The Train (13 page)

This long caterpillar had already reached La Rochelle, crawling past us in the direction of Bordeaux.

Men, women, and children were dying as our engineer had died, their eyes staring up into the blue sky. Others were bleeding like the old man who had held his reddened
handkerchief to his face, or groaning like the woman with her shoulder shot away.

I ought to be ashamed of admitting it: I didn’t participate in this drama. It was outside us. It no longer affected us personally.

It was as if I had known, when I had left Fumay, what I was going to find: a little circle made to measure for me, which would become my shelter and in which it was essential for me to establish myself.

Since the reception center was intended for Belgian refugees, we had no right to be there, Anna and I. That is why we made ourselves as inconspicuous as possible, forgoing the first distributions of soup for fear of being noticed.

A low kitchen range had been installed in the open air, then two, then three, then four, with huge copper pans, real vats, like those used on farms for cooking pig-food.

Later a new prefabricated hut was put up to serve as a kitchen, with fixed tables at which we could sit down to eat.

Followed by Anna, who never left me, I watched the comings and goings. I had soon understood the organization of the camp, which was in fact a continuous improvisation.

One man was in charge of the whole camp, a Belgian, the man who had questioned me on my arrival and whom I avoided as much as possible. He was helped by a number of girls and scouts, including some older scouts from Ostend who had come off one of the first trains.

The refugees were sorted out as well as possible into the useful and useless, that is to say those who were capable of working and those—old men, women, and children—who could only be given shelter.

Theoretically the camp was a stop where people shouldn’t have spent more than a few hours or a night.

The factories engaged on defense work, at Aytré, La Pallice, and elsewhere, were clamoring for labor, and woodcutters were needed in a nearby forest to keep the bakeries supplied with firewood.

Coaches took the skilled workers and their families to these places, where local committees tried to find accommodations for them.

As for the unaccompanied women, the fatherless families, the unemployable persons, they were sent to towns which hadn’t any industry, such as Saintes or Royan.

The aim we set ourselves, Anna and I, right away, was to stay at the camp and get ourselves accepted there.

The nurse who had come in a car to bring us food on the last evening of our journey was called Madame Bauche and struck me as the most important person, so that, like a schoolboy who wants to get into his teacher’s good books, I gave her all my attention.

She was not very tall, plump, almost fat, aged, as I have said already, between thirty and forty, and I have never seen anybody display so much energy with such unruffled good humor.

I don’t know whether she was a registered nurse. She belonged to the upper crust of La Rochelle society, and was married to a doctor or an architect, I can’t remember which, for there were four or five other women with her, from the same place, and I used to get their husbands’ jobs mixed up.

As soon as a train was announced, she was the first at the station, not, like a lot of others, wearing arm bands, to distribute kind words and chocolate, but to find out those in the crowd who were most in need of help.

As the invasion gathered speed, they became more and more numerous, and she could be seen taking the cripples,
the babies, the more helpless of the old people into one of the huts, where, on her knees, in a white smock, she washed sore feet, dressed wounds, and led behind a blanket, which did duty as a curtain, those women who needed special attention.

More often than not she was still there at midnight, making a silent tour of inspection with the aid of a pocket flashlight, comforting women in tears, scolding men who were making too much noise.

The electric system, which had been installed in a hurry, was unsatisfactory, and when I offered to repair it Madame Bauche asked me:

“Do you know about that sort of thing?”

“It’s my trade, in a manner of speaking. All I need is a ladder.”

“Go and find one.”

I had noticed a building under construction in a group of new blocks of flats. I went to the site, and as there was nobody there to ask, I walked off with a ladder with Anna helping me. That ladder stayed at the camp as long as I did, without anybody coming to claim it.

I also replaced some broken windows, mended some taps and water pipes. Madame Bauche didn’t know my surname, or where I came from. She called me Marcel and got into the habit of sending for me whenever anything went wrong.

After two or three days I had become the general handyman. Leroy had disappeared with the first batch, sent off in the direction of Bordeaux or Toulouse. Of all the people in our car, old Jules was the only one who remained at the camp, where he was tolerated because he played the fool.

In town I met the man with the pipe, the one I used to call the concierge. Looking very harassed, he told me in passing that he was on his way to the Prefecture to demand news of his wife, and I never saw him again.

That happened on the second or third day. The day before, Anna had washed her panties and her brassiere, which she had hung out to dry in the sun, and as we wandered about the camp we exchanged conspiratorial glances at the thought that she was naked under her black dress.

There was a big tower at the end of the quay, the Clock Tower, which was a more massive construction than those flanking the entrance to the port, and which you went under to get to the main street.

This archway was to become a familiar sight for us, as were the arcaded streets which were unbelievably busy, for, over and above the population and the refugees, the town had troops and sailors stationed in it.

When I suggested buying Anna a change of underwear, she made no objection. It was essential. I had wondered whether I might not take the opportunity to buy her a light-colored dress of the sort you could see in all the shop windows. She must have thought about it too, for she guessed everything that entered my head.

“You know,” I said to her, “I’d offer to give you a dress …” She didn’t feel obliged to protest politely, as so many others would have done, if only as a matter of form, and she looked at me with a smile.

“Well? What were you going to add?”

“That I hesitate to do so, out of selfishness. For me, your black dress is almost part of you. You understand? I wonder whether I wouldn’t be disappointed to see you wearing something else.”

“I’m happy as I am,” she murmured, squeezing my fingertips.

I could feel that that was true. I was happy too. As we were passing a cosmetics shop I stopped.

“You don’t use powder or lipstick?”

“I used to, before.”

She didn’t mean before me, but before Namur.

“Would you like to have some again?”

“That depends on you. Only if you prefer me with makeup.”

“No.”

“Then I’d rather not.”

She didn’t want to have her hair cut either; it was neither long nor short.

There was something I never thought about, not only because I refused to think about it, but because it never entered my head: the fact that our life together didn’t have any future.

I didn’t know what was going to happen. Nobody could know. We were living through an interval, outside space, and I savored those days and nights greedily.

I was greedy for everything, for the changing spectacle of the port and the sea, the fishing boats of different colors which went off in Indian file at high tide, the fish which was unloaded in baskets or flat boxes, the crowds in the streets, glimpses of the camp and the station.

I was even hungrier for Anna, and for the first time in my life I wasn’t ashamed of my sexual desires.

On the contrary. With her, it had become a game which struck me as very pure. We talked about it gaily, frankly, inventing a whole code, adopting a certain number of signs which allowed us to exchange certain secret thoughts in public.

The center of this new world was the greenish tent which could be seen from a long way off dominating the huts, and, inside this tent, our own corner in the straw, what we called our stable.

We had arranged our belongings there, the things I had taken out of my luggage and other things which I had bought, such as mess tins for the soup and a compact spirit stove with everything we needed to brew our morning coffee, outside, between a couple of huts, facing the boats.

The others, especially those who were only staying there for a night, looked at our corner in surprise and, I feel sure, with envy, just as I in the past had sometimes looked at a real stable, with horses living snugly on their litter.

I used to talk about our litter too, and I didn’t like changing our straw too often, so that it remained impregnated with us.

It wasn’t only there that we made love, but all over the place, often in the most unexpected spots. That had begun with the boat one evening when we were looking at the fishing smacks rocking beside the quay while the creaking of the pulleys imitated the cry of the seagulls.

Knowing that in all probability I would never go to sea, I looked longingly at the open hatchway of one of the boats, whose deck was piled with lobster pots. Next my eyes turned to Anna, then back to the boat, and she started laughing with a laugh which formed part of our secret language.

“You want to?”

“What about you?”

“You aren’t afraid we might be taken for thieves and arrested?”

It was after midnight. The quay was deserted, all the lights camouflaged. Any footsteps could be heard a long
way off. The hardest thing about it was going down the iron ladder embedded in the stone. The last few rungs were slimy.

We managed all the same and slipped through the hatchway into the darkness below, where we bumped into more baskets, cans, and objects we couldn’t identify.

There was a smell of fish, seaweed, and paraffin. Finally Anna said:

“This way …”

I found her hand, which guided me along, and the two of us collapsed onto a hard, narrow bunk, pushing aside some oilskins which were in our way.

The tide rocked us gently to and fro. Through the hatchway we could see a patch of sky and a few stars; a train whistled over by the station. It wasn’t a new arrival. Some carriages were moving backward and forward, shunting around as if they were trying to tidy up the tracks.

There were no fences yet around the camp. We could come in and go out as we liked. There was nobody mounting guard. We just had to move softly so as not to wake our neighbors.

Later on, fences were put up, not to shut us in, but to prevent prowlers from mixing with the refugees and stealing things, as had happened once or twice.

Often, too, in the evening, we used to roam around the station, and one night when there was no traffic we lay down on the bench farthest away from the station buildings.

That amused us. It was a sort of challenge, and once we made love behind some bales of straw, close to Madame Bauche, who was bandaging sore feet and talking to us at the same time.

Every day I devoted a certain amount of time to looking
for my wife and daughter to the best of my ability.

They hadn’t been deceiving us, I can’t remember where, at Auxerre or Saumur, or perhaps it was at Tours, when they had told us of lists which would be posted up. Some were beginning to appear on the door of the office, where groups collected every morning to consult them.

Only they were lists of Belgian refugees. A lot of them were at Bordeaux, at Saintes, at Cognac, at Angoulême. Some had gone as far as Toulouse, and a good many were living in villages I had never heard of before.

I looked through the lists just in case. Every day, too, I went to see an official at the station who had promised to find out what had become of our train. He had made it a point of honor and it annoyed him intensely to be unable to find any trace of it.

“A train can’t disappear like that,” he muttered, “even in wartime. Sooner or later, I’m bound to find out where it’s gone.”

Thanks to the block telephone system linking one station to another, he had put his colleagues on the trail, and they were beginning to talk about the ghost train.

We went to the town hall, Anna and I. Crowds used to gather outside all the offices, for at that time everybody needed a piece of information, a permit, a paper bearing an official stamp.

Here too lists were posted up, of French people this time, but my wife’s name still wasn’t on them.

“If you’re looking for somebody, you’d do better to try the Prefecture.”

We went there. The courtyard was bright, the corridors and the offices bathed in sunshine, with clerks in shirt sleeves and a lot of girls in summer dresses. I had left Anna
in the street, seeing that I couldn’t pass her off as my wife when it was my wife I was trying to trace.

I saw her from the window, standing on the curb, raising her head, then walking up and down, grave, thoughtful. Already I felt impatient to rejoin her, and I reproached myself for leaving her, even for such a short time.

They were issuing petrol coupons to motorists. The Place d’Armes, the quays, the streets were crowded with hundreds of cars from all points of the compass. Their owners were here, at the Prefecture, waiting in the longest of the queues for the precious coupon which would enable them to continue their exodus.

The day before, in the line of cars making their way toward Rochefort, I had caught sight of a hearse from Charleroi in which a whole family was installed, and I suppose that their luggage was occupying the place of the coffin.

“Are you looking for something?”

“I’d like to know where my wife …”

It seems that there were already thousands of us, and there would soon be tens of thousands, in the same plight. Not only were people still fleeing from Belgium and the north, but panic had taken hold of the Parisians since the government had left the city, and it was said that, apart from the cars, a long procession of men and women on foot was now winding along the roads.