The Train (16 page)

“There was a lot of traffic yesterday evening and last night. It will probably start again. What we’ve seen has been
mainly motorbikes and field kitchens. I suppose the tanks are following.”

He stopped to leave a parcel at a smithy where a plow-horse turned toward us, neighing. The day seemed terribly long to me, and in spite of our stroke of luck the journey went on and on.

I felt rather annoyed with Anna now for having come with me. It would have been better for both of us to have done with it at La Rochelle, with my kit bag on my shoulder and my suitcase in my hand.

Knowing that I was annoyed, she made herself as inconspicuous as she could between the driver and me. It suddenly occurred to me that her warm hip was touching the driver’s, and I felt a surge of jealousy.

We took nearly two hours to get to Pouzauges, meeting nobody but a motorized column half a mile long. The soldiers looked at us as they went by, looked at Anna above all, and a few of them waved to her.

“You’re only about fifteen miles from Bressuire. You’d better come into this café with me. I might be able to get you a lift.”

Some surly-looking men were playing cards. Two others, at the back of the room, were arguing over some papers spread out between the glasses.

“Look, is anybody going Bressuire way? This lady and gentleman are refugees who have to get there before tonight.”

One of the men who was arguing and who looked like an estate agent inspected Anna from head to foot before saying:

“I can take them as far as Cerizay.”

I didn’t know where Cerizay was. They explained that
it was halfway to Bressuire. I had expected to have to overcome difficulties and show a certain heroism in order to rejoin my wife, to tramp the roads for several days and to be harassed by the Germans.

I was almost disappointed that everything was going so easily. We waited for an hour until the discussion ended. Several times the men stood up and made as if to shake hands, only to sit down again and order another round of drinks.

Our new driver had an apoplectic complexion. With a self-important manner he made Anna sit beside him while I installed myself on the backseat. I suddenly felt the fatigue of my sleepless night; my eyelids were heavy and my lips burning hot, as if I had a fever. Perhaps I had got sunstroke?

After some time I ceased to be able to make out the conversation going on in front. I was vaguely aware of meadows, woods, and one or two sleepy-looking villages. We crossed a bridge over a river which was practically dry, before finally stopping in a square.

I thanked the driver. So did Anna. We walked two or three hundred yards before noticing, outside a baker’s shop, a flour truck on which the name of a miller at Bressuire was painted.

So I didn’t have to do any walking. Nor did Anna. We weren’t alone together once all day.

Night had fallen. We were standing on a pavement, near the terrace of a café, with my kit bag and my suitcase at my feet. I turned aside to take a few bank notes out of my wallet. Anna understood and didn’t protest when I slipped them into her handbag.

The square was empty all around us. I have never had
such an impression of emptiness. I stopped a boy who was passing.

“Can you tell me where the maternity home is?”

“Second street on the left, right at the end. You can’t miss it.”

Guessing that I was going to say goodbye there and then, Anna murmured:

“Let me go as far as the door with you.”

She was so humble that I hadn’t the heart to refuse. In one square there were some Germans fussing around a dozen big tanks and some officers shouting orders.

The street with the maternity home was on a slope, lined with middle-class houses. At the far end there was a big brick building.

Once again I put down my kit bag and my suitcase. I didn’t dare to look at Anna. A woman was leaning out of a window, a child sitting on the doorstep, and only the rooftops were still lit by the setting sun.

“Well …” I began.

The sound stopped in my throat and I took hold of her hands.

Despite myself I had to look at her one last time and I saw a face which seemed already blurred and indistinct.

“Goodbye!”

“I hope you’ll be happy, Marcel.”

I pressed her hands. I let go of them. I picked up my kit bag and my suitcase again, almost staggering, and when I had nearly got to the door of the maternity home she ran up behind me to whisper in my ear:

“I’ve been happy with you.”

Through the glass door I caught sight of some nurses in an entrance hall, a trolley, the receptionist talking on the
telephone. I went in. I turned around. She was standing there on the pavement.

“Madame Feron, please.”

IT WASN’T SIMPLY TO STRAIGHTEN OUT MY ideas, nor in the hope of understanding certain things which have always worried me, that I started writing these recollections, unknown to my wife and everybody else, in a notebook which I lock up every time anybody comes into my office.

For now I have an office, a shop with two display windows in the Rue du Château, and I employ more people than the son of my former employer, Monsieur Ponchot, who hasn’t kept up with the times and whose shop is still as dark and solemn as when I used to work there.

I have three growing children, two girls and a boy. It is the boy, Jean-François, who was born at Bressuire while Sophie was being looked after by some farmers in a nearby village who had taken my wife in when the train had abandoned them.

Sophie seemed pleased to see me, but not surprised, and when, a month later, we took the train to Fumay with her mother and her little brother, she was very upset.

The birth had been easy. Jean-François is the sturdiest of the three. It is his younger sister who has given us a lot of trouble. It is true that I found Jeanne edgier than ever,
getting frightened about nothing at all, and convinced that misfortune was lying in wait for her.

Isabelle, our third child, was born at the most dramatic moment in the war, when we were waiting for the Allied landing. Some people said that the landing would produce the same chaos and disorder as the German invasion. The authorities expected that all the able-bodied men would be sent to Germany, and routes were marked with arrows so that we shouldn’t congest the roads needed by the army.

It was also the time of shortages. Food stocks were at their lowest point and I couldn’t afford to buy much on the black market.

The fact remains that Jeanne was delivered prematurely, the baby was put in an incubator, and my wife has never really recovered. I mean morally even more than physically. She is still timid and pessimistic, and when, later on, we moved to the Rue du Château, she was convinced for a long time that we were heading for disaster and that we would end up poorer than ever.

I picked up my life where I had left it, as it was my duty and destiny to do, because that was the only possible solution and I had never imagined that it might be otherwise.

I worked hard. When the time came, I sent my children to the best schools.

I don’t know what they are going to do in later life. For the moment they are like all the other children of our sort of world and accept the ideas they are taught.

All the same, especially watching my son growing up, listening to the questions he asks, and seeing the glances he darts at me, all the same I wonder.

Perhaps Jean-François will go on behaving as his mother
and his schoolmasters teach him to and as I do more or less sincerely myself.

It is also possible that one day he may rebel against our ideas, our way of life, and try to be himself.

That is true of the girls as well, of course, but it was when I tried to imagine Jean-François as a young man that I started feeling worried.

My hair has receded. I need glasses with increasingly thick lenses. I am a fairly prosperous, quiet, rather dull man. From a certain point of view, the pair we form, Jeanne and I, is really a caricature of the married couple.

And then the idea came to me of leaving my son another picture of myself. I wondered whether it wouldn’t do him good, one day, to know that his father hadn’t always been the shopkeeper and the timid husband he had known, with no ambition beyond that of bringing up his children to the best of his ability and helping them to climb a small rung of the social ladder.

Like that, my son, and perhaps my daughters too, would learn that there had been a different man in me, and that for a few weeks I had been capable of a real passion.

I don’t know yet. I haven’t made up my mind what to do with this notebook, and I hope that I have some time left in which to think it over.

In any case, I owed it to myself to reveal that idea of mine here, just as I owe it to myself, in order to be honest with myself and other people, to go on to the end of the story.

As early as the winter of 1940, life had almost gone back to normal, except for the presence of the Germans and the food situation, which was already getting difficult. I had gone back to work. Radio sets were not prohibited, and
more of them were being bought than ever before. Nestor, the cock, and our hens, minus one, had returned to the bottom of the garden, and, contrary to my expectations, nothing had been stolen from the house, not a single radio, not a single tool; my workshop was just as I had left it, except for the dust.

The spring and the autumn of 1941 must have been uneventful, for I can remember very little about them except that Dr. Wilhems was a frequent caller. Jeanne’s health was worrying him, and he later admitted to me that he was afraid of her having a nervous breakdown.

Although there has never been any mention of Anna between my wife and myself, I would swear that she knows. Did some rumor reach her ears, spread by refugees who had returned home like us? I can’t remember meeting any at the time, but it isn’t impossible.

In any case, that had nothing to do with her health or her worries. She has never been a passionate or a jealous woman, and, like her sister Berthe, whose husband, the confectioner, is said to be a ladykiller, she wouldn’t mind me having affairs, provided they were kept discreet and didn’t endanger our home.

I am not trying to get rid of my responsibilities. I am saying what I think, quite objectively. If she realized, at Bressuire, that for a while I had stopped being the same man, my behavior, from then on, reassured her.

Did she guess that she had nearly lost me? But that isn’t really true. Our marriage hadn’t been in any serious danger: I say that at the risk of diminishing myself in my own eyes.

It was mainly the Germans that frightened her, filling her with an instinctive, physical fear: their footsteps in the street, their music, the posters which they put up on the
walls and which always announced bad news.

On account of my trade, they had ransacked my workshop and the house twice, and had even dug holes in the garden in search of secret radio transmitters.

We were still living in the same street at that time, near the quay, between the old Matrays’ house and that of the schoolmaster with the curly-haired daughter. The schoolmaster and his family hadn’t returned and we didn’t see them again until after the Liberation, for they spent the whole of the war near Carcassonne, where he was in the Resistance.

As far as I can remember, the winter of 1941–42 was a very cold one. Shortly before Christmas, when there had already been some snow, Dr. Wilhems called one morning to see Jeanne, who was just recovering from an attack of influenza. We had all had it, but she was taking some time to get over hers and was more worried than ever.

As he was taking leave of me, in the corridor, he said:

“Would you mind coming around and having a look at my radio? I’ve an idea that one of the tubes has burned out.”

It was dark by four o’clock in the afternoon and the street lamps were still painted blue, the shop windows unlighted. I had just finished a job when I remembered Dr. Wilhems, and I told myself that I had time to go over to his house before dinner.

I told my wife and put on my windbreaker. With my toolbox in one hand, I left the warmth of the house for the cold and the darkness of the street.

I had scarcely covered a few yards before a silhouette detached itself from the wall and came toward me while a voice called me by my name.

“Marcel.”

I recognized her immediately. She was wearing a beret and a dark coat. Her face struck me as paler than ever. She fell in step beside me just as when I used to say to her:

“Come along.”

She looked perished with cold, and nervous, while I remained calm and clearheaded.

“I’ve got to speak to you, Marcel. It’s my last chance. I’m at Fumay with an English airman I’m taking to the unoccupied zone.”

I turned around and thought I could see the figure of a man hiding in the Matrays’ doorway.

“Somebody has given us away and the Gestapo’s after us. We need to hide for a few days in a safe place until they’ve forgotten us.”

She was getting out of breath as she walked along, something which didn’t used to happen to her. There were rings under her eyes and her face was tired.

I was still striding along, and just as we were turning the corner onto the quay, I began:

“Listen …”

“I understand.”

She always understood before I had opened my mouth. All the same, I wanted to say what I had to say:

“The Germans are watching me. Twice, they …”

“I understand, Marcel,” she said again. “I don’t hold it against you. Excuse me.”

I didn’t have time to stop her. She had turned back, running toward the man who was waiting in the dark.

I never mentioned it to anybody. When I had repaired the doctor’s radio, I went back home where Jeanne was setting the table in the kitchen while Jean-François was already eating in his high chair.

“You haven’t caught cold, have you?” she asked, looking at me.

Everything was in its usual place, the furniture, the various objects, just as we had left it all when we had left Fumay, and there was an extra child in the house.

A month later, I noticed a freshly printed poster on the wall of the town hall. There were five names on it, including an English name and that of Anna Kupfer. All five had been shot as spies, two days before, in the courtyard of Mézières prison.