Two hours forty at the border

You've been in the queue for the border for two hours and forty minutes and you've started to think about the queue as a place you live. It's the crossing between two countries that used to be one, in the mountains, at the end of August, which everyone told you not to do and you did. Your car is a rental with a dent you didn't make and photographed carefully. The car in front is a Golf with Swiss plates and a family of five in it who have long since given up pretending to be patient. The car behind you is a lorry, and the lorry driver got out forty minutes ago and is sitting on the crash barrier smoking with the calm of a man who is paid by the hour. There is nothing to do. This is the thing about borders. They are the only places left where there's genuinely nothing to do. Your phone has one bar and it's lying. You've read the guidebook section on the next town twice. You've counted the cars ahead (thirty-one, then twenty-eight, then thirty-one again when someone let their cousin in). At some point the Swiss family's youngest, a girl of maybe seven, gets out of the Golf and walks along the queue looking at every car with great seriousness, like an inspector. When she gets to yours she stops and looks at you through the window for a long moment and then says, in careful English, "It is very boring." "It is," you agree. "My father says one hour more." "Your father is an optimist." She thinks about that. "What is optimist?" "Someone who thinks it's one hour more." She nods, satisfied, and walks back. The lorry driver has produced a folding chair from somewhere. A man is walking down the line selling cold drinks from a cool box and you buy two and give one to the lorry driver, who accepts it with a nod that says this was correct. It moves. Slowly. A car every four minutes, then two, then one. By the time you're three cars from the booth the sun is low and the mountains have gone gold and you have stopped being annoyed some time ago and haven't noticed when.

The guard takes your passport. Looks at it. Looks at you. Looks at the dent. "Not mine," you say. "Photographed." He doesn't care. He stamps it. He hands it back. He waves you through with the smallest possible movement of two fingers, and the barrier goes up, and you drive into a country you've never been to, and behind you the Swiss girl is waving out of the Golf's back window and you wave back, and nobody in this story has learned anything, and the road goes down into a valley and the valley is beautiful.