The Train Read online

Other people, like us, were walking toward the station, burdened with suitcases and bundles. An old woman asked me if she might put hers on my cart, and she started pushing it along with me.

  “Do you think we’ll still get a train? Somebody told me the line was up.”

  “Where?”

  “Near Dinant. My stepson, who works on the railways, has seen a trainload of wounded go by.”

  There was a rather wild look in most people’s eyes, but that was chiefly the result of impatience. Everybody wanted to be off. It was all a matter of arriving in time. Everybody was convinced that part of the huge crowd would be left behind and sacrificed.

  Were those who were not leaving taking greater risks? Behind the windowpanes, faces were watching the fugitives, and it seemed to me, looking at them, that they were stamped with a sort of icy calm.

  I knew the freight service buildings where I often used to go to collect parcels. I went in that direction, beckoning to my wife and daughter to follow me, and that was how we managed to get a train.

  There were two in the station. One was a troop train full of disheveled soldiers grinning at the crowd.

  Nobody was getting into the other train yet. Or rather, not everybody. Gendarmes were holding back the crowd. I had left my handcart. Young women wearing arm bands were bustling about, looking after the old people and the children.

  One of them noticed my wife’s belly, and our daughter whom she was holding by the hand.

  “This way.”

  “But my husband …”

  “The men will find room later on in the freight cars.”

  There was no arguing. You went where you were told, willy-nilly. Jeanne turned around, not knowing what was happening to her, trying to catch sight of me among all the heads. I shouted:

  “Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle!”

  The girl with the arm band came back toward me.

  “Give her this. It’s the little girl’s food.”

  Indeed it was all the food we had brought with us.

  I saw them get into a first-class carriage, and from the footboard Sophie waved to me—or, at least, in my direction, for she could not recognize me among the hundreds of faces.

  I was jostled about. I felt in my pocket to make sure that my spare pair of glasses were still there; those glasses which were my constant anxiety.

  “Don’t push!” cried a little man with a mustache.

  And a gendarme repeated:

  “Don’t push. The train won’t be leaving for another hour anyway!”

  2

  THE LADIES WITH THE ARM BANDS WENT ON filling the carriages with an endless succession of old people, pregnant women, young children, and cripples, and I was not the only one to wonder whether, in the end, there would be any room on the train for the men. I looked forward with a certain irony to seeing my wife and daughter go off while I was obliged to stay behind.

  It was the gendarmes who finally got tired of holding back the crowd. They suddenly broke the cordon and everybody rushed toward the five or six freight cars at the rear of the train.

  At the last minute I had given Jeanne, together with the food, the suitcase containing Sophie’s things and some of hers. I was left with the heavier of the two suitcases, and with my other hand I was dragging along as best I could the black trunk, which was bumping against my legs at every step. I didn’t feel the pain. I wasn’t thinking of anything, either.

  I hoisted myself up, pushed by the people behind me, and, trying to stay as near as possible to the sliding door, I managed to put my trunk against the side of the car and sit down on it, panting for breath, with the suitcase on my lap.

  To begin with, I could see only the lower half of my companions, men and women, and it was only later that I made out their faces. At first I thought that I didn’t know any of them, and that surprised me, for Fumay is a little town, with a population of about five thousand. It is true that some farm workers had come in from the surrounding country. A crowded district, which I didn’t know very well, had emptied.

  Everybody settled down hurriedly, ready to defend his space, and a voice shouted from the back of the car:

  “Full up! Don’t let any more in, you!”

  There was some nervous laughter, the first, and that reduced the tension slightly. The first contact had already become easier. Everybody started making himself comfortable, arranging his suitcases and bundles around him.

  The sliding doors on both sides of the car had been left open, and we looked without much interest at the crowd waiting on the platform for another train, the refreshment room and the bar being pillaged, the bottles of beer and wine being passed from hand to hand.

  “Hey, you over there … Yes, you, Ginger … You couldn’t go and get me a bottle, could you?”

  For a moment I thought of going to see how my wife and daughter had settled down, and at the same time reassure them with the news that I had found a place; I didn’t do so for fear of not finding it on my return.

  We didn’t wait an hour, as the gendarme had said, but two and a half hours.

  Several times the train gave a shudder and the buffers bumped against one another, and every time we held our breath, hoping that we were moving off at last. Once, it was because some cars were being added to the train.

  The men who were close to the open doors reported on what was happening to those who could not see anything.

  “They’re adding at least eight cars. The train stretches at least halfway round the bend now.”

  A sort of fellowship was being established between those who had found a place on the train and were more or less sure of getting away.

  One man, who had jumped down onto the platform, counted the carriages and freight cars.

  “Twenty-eight!” he announced.

  We didn’t care a jot about the people stranded on the platforms and outside the station. The next rush was no concern of ours, and indeed we hoped that the train would go before it started.

  We saw an old lady in a wheelchair being pushed along by a nurse toward the first-class carriages. She was wearing a mauve hat and a little white veil, and she had white thread gloves on her hands.

  Later on, some stretchers were carried in the same direction, and I wondered whether people already in the carriages were going to be turned out, for a rumor started spreading that the hospital was being evacuated.

  I was thirsty. Two of my neighbors dropped onto the line, ran over to the platform, and came back with bottles of beer. I didn’t dare imitate them.

  Little by little I started getting used to the faces around me, old men, for the most part, for the others had been called up, working-class women and country women, a fifteen-year-old boy with a long scraggy neck, and a girl of nine or ten whose hair was tied with a shoelace.

  I finally recognized somebody after all, indeed two people. First Fernand Leroy, who had been at school with me and had become a clerk at Hachette’s bookshop, next door to the confectioner’s run by my sister-in-law.

  From the other end of the car, where he was wedged in a corner, he gave me a little wave which I returned although I had had no occasion to speak to him for years.

  As for the second person, he was a picturesque Fumay character, an old drunkard whom everybody called Jules and who distributed handbills outside the movie houses.

  It took me some time to identify a third face, even though it was nearer to me, because it was hidden from me by a man with shoulders twice as broad. This third person was a buxom woman of about thirty, who was already eating a sandwich, a certain Julie who ran a little café near the port.

  She was wearing a blue serge skirt, which was too tight and riding up her hips, and a white blouse marked with rings of sweat, through which you could see her brassiere.

  She smelled of powder and perfume, and I remember seeing her lipstick coming off onto the bread.

  The troop train moved off toward the north. A few minutes later we heard a train approaching on the same line, and somebody shouted:
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  “Now it’s coming back!”

  It wasn’t the same one, but a Belgian train even more crowded than ours and with only civilians on it. There were even people standing on the footboards.

  Some of them jumped onto our cars. The gendarmes came running up, shouting orders. The loudspeaker joined in, announcing that nobody was allowed to leave his place.

  All the same, a few managed to get in on the wrong side of the train, among them a young brunette in a black dress covered with dust, who was carrying no luggage and hadn’t even a handbag.

  She climbed shyly into our car, pale-faced, sad-looking, and nobody said anything to her. One or two men just exchanged winks while she huddled in a corner.

  We couldn’t see the cars anymore and I am sure that none of us cared. Those who were near the doors looked at nothing but the piece of sky which was visible, a sky as blue as ever, wondering whether a German squadron might not appear at any moment and start bombing the station.

  Since the arrival of the Belgian train, it was rumored that some stations had been bombed on the other side of the frontier, according to certain people the station at Namur.

  I wish I could convey the atmosphere and above all the state of suspense in our car. We were beginning, in the stationary train, to form a little world on its own, but which remained, so to speak, in a state of tension.

  Cut off from the rest, it was as if our group was only waiting for a signal, a whistle, a hiss of steam, the sound of the wheels on the rails, to fall back entirely upon itself.

  And that finally happened, when we were beginning to give up hope.

  What would my companions have done if they had been told that the line was blocked, that the trains had stopped running? Would they have gone home with their bundles?

  Speaking for myself, I don’t think that I would have given up: I think I would rather have walked along the track. It was too late to turn back. The break had occurred. The idea of going back to my street, my house, my workshop, my garden, my habits, the labeled radios waiting on the shelves to be repaired, struck me as unbearable.

  The crowd on the platform started slipping slowly behind us, and for me it was as if it had never existed, as if the town itself, where, except for the four years in the sanatorium, I had spent my life, had lost its reality.

  I didn’t give a thought to Jeanne and my daughter sitting in their first-class carriage, farther from me than if they had been hundreds of miles away.

  I didn’t wonder what they were doing, how they had borne the long wait, or whether Jeanne had been sick again.

  I was more concerned about my spare pair of glasses, and every time one of my companions moved I protected my pocket with my hand.

  Just outside the town we passed, on the left, the state forest of Manise, where we had spent so many Sunday afternoons on the grass. To my eyes, it was not the same forest, possibly because I was seeing it from the railway. The broom was growing thickly and the train was moving so slowly that I could see the bees buzzing from flower to flower.

  All of a sudden the train stopped and we all looked at one another with the same fear in our eyes. A railwayman ran along the track. Finally he shouted something I didn’t understand and the train moved off again.

  I wasn’t hungry. I had forgotten my thirst. I looked at the grass passing by a few yards away, sometimes only a foot or two, and the wild flowers, white, blue, and yellow, whose names I didn’t know and which I felt I was seeing for the first time. Whiffs of Julie’s perfume reached me, especially on the bends, mingled with the strong but not unpleasant smell of her sweat.

  Her café was like my shop. It wasn’t a real café. There were curtains in the windows which, when they were drawn, made it impossible to make out anything inside.

  The bar was tiny, without either a metal top or a sink behind. The shelf, with five or six bottles on it, was just a kitchen fitting.

  I had often glanced inside when I was passing, and I remember, on the wall, next to a cuckoo clock which didn’t work and the notice about the law on drunkenness in public, a publicity calendar showing a blonde holding a glass of foaming beer. A glass shaped like a champagne glass, that was what struck me.

  That isn’t interesting, I know. I mention it because I thought of it at that moment. There were other smells in our car, not counting that of the car itself, which had carried some cattle on one of its recent trips and smelled of the farmyard.

  Some of my companions were eating sausages or pâté. One country girl had brought a huge cheese with her and kept cutting into it with a kitchen knife.

  So far we had exchanged only inquisitive glances, which were still cautious, and only those who came from the same village or the same district were talking, generally to identify the places we were passing.

  “Look! Dede’s farm! I wonder if he’s staying. His cows are in the meadow, anyway.”

  We went through stops and deserted little stations where there were baskets of flowers hanging from the lamps and travel posters on the walls.

  “Look, Corsica! Why don’t we go to Corsica?”

  After Revin we went faster, and before arriving at Monthermé we saw a lime kiln and more rows of working-class houses.

  Just as we were entering the station, the engine gave a piercing whistle like a big express. Passing the station buildings and the platforms swarming with troops, it drew up in a setting of deserted tracks and signal boxes.

  A pump, next to our car, was oozing huge drops of water, one by one, and I felt my thirst coming on again. A peasant, jumping down from the train, urinated on the next track, out in the sunshine, with one eye on the engine. This made everybody laugh. We felt a need to laugh, and some of the men started cracking jokes on purpose. Old Jules was asleep, with a half-empty bottle in one hand and his haversack, containing more bottles, on his belly.

  “They’re uncoupling the engine!” announced the man who was relieving himself.

  Two or three others got out. I still didn’t dare. It seemed to me that I had to hang on at all costs, that it was particularly important for me.

  A quarter of an hour later, another engine was pulling us in the opposite direction, but, instead of going through Monthermé, we took a side track running alongside the Semois toward Belgium.

  I had made this trip before, with Jeanne, before she became my wife. I even wonder whether it wasn’t that day, a Sunday in August, which decided our fate.

  Marriage at that time didn’t mean the same to me as to somebody normal. Has there been anything really normal in my life since that evening when I saw my mother come home naked and with her hair cropped?

  Yet it wasn’t even that event which struck me. At the time I didn’t understand or try to understand. For the past four years so many things had been put down to the war that one more mystery was not likely to upset me.

  Madame Jamais, our landlady, was a widow and earned a good living as a dressmaker. She looked after me for about a fortnight, until my father came home. I didn’t recognize him at first. He was still wearing uniform, a different uniform from the one in which he had gone away; his mustache smelled of sour wine; his eyes were shining as if he had a cold in the head.

  The fact was, I scarcely knew him, and the only photograph we had of him, on the sideboard, was the one taken with my mother on their wedding day. I still wonder why both their faces were lopsided. Perhaps Sophie finds that in our wedding photograph our features too are lopsided?

  I knew that he had worked as a clerk for Monsieur Sauveur, the dealer in seeds and fertilizers whose offices and warehouses, occupying a long stretch of the quayside, were linked by a private track to the freight station.

  My mother had pointed Monsieur Sauveur out to me in the street, a rather short, fat man with a very pale face, who must have been sixty at the time and walked slowly, cautiously, as if he were afraid of the slightest shock.

  “He’s got a heart disease. He may drop dead in the street any minute. The last time he had an attack, they only just
managed to save him, and afterward they had to call in a great specialist from Paris.”

  When I was a little boy I sometimes followed him with my eyes, wondering whether the accident was going to happen in front of me. I couldn’t understand how, with a threat like that hanging over him, Monsieur Sauveur could come and go like everybody else without looking sad.

  “Your father is his right-hand man. He started working for him as an office boy, at the age of sixteen, and now he can sign for the firm.”

  Sign what? I found out later that my father was in fact the managing clerk and that his position was just as important as my mother had said.

  He went back to his old job, and we gradually got used to living together in our flat, where my mother was never mentioned, although the wedding photograph remained on the sideboard.

  It had taken me some time to understand why my father’s mood changed so much from one day to the next, sometimes from one hour to the next. He could be very affectionate and sentimental, taking me on his knees, which rather embarrassed me, and telling me with tears in his eyes that I was all he had in life, that that was enough for him, that nothing mattered in life but a son.…

  Then, a few hours later, he would seem surprised to find me at home and would order me about as if I were a maid, bullying me and shouting at me that I was no better than my mother.

  Finally I heard that he drank, or to be more precise that he had started drinking, out of grief, when he hadn’t found his wife waiting for him on his return and when he had heard what had happened.

  I believed that for a long time. Then I thought about it. I remembered the day of his arrival, his shining eyes, his jerky gestures, his smell, the bottles which he went to the grocer’s to get right away.

  I caught odd phrases when he was talking about the war with his friends, and I guessed that it was at the front that he had got into the habit of drinking.

  I don’t hold it against him. I have never held it against him, even when, reeling about and muttering swear-words, he would bring home a woman he had picked up in the street and lock me in my room.

  I didn’t like Madame Jamais wheedling me and treating me like a victim. I avoided her. I had got into the habit of going shopping after school, cooking the meals, doing the washing-up.