The Train (3 page)

“Go and play now, Sophie.”

And my wife, once she was alone with me, said:

“Perhaps I’d better go and see my father.”

“What for?”

“To find out what they are doing.”

She still had her father and mother, and three sisters, all married, two of whom lived at Fumay, one of them the wife of a confectioner in the Rue du Château.

It was because of her father that I had set up in business
on my own, for he was ambitious for his daughters and would not have allowed any of them to marry a workman.

It was he, too, who had made me buy the house on a twenty-year mortgage. I still had fifteen years of installments to pay, but in his eyes I was a property owner and that reassured him for the future.

“You never know what might happen to you, Marcel. You’re cured, but people have been known to have relapses.”

He had started in life as a miner in Delmotte’s slate-pits, and had become a foreman. He had his own house too, and his own garden.

“You can arrange to buy a house in such a way that, if the husband happens to die, the wife doesn’t have to pay anything more.”

Wasn’t it funny thinking about that on that particular morning, when nobody in the world could be sure of the future anymore?

Jeanne dressed and put on her hat.

“You’ll keep an eye on Sophie, won’t you?”

She went off to see her father. The cars went by, more and more of them, all heading south, and two or three times I thought I heard some planes. They didn’t drop any bombs. Perhaps they were French or English: it was impossible to tell, for they were flying very high and the sun was dazzling.

I opened the shop while Sophie was playing in the yard. It isn’t a real shop, for the house was not built for use as business premises. My customers have to go along a corridor and an ordinary window has to serve as a shop window. The same is true of the dairy shop, a little farther on. It is often like that in the suburbs, at least in the north. It means that we are forced to leave the front door open and I have fitted the shop door with a bell.

A couple of bargees came in for their radios. They weren’t ready but they insisted on taking them all the same. One of them was going downstream toward Rethel, while the other, a Fleming, wanted to get home at all costs.

I washed and shaved, watching my daughter through the window from which I could see all the gardens in the street full of flowers and grass, which was still a fresh green. People were talking to each other over the walls and I could hear a conversation between the Matrays, on the same floor as I was, for the windows were open.

“How do you expect to take all that with you?”

“We’ll need it.”

“We may need it, but I don’t see how we’re going to carry those suitcases to the station.”

“We’ll take a taxi.”

“If we can find one! I wonder if there’ll still be any trains.”

I was suddenly afraid. I pictured the crowds pouring down every street toward the little station just as the cars were streaming toward the south. It struck me that we ought to be leaving, that it was no longer a matter of hours but of minutes, and I reproached myself for having allowed my wife to go and see her father.

What advice could he give her? What did he know that I didn’t?

The fact of the matter was that she had never ceased to belong to her family. She had married me, lived with me, given me one child, was going to give me another. She bore my name but remained a Van Straeten for all that, and the slightest thing was enough to send her running to see her parents or her sisters.

“I must go and ask Berthe’s advice …”

Berthe was the confectioner’s wife, the youngest of the
sisters and the one who had made the best match, which was probably why Jeanne regarded her as an oracle.

If we were leaving, it was time to go, I was sure of that, just as I was suddenly sure, without asking myself why, that we had to leave Fumay. I hadn’t got a car, and for deliveries I used a handcart.

Without waiting for my wife to return, I went up to the attic to get the suitcases and a black trunk in which we kept old clothes.

“Are we taking the train, Daddy?”

“I think so.”

“You aren’t certain.”

I was getting nervous. I felt angry with Jeanne for going out and was afraid that at any moment something might happen: anything, perhaps not yet the arrival of the German tanks in the town, but something like an air raid which would cut us off from each other.

Every now and then I went into Sophie’s bedroom, which so to speak had never been used, since my daughter refused to sleep there, to look out into the street.

Outside three houses, including the house next door, cars were being loaded. The schoolmaster’s daughter, Michele, as curlyhaired and fresh in her white dress as when she went to mass on Sunday, was holding a canary’s cage while she waited for her parents to finish tying a mattress onto the roof of the car.

That reminded me of our hens and of Nestor, the cock Sophie was so fond of. It was I, three years earlier, who had put up some wire netting at the bottom of the garden and made a sort of hen-house.

Jeanne wanted fresh eggs for the child. Because of her father, of course, who had always kept hens, rabbits, and
pigeons. He also had some carrier pigeons, and when there was a competition on a Sunday, he would spend motionless hours at the bottom of his garden waiting for his birds to return to the pigeon-house.

Our cock, two or three times a week, flew over the walls and I had to go from house to house looking for him. Some people complained of the damage he caused in their gardens, others of being waked up by his crowing.

“Can I take my dolly with me?”

“Yes.”

“And the pram?”

“Not the pram. There won’t be enough room in the train.”

“Where’s my dolly going to sleep?”

I very nearly snapped back that, only the night before, the doll had spent the night out in the yard. At last my wife came back.

“What you are doing?”

“I’ve started packing.”

“You’ve decided to leave?”

“I think it’s the best thing to do. What are your parents doing?”

“They’re staying. My father has sworn not to leave his house, whatever happens. I dropped in at Berthe’s too. They’ll be on their way in a few minutes. They’ll have to hurry, because it seems there are jams everywhere, especially Mézières’ way. In Belgium, the Stukas are skimming the ground to machine-gun trains and cars.”

She didn’t protest at my decision because of her father, but didn’t seem in any hurry to go. Perhaps she too would have preferred to cling to her house?

“They say there are peasants going off in their carts with
everything they can take with them, and driving their animals in front of them. I saw the station from a distance. It was swarming with people.”

“What are you taking with you?”

“I don’t know. Sophie’s things, anyway. And we ought to take something to eat, especially for her. If you could find some condensed milk …”

I went to the grocer’s in the next street, and, contrary to my expectations, there was nobody in the shop. It is true that most of the local people had stocked up back in October. The grocer, in his white apron, was as calm as usual and I felt slightly ashamed of my feverishness.

“Have you any condensed milk left?”

He pointed to a whole shelf full of tins.

“How much do you want?”

“A dozen tins?”

I expected him to refuse to sell me as many as that. I also bought several bars of chocolate, some ham, and a whole sausage. There were no standards left, no landmarks. Nobody was capable of saying what was going to be valuable or not.

At eleven o’clock we were still not ready and Jeanne delayed us still further by being sick. I hesitated. I felt sorry for her. I asked myself whether, in view of her condition, I had any right to take her off into the unknown. She didn’t complain, bustling about and bumping her huge belly against the furniture and the door jambs.

“The hens!” she exclaimed all of a sudden.

Perhaps she had a vague hope that we would stay on account of the hens, but I had thought about them before her.

“Monsieur Reverse will take them in with his.”

“They’re staying, are they?”

“I’ll dash around and ask him.”

The Reverses lived on the quayside. They had two sons at the front and a daughter who was a nun in a convent at Givet.

“We are in God’s hands,” the old man told me. “If He is going to protect us, He will do it just as well here as anywhere else.”

His wife, in the shadows, was telling her beads. I announced my intention of giving them my hens and my cock.

“How can I go and collect them?”

“I’ll leave the key with you.”

“It’s a big responsibility.”

I nearly decided to bring the birds around right away, but then I thought of the trains, of the crowd besieging the station, of the planes in the sky. This was no time to go running after poultry.

I had to insist.

“Even so, we shall probably never see anything we leave behind again …”

The idea didn’t upset me. On the contrary, it filled me with a sort of somber joy, like that of destroying something you have patiently built up with your own hands.

What counted was going, was leaving Fumay. It didn’t matter if, somewhere else, other dangers were waiting for us. True, we were running away. But as far as I was concerned, it wasn’t from the Germans, from the bullets and bombs, from death.

After thinking carefully about it, I swear that that was how I felt. I had the impression that for other people this departure wasn’t very important. For me, as I have already said, it was the hour of my meeting with Fate, the hour of an appointment which I had had a long time, which I had always had, with Fate.

Jeanne was sniveling as we left the house. Walking between the shafts of the handcart, I didn’t even turn around. As I had finally informed Monsieur Reverse, to persuade him to take charge of my hens, I had left the house unlocked so that my customers could come and collect their radios if they wanted to. Just ordinary honesty on my part. And if anybody was going to steal something, wouldn’t he have broken the door down anyway?

All that was over and done with. I pushed my handcart along and Jeanne walked along the pavement with Sophie, who was clutching her doll to her chest.

I had a hard time threading my way through the traffic jams, and once I thought I had lost my wife and daughter, until I found them a little farther on.

An army ambulance drove past at full speed with its siren wailing, and a little farther on I caught sight of a Belgian car which was pitted with bullet holes.

Other people, like us, were walking toward the station, burdened with suitcases and bundles. An old woman asked me if she might put hers on my cart, and she started pushing it along with me.

“Do you think we’ll still get a train? Somebody told me the line was up.”

“Where?”

“Near Dinant. My stepson, who works on the railways, has seen a trainload of wounded go by.”

There was a rather wild look in most people’s eyes, but that was chiefly the result of impatience. Everybody wanted to be off. It was all a matter of arriving in time. Everybody was convinced that part of the huge crowd would be left behind and sacrificed.

Were those who were not leaving taking greater risks?
Behind the windowpanes, faces were watching the fugitives, and it seemed to me, looking at them, that they were stamped with a sort of icy calm.

I knew the freight service buildings where I often used to go to collect parcels. I went in that direction, beckoning to my wife and daughter to follow me, and that was how we managed to get a train.

There were two in the station. One was a troop train full of disheveled soldiers grinning at the crowd.

Nobody was getting into the other train yet. Or rather, not everybody. Gendarmes were holding back the crowd. I had left my handcart. Young women wearing arm bands were bustling about, looking after the old people and the children.

One of them noticed my wife’s belly, and our daughter whom she was holding by the hand.

“This way.”

“But my husband …”

“The men will find room later on in the freight cars.”

There was no arguing. You went where you were told, willy-nilly. Jeanne turned around, not knowing what was happening to her, trying to catch sight of me among all the heads. I shouted:

“Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle!”

The girl with the arm band came back toward me.

“Give her this. It’s the little girl’s food.”

Indeed it was all the food we had brought with us.

I saw them get into a first-class carriage, and from the footboard Sophie waved to me—or, at least, in my direction, for she could not recognize me among the hundreds of faces.

I was jostled about. I felt in my pocket to make sure that
my spare pair of glasses were still there; those glasses which were my constant anxiety.

“Don’t push!” cried a little man with a mustache.

And a gendarme repeated:

“Don’t push. The train won’t be leaving for another hour anyway!”

THE LADIES WITH THE ARM BANDS WENT ON filling the carriages with an endless succession of old people, pregnant women, young children, and cripples, and I was not the only one to wonder whether, in the end, there would be any room on the train for the men. I looked forward with a certain irony to seeing my wife and daughter go off while I was obliged to stay behind.

It was the gendarmes who finally got tired of holding back the crowd. They suddenly broke the cordon and everybody rushed toward the five or six freight cars at the rear of the train.

At the last minute I had given Jeanne, together with the food, the suitcase containing Sophie’s things and some of hers. I was left with the heavier of the two suitcases, and with my other hand I was dragging along as best I could the black trunk, which was bumping against my legs at every step. I didn’t feel the pain. I wasn’t thinking of anything, either.

I hoisted myself up, pushed by the people behind me, and, trying to stay as near as possible to the sliding door, I managed to put my trunk against the side of the car and sit down on it, panting for breath, with the suitcase on my lap.