The Train (8 page)

She pointed to the nurses, the young women of the reception service.

“What name did you say?”

The oldest of the women took a note-pad out of her pocket on which I could see names written by different hands, often in a clumsy script.

“Feron? No. Is she a Belgian?”

“She comes from Fumay, and she’s traveling with a little girl of four who’s holding a doll dressed in blue in her arms.”

I was sure that Sophie hadn’t let go of her doll.

“She is seven and a half months pregnant,” I went on insistently.

“Then go to the sick room, in case she felt ill.”

It was an office which had been converted and which smelled of disinfectant. No. They had treated several pregnant women. One of them had had to be taken straight to the nearest maternity home to have her baby, but she wasn’t called Feron and her mother was with her.

“Are you worried?”

“Not really.”

I was sure that Jeanne would not leave any message for me. It wasn’t in her nature. The idea of bothering one of these distinguished ladies, of writing her name in a notebook, of drawing attention to herself, would never have occurred to her.

“Why do you keep touching your left-hand pocket?”

“Because of my spare pair of glasses. I’m afraid of losing them or breaking them.”

We were given some more sandwiches, one orange each, and coffee with as much sugar as we liked. Some people put a few lumps in their pockets.

Noticing a pile of pillows in a corner, I asked if it was possible to hire a couple. The person I asked didn’t know, and said that the woman in charge wasn’t there, that she wouldn’t be back for an hour.

Then, feeling a little awkward, I took two pillows, and when I got back into the car my companions rushed to get the others.

Now that I think of it, I am surprised that during that long day Anna and I should have said scarcely anything to each other. As if by common consent, we stayed together. Even when we separated, at Rheims, to go to the respective lavatories, I found her waiting for me outside the men’s.

“I’ve bought a bar of soap,” she announced with childish joy. She smelled of soap, and her hair, which she had moistened before arranging, was still wet.

I could count the number of times I had taken a train before that journey. The first time, at the age of fourteen, when I had to go to Saint-Gervais, I had been given a card with my name, my destination, and a note saying:

“In case of accident or difficulties, please inform Madame Jacques Delmotte, Fumay, Ardennes.”

Four years later, when I returned home, aged eighteen, I no longer needed a note of that sort.

After that I never went anywhere except to Mézières, periodically, to see the specialist and have an X-ray examination.

Madame Delmotte was my benefactress, as people called her, and I had ended up by adopting that word too. I can’t remember the circumstances in which she came to take an interest in me. It was soon after the First World War and I was not yet eleven.

She must have heard about my mother’s disappearance,
my father’s behavior, my situation as a virtually abandoned child.

At that time I used to go to the church club, and one Sunday our curate, the Abbé Dubois, told me that a lady had invited me to her house for chocolate the following Thursday.

Like all in Fumay, I knew the name of Delmotte, since the family owns the main slate pits and consequently everybody in the town is more or less dependent on them. Those Delmottes, in my mind, were the employer Delmottes.

Madame Jacques Delmotte, who was then about fifty, was the charity Delmotte.

They were all brothers, sisters, brothers-in-law, or cousins; their fortune had a common origin but they nonetheless formed two distinct clans.

Was Madame Delmotte, as some people claimed, ashamed of her family’s hardness? Widowed at an early age, she had made a doctor of her son, and he had been killed at the front.

Since then she had lived with two maidservants in a big stone house where she spent her afternoons on the veranda. From the street you could see her knitting for the old people in the almshouse, in a black dress with a narrow white lace collar. Dainty and pink, she gave off a sugary smell.

It was on the veranda that she gave me chocolate to drink and biscuits to eat while asking me questions about school, my friends, what I wanted to do later on, etc. Making no mention of my mother and father, she asked me if I would like to serve at mass, with the result that I was a choirboy for two years.

She invited me to her house nearly every Thursday and sometimes another little boy or girl shared our snack. We
were invariably given homemade biscuits of two sorts, bright yellow ones with lemon flavoring and brown ones with spices and almonds.

I can still remember the smell of the veranda and the warmth in winter, which wasn’t the same as anywhere else and struck me as subtler and more pervasive.

Madame Delmotte came to see me when I had what was diagnosed at first as dry pleurisy, and it was she, in her car driven by Desire, who took me to see a specialist at Mézières.

Three weeks later, thanks to her, I was admitted to a sanatorium where I wouldn’t have obtained a bed without her intervention.

It was she too who, when I got married, gave us the silver bowl which stands on the kitchen sideboard. It would look better in a dining room, but we haven’t got one.

I think that Madame Delmotte, indirectly, played an important part in my life and, more directly, in my departure from Fumay.

As for her, she had no need to leave, for, having become an old lady, she was already in her flat at Nice, as she was every year at the same season.

Why did I begin thinking about her? For I did think about her, sitting in my cattle car, where it was dark again, feeling Anna’s shoulder against mine and wondering whether I dared to take her hand.

Madame Delmotte had made a choirboy of me and Anna had just left prison. I wasn’t interested in finding out why she had been sent to prison and for how long.

I suddenly remembered that she had no luggage, no handbag, that when the gates had been opened the authorities hadn’t been able to give back their things to the
prisoners. So in all probability she hadn’t any money on her. And yet, a little earlier, she had told me that she had just bought a bar of soap.

Jeff and Julie, lying side by side, were kissing each other full on the lips and I could make out the scent of their saliva.

“Don’t you feel sleepy?”

“What about you?”

“Perhaps we could lie down?”

“Perhaps.”

Both of us were forced to bump against our neighbors, and I would have sworn that there were legs and feet all over the place.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“You aren’t cold?”

“No.”

Behind me, the man I had taken for a horse dealer hoisted himself imperceptibly onto his neighbor, who, as she spread her legs, brushed against my back. We were so close to one another and my senses were so alert that I knew the exact moment of penetration.

Anna too, I would swear to that. Her face touched my cheek, her hair, her parted lips, but she didn’t kiss me and I didn’t try to kiss her.

Others besides ourselves were still awake and must have known. The movement of the train was shaking us all; after a while the noise of the wheels on the rails became a sort of music.

I am possibly going to express myself crudely, out of clumsiness, precisely because I have always been a prudish man, even in my thoughts.

I wasn’t discontented with my way of life. I had chosen
it. I had patiently realized an ideal which, until the previous day—I repeat this in all sincerity—had satisfied me completely.

Now I was there, in the dark, with the song of the train, red and green lights passing by, telegraph wires, other bodies stretched out in the straw, and close beside me, within reach of my hand, what the Abbé Dubois called the carnal act was taking place.

Against my own body, a woman’s body pressed itself, tense, vibrant, and a hand moved to pull up the black dress, to push the panties down to the feet which kicked them off with an odd jerking movement.

We still hadn’t kissed each other. It was Anna who drew me toward her, on top of her, both of us as silent as snakes.

Julie’s breathing grew quicker and louder just as Anna was helping me to enter her, and I suddenly found myself there.

I didn’t cry out. But I came close to doing so. I came close to talking incoherently, saying thank you, telling of my happiness, or else complaining, for that happiness hurt me. Hurt me with the attempt to reach the unattainable.

I should have liked to express all at once my affection for this woman whom I hadn’t known the day before, but who was a human being, who in my eyes was becoming
the
human being.

I bruised her unconsciously, my hands trying to grasp the whole of her.

“Anna …”

“Hush!”

“I love you.”

“Hush!”

For the first time in my life I had said “I love you” like
that, from the depths of my heart. Perhaps it wasn’t she that I loved, but life? I don’t know how to put it: I was inside her life, and I should have liked to stay there for hours, never to think of anything else, to become like a plant in the sun.

Our lips met, each mouth as moist as the other. I didn’t think of asking her, as I used to during my experiences as a young man:

“Can I?”

I could, seeing that she wasn’t worried, seeing that she didn’t push me away but on the contrary held me inside her.

Finally our lips parted at the same time as our arms and legs relaxed.

“Don’t move,” she whispered.

And, with both of us invisible to each other, she stroked my forehead gently, following the lines of my face with her hand, like a sculptor.

Still in a whisper, she asked me:

“Did you enjoy that?”

Hadn’t I been right in thinking that I had an appointment with Fate?

AS USUAL, I WOKE UP AT DAWN, ABOUT HALF past five in the morning. Several of my companions, mostly peasants, were already sitting, wide awake, on the floor of the car. So as not to wake the others, they just said good morning to me with their eyes.

Although one of the sliding doors had been shut for the night, you could feel the biting cold which always precedes sunrise, and, afraid that Anna might catch cold, I spread my jacket over her shoulders and her chest.

So far I hadn’t really looked at her. I took advantage of her being asleep to examine her solemnly, somewhat disturbed by what I saw. I was rather inexperienced. Until then I had scarcely seen anybody except my wife and daughter, and I knew how both of them looked in the early morning.

When she wasn’t pregnant and oppressed by the weight of her body, Jeanne seemed younger at dawn than she did during the day. With her features erased as it were, she took on the pouting expression of a little girl, roughly the same as Sophie, innocent and satisfied.

Anna was younger than my wife, I put her down as twenty-two, twenty-three at the most, but her face was that of someone much older, as I noticed that morning. I also realized, looking at her more closely, that she was a foreigner.

Not only because she came from another country, I didn’t know which, but because she had a different life, different thoughts, different feelings from the people at Fumay and all the others I knew.

Instead of letting herself go, to get rid of her weariness, she had curled up, on the defensive, with a crease in the middle of her forehead, and now and then the corners of her mouth twitched as if she felt a pain or experienced a disagreeable mental picture.

Her flesh didn’t look like Jeanne’s flesh either. It was firmer, more solid, with muscles capable of suddenly becoming taut, like those of a cat.

I didn’t know where we were. There were poplars lining meadows and cornfields which were still green. Billboards kept slipping by as usual, and once we passed close to an almost deserted road where there was nothing to remind us of the war.

I had some water in my bottles, a towel, a shaving brush, and everything I needed in my suitcase; I took the opportunity to have a shave, for I had been ashamed, ever since the day before, of the reddish hairs, a quarter of an inch long, which covered my cheeks and my chin.

When I finished, Anna was looking at me, motionless, and I didn’t know how long she had been awake.

She must have taken the opportunity, as I had a little earlier, to look at me inquisitively. I smiled at her while I was wiping my face, and she returned my smile, in what struck me as an embarrassed way, or as if her thoughts were somewhere else.

I could still see the crease in her forehead. Propping herself up on her elbow, she found my jacket covering her.

“Why did you do that?”

If she hadn’t spoken first, I wouldn’t have known whether to use the
tu
or the
vous
form of address. Thanks to her, everything became easy.

“Before sunrise it was rather chilly.”

She didn’t react like Jeanne either. Jeanne would have been profuse in her thanks, would have felt obliged to protest, to show that she was touched.

Anna simply asked me:

“Did you get any sleep?”

“Yes.”

She spoke in a low voice, on account of the people who were still asleep, but didn’t think it necessary, as I had done, to give a friendly glance to those of our companions who were already awake and who were looking at us.

I wonder whether it wasn’t that which, the day before, as soon as she had slipped into our car, had struck me about her. She didn’t live with other people. She didn’t mix. She remained alone among others.

It may seem ridiculous to say that, after what had happened the previous evening. All the same, I know what I mean. She had followed me along the track when I hadn’t called her. I had given her an empty bottle, without asking her for anything in exchange. I hadn’t spoken to her. I hadn’t asked her any questions.

She had accepted a place on my trunk without feeling the need to say thank you, just as with the jacket now. And, when our bodies had drawn together, she had bared her belly and guided my movements.