The Train (11 page)

“And what about us? Seeing that we aren’t Belgians?”

“Oh, we’ll manage.”

We were moving slowly and I kept reading place names which reminded me of books I had read: Pornic, Saint-Jean-de-Monts, Croix-de-Vie …

We caught sight of the Île d’Yeu, which, in the dazzling sunlight, you might have taken for a cloud stretched out on a level with the water.

For hours our train seemed to be taking the longest route, as if we were on an excursion, going off on side tracks to stop in the open country and then coming back again.

We were no longer afraid of getting off and jumping on again, for we knew that the engineer would wait for us.

I realized why we were following such a circuitous route, and also perhaps why we had taken such a long time coming from the Ardennes.

The regular trains, with normal passengers who paid for their tickets, were still running, and on the main lines there was also a continual traffic of troop trains and munitions trains which had priority over the rest.

In nearly every station, as well as the ordinary staff, we started seeing an officer giving orders.

As we belonged to none of these categories, we kept being shunted into a siding to make room.

Once I overheard a telephone conversation in a pretty station red with geraniums, where a dog was stretched out across the doorway of the stationmaster’s office. The stationmaster, who was feeling hot, had pushed his cap back and was toying with his flag, which was lying on the desk.

“Is that you, Dambois?”

Another stationmaster explained to me that this wasn’t an ordinary telephone. If I remember rightly, it is called the block telephone and you can only speak to and hear the
nearest station on it. That is how notice of a train’s approach is given.

“How are things with you?”

There were some hens behind some chicken wire, just like at home, and a well-kept garden. The stationmaster’s wife was doing the rooms upstairs and came to the window now and then to shake her duster.

“I’ve got the 237 here … I can’t keep them much longer, because I’m expecting the 161 … Is your siding free? … Is Hortense’s café open? … Tell her she’s going to have a crowd of customers … Right! … Thanks … I’ll send it on to you …”

The result was that we spent three hours in a tiny station next to an inn painted pink. The tables were taken by storm. Everybody drank. Everybody ate. Anna and I stayed outside, under a pine tree, and at times we felt embarrassed at having nothing to say to each other.

If I had to describe the place, I could only talk of the patches of sunshine and shadow, of the pink daylight, of the green vines and currant bushes, of my feeling of torpor and animal well-being, and I wonder whether, that particular day, I didn’t get as close as possible to perfect happiness.

Smells existed as they had in my childhood, the quivering of the air, the imperceptible noises of life. I think I have said this before, but as I am not writing all at one go but scribbling a few lines here, a page or two there, in secret, on the sly, I am bound to repeat myself.

When I began my story, I was tempted to start with a foreword, for sentimental rather than practical reasons. You see, at the sanatorium the library consisted mainly of books dating back before 1900, and it was the fashion for authors in the last century to write a foreword, an introduction, or a preface.

The paper in those books, yellow and speckled with brown spots, was thicker and shinier than in present-day books, and they had a pleasant smell which, for me, has clung to the characters in the novels. The black cloth of the bindings was as shiny as the elbows of an old jacket, and I found the same cloth again in the public library at Fumay.

I dropped the idea of a foreword for fear of seeming conceited. It is true that I may repeat myself, get mixed up, even contradict myself, for I am writing this mainly in the hope of discovering a certain truth.

As for the events which don’t concern me personally, I record them, when I witnessed them, to the best of my recollection. To find certain dates I would have had to look up the back numbers of the newspapers, and I don’t know where to find them.

I am sure about the date of Friday the 10
^th
, which must be in the history books now. I am sure too, more or less, about the itinerary we followed, although, even on the train, some of my companions started mentioning names of stations which we hadn’t seen.

A road which was deserted in the morning, in those days, could be swarming with life an hour later. Everything went terribly fast and terribly slowly. People were still talking about fighting in Holland when the Panzers had already reached Sedan.

Again, my memory may occasionally play tricks on me. As I said about the last morning at Fumay, I could reconstruct certain hours minute by minute, whereas with others I can only remember the general atmosphere.

It was like that on the train, especially with the fatigue, the dull, dazed feeling which resulted from our way of life.

We no longer had any responsibilities, any decisions to make. Nothing depended on us, not even our own fate.

One detail, for instance, has worried me a lot, because I am rather persnickety and tend to think over an idea for hours until I have got it right. When I wrote about the plane machine-gunning our train, about the fireman gesticulating beside his engine, and about the dead driver, I didn’t mention the guard. Yet there ought to have been a guard, whose job it was to make the necessary decisions.

I didn’t see him. Did he exist or didn’t he? Once again, things didn’t necessarily happen in a logical way.

As for the Vendée, I know that my skin, my eyes, the whole of my body have never drunk in the sunshine as greedily as they did that day, and I can say for sure that I appreciated every nuance of the light, every shade of green of the meadows, the fields, and the trees.

A cow, stretched out in the shade of an oak, all white and brown, its wet muzzle twitching endlessly, ceased to be a familiar animal, a commonplace sight, to become …

To become what? I can’t find the words I want. I am no good at expressing myself. The fact remains that tears came into my eyes looking at a cow. And, that day on the terrace of a pink-painted inn, my eyes remained for a long time fixed in wonderment on a fly circling around a drop of lemonade.

Anna noticed. I became aware that she was smiling. I asked her why.

“I’ve just seen you as you must have been when you were five.”

Even the smells of the human body, particularly that of sweat, were pleasant to rediscover. Finally, I had found a part of the world where the land was on a level with the sea
and where you could see as many as five church steeples at once.

The country people went about their work as usual, and when our train stopped they just looked at it from a distance, without feeling the need to come and inspect us or ask us questions.

I noticed that there were far more geese and ducks than there were at home, and that the houses were so low that you could touch the roofs, as if the inhabitants were afraid of the wind carrying them away.

I saw Lucon, which made me think of Cardinal Richelieu, then Fontenay-le-Comte. We could have arrived at La Rochelle in the evening, but the stationmaster at Fontenay came and explained to us that it would be difficult to disembark us in the dark and install us in the reception center.

You have to remember that, on account of the air raids, the gas lamps and all the other street lights were painted blue and people had to hang black curtains in their windows, so that at night, in the towns, the passersby carried flashlights and the cars drove at a walking pace, with just their side lights on.

“They’re going to find you a quiet spot to spend the night in. And somebody’ll bring you food and drink.”

It was true. We approached the sea only to leave it behind again, and our train, which had no timetable to observe and seemed to be looking for a resting place, ended up by stopping in a meadow, near to a way station.

It was six o’clock in the evening. You couldn’t feel the chill of twilight yet. Nearly everybody got out to stretch their legs, except for the old men in the care of the priest and the nuns, and I saw middle-aged women with grim faces bending down to pick daisies and buttercups.

Somebody said the old men in the coarse gray uniforms were mental patients. That may have been the case. At La Rochelle they were met by nurses and more nuns who piled them into a couple of coaches.

I had already had an idea, and I went over to Dede, the fifteen-year-old boy, to buy one of his blankets from him. It was more difficult than I had expected. He haggled more stubbornly than a peasant at a fair, but I got my way in the end.

Anna watched us with a smile, unable, I imagine, to guess the object of our bargaining.

I was enjoying myself. I felt young. Or rather I didn’t feel any age in particular.

“What were you talking about so earnestly?”

“An idea of mine.”

“I know what it is.”

“I doubt it.”

“Bet you I do.”

As if I were a boy and she were a little girl.

“Tell me what you’re thinking, to see if you’ve guessed.”

“You don’t want to sleep on the train.”

It was true, and I was surprised that she had thought of it. To my mind, it was a rather crazy idea, which couldn’t occur to anybody but myself. I had never had an opportunity to sleep in the open air as a child because my mother wouldn’t have allowed it, and besides it would have been difficult in a town, and later on account of my illness.

As soon as the stationmaster had spoken of finding us a quiet spot in the country, the idea had occurred to me, and now I had got hold of a blanket which would protect us from the dew and safeguard our intimacy.

A yellow car arrived with a jovial nurse and four boy
scouts of sixteen or seventeen. They brought us sandwiches, bars of chocolate, and a couple of cans of hot coffee. They also had some blankets, which were reserved for the children and the old men.

The doors banged. For a good hour, in the slowly fading light, there was a confused hubbub in which cries in Flemish could be heard the loudest.

If it hadn’t been for that night’s halt, I would never have known that there were some babies in the Belgian carriages. But the nurse knew, thanks to the block telephone, and she had brought along some feeding bottles and a big bundle of diapers.

That was of no interest to our car. Not because they were Belgians but because the children didn’t belong to our group. Besides, the French people in the other two freight cars, although they had got on the train at the same time as us at Fumay, were just as foreign to us.

Cells had been formed, airtight, self-contained. And in each cell smaller cells could be observed, such as the card players or the couple consisting of Anna and myself.

Frogs started croaking, and new sounds could be heard in the meadows and the trees.

We went for a stroll without holding hands, without touching each other, and Anna smoked one of the cigarettes I had bought her at Nantes.

The idea of talking about love never occurred to us, and I wonder today if it was really love that we felt for each other. I mean love in the sense which is usually given to the word, for to my mind it was much more.

She didn’t know what I did for a living and showed no desire to find out. She knew that I had had tuberculosis, for I had happened to remark, on the subject of sleep:

“At the sanatorium they used to turn the lights out at eight o’clock.”

She looked at me immediately and that movement was characteristic of her, as was her glance which I would find difficult to describe. It was as if an idea had struck her all of a sudden, not an idea born of reflection, but something palpable if fleeting which she had caught instinctively in flight.

“Now I understand,” she murmured.

“You understand what?”

“You.”

“What have you found out?”

“That you’ve spent several years shut up.”

I didn’t press the point but I think that I understood in my turn. She had been shut up, too. The name of the place where you are condemned to live between four walls is of small importance.

Didn’t she mean that it leaves a mark, and that she had recognized that mark in me without knowing how to explain it?

We walked slowly back to the darkened train where nothing could be seen but the firefly glimmer of cigarettes and we could hear a few voices whispering.

I collected the blanket. We looked for a place, our place, some soft earth, some tall grass, a gentle slope.

A clump of three trees hid us from sight and there was also a big, smelly patch of cow dung in which somebody had walked. The moon wouldn’t rise before three o’clock in the morning.

We stood for a while rather awkwardly facing one another, and to keep my composure I started arranging the blanket.

I remember Anna throwing away her cigarette, which
went on glowing in the grass, taking off her dress with a movement I hadn’t seen before, and then removing her underclothes.

She came up to me then, naked, surprised by the cold which made her shiver once or twice, and gently pulled me down on the ground.

I realized right away that she wanted it to be my night. She had guessed that I was looking forward to it, just as she had guessed so many of my thoughts.

It was she who took the initiative all the time; she too who pushed away the blanket so that our bodies should be in contact with the ground, with the smell of the earth and the grass.

When the moon rose, I was still awake. Anna had put her dress on again and we were rolled up in the blanket, pressed against each other, on account of the cool of the night.

I could see her dark hair with its glints of red, her exotic profile, and her pale skin whose texture was unlike anything I had ever known before.

We had blended so closely into each other that we had only a single smell.

I don’t know what I thought about while I was looking at her. I was in a serious mood, neither gay nor sad. The future didn’t worry me. I refused to let it intervene in the present.