The Kathmandu Express

I came back home at lunchtime and knew that Pierre Sabatier was here and that he'd stay for a long time.
Abdel had made a lasagne and brought it over to the moulin.  I'd never met Abdel and called him Ahmed for a while.  Once that was in my head I couldn't get rid of it, so I wrote Abdel on a piece of paper and kept it to hand.
Pierre remains the Emperor of a fallen empire which included the moulin.  He sits at the end of the table.  He presides.  He has class and a large handle bar mustache that he twists with his fingers.   When he wasn't at the table I found him wandering round the moulin, remembering.  
He is the benjamin of the Sabatiers; a handsome, solid man  in his late 70's with a capacity to drink and to hold it.  He vouvoies his dog.  He uses the literary passé simple when he talks.  He speaks slowly and his stories twist and turn and you never know when and how they'll end. 
He knows this place well.  He describes the sounds of the machines, the fatal flour dust,  the origins and use of the wood, the iron and the leather belts that we have kept.  
A man who is voracious at the best of times becomes even more so after a few tokes.  
He cycled off shakily in the evening, choosing to take the dark river path home past his field of horses which, he claimed, had turned into large pink elephants.