper-vigilant mode, even noticing the tiny Princeton insignia on his off-orange polo shirt. I was surprised that Kev was so relaxed with the encounter.
“Is this the red line?” The Visitor asked again.
“I don’t know, but either way, we’re the third stop,” I said, too brightly, too loudly and too eagerly.
“Then I have to give you your history lesson quickly,” The Visitor said, whipping off the top of the mystery box. My heart stopped, started, and stopped again as his show-and-tell unfolded:
”This is my dad. He was 115 pounds, 5’3” and 36 years old when he enlisted to fight in WWII. He was 51 when I was born, I was only 14 when he died and at 18, I found his satchel, journal and flags from his time fighting the Germans.”
Out came a leather messenger bag, aged like my face, from which he withdrew a journal and opened it to show is his father’s meticulous writing. He flipped to a page mid-way through the small notebook, and held it up while he pulled a small, pale blue, triangular piece of fabric from the box. It was adorned with a swastika. I choked down the bile when he suggested we touch it. “It has over 1,000 silk beads woven into it. They took it off of a German officers’ car.”
I really didn’t want to touch it, but he was rather insistent. AJ asked if she could take a photo of it. He set down the journal and held up the insignia in both hands for her to snap.
“We have only one more stop to go,” AJ said, showing me the photo before she pocketed her phone. There was something off about it, but I couldn’t process it right then, as he was withdrawing the final item from the box: An entire, full size Third Reich flag.
All the hair on my body stood up at once; anxiety and adrenaline were pulsing through me as if I was on IV coffee. AJ gripped my arm, Kev shifted forward for a closer look.
The flag had writing all over it - small blocks of poetry. Just as the train slowed to our stop, he began to read us the poem written closest to the swastika. The incongruence of poetry - my language, my refuge- and the swastika - my terror, my trauma - was startling, and I wasn’t able to absorb everything he read, but I did catch the end: “If we contain this evil/our deaths will not be in vain” he finished reading.
The train stopped.
“Thank you, God bless you and your father’s service,” I said to him as we exited.
”Wait!” He yelled as the doors started their squeaky return, “Is this the red line?”
”Yes,” AJ called back through the closing doors, “it says so here by the track”
The train clattered off into the wet, dark night and we climbed the stairs to the street level.
“What just happened, Mom?”
“Can I see that photo you took of the car banner?”
AJ’s reflection in the train window - one hand over her mouth, gasping, while the other hand took the picture - was clear. But, even though The Visitor was holding the flag out to her, no part of him was visible in the photo. It looked like the flash ricocheted off the window behind him, though, as there was orange light behind where his head should have been.
”That’s not the flash,” Kev said, as if reading my mind. “He had that halo the whole time.”
Lastly, the end
I wish I had recorded the conversation; captured the poetry, gotten his name, knew if he really went to Princeton. And yet, even in the moment, I knew this was the type of encounter that was just supposed to flow like sand in an hourglass and I was helpless to lay the glass on its side. We are left with fragmented memories, varying impressions, and crumpled train tickets.
*standing O*