I walked through the train and kept saying “Scusi“to all the Italian people standing in the hallways. At one end of the car there was a family sitting in front of where the toilet is in the space by the door. They had put out some picnic things on a suitcase and were cutting up a salami. The mother was breastfeeding her baby. When she looked up and saw me staring at her and the baby, she didn’t look shy or annoyed but smiled and said something in Italian to her husband, who then held out a piece of salami to me. I said, “No, grazie” because I wanted to keep looking for Jennifer.

When I got to the first-class compartments, they were nearly empty. I looked into one empty seat after another as I walked down the hall.

In one compartment an elderly Swiss woman and man were sitting, and when they saw me look in at them, the woman reached over and pulled the blind down on the window facing into the hall. She looked angry that I was watching them and she said something in Swiss German to her husband that sounded scolding, though of course I couldn’t understand what it was because no one except Swiss Germans speak Swiss German.

When I got to the end of the car there was no place left to look. So I walked back down the length of the train to our compartment.

While I had been away a man who had been asleep in the corner had woken up and was smoking a cigarette. Mom kept staring at him and then at all of us. But he just lit another cigarette while he kept his eyes on the copy of Paris Match he was reading.

Mom, seeing his magazine, guessed where he was from and said to Janet, very low so he wouldn’t hear, “French.” They both nodded because they understood each other perfectly. The way Mom had said “French” meant she was pretty disgusted with France and how dirty it was and how it was full of Roman Catholic atheists who smoked and drank and how they had murdered the Huguenot Protestants in the seventeenth century and were one of the darkest and most pagan countries in Europe where the men “urinated in public.” When she and Dad went to Paris once to give a talk on Calvin’s Doctrine of the Lord’s Supper at an Action Biblique conference on evangelism, she had come home with a very bad impression of the French.

When the Frenchman glanced at Mom, who was staring at him, he looked up, pulled a blue packet of Gauloise cigarettes out of his pocket, and offered Mom one, thinking that she was staring at him because she wanted to smoke. She said very loud and firm, “Non merci, je ne fume pas!”She shuddered in disgust to think that he could have mistaken her for that kind of person.