The Train Read online

  One November evening I saw my mother come home naked, her hair cropped short, screaming insults and foul words at some youths who were trooping after her.

  I was ten years old. We lived in the center of the town, in a first-floor flat.

  She dressed without taking any notice of me, a mad look in her eyes, still muttering words I had never heard her use before, and suddenly, ready to go out, with a shawl around her head, she seemed to remember that I was there.

  “Madame Jamais will look after you until your father comes home.”

  Madame Jamais was our landlady and lived on the ground floor. I was too terrified to cry. She didn’t kiss me. At the door she hesitated, then she went out without saying anything else and the street door slammed.

  I am not trying to explain. I mean that all this may have nothing to do with my feelings in 1939 or 1940. I am putting down the facts as they came back to me, without any falsification.

  I contracted tuberculosis four years later. I had two or three other illnesses one after another.

  Altogether, my impression, when war broke out, was that Fate was playing another trick on me and I was not surprised for I was practically certain that that was going to happen one day.

  This time it wasn’t a microbe, a virus, a congenital deformity of heaven knows what part of the eye—the doctors have never been able to agree about my eyes. It was a war which was hurling men against one another in tens of millions.

  The idea was ridiculous, I realize that. But the fact remains that I knew, that I was ready. And that waiting, ever since October, was becoming unbearable. I didn’t understand. I kept wondering why what was bound to happen didn’t happen.

  Were they going to tell us, one fine morning, as at Munich, that everything had been settled, that life was going back to normal, that this great panic had just been a mistake?

  Wouldn’t such a turn of events have meant that something had gone wrong with my personal destiny?

  The sunshine was growing warmer, invading the yard, falling on the doll. Our bedroom window opened and my wife called out:

  “Marcel!”

  I stood up, went out of the workshop, and leaned my head back. My wife looked as if she were wearing a mask, as she had during her first pregnancy. Her face, with the skin all taut, struck me as touching but almost unfamiliar.

  “What’s happening?”

  “You heard?”

  “Yes. Is it true? Are they attacking?”

  “They’ve invaded Holland.”

  And my daughter, behind her, asked:

  “What is it, Mummy?”

  “Lie down. It isn’t time to get up.”

  “What did Daddy say?”

  “Nothing. Go to sleep.”

  She came down almost at once, smelling of the bed and walking with her legs slightly apart, because of her belly.

  “Do you think they’ll let them get through?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  “What does the government say?”

  “It hasn’t said anything yet.”

  “What do you intend to do, Marcel?”

  “I haven’t thought about it. I’m going to try to get some more news.”

  It was still from Belgium that it was coming, given out by a dramatic staccato voice. This voice announced that at one o’clock in the morning some Messerschmitts and Stukas had flown over Belgian territory and had dropped bombs at several points.

  Panzers had entered the Ardennes, and the Belgian government had addressed a solemn appeal to France to help it in its defense.

  The Dutch, for their part, were opening their dykes and flooding a large part of the country, and there was talk, if the worst came to the worst, of halting the invader in front of the Albert Canal.

  In the meantime my wife was making breakfast and setting the table, and I could hear the clatter of crockery.

  “Any more news?”

  “Tanks are crossing the Belgian frontier pretty well everywhere.”

  “But in that case …”

  For certain moments of the day, my memories are so precise that I could write a detailed account of them, whereas for others I remember above all else the sunshine, the springtime smells, the blue sky like the one on the day I took my first Communion.

  The whole street was waking up. Life was beginning in houses more or less similar to ours. My wife went to open the street door to take in the bread and milk and I heard her talking to our next-door neighbor on the right, Madame Piedboeuf, the schoolmaster’s wife. They had an ideal little girl, curly-haired and pinkcheeked, with big blue eyes and long doll’s eyelashes, who was always dressed as if for a party, and for the past year they had had a little car in which they used to go for a drive every Sunday.

  I don’t know what the two women said to each other. From the noises I could hear, I gathered that they weren’t the only ones outside, that women were calling to one another from doorstep to doorstep. When Jeanne came back, she looked pale and even more drawn than usual.

  “They’re going!” she told me.

  “Where?”

  “South, anywhere. At the end of the street I saw more cars going past with mattresses on the roof, Belgians mostly.”

  We had already seen them go by before Munich, and in October a certain number of Belgians had once again traveled to the south of France, rich people, who could wait.

  “Do you intend to stay here?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  I was telling the truth. I who had seen this event coming from so far away, who had waited for it for so long, I had not made any decisions in advance. It was as if I were waiting for a sign, as if I wanted Fate to decide for me.

  I wasn’t responsible anymore. Perhaps that’s the word, perhaps that’s what I was trying to explain just now. Only the day before, it had been up to me to manage my life and that of my family, to earn a living, to arrange for things to happen in the way things have to happen.

  But not now. I had just lost my roots. I was no longer Marcel Feron, radio engineer in a newish district of Fumay, not far from the Meuse, but one man among millions whom superior forces were going to toss about at will.

  I was no longer firmly attached to my house, to my habits. From one moment to the next, I had, so to speak, jumped into space.

  From now on, decisions were no longer any concern of mine. Instead of my own palpitations, I was beginning to feel a sort of general palpitation. I wasn’t living at my tempo anymore, but at the tempo of the radio, of the street, of the town which was waking up much faster than usual.

  We ate in silence, in the kitchen, as usual, listening hard to the noises outside, without appearing to do so, on account of Sophie. Anyone would have thought that our daughter herself was hesitating to ask us any questions and she watched us in silence, one after the other.

  “Drink your milk.”

  “Will we have any milk there?”

  “What do you mean, there?”

  “Why, where we are going …”

  Tears started running down my wife’s cheeks. She turned her head away while I looked sadly at the familiar walls, at the furniture which we had chosen piece by piece five years earlier, before we got married.

  “Go and play now, Sophie.”

  And my wife, once she was alone with me, said:

  “Perhaps I’d better go and see my father.”

  “What for?”

  “To find out what they are doing.”

  She still had her father and mother, and three sisters, all married, two of whom lived at Fumay, one of them the wife of a confectioner in the Rue du Château.

  It was because of her father that I had set up in business on my own, for he was ambitious for his daughters and would not have allowed any of them to marry a workman.

  It was he, too, who had made me buy the house on a twenty-year mortgage. I still had fifteen years of installments to pay, but in his eyes I was a property owner and that reassured him for the future.

&n
bsp; “You never know what might happen to you, Marcel. You’re cured, but people have been known to have relapses.”

  He had started in life as a miner in Delmotte’s slate-pits, and had become a foreman. He had his own house too, and his own garden.

  “You can arrange to buy a house in such a way that, if the husband happens to die, the wife doesn’t have to pay anything more.”

  Wasn’t it funny thinking about that on that particular morning, when nobody in the world could be sure of the future anymore?

  Jeanne dressed and put on her hat.

  “You’ll keep an eye on Sophie, won’t you?”

  She went off to see her father. The cars went by, more and more of them, all heading south, and two or three times I thought I heard some planes. They didn’t drop any bombs. Perhaps they were French or English: it was impossible to tell, for they were flying very high and the sun was dazzling.

  I opened the shop while Sophie was playing in the yard. It isn’t a real shop, for the house was not built for use as business premises. My customers have to go along a corridor and an ordinary window has to serve as a shop window. The same is true of the dairy shop, a little farther on. It is often like that in the suburbs, at least in the north. It means that we are forced to leave the front door open and I have fitted the shop door with a bell.

  A couple of bargees came in for their radios. They weren’t ready but they insisted on taking them all the same. One of them was going downstream toward Rethel, while the other, a Fleming, wanted to get home at all costs.

  I washed and shaved, watching my daughter through the window from which I could see all the gardens in the street full of flowers and grass, which was still a fresh green. People were talking to each other over the walls and I could hear a conversation between the Matrays, on the same floor as I was, for the windows were open.

  “How do you expect to take all that with you?”

  “We’ll need it.”

  “We may need it, but I don’t see how we’re going to carry those suitcases to the station.”

  “We’ll take a taxi.”

  “If we can find one! I wonder if there’ll still be any trains.”

  I was suddenly afraid. I pictured the crowds pouring down every street toward the little station just as the cars were streaming toward the south. It struck me that we ought to be leaving, that it was no longer a matter of hours but of minutes, and I reproached myself for having allowed my wife to go and see her father.

  What advice could he give her? What did he know that I didn’t?

  The fact of the matter was that she had never ceased to belong to her family. She had married me, lived with me, given me one child, was going to give me another. She bore my name but remained a Van Straeten for all that, and the slightest thing was enough to send her running to see her parents or her sisters.

  “I must go and ask Berthe’s advice …”

  Berthe was the confectioner’s wife, the youngest of the sisters and the one who had made the best match, which was probably why Jeanne regarded her as an oracle.

  If we were leaving, it was time to go, I was sure of that, just as I was suddenly sure, without asking myself why, that we had to leave Fumay. I hadn’t got a car, and for deliveries I used a handcart.

  Without waiting for my wife to return, I went up to the attic to get the suitcases and a black trunk in which we kept old clothes.

  “Are we taking the train, Daddy?”

  “I think so.”

  “You aren’t certain.”

  I was getting nervous. I felt angry with Jeanne for going out and was afraid that at any moment something might happen: anything, perhaps not yet the arrival of the German tanks in the town, but something like an air raid which would cut us off from each other.

  Every now and then I went into Sophie’s bedroom, which so to speak had never been used, since my daughter refused to sleep there, to look out into the street.

  Outside three houses, including the house next door, cars were being loaded. The schoolmaster’s daughter, Michele, as curlyhaired and fresh in her white dress as when she went to mass on Sunday, was holding a canary’s cage while she waited for her parents to finish tying a mattress onto the roof of the car.

  That reminded me of our hens and of Nestor, the cock Sophie was so fond of. It was I, three years earlier, who had put up some wire netting at the bottom of the garden and made a sort of hen-house.

  Jeanne wanted fresh eggs for the child. Because of her father, of course, who had always kept hens, rabbits, and pigeons. He also had some carrier pigeons, and when there was a competition on a Sunday, he would spend motionless hours at the bottom of his garden waiting for his birds to return to the pigeon-house.

  Our cock, two or three times a week, flew over the walls and I had to go from house to house looking for him. Some people complained of the damage he caused in their gardens, others of being waked up by his crowing.

  “Can I take my dolly with me?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the pram?”

  “Not the pram. There won’t be enough room in the train.”

  “Where’s my dolly going to sleep?”

  I very nearly snapped back that, only the night before, the doll had spent the night out in the yard. At last my wife came back.

  “What you are doing?”

  “I’ve started packing.”

  “You’ve decided to leave?”

  “I think it’s the best thing to do. What are your parents doing?”

  “They’re staying. My father has sworn not to leave his house, whatever happens. I dropped in at Berthe’s too. They’ll be on their way in a few minutes. They’ll have to hurry, because it seems there are jams everywhere, especially Mézières’ way. In Belgium, the Stukas are skimming the ground to machine-gun trains and cars.”

  She didn’t protest at my decision because of her father, but didn’t seem in any hurry to go. Perhaps she too would have preferred to cling to her house?

  “They say there are peasants going off in their carts with everything they can take with them, and driving their animals in front of them. I saw the station from a distance. It was swarming with people.”

  “What are you taking with you?”

  “I don’t know. Sophie’s things, anyway. And we ought to take something to eat, especially for her. If you could find some condensed milk …”

  I went to the grocer’s in the next street, and, contrary to my expectations, there was nobody in the shop. It is true that most of the local people had stocked up back in October. The grocer, in his white apron, was as calm as usual and I felt slightly ashamed of my feverishness.

  “Have you any condensed milk left?”

  He pointed to a whole shelf full of tins.

  “How much do you want?”

  “A dozen tins?”

  I expected him to refuse to sell me as many as that. I also bought several bars of chocolate, some ham, and a whole sausage. There were no standards left, no landmarks. Nobody was capable of saying what was going to be valuable or not.

  At eleven o’clock we were still not ready and Jeanne delayed us still further by being sick. I hesitated. I felt sorry for her. I asked myself whether, in view of her condition, I had any right to take her off into the unknown. She didn’t complain, bustling about and bumping her huge belly against the furniture and the door jambs.

  “The hens!” she exclaimed all of a sudden.

  Perhaps she had a vague hope that we would stay on account of the hens, but I had thought about them before her.

  “Monsieur Reverse will take them in with his.”

  “They’re staying, are they?”

  “I’ll dash around and ask him.”

  The Reverses lived on the quayside. They had two sons at the front and a daughter who was a nun in a convent at Givet.

  “We are in God’s hands,” the old man told me. “If He is going to protect us, He will do it just as well here as anywhere else.”

  His wife, in t
he shadows, was telling her beads. I announced my intention of giving them my hens and my cock.

  “How can I go and collect them?”

  “I’ll leave the key with you.”

  “It’s a big responsibility.”

  I nearly decided to bring the birds around right away, but then I thought of the trains, of the crowd besieging the station, of the planes in the sky. This was no time to go running after poultry.

  I had to insist.

  “Even so, we shall probably never see anything we leave behind again …”

  The idea didn’t upset me. On the contrary, it filled me with a sort of somber joy, like that of destroying something you have patiently built up with your own hands.

  What counted was going, was leaving Fumay. It didn’t matter if, somewhere else, other dangers were waiting for us. True, we were running away. But as far as I was concerned, it wasn’t from the Germans, from the bullets and bombs, from death.

  After thinking carefully about it, I swear that that was how I felt. I had the impression that for other people this departure wasn’t very important. For me, as I have already said, it was the hour of my meeting with Fate, the hour of an appointment which I had had a long time, which I had always had, with Fate.

  Jeanne was sniveling as we left the house. Walking between the shafts of the handcart, I didn’t even turn around. As I had finally informed Monsieur Reverse, to persuade him to take charge of my hens, I had left the house unlocked so that my customers could come and collect their radios if they wanted to. Just ordinary honesty on my part. And if anybody was going to steal something, wouldn’t he have broken the door down anyway?

  All that was over and done with. I pushed my handcart along and Jeanne walked along the pavement with Sophie, who was clutching her doll to her chest.

  I had a hard time threading my way through the traffic jams, and once I thought I had lost my wife and daughter, until I found them a little farther on.

  An army ambulance drove past at full speed with its siren wailing, and a little farther on I caught sight of a Belgian car which was pitted with bullet holes.