The Train Read online

  One evening, a couple of passersby brought in my father, whom they had found lying unconscious on the pavement. I wanted to go for a doctor but they said that that wasn’t necessary, that all my father needed was to sleep it off. I helped them to undress him.

  Monsieur Sauveur only kept him on out of pity, I knew that too. Several times he was insulted by his managing clerk, who, the next day, would beg his forgiveness with tears in his eyes.

  That isn’t really important. What I wanted to show was that I didn’t lead the same kind of life as other children of my age and that when I was fourteen I had to be sent to a sanatorium above Saint-Gervais in Savoy.

  When I set off, alone on my train—it was the first time I had ever taken a train—I was convinced that I wasn’t going to come back alive. This idea didn’t make me sad, and I began to understand Monsieur Sauveur’s serenity.

  In any case, I would never be like other men. Already, at school, my poor sight had prevented me from playing any games. And now, on top of that, I was suffering from a disease which was regarded as a taint, a disease which was almost shameful. What woman would ever agree to marry me?

  I spent four years up there, rather like here in the train; I mean that the past and future didn’t count, nor what was happening in the valley, still less in the faraway towns.

  When I was declared to be cured and sent back to Fumay, I was eighteen. I found my father more or less as I had left him, except that his features were softer, his eyes sad and frightened.

  When he saw me, he studied my reaction and I realized that he was ashamed, that in his heart of hearts he wished I hadn’t come back.

  I had to find a sedentary occupation. I started work as an apprentice to Monsieur Ponchot, who ran the town’s big piano, record, and radio shop.

  In the mountains, I had got into the habit of reading up to two books a day, and I kept it up. Every month, then every three months, I went to a specialist at Mézières to be examined, never trusting his reassuring words.

  I had returned to Fumay in 1926. My father died in 1934, from a clot of blood, while Monsieur Sauveur was still going strong. I had just met Jeanne, who was an assistant in Choblet’s glove shop, two doors away from where I worked.

  I was twenty-six; she was twenty-two. We walked along the streets in the twilight. We went together to the movies, where I held her hand, then, on Sunday afternoon, I obtained permission to take her into the country.

  That struck me as incredible. For me, she was not just a woman, but the symbol of a normal regular life.

  And it was, I would swear to it, in the course of that outing in the Semois valley, for which I had had to ask her father’s permission, that I acquired the assurance that it was possible, that she was ready to marry me, to start a family with me.

  I was speechless with gratitude. I would gladly have gone on my knees at her feet. If I talk about it at such length, it is in order to emphasize Jeanne’s importance in my eyes.

  Now, in my cattle car, I didn’t give a thought to her, a woman seven and a half months pregnant, for whom this journey must have been particularly difficult. My thoughts were elsewhere. I wondered why we were being shunted down a side track which led nowhere, except to a place more dangerous than the one we had just left.

  As we were stopping in the open country, near a grade crossing which cut across a minot road, I heard someone say:

  “They’re clearing the lines to let the troop trains through. They must need reinforcements out there.”

  The train didn’t move. We couldn’t hear anything except, all of a sudden, birds singing and the murmur of a spring. One man jumped onto the bank, followed by another.

  “Hey there, guard, are we going to stay here long?”

  “An hour or two. Unless we spend the night here.”

  “The train isn’t likely to move off without warning, is it?”

  “The engine is going back to Monthermé, and they’re sending us another from there.”

  I made sure that the engine really was being uncoupled; then, when I saw it go off by itself in a landscape of woods and meadows, I jumped down onto the ground, and, before doing anything else, went to have a drink at the spring, in the hollow of my hand, as I used to when I was little. The water had the same taste as it had then, the taste of grass and my own hot body.

  People were getting out of all the carriages. Hesitant at first, then more self-assured, I started walking alongside the train, trying to see inside.

  “Daddy!”

  My daughter was calling me and waving.

  “Where’s your mother?”

  “Here.”

  Two elderly women were blocking the view and would not have moved for all the gold in the world, scowling disapprovingly at my daughter’s excitement.

  “Open the door, Daddy. I can’t manage. Mummy wants to talk to you.”

  The carriage was an old model. I succeeded in opening the door and was confronted with eight people in two rows, as grim and motionless as in a dentist’s waiting room. My wife and daughter were the only ones under sixty, and an old man in the far corner was clearly a nonagenarian.

  “Are you all right, Marcel?”

  “Yes. What about you?”

  “I’m all right. I was wondering what you were going to eat. Luckily, we’ve stopped. You see, we’ve got all the food.”

  Wedged between two women with monumental hips, she could scarcely move, and she had some difficulty in handing me a thin loaf of bread together with the whole sausage.

  “But what about you two?”

  “You know perfectly well we can’t stand garlic.”

  “Is there some garlic in it?”

  That morning, at the grocer’s, I hadn’t bothered to make sure.

  “How are you fixed?”

  “All right.”

  “You couldn’t get me some water, could you? They gave me a bottle before we left, but it’s so hot here that we’ve already drunk it all.”

  She handed me a bottle and I ran to the spring to fill it. There, on her knees, washing her face, I found the young woman in the black dress who had got in on the wrong side of the car after the arrival of the Belgian train.

  “Where did you find a bottle?” she asked me.

  Her accent was neither Belgian nor German.

  “Somebody gave it to my wife.”

  She didn’t press the point, but wiped her face with her handkerchief, and I went off toward the first-class carriage.

  On the way I stumbled over an empty beer bottle and turned back to pick it up as if it were a precious object. My wife jumped to the wrong conclusion.

  “Are you drinking beer?”

  “No. It’s to put some water in.”

  It was curious. We were talking to each other like strangers. Not exactly: rather, like distant relatives who haven’t seen each other for a long time and don’t know what to say. Perhaps it was because of the presence of the old women.

  “Can I get out, Daddy?”

  “If you like.”

  My wife looked worried.

  “What if the train starts moving?”

  “We haven’t got an engine anymore.”

  “You mean we’re going to stay here?”

  At that moment we heard the first explosion, a muffled, distant sound, but one which nonetheless made us jump, and one of the old women made the sign of the cross and shut her eyes as if she had heard a clap of thunder.

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You can’t see any planes?”

  I looked at the sky, which was as blue as it had been that morning, with just two gilded clouds floating slowly along.

  “Don’t let her go far, Marcel.”

  “I won’t let her out of my sight.”

  Holding Sophie by the hand, I walked along the tracks looking for another bottle, and I was lucky enough to find one, bigger than the first.

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  I told a half lie.


  “I’m collecting them.”

  For I was just picking up a third bottle which had contained some wine. My intention was to give at least one to the young woman in black.

  I could see her from a distance, standing in front of our car, and her dusty satin dress, her figure, her tousled hair seemed foreign to everything around her. She was stretching her legs without paying any attention to what was happening and I noticed her high, pointed heels.

  “Your mother hasn’t been sick?”

  “No. There’s a woman who talks all the time and she says the train is sure to be bombed. Is that true?”

  “She doesn’t know anything about it.”

  “You don’t think it’ll be bombed?”

  “I’m sure it won’t.”

  “Where are we going to sleep?”

  “In the train.”

  “There aren’t any beds.”

  I went and washed the three bottles, rinsing them several times to remove as far as possible the taste of the beer and the wine, and filled them with fresh water.

  I went back to my car, still accompanied by Sophie, and handed one of the bottles to the young woman.

  She looked at me in surprise, looked at my daughter, thanked me with a nod of her head, and climbed up into the car to put it in a safe place.

  There was only one house in sight, apart from the one belonging to the grade-crossing keeper: a tiny farm, a fair way away, on the hillside, and in the yard a woman with a blue apron was feeding the hens as if the war didn’t exist.

  “Is that where you are? On the floor?”

  “I sit on the trunk.”

  Julie was at grips with a red-faced man with thick, gray hair who was giving her meaningful looks, and every now and then the two of them burst into the sort of laughter you hear in the arbors of tavern gardens. The man had a bottle of red wine in his hand and kept giving his companion a swig from it. There were purple stains on her blouse, inside of which her big breasts bounced about with every burst of laughter.

  “Let’s go back to your mother.”

  “Already?”

  New subdivisions were beginning to take shape. On one side there was the world of the passenger carriages and on the other there was ours, the world of the cattle cars and the freight cars. Jeanne and my daughter belonged to the first world, I to the second, and I unconsciously showed some haste in taking Sophie back.

  “Aren’t you going to eat?”

  I ate my bread and sausage, on the track, in front of the open door. We could not say very much to one another, with those two rows of frozen faces whose eyes kept moving from my wife to me and my daughter.

  “Do you think we’ll set off again soon?”

  “They have to let the troop trains through. Once the line is clear, it will be our turn. Look! The engine’s arriving.”

  We could hear it, then see it, all by itself, with its white smoke, following the bends of the valley.

  “Hurry back to your place. I’m so frightened that somebody might have taken it!”

  Relieved to get away, I kissed Sophie but didn’t dare to kiss Jeanne in front of everybody. A spiteful voice called after me:

  “You might at least shut the door!”

  Nearly every Sunday in summer, first with Jeanne, then with her and my daughter, I used to go into the country to have a snack and sometimes lunch on the grass.

  But it wasn’t the smell or the taste of that countryside which I was rediscovering today but the smell and the taste of my childhood memories.

  For years I had sat down every Sunday in a clearing, I had played there with Sophie, I had picked flowers to make garlands for her, but all that was, so to speak, neutral.

  Why was it that today the world had recovered its savor?

  Even the buzzing of the wasps reminded me of the buzzing I heard when I used to hold my breath and watch a bee circling around my bread and butter.

  The faces, when I got back into the car, seemed more familiar. A sort of complicity was growing up between us, making us wink, for instance, after watching the antics of Julie and her horse dealer.

  I say horse dealer without knowing. People’s names didn’t matter, nor their occupation. He looked like a horse dealer and that was what I called him to myself.

  The couple were holding each other around the waist, and the man’s big hand was squeezing Julie’s breast when the train started moving again after a few jolts.

  The woman in black, who was still pressed against the side of the car, a few feet away from me, had nothing to sit on. It is true that, like so many others, she could have sat down on the floor. There were even four people in one corner who were playing cards as if they were sitting around a table in an inn.

  We returned to Monthermé, and a little later I caught a glimpse of Leversy Lock, where a dozen motor barges were vibrating on the dazzling water. The bargees had no need of a train, but the locks were there to stop them and I could imagine their impatience.

  The sky was turning pink. Three planes went over, flying very low, with reassuring tricolor roundels. They were so close that we could make out the face of one of the pilots. I could have sworn that he waved to us.

  When we arrived at Mézières, dusk had fallen, and our train, instead of going into the station, drew up in a wilderness of tracks. A soldier whose rank I didn’t see went along the train shouting:

  “Nobody must get out! It is absolutely forbidden to leave the train.”

  There was no platform anyway, and a little later some guns mounted on open trucks went past us at full speed. They had scarcely disappeared before the siren sounded an air-raid warning while the same voice went on shouting:

  “Stay where you are. It’s dangerous to get off the train. Stay where you are …”

  Now we could hear the drone of a certain number of planes. The town was in darkness and in the station, where all the lights were out, the passengers were probably running into the subways.

  I don’t think that I was frightened. I sat perfectly still, staring at the faces opposite me, and listening to the sound of the engines, which grew louder and then seemed to fade away.

  There was complete silence and our train stayed there, as if abandoned in the middle of a complicated network of tracks on which a few empty carriages were standing about. Among others, I can remember a tanker which bore in big yellow letters the name of a Montpellier wine merchant.

  Despite ourselves, we remained in suspense, not saying anything, waiting for the all-clear, which was not sounded for almost another half hour. During this time, the horse dealer’s hand had left Julie’s breast. It settled there again, more insistent than before, and the man pressed his lips on his neighbor’s.

  A countrywoman muttered:

  “Disgusting, I call it, in front of a little girl.”

  And he retorted, his mouth daubed with lipstick:

  “The little girl will have to learn one day! Didn’t you ever learn, in your day?”

  This was the sort of coarse, vulgar remark to which I wasn’t accustomed. It reminded me of the torrent of abuse my mother had poured on the youths who had followed her, jeering at her. I glanced at the dark-haired girl. She was looking somewhere else as if she hadn’t heard, and didn’t notice my interest.

  I have never been drunk for the simple reason that I drink neither wine nor beer. But I imagine that when night fell I was in roughly the condition of a man who has had a drop too much.

  Possibly on account of the afternoon sun, in the valley with the spring, my eyelids were hot and prickly; I felt that my cheeks were red, my arms and legs numb, my mind empty.

  I gave a start when somebody, striking a match to look at his watch, announced in an undertone:

  “Half past ten …!”

  Time was passing at once fast and slowly. To tell the truth, there was no time anymore.

  Some of my companions were asleep, others were talking in low voices. I dozed off, for my part, on the black trunk, with my head against the side of th
e car, and later on, in a half sleep, while the train was still motionless, surrounded by darkness and silence, I became aware of rhythmical movements close beside me. It took me some time to realize that it was Julie and her companion making love.

  I wasn’t shocked, even though, possibly on account of my disease, I have always been rather prudish. I followed the rhythm as if it were music and I must admit that, little by little, a detailed picture took shape in my mind, and the whole of my body was filled with a diffused warmth.

  When I dropped off to sleep again, Julie was murmuring, probably to another neighbor of hers:

  “No! Not now!”

  A long time afterward, toward the middle of the night, a series of jolts shook us, as if our train were shunting about. People were walking up and down the line, talking. Somebody said:

  “It’s the only way.”

  And somebody else:

  “I’ll only take orders from the military commandant.”

  They went off arguing and the train started moving, only to halt again after a few minutes.

  I stopped taking any notice of these movements which I couldn’t understand. We had left Fumay, and, provided we didn’t go back, the rest was a matter of indifference to me.

  There were some whistle blasts, more jolts, more halts followed by the hissing of steam.

  I know nothing about what happened that night at Mézières or anywhere else in the world, except that there was fighting in Holland and Belgium, that tens of thousands of people were crowding the roads, that planes were streaking across the sky nearly everywhere, and that the anti-aircraft guns fired a few random shots every now and then. We heard some bursts of gunfire, in the distance, and an endless convoy of trucks, on a road which must have passed close to the railway.

  In our car, where it was pitch-dark, the sound of snoring created a curious intimacy. Now and then somebody in an uncomfortable position or having a nightmare would give an unwitting groan.

  When I finally opened my eyes, we were moving, and half my companions were awake. A milky dawn was breaking, lighting up a countryside which was unfamiliar to me, fairly high hills covered with woods and farmhouses standing in huge clearings.