Twenty years ago, while living in Belgium, he'd simply wanted to go to England by boat. He sat in a tight envelope of air that smelled faintly of regurgitation.Īlfred's odyssey had begun when he was a young man from a well-to-do family living in Iran and had ended here on an airport bench in Paris, by mistake. Mostly, he passed time on the terminal's first level, in gurulike meditation, on a red bench before a big, filmy plate-glass window near a shop selling CDs. For years now, he'd lived mostly on the kindness of strangers, eating his meals at a nearby McDonald's, wandering the terminal's white-tile floor as if it were his own cathedral.
In some ways, it was as if he'd been found in the bulrushes-or was still lost there. He was born in either 1945 or 1947 or 1953 and claimed to be Iranian, British or Swedish. The truth was that no one knew the whole truth about Alfred, not even Alfred himself. Like everyone in this place, they were apparitions, part of the incessant tide that rushed, then ebbed, that filled and emptied, filled and emptied-at moments leaving the airport a lonely beachhead, one that bore no trace of those who had just been there. The group, maybe 200 in all, had materialized suddenly, as if by incantation, and would just as quickly vanish in the night, in the silver gut of a 747 roaring southward over desert and veld for home. Meanwhile, the flight to Libreville, which was to leave in two hours, had brought a raucous horde to the Air Gabon counter, the women dressed in colorful gowns, a cacophony of clipped tribal dialects punching holes in the fabric of the terminal's white noise. Later it would make a good story: the purgatorial night spent in Terminal One at Charles de Gaulle Airport. A few scanned the terminal mournfully, searching for the right bench or piece of floor to camp for the night. Some were arguing with the airlines some were studying the ever shuffling flight board some were headed off to nearby hotels, parched and ready for cold gin-and-tonics to ease the dull throb of their long day. Tenerife, Johannesburg, Málaga and Marrakech had been canceled for various reasons, and stragglers from those flights were trying to figure out their next move on this humid night at the end of May. Manchester and London were delayed on account of weather, and Tel Aviv was a faulty wing flap.
0 kommentar(er)
