The Train (6 page)

I don’t think that I was frightened. I sat perfectly still, staring at the faces opposite me, and listening to the sound of the engines, which grew louder and then seemed to fade away.

There was complete silence and our train stayed there, as if abandoned in the middle of a complicated network of tracks on which a few empty carriages were standing about. Among others, I can remember a tanker which bore in big yellow letters the name of a Montpellier wine merchant.

Despite ourselves, we remained in suspense, not saying anything, waiting for the all-clear, which was not sounded for almost another half hour. During this time, the horse
dealer’s hand had left Julie’s breast. It settled there again, more insistent than before, and the man pressed his lips on his neighbor’s.

A countrywoman muttered:

“Disgusting, I call it, in front of a little girl.”

And he retorted, his mouth daubed with lipstick:

“The little girl will have to learn one day! Didn’t you ever learn, in your day?”

This was the sort of coarse, vulgar remark to which I wasn’t accustomed. It reminded me of the torrent of abuse my mother had poured on the youths who had followed her, jeering at her. I glanced at the dark-haired girl. She was looking somewhere else as if she hadn’t heard, and didn’t notice my interest.

I have never been drunk for the simple reason that I drink neither wine nor beer. But I imagine that when night fell I was in roughly the condition of a man who has had a drop too much.

Possibly on account of the afternoon sun, in the valley with the spring, my eyelids were hot and prickly; I felt that my cheeks were red, my arms and legs numb, my mind empty.

I gave a start when somebody, striking a match to look at his watch, announced in an undertone:

“Half past ten …!”

Time was passing at once fast and slowly. To tell the truth, there was no time anymore.

Some of my companions were asleep, others were talking in low voices. I dozed off, for my part, on the black trunk, with my head against the side of the car, and later on, in a half sleep, while the train was still motionless, surrounded by darkness and silence, I became aware of rhythmical
movements close beside me. It took me some time to realize that it was Julie and her companion making love.

I wasn’t shocked, even though, possibly on account of my disease, I have always been rather prudish. I followed the rhythm as if it were music and I must admit that, little by little, a detailed picture took shape in my mind, and the whole of my body was filled with a diffused warmth.

When I dropped off to sleep again, Julie was murmuring, probably to another neighbor of hers:

“No! Not now!”

A long time afterward, toward the middle of the night, a series of jolts shook us, as if our train were shunting about. People were walking up and down the line, talking. Somebody said:

“It’s the only way.”

And somebody else:

“I’ll only take orders from the military commandant.”

They went off arguing and the train started moving, only to halt again after a few minutes.

I stopped taking any notice of these movements which I couldn’t understand. We had left Fumay, and, provided we didn’t go back, the rest was a matter of indifference to me.

There were some whistle blasts, more jolts, more halts followed by the hissing of steam.

I know nothing about what happened that night at Mézières or anywhere else in the world, except that there was fighting in Holland and Belgium, that tens of thousands of people were crowding the roads, that planes were streaking across the sky nearly everywhere, and that the anti-aircraft guns fired a few random shots every now and then. We heard some bursts of gunfire, in the distance, and
an endless convoy of trucks, on a road which must have passed close to the railway.

In our car, where it was pitch-dark, the sound of snoring created a curious intimacy. Now and then somebody in an uncomfortable position or having a nightmare would give an unwitting groan.

When I finally opened my eyes, we were moving, and half my companions were awake. A milky dawn was breaking, lighting up a countryside which was unfamiliar to me, fairly high hills covered with woods and farmhouses standing in huge clearings.

Julie was asleep, her mouth half open, her blouse undone. The young woman in the black dress was sitting with her back against the side of the car, and a lock of hair hanging over one cheek. I wondered whether she had stayed like that all night and whether she had been able to sleep. Her eyes met mine. She smiled at me, on account of the bottle of water.

“Where are we?” asked one of my neighbors, waking up.

“I don’t know,” answered the man sitting in the doorway with his legs hanging out. “We’ve just passed a station called Lafrancheville.”

We passed another decked with flowers and deserted like the rest. On the blue-and-white sign I read the name:
BOULZICOURT
.

The train started rounding a bend, through some fairly flat country; the man with the dangling legs took his pipe out of his mouth to exclaim in comical despair:

“Hell!”

“What is it?”

“The swine have shortened the train!”

“What’s that you say?”

There was a rush toward the door, and, hanging on with both hands, the man protested:

“Stop pushing, you! You’re going to shove me out on the line. You can see for yourselves there are only five carriages in front of us. Well, what have they done with the others? And how am I going to find my wife and kids? Hell! Oh, damn it to hell!”

“I KNEW PERFECTLY WELL THAT THE ENGINE couldn’t pull all those carriages. They must have realized that in the end and decided to cut the train in two.”

“The first thing to do was to tell us, wasn’t it? What’s going to happen to the women?”

“Perhaps they’re waiting for us at Rethel. Or at Rheims.”

“Unless they’re going to give them back to us, like soldiers’ wives, when this damned war finishes—if it ever does!”

I tried automatically to distinguish between sincerity and sham in these angry complaints. Wasn’t this above all a sort of game these men were playing with themselves, because there were witnesses?

Personally I wasn’t upset, nor really anxious. I stayed where I was, motionless, a little startled in spite of everything. Suddenly I had the feeling that a pair of eyes were gazing insistently at me.

I was right. The face of the woman in black was turned toward me, paler in the dawn light, and not as clear-cut as the day before. She was trying, with her gaze, to convey a message of sympathy to me, and at the same time I had the impression that she was asking a question.

I interpreted it as:

“How are you standing up to the shock? Are you terribly upset?”

This put me in a quandary. I didn’t dare to show her my lack of concern, which she would have misinterpreted. I accordingly assumed a sad expression, but without overdoing it. She had seen me on the track with my daughter and must have deduced that my wife was with me too. As far as she could see, I had just lost them both, temporarily, but lost them nonetheless.

“Courage!” her brown eyes said to me over the others’ heads.

I responded with the smile of a sick man whom somebody is trying to reassure but who feels no better as a result. I am almost certain that if we had been closer to one another she would have given my hand a furtive squeeze.

In behaving like that, I didn’t intend to deceive her, as one might imagine, but, with all those heads between us, it wasn’t the time to explain how I felt.

Later on, if we happened to be brought together and if she gave me the opportunity, I would tell her the truth, since I wasn’t ashamed of it.

I was no more surprised by what was happening to us than I had been, the day before, on hearing of the invasion of Holland and the Ardennes. On the contrary, my idea that it was a matter between Fate and myself was reinforced. It was becoming more obvious. I had been separated from my family, which was a personal attack and no mistake.

The sky was rapidly brightening, as pure and clear as the day before when, in my garden, I had been feeding the hens without knowing that it was the last time.

I was touched by the memory of my hens, and the
mental picture of Nestor, his comb all crimson, struggling fiercely when old Monsieur Reverse tried to grab him.

I imagined the scene between the two low, whitewashed walls, the beating of the wings, the white feathers flying, the vicious pecks, and perhaps Monsieur Matray, if he had been prevented from leaving, climbing onto his crate to look over the wall and give advice as he usually did.

That didn’t prevent me from thinking at the same time about this woman who had just shown sympathy for me when I had done nothing but give her an empty bottle picked up from the track.

While she was doing her hair with her fingers moistened with saliva, I tried to decide to what category she belonged. I couldn’t make up my mind. I told myself that it didn’t really matter and eventually the idea occurred to me of handing her the comb I had in my pocket, while my neighbor whom I was disturbing gave me a meaningful look.

He was mistaken. I wasn’t doing it for that.

We were moving fairly slowly and out in the open country when we began to hear a steady buzz which we didn’t manage to place immediately, and which was just a vibration of the air to begin with.

“There they are!” exclaimed the man with the pipe, his legs still dangling in the air.

For somebody who never felt giddy, he had the best place in the car.

I discovered later on that he was a constructional ironworker.

Bending down, I saw them too, for I wasn’t far from the door. The man was counting:

“Nine … ten … eleven … twelve … there are twelve of them … probably what they call a squadron. If it was the
right time of the year and they weren’t making any noise, I’d swear they were storks.…”

I counted eleven of them, high up in the sky. Because of a trick of the light, they appeared white and luminous, and they were flying in a V-shaped formation.

“What’s that fellow up to?”

Pressed against one another, we were looking up at the sky when I felt the woman’s hand on my shoulder where she might easily have put it inadvertently.

The last plane in one leg of the V had just broken away from the others and seemed to be diving toward the ground, so that our first impression was that it was falling. It grew larger at incredible speed, spiraling down, while the others, instead of continuing on their way toward the horizon, started forming a huge circle.

The rest happened so quickly that we didn’t have time to be really frightened. The plane which was doing the nose dive had disappeared from our sight, but we could hear its menacing roar.

It flew over the train, along its whole length, from back to front, so low that we instinctively ducked.

Then it disappeared only to repeat its maneuver, with the difference that this time we heard the rattle of the machine gun above us, and other sounds, like that of wood splintering.

There were shouts, inside our car and elsewhere. The train went a little farther, then, like a wounded animal, stopped after a few jolts.

For a while there was complete silence, the silence of fear, which I was facing for the first time, and I was probably not breathing any more than my companions.

All the same, I went on looking at the scene in the sky,
the plane soaring upwards again, its two swastikas clearly visible, the head of the pilot giving us a final glance, and the others, up there, circling around until he took up his position again.

“Swine!”

I don’t know from whose breast the word exploded. It relieved us all and roused us from our immobility.

A little girl was crying. A woman pushed forward, repeating as if she didn’t know what she was saying:

“Let me pass … Let me pass.”

“Are you hurt?”

“My husband …”

“Where is he?”

Everybody looked instinctively for a body stretched out on the floor.

“In the next car.… The one that’s been hit … I heard it …”

Her face drawn, she dropped to the stones beside the lines and started running along, shouting:

“François! … François!”

None of us made a pretty picture and we felt no desire to look at one another. It seemed to me that everything was happening in slow motion, but perhaps that was just an illusion. I also remember something like zones of silence around isolated noises which sounded even louder as a result.

One man, then another, then a third jumped down, and their first instinct was to pass water without taking the trouble to move away, or even, in one case, to face the other way.

Farther off a continuous lament could be heard, a sort of animal howl.

As for Julie, she stood up, her blouse coming out of her crumpled skirt, and said in a drunken voice:

“Well, chum!”

She repeated this two or three times; perhaps she was still repeating it when I got out in my turn and helped the woman in black to jump down onto the ground.

Why was it that particular moment that I asked her:

“What’s your name?”

She didn’t consider the question stupid or out of place, for she answered:

“Anna.”

She didn’t ask me what I was called. I told her all the same:

“My name is Marcel. Marcel Feron.”

I would have liked to pass water like the others. I didn’t dare, because of her, and it hurt me to restrain myself.

There was a meadow below the track, with tall grass, barbed wire, and, a hundred yards away, a white farmhouse where there was nobody to be seen. Some hens, around a pile of manure, had all started cackling together, as excited as if they had been frightened too.

The people in the other car had got out, as flustered and awkward as we were.

In front of one of the carriages there was a more compact, solemn crowd. Some faces were turned away.

“A woman has been wounded over there,” somebody came and told us. “I don’t suppose there’s a doctor among you?”

Why did the question strike me as grotesque? Do doctors travel in cattle cars? Could any of us be taken for a doctor?