The Train

PRAISE FOR
THE TRAIN

PRAISE FOR GEORGES SIMENON

GEORGES SIMENON
(1903–1989) was born in Liège, Belgium, the son of an accountant. His father’s ill health forced him to quit school at 16, and he became a newspaperman, assigned to the crime beat. He published his first book,
Au Point des arches
, a year later, under his reporter’s pen-name, G. Sim. In 1922 he moved to Paris and began to write novels at a furious pace, using at least a dozen pen-names, although he created his most famous character, Commissaire Maigret of the Paris Police, under his own name. Maigret would eventually star in 75 novels. His non-Maigret novels—referred to as his
roman durs
(literally, “hard novels”)—were even more critically acclaimed, leading to speculation he would eventually win the Nobel. In the early thirties Simenon took up travel, living on a houseboat cruising the Belgian canal system, touring Africa and the Soviet Union, and living throughout the US and Canada. During the war years he moved to the French countryside, but was harassed by the Nazis who suspected his last name was Jewish. Nonetheless, after the war he was banned from publishing for five years for having sold film rights to German filmmakers. Married and divorced twice, Simenon was the father of four children, one of whom, his daughter Mari-Jo, committed suicide at age 25. (She would be the subject of his novel,
The Disappearance of Odile.
) It would darken Simenon’s later years, but he never stopped writing. Estimates are that he wrote as many as 500 books by the time of his death of natural causes at age 86.

ROBERT BALDICK
(1927–1972) was a British author and translator, in addition to being a Fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford and joint editor of the Penguins Classics series.

THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY

I was by no means the only reader of books on board the
Neversink.
Several other sailors were diligent readers, though their studies did not lie in the way of belles-lettres. Their favourite authors were such as you may find at the book-stalls around Fulton Market; they were slightly physiological in their nature. My book experiences on board of the frigate proved an example of a fact which every book-lover must have experienced before me, namely, that though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much
.
—HERMAN MELVILLE,
WHITE JACKET

WHEN I WOKE UP, A YELLOWISH LIGHT WHICH I knew so well was filtering into the bedroom through the Holland curtains. Our windows, on the first floor, have no shutters. None of the houses in the street has any. I could hear, on the bedside table, the ticking of the alarm clock, and, beside me, my wife’s regular breathing, which was almost as loud as that of patients, at the movies, during an operation. She was then seven and a half months pregnant. As when she was expecting Sophie, her huge belly forced her to sleep on her back.

Without looking at the alarm clock, I slipped one leg out of bed. Jeanne stirred and stammered in a faraway voice:

“What time is it?”

“Half past five.”

I have always got up early, especially after my years in the sanatorium, where, in summer, they used to bring us the thermometer at six in the morning.

My wife had already ceased to be aware of what was happening around her and one of her arms had stretched out across the place I had just left.

I dressed silently, carrying out, in order, the ritual movements of every morning, and glancing now and then at my daughter, whose bed at that time was still in our room. Yet
we had furnished the prettiest room in the house for her, a front room communicating with ours.

She refused to sleep in it.

I went out of the room carrying my slippers in one hand, and put them on only at the foot of the stairs. It was then that I heard the first boats’ hooters over at Uf Lock, which is about two miles away. The regulations state that the locks must be open to barge traffic at sunrise, and every morning there is the same concert.

In the kitchen I lit the gas and put the water on to boil. Once again, it looked like being a hot, sunny day. During the whole of that period, we had nothing but glorious days and even now I could still point out, hour by hour, the position of the pools of sunlight in the various rooms in the house.

I opened the back door to the glass porch which we had put on so that my wife can do the washing there in all weathers and my daughter can play there. I can picture the doll’s pram, and the doll a little farther off, on the yellow tiles.

I avoided going straight into my workshop because I wanted to obey the rules, as I used to say at that time when speaking of my timetable. A timetable which had established itself, little by little, made up of habits rather than obligations.

While the water was warming up, I poured some corn into an old blue enamel pan with a rusty bottom, which could no longer be used for anything else, and crossed the garden to go and feed the hens. We had six white hens and one cock.

The dew was sparkling on the vegetables and on our solitary lilac, whose flowers, which were early that year,
were beginning to wither, and I could still hear, not only the hooting of the boats on the Meuse, but also the panting of the diesel engines.

I want to make it clear right away that I was not an unhappy man, nor a sad man either. At the age of thirty-two, I considered that I had gone beyond all the plans I had made, all my dreams.

I had a wife, a house, and a four-year-old daughter who was rather high-strung, but Dr. Wilhems said that that would pass.

I had a business of my own and my clientele grew from day to day, especially in the last few months of course. Because of what had been happening, everybody wanted to have a radio. I never stopped selling new radios and repairing old ones, and since we lived close to the quayside where the boats stopped for the night, I had the bargees as customers.

I remember that I heard the door open in the house on the left, where the Matrays, a quiet old couple, lived. Monsieur Matray, who worked as a cashier in the Bank of France for thirty-five or forty years, is another early riser and starts every day by going into his garden for a breather.

All the gardens in the street look the same, each as wide as the house and separated from one another by walls just so high that you can see nothing but the top of your neighbor’s head.

For some time past, old Monsieur Matray had got into the habit of watching out for me, on account of my sets, which could pick up short waves.

“No news this morning, Monsieur Feron.”

That day, I went back inside before he asked me the question and I poured the boiling water onto the coffee. The
familiar objects were in their places, those that Jeanne and I had allotted them or which they had ended up by taking, almost of their own accord, with the passing of time.

If my wife had not been pregnant, I would have begun to hear her footsteps on the first floor, for she normally got up straight after me. All the same I insisted, out of habit, on making myself my first cup of coffee before going into my workshop. We observed a certain number of rites of that sort, and I suppose the same is true of every family.

The first pregnancy had been painful, the delivery difficult. Jeanne attributed Sophie’s nervous temperament to the forceps which had had to be used and which had bruised the child’s head. Ever since her second pregnancy had started, she had been dreading a troublesome delivery and she was haunted by the idea of giving birth to an abnormal child.