The Train (9 page)

“You aren’t thirsty?”

There was some water left in the second bottle, and I gave her some in a camping cup which my wife had put in the suitcase.

“What time is it?”

“Ten past six.”

“Where are we?”

“I don’t know.”

She ran her fingers through her hair, still looking at me thoughtfully.

“You’re a cool one,” she finally concluded, talking to herself. “You always stay cool. Life doesn’t frighten you. You haven’t any problems, have you?”

“Can’t you shut up, the two of you?” grumbled fat Julie.

We smiled and sat down on the trunk to watch the countryside go by. I took her hand. She let me, a little surprised, I think, especially when I raised it to my lips to kiss her fingertips.

A long time afterward, the sight of the congregation coming out of a village church reminded me that it was Sunday, and I was amazed at the thought that, two days before at the same time, I had been at home, wondering whether we ought to leave.

I saw myself again throwing corn to the hens while the water was boiling for my coffee; then I recalled Monsieur Matray’s head appearing over the wall, my wife at the window, her face at once drawn and puffy, and later my daughter’s anxious voice.

It was as if I could still hear the comical dialogue, on the radio, about the colonel who couldn’t be found, and I understood it better now that I was plunged in the muddle myself.

We were moving slowly again. A bend in the line took us nearly all the way around the village, which was perched on a hillock.

The church and the houses weren’t the same shape or
the same color as in our part of the world, but the congregation outside the church was behaving in accordance with an identical ritual.

The men in their black clothes, all old because the others were at the front, were standing about in groups, and you could tell that it wouldn’t be long before they went into the inn.

The old women were going off one by one, hurrying along and keeping close to the walls, while the girls in bright dresses and the youths stood waiting for one another, holding their missals in their hands, and the children started running immediately.

Anna was still looking at me, and I wondered if she knew what mass on Sunday was like. Before Sophie was born, Jeanne and I used to go to high mass at ten o’clock. Afterward we went for a stroll around the town, greeting our acquaintances, before stopping at her sister’s to collect our cake.

I paid for it. I had insisted on paying for it, accepting nothing but a discount of twenty percent. Often the cake was still warm, and on the way home I could smell the sugar on it.

After Sophie, Jeanne got into the habit of going to the seven o’clock mass while I looked after the child, and later, when the little girl could walk, I took her with me to the ten o’clock mass while my wife cooked lunch.

Was there a high mass that morning at Fumay? Were there still enough members of the congregation? Had the Germans bombed or invaded the town?

“What are you thinking about? Your wife?”

“No.”

That was true. Jeanne figured only incidentally in these
thoughts. I was thinking just as much about old Monsieur Matray and the schoolmaster’s curly-haired little girl. Had their car managed to make its way through the chaos on the roads? Had Monsieur Reverse been to get our hens and our poor Nestor?

I wasn’t upset. I asked myself these questions objectively, almost playfully, because everything had become possible, even, for example, the razing of Fumay to the ground and the shooting of its population.

That was just as plausible as our driver’s death in the cab of his engine, or, in my case, making love in the middle of forty people with a young woman whom I hadn’t known two days before and who had just come out of prison.

More and more of the others had sat down like us, looking around with vacant eyes, and a few were taking food out of their luggage. We were getting near a town. On the billboards I had read some names which were familiar to me, and when I saw that we were at Auxerre I had to make an effort to remember the map of France.

I don’t know why I had got it into my head that we were going to go through Paris. We had avoided the capital, probably going by way of Troyes during the night.

Now we found ourselves under the big glass roof of a station whose atmosphere was different from the one where we had stopped before.

Here it was a real Sunday morning, a prewar Sunday, with no reception service, no nurses, no girls wearing arm bands.

A score of people in all were waiting on the green benches on the platforms, and the sunshine, filtering through the dirty panes and reduced to light-dust, gave an unreal quality to the silence and solitude.

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

The guard looked at the front of the train, then at the clock. I don’t know why, for he replied:

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“Have we got time to go to the refreshment room?”

“You’ve got an hour at least, I should say.”

“Where are they taking us?”

He went off shrugging his shoulders, indicating that this question didn’t come within his province.

I wonder whether we weren’t rather annoyed—I say we on purpose—at not being welcomed, at finding ourselves suddenly left to our own resources. Expressing in his fashion the general feeling, somebody called out:

“So nobody’s feeding us anymore?”

As if it had become aright.

Right away, seeing that we were now in a civilized part of the world, I said to Anna:

“Are you coming?”

“Where?”

“To have something to eat.”

Our first instinctive action, for all of us, once we were on the platform, where we suddenly had too much room, was to look at our train from one end to the other, and it was a disappointment to find that it was no longer the same train.

Not only had the engine been changed, but, behind the tender, I counted fourteen Belgian carriages, as clean-looking as on ordinary trains.

As for our cattle cars and freight cars, there were only three of them left.

“The swine have cut us in two again!”

The doors opened in front, and the first person to get
out was a huge, athletic priest, who went over to the stationmaster with an air of authority about him.

They talked together. The stationmaster seemed to be agreeing to something, and afterward the priest spoke to the people who had stayed in the carriage, and helped a nun in a white coif to get down onto the platform.

There were four nuns in all, two of them very young, with baby faces, to help out and line up like schoolchildren about forty old men dressed in identical gray woolen suits.

It was an old people’s home which had been evacuated, and we learned later that the train to which we had been joined while we were asleep came from Louvain.

The men were all very old, and more or less infirm. Beards had grown, thick and white, on faces as clear-cut as in old pictures.

The extraordinary thing was their meekness, the indifference which you could read in their eyes. They allowed themselves to be taken to the second-class refreshment room, where they were installed as in a refectory while the priest spoke to the manager.

Once again Anna looked at me. Was it because of the priest and the nuns, because she thought that I was familiar with that world? Or was it because the old men in a line reminded her of prison and a discipline which I didn’t know but of which she had experience?

I don’t know. We kept darting these brief, probing glances at each other like this, only to resume an impassive expression immediately afterward.

THE LIEGE FORTS IN GERMAN HANDS
.

I read this headline on a newspaper on the stall, and, in smaller letters:

PARACHUTISTS ATTACK ALBERT CANAL
.

“What do you want to eat? Do you like croissants?”

She nodded.

“Light coffee?”

“Black. If we’ve got time, I’d like to tidy up first. Would you mind lending me your comb?”

As we had sat down at a table and all the others had been taken, I didn’t dare to get up to follow her. Just as she was going through the glass door, I felt my heart sink, for the idea occurred to me that I might never see her again.

Through the window I could see a quiet square, some taxis on a rank, a hotel, and a little blue-painted bar where the waiter was wiping the tables on the terrace.

There was nothing to stop Anna from going.

“Had any news of your wife and daughter?”

Fernand Leroy was standing in front of me, a bottle of beer in his hand, an ironical look in his eye. I said no, trying not to blush, for I realized that he knew what had happened between Anna and myself.

I have never liked Leroy. The son of a sergeant-major in the cavalry, he used to explain to us at school:

“In the cavalry, a sergeant-major is much more important than a lieutenant or even a captain in any other branch of the army.”

He always managed to get other boys punished instead of him and the masters were taken in by his innocent expression, something which didn’t prevent him from making faces behind their backs.

I learned, later on, that he had failed his
baccalaureat
twice. His father was dead. His mother worked as a cashier in a movie house. He got a job at Hachette’s bookshop and, two or three years later, married the daughter of a rich contractor.

Did he marry her for her money? That’s none of my business. It was without any malicious intent that I in turn asked:

“Isn’t your wife with you?”

“I thought you knew. We’re getting a divorce.”

If it hadn’t been for him, I should have gone to look for Anna.

Time seemed to drag. My hands were getting moist. I was filled with an impatience I had never known before, which, though much stronger, was comparable only to the feeling which had gripped me the previous Friday, in the station at Fumay, when I was wondering whether we would manage to get away.

A waitress came over and I ordered coffee and croissants for two while Leroy put on his horrible smile again. People like him, I thought to myself, are capable of dirtying everything with a glance, and all the time I was waiting I really hated him.

It was only when he saw Anna pushing open the door that he moved away in the direction of the bar, saying:

“I’ll leave the two of you.”

Yes, the two of us. We were the two of us again. My face must have shown the joy I felt, for Anna had scarcely sat down opposite me before she murmured:

“Were you afraid I wouldn’t come back?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I suddenly felt lost and I nearly ran after you on the platform.”

“I haven’t any money.”

“And if you’d had some?”

“I wouldn’t have gone even then.”

She didn’t say whether this was because of me, but just asked me for some small change which she took to the woman in charge of the ladies’ washrooms.

The old men were eating in silence, as they must have done in the institution. The tables had been put together. The priest was at one end, the oldest of the nuns at the other. It was half past ten in the morning. Presumably to provide two meals in one, or because nobody knew what lay ahead of us, each of them had been given some cheese and a hard-boiled egg.

Some of them, who had no teeth left, were munching with their gums. One of them was dribbling so badly that a nun had tied a paper napkin around his neck and was keeping a close watch on his movements. A good many were red-eyed and had thick blue veins standing out on their hands.

“Don’t you want to go and wash up too?”

I not only went to have a wash, but I took a clean shirt out of my suitcase in order to change. My traveling companions were in the washrooms, stripped to the waist, washing, shaving, and combing their wet hair. The roller towel was black and had a doggy smell.

“You know how many fellows had her last night?”

I caught my breath and felt a bar across my chest, something which taught me that I was jealous.

“Three, as well as the fat fellow! I counted them, seeing that I hardly slept a wink because of them. But they had to cough up their twenty francs, just like they did in her pub. Have you ever been in her pub?”

“Once, with my brother-in-law.”

“Who’s your brother-in-law?”

“You saw him when you got married and when you
registered your kids. He’s the clerk in the register office.”

“Is he here?”

“They aren’t allowed to leave. That’s what they say, anyway. All the same, I saw with my own eyes a police officer scramming on his motor-bike with his wife up behind him.”

Why had I felt frightened? It was all the more ridiculous in that I am a light sleeper and Anna had so to speak slept in my arms.

I also discovered, there in the washrooms, that there had been other couplings during the night, in the corner opposite ours, including some with a huge countrywoman who was over fifty. They even said that old Jules, after a few others had had her, had tried his luck and that she had been hard put to it to push him away.

Wasn’t it odd that nobody had made the slightest approach to Anna? They had seen her get on the train by herself, so they knew that she wasn’t with me, that we had met by chance. There was no reason, in the minds of those men, why I should enjoy an exclusive privilege.

Yet they just looked at her from a distance. It was true—and that struck me now—that nobody had spoken to her. Had they recognized that she belonged to another race? Did they distrust her?

I rejoined her. The stationmaster came along twice to have a chat with the priest. In that way, as long as the old men stayed at the table, we were in no danger of seeing the train leave without us.

“Do you know where we’re going?”

It was the man with the pipe who had suddenly reappeared, clean-shaven, his pockets stuffed with packets of tobacco, of which he had bought a whole stock.

“For the moment my instructions are to send you on
to Bourges, via Clamecy, but all that may change from one minute to the next.”

“And after that?”