Without a Map
Meredith Hall

The winter air is heavy with sweet coal smoke as I walk and hitchhike, following the Rhône River through eastern France. I am walking blind, with no maps, and learn the names of the cities I am passing through from small, brown signs: Nancy, Dijon, Lyons, Montelimar, Arles. Everything—buildings, fields, chugging factories, workers’ faces and clothes—is gray. Snow falls and turns to slush. I am cold and wet, but I am strangely excited. My money is going fast on bread and cheese and hot soup. Each late afternoon, I have one purpose—to find a dry place to sleep where no one will find me. I am furtive as each day closes, slipping into farm sheds and factory storerooms and derelict warehouses. Sometimes I am caught, and an angry or indignant man or woman sends me back into the night. I sleep lightly, listening for footsteps. If I am near a town in the morning, I like to find a public place—a cafe or market—and spend a few minutes warming up, my backpack resting against my legs near the sweaty windows. Often, the owner realizes I have no money to spend and shoos me out. Sometimes a man or a young woman—a mother with a small, wide-eyed child, perhaps—smiles and motions me to sit down. My French is poor: “Yes,I am walking to India,” I say. “Thank you,” I say, again and again. I eat a pastry and drink a bowl of steaming coffee. Sometimes the men who pick me up in their green Deux Cheveaux or blue Fiats or black Mercedes pull over at a market and buy me bread and tins of sardines and cheese. The world feels perfectly benign, generous even, and I go on my way, following the river.

I think of Steve, hoping he did not sit long in the train station waiting for me before he realized there was trouble, before he made his way to the American Express office and ripped open my telegram. I half-expect to see him waving at me across an intersection where roads meet and part again. I have no idea where I am.

One cold, windy day, as I walk through another little town with no name, I meet a man named Alex, who is absent without leave from the British Army. He is tall and very, very thin, with hollowed-out cheeks and sunken eyes. His boots are rotting away; he has tied newspapers around the soles. In his dirty, wet canvas satchel, he carries a brown wool blanket, which is thin and filthy, and a miniature chess set. He has no passport. He has not contacted his family for over a year. He looks haunted, as if he no longer belongs to the world. He teaches me to play chess in the back stairwell of an apartment building. He is curt with me and never smiles. He smells unwashed, but, more than that, he seems to be fading from the world. I feel as if I am looking at myself a year from now.

The next morning, Alex points down the empty road and tells me, “Go that way until you reach the Mediterranean Sea. Turn left there. It will take you to a warmer place.” I leave him sitting on a heap of stones at the edge of a field and head in the direction he pointed.