Perhaps we hadn’t quite reached a state of indifference, but each of us had given up thinking for himself.
Thinking about what, anyway? We knew absolutely nothing. What was happening was beyond us and it was no use thinking or arguing.
For heaven knows how many miles, for instance, I puzzled over the question of the stations. The little stations, the stops, as I have already said, were empty, without even a railwayman to rush out with his whistle and his red flag when the train appeared. On the other hand the bigger stations were packed with people, and police cordons had to be established on the platforms.
I finally hit on an explanation which seems to me to be the right one: namely, that the slow trains had been withdrawn.
The same was true of the roads, the empty ones probably having been closed to traffic for military reasons.
Somebody from Fumay, whom I didn’t know, told me, that very morning, when I was sitting beside Anna, that there was a plan for the evacuation of the town and that he had seen a poster about it at the town hall.
“Special trains have been arranged to take refugees to reception centers in the country where everything is ready to accommodate them.”
That may be true. I didn’t see the poster. I rarely set foot in the town hall, and when we got to the station my wife, Sophie, and I jumped on the first train we saw.
What made me think that my neighbor was right was that at Rethel nurses, boy scouts, and a whole reception service were waiting for us. There were some stretchers ready, as if somebody already knew what had happened to us, but I learned a little later that our train wasn’t the first to have been machine-gunned on the way.
“And our wives? Our kids?” the man with the pipe started shouting, even before the train had come to a stop.
“Where do you come from?” asked an elderly lady in white, who obviously belonged to the upper class.
“Fumay.”
I counted at least four trains in the station. There were crowds of people in the waiting rooms and behind the barriers, for barriers had been put up as for an official procession. The place was swarming with soldiers and officers.
“Where are the wounded?”
“But what about my wife, dammit?”
“She may have been on the train which has been sent to Rheims.”
“When?”
The more gently the lady in white spoke to him, the more fierce and aggressive he was—on purpose, for he was beginning to feel that he had certain rights.
“About an hour ago.”
“They could have waited for us, couldn’t they?”
Tears came into his eyes, for he was worried in spite of everything and perhaps he wanted to feel unhappy. That didn’t prevent him, a few moments later, from falling on the sandwiches some girls were passing in big baskets from car to car.
“How many can we take?”
“As many as you like. It’s useless hoarding them. You’ll find fresh sandwiches at the next station.”
We were given bowls of hot coffee. A nurse went by asking:
“Nobody sick or wounded?”
Feeding bottles were ready and an ambulance was waiting at the end of the platform. On the next line a train full of Flemings seemed to be on the point of pulling out. They had had their sandwiches and watched us inquisitively as we ate ours.
The Van Straetens are Flemish in origin; they settled at Fumay three generations ago and no longer speak their original language. In the slate-pits, though, they still call my father-in-law the Fleming.
“Take your seats! Watch out for the doors!”
So far they had kept us for hours in stations or sidings. Now they were dealing with us as quickly as possible, as if they were in a hurry to get rid of us.
Because there were too many people on the platform, I couldn’t make out the headlines of the newspapers on the bookstall. I only know that there was one in bold lettering with the word “troops.”
We were moving and a girl wearing an arm band was running alongside the train to distribute her last bars of chocolate. She threw a handful in our direction. I managed to catch one for Anna.
We were going to find similar reception centers at Rheims and elsewhere. The horse dealer had returned to his place in our car after being allowed to wash in the station lavatories, and he was treated as a hero. I heard Julie call him Jeff. He was holding a bottle of Cointreau which he had bought in the refreshment room along with two oranges whose scent spread throughout the car.
It was between Rethel and Rheims, toward the end of the afternoon, for we were not moving fast, that a countrywoman stood up grumbling:
“I can’t help it. I’m not going to make myself ill.”
Going over to the open door, she put a cardboard box on the floor, squatted down and relieved herself, still muttering between her teeth.
That too was significant. The conventions were giving way—in any case those which had been in force the day before. Today nobody protested at the sight of the horse dealer dozing with his head on Julie’s plump belly.
“You haven’t got a cigarette, have you?” Anna asked me.
“I don’t smoke.”
It had been forbidden in the sanatorium and afterward I hadn’t been tempted to take it up. My neighbor passed her one. I hadn’t any matches on me either, and because of the straw it worried me to see her smoke, although other people had been smoking since the previous day. Perhaps it was a sort of jealousy on my part, a feeling of displeasure which I can’t explain.
We spent a long time in a suburb of Rheims, looking at the backs of the houses, and in the station we were told that our train would be leaving in half an hour.
There was a rush toward the refreshment room, the lavatories, and the inquiry office, where nobody had heard of women, children, and invalids from a train coming from Fumay.
Trains were going through all the time, troop trains, munitions trains, refugee trains, and I still wonder how it was that there weren’t more accidents.
“Perhaps your wife has left a message for you?” Anna suggested.
“Where?”
“Why don’t you ask those ladies?”
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.
“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?
4
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.
The Train Page 6
