Carshare

Sunrise at a service station in subzero conditions. The autoroute is lined with snow. The car’s a silver Opel with upholstery the colour of wet pavestones. The back windows are translucent with a thin layer of ice, through which the pale sky glows coldly. I’m in the middle seat waiting for the others at the rest stop. There were four others in the car to Paris. A brown-haired cinema student from Paris named Noemi. Greg, a journalist for Canal+ making a documentary on police brutality. A middle aged man, with deep wrinkles and glasses, whose name I did not catch. Aziz, the driver, who told me about his wife and children in broken English whilst the nameless man nodded and the others slept. Now they were all gone and I stayed, staring at the dashboard through clouds of my own breath, staring out the windows through sheets of ice. The glove compartment is all scratched and I’m wondering what did it, a dog? Someone with a penknife, bored after a long journey? The scars are deep in the slate-grey plastic. I watch my breath curl and dissipate. Something moves in the periphery of my focus, a dark shape through exhaled steam, past the scratched dashboard and through the misted windscreen.  Outside in the snow, a dark-clothed figure with their back to me. A man peeing. But then he knelt down and seemed to peel up a dark square of earth from the snow, shifting it slightly. Still on his knees, he bowed deeply and touched his head to the ground. When he rose again, it became clear that the dark patch he knelt on was a prayer mat.

I watched him bow, and rise, and stand, and kneel again. I couldn’t hear him praying. I couldn’t hear anything other than the whoosh of the motorway behind me, like waves washing up on the shore, and the cold, capsular silence of the car. The man, still in prayer, was framed by the windshield, and it seemed as though I was watching a silent film in an empty cinema, black and white and grey. My whole body was tense with the cold and watching him made me feel it all the more, his knees pressed down into a damp mat on the snow, his gloveless hands, unseen, held out into the cold air. But he showed no sign of haste, nor reluctance. In my secret, barren cinema, I watched him praying and it was I, the silent voyeur, that was filled with reverence.  I looked away and began to scrape slivers of frost from the window. Not embarrassed, but humbled. When I looked up again, the figure had disappeared from the screen, leaving only prints in the snow. The driver’s door suddenly opened, and I jumped a little.

Aziz’s smiling head poked in. “Il fait froid!” he chuckled. In his hand, a prayer mat, dusted with snow; he placed it under his seat and shut the door. In the rear-view mirror, I could see his face, reddened with cold. Smiling.