HIS NAME WAS DANIEL, he told me, eventually. He'd found me stumbling down the highway near the Hungarian-Croatian border on a sweltering day. I still had a vague hope of getting to Budapest, but by that point I'd given up trying to catch a ride and was seriously dehydrated. Seeing a two-liter bottle peeking out from the roadside grass, I'd run across two lanes to have a look. As I unscrewed the cap, the vapor of heated urine rose up and I fumbled the bottle back to where I'd found it. I kept walking, not holding my thumb up anymore, only trying to scout out a spot over the barrier where I could sleep. While I wasn't looking, Daniel's shiny new BMW pulled over in front of me and I bumped into it.
The short, bald, muscular man inside, dripping with sweat, started swearing in French. He asked what the hell I thought I was doing. In my own stuttering French, I thanked him for stopping and asked where he was headed. He told me Romania. Running through the map in my head, I asked whether he could drop me off near Budapest. He said he would and handed me a bottle as I got in. I guzzled the water down, and we sped away.
When I caught my breath, I said he didn't sound like he was French. Speaking in a mix of stilted English and oddly accented French, he told me he was from Transylvania. He'd trained as an engineer, but there'd been no jobs, so he'd joined the French Foreign Legion. I asked whether it was true that they took on criminals sometimes. “Not if you are a fucking psychopath,” he said. “Not if you killed a bunch of people or burnt down a school. If you just robbed a bank, then maybe yes.”
He'd been a paratrooper in the Congo. He wouldn't tell me anything more. Instead, he told me about his trip, how he'd started in the south of France and had driven to where he'd picked me up, more than 700 miles, without stopping, except for gas. When I pressed him for stories about the Legion, he looked at me with genuine pain. “Do you want me to tell you how I watched my friends die for the first time? How I left them? No! About how it feels to take life? Non, bien sur.”
Read Full Article »
