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The curious tricks the mind seems to delight in playing upon us and even
upon itself are a source of constant wonder to me. So simple do they seem
that we often forget them -- if, indeed, we have been aware of their
happening at all; but every now and then, as if it were laughing at us, the
mind startles us with a trick we can neither quite nor fully explain. Such
was my experience one night not long ago.
While I was preparing a solitary dinner, accompanied only by the radio
playing softly in the background, suddenly, as if from the very act
of placing the hamburgers into the hot pan, there flashed before me a
scene long forgotten, isolated, and yet perfectly framed. Perhaps even
the hamburgers ceased sizzling while I wondered at that scene in my mind's
eye and, possibly even then, groped to find what it was in the deep, dim
past that such a scene had stood for and why I should have remembered
it with detail and impact.
It is not a memorable scene, surely not from the artistic point of view
of colour and composition, of perspective and design. There is simply
a tavern on a street corner somewhere in Europe. There the brown building
stands in the early, rainy spring evening, its narrow, peaked gables and
fretted windows reminiscent of the fairy tales we used to read as children.
Across the street, at the same intersection, crouches a long, low building,
obscured by dusk and rain falling, and from above the two buildings the
street itself descends a long hill. The street is made of cobble-stones, wet
and flecked with straw, and it is different from streets in Paris or Hong
Kong or Buenos Aires, and there I am on the corner, thinking that if there
is a difference in streets, not merely in the material but in the very quality
of streets, how much more might I be moved by differences other than
those of streets in the rain, differences that soldiers do not often have the
time or inclination to distinguish, much less notice, so quickly do they
move on from one city to another in time of war.
I was a soldier then, and I had just come out of that tavern, recently
requisitioned for a mess hall, and I was standing there in the rain, smoking
and thinking that because I was a soldier in that town where the cobbled
street ran down the hill, there really was a difference, and the civilian who
abruptly scurried across the street and disappeared into the drizzle might
never know how important to me he became simply in the act of crossing
my strange street, which for him might be shabby with familiarity and
despair. It was the fragility of the moment, the tension in mood and tone,
caught, without warning, in a moment of peace amid a world at war, that
evoked my emotional response, coloured my perceptions -- a moment heightened, perhaps, by the fatigue of a long day's journey by jeep, by
the relaxation of a good meal (hamburgers, do you suppose?) inside the
tavern with fellow soldiers, who had been friendly and homesick and
it had all led to that moment of standing on a street corner, alone, in the
rain, and was even then, from the sound of motors on the hill, to lead to
more. A convoy of trucks filed past my corner, and I caught a glimpse
of the insignia on the bumpers, the white cross of Lorraine on a blue shield.
Right then I stopped remembering, quickly turned down the gas below
the smoking hamburgers, and instinctively paused, listening, listening to
music from the radio -- a singer crooning an old favourite, "Sweet
Lorraine" -- and then, as I began to understand, listening to my mind
maliciously asking why that scene remained so clear to me in its obscurity.
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