The Train (2 page)

Dr. Wilhems, in whom she had absolute confidence, could not manage to reassure her, except for a few hours at a time, and at night she found it impossible to fall asleep. Long after we had gone to bed, I could hear her trying to find a comfortable position and she nearly always ended up by asking in a whisper:

“Are you asleep, Marcel?”

“No.”

“I wonder if I’m suffering from a deficiency of iron. I’ve read in an article …”

She tried to drop off to sleep, but often it was two o’clock in the morning before she succeeded and afterward it was not uncommon for her to sit up with a cry.

“I’ve had another nightmare, Marcel.”

“Tell me about it.”

“No, I’d rather forget about it. It’s too horrible. Forgive
me for stopping you from sleeping, and when you work so hard too …”

Recently she had been getting up about seven o’clock and coming downstairs after that to make breakfast.

With my cup of coffee in one hand, I went into my workshop and opened the glass door which looked out onto the yard and the garden. I was entitled, at that moment, to the first ray of sunshine of the day, a little to the left of the door, and I knew exactly when it would reach my bench.

It isn’t a real bench, but a big, heavy table which came from a convent and which I bought at a sale. There are always two or three sets on it which are in the process of being repaired. My tools, arranged in a rack on the wall, are within easy reach. All round the room the deal shelves I had put up were littered with sets, each of which bore the customer’s name on a label.

I ended up of course by turning the knobs. It was almost a game with me to put off that moment. I used to tell myself in defiance of all the laws of logic:

“If I wait a little longer, it may be today …”

Straightaway, that particular morning, I realized that something was happening at last. I had never known the air so crowded. Whatever wavelength I picked, broadcasts were overlapping, voices, whistles, phrases in German, Dutch, English, and you could feel a sort of dramatic throbbing in the air.

“During the night, the German armies launched a massive attack on …”

So far it was not France but Holland which had just been invaded. What I could hear was a Belgian station. I tried to get Paris but Paris remained silent.

The patch of sunshine was trembling on the gray floor,
and at the bottom of the garden our six hens were fussing around the cock Sophie called Nestor. Why did I wonder all of a sudden what was going to become of our little poultry yard? I was almost moved to tears by its fate.

I turned some more knobs, searching the short waves where everybody seemed to be talking at once. In that way I picked up, for a brief moment, a military band which I promptly lost, so that I have never known to what army it belonged.

An Englishman was reading a message I could not understand, repeating each sentence as if he were dictating it to a correspondent, and after that I came across a station I had never heard before, a field transmitter.

It was obviously very close, and belonged to one of the regiments which, since October, since the beginning of the phony war, had been camping in the region.

The voices of the two men were as clear as if they had been talking to me on the telephone, and I supposed that they were in the neighborhood of Givet. Not that it matters in the slightest.

“Where is your colonel?”

That one had a strong southern accent.

“All I know is that he isn’t here.”

“He ought to be.”

“What do you want me to do about it?”

“You’ve got to find him. He sleeps somewhere, doesn’t he?”

“I suppose so, but not in his bed.”

“In whose bed, then?”

A dirty laugh.

“Here one night, there the next.”

Some atmospherics prevented me from hearing the rest,
and I caught sight of Monsieur Matray’s white hair and pink face over the wall, at the place where he had installed an old packing case to serve as a stepladder.

“Any news, Monsieur Feron?”

“The Germans have invaded Holland.”

“Is that official?”

“The Belgians have announced it.”

“And Paris?”

“Paris is playing music.”

I heard him dash indoors shouting:

“Germaine! Germaine! This is it! They’ve attacked!”

I too was thinking that this was it, but the words had a different meaning for me than for Monsieur Matray. I am rather ashamed of saying this, but I felt relieved. I even wonder whether ever since October, indeed ever since Munich, I had not been waiting impatiently for this moment, whether I had not been disappointed every morning, when I turned the knobs of the radio, to learn that the armies were still facing each other without fighting.

It was the 10
^th
of May. A Friday, I am almost sure of that. A month earlier, at the beginning of April, the 8
^th
or 9
^th
, my hopes had risen when the Germans had invaded Denmark and Norway.

I don’t know how to explain myself and I wonder if there is anybody capable of understanding me. It will be pointed out that I was in no danger, as, on account of my shortsightedness, I was exempt from military service. My prescription is sixteen diopters, which means that, without my glasses, I am as helpless as somebody in total darkness, or at least in a thick fog.

I have always been terrified of finding myself without my glasses, for example of falling down in the street and
breaking them, and I always have a spare pair in my pocket. That’s to say nothing of my health, of the four years I spent in a sanatorium, between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, of the check-ups I had to undergo until a few years ago. None of that has anything to do with the impatience I am trying to describe.

I had little hope, at first, of leading a normal life, still less of getting a decent job and starting a family.

Yet I had become a happy man, I want to make that perfectly clear. I loved my wife. I loved my daughter. I loved my house, my habits, and even my street, which, quiet and sunny, ran down to the Meuse.

The fact remains that on the day war was declared I felt a sense of relief. I found myself saying out loud:

“It was bound to happen.”

My wife looked at me in astonishment.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I felt certain about it, that’s all.”

It wasn’t France and Germany, or Poland, England, Hitler, Nazism, or Communism which, to my mind, were involved. I have never taken any interest in politics and I don’t know anything about it. It would have been as much as I could do to quote the names of three or four French Ministers from having heard them on the radio.

No. This war, which had suddenly broken out after a year of spurious calm, was a personal matter between Fate and me.

I had already experienced one war, in the same town, Fumay, when I was a child, for I was six years old in 1914. I saw my father go off, in uniform, one morning when the rain was pouring down, and my mother was red-eyed all day. I heard the sound of gunfire for nearly four years,
especially when we went up in the hills. I remember the Germans and their pointed helmets, the officers’ capes, the posters on the walls, rationing, the poor bread, the shortage of sugar, butter, and potatoes.

One November evening I saw my mother come home naked, her hair cropped short, screaming insults and foul words at some youths who were trooping after her.

I was ten years old. We lived in the center of the town, in a first-floor flat.

She dressed without taking any notice of me, a mad look in her eyes, still muttering words I had never heard her use before, and suddenly, ready to go out, with a shawl around her head, she seemed to remember that I was there.

“Madame Jamais will look after you until your father comes home.”

Madame Jamais was our landlady and lived on the ground floor. I was too terrified to cry. She didn’t kiss me. At the door she hesitated, then she went out without saying anything else and the street door slammed.

I am not trying to explain. I mean that all this may have nothing to do with my feelings in 1939 or 1940. I am putting down the facts as they came back to me, without any falsification.

I contracted tuberculosis four years later. I had two or three other illnesses one after another.

Altogether, my impression, when war broke out, was that Fate was playing another trick on me and I was not surprised for I was practically certain that that was going to happen one day.

This time it wasn’t a microbe, a virus, a congenital deformity of heaven knows what part of the eye—the doctors have never been able to agree about my eyes. It was a
war which was hurling men against one another in tens of millions.

The idea was ridiculous, I realize that. But the fact remains that I knew, that I was ready. And that waiting, ever since October, was becoming unbearable. I didn’t understand. I kept wondering why what was bound to happen didn’t happen.

Were they going to tell us, one fine morning, as at Munich, that everything had been settled, that life was going back to normal, that this great panic had just been a mistake?

Wouldn’t such a turn of events have meant that something had gone wrong with my personal destiny?

The sunshine was growing warmer, invading the yard, falling on the doll. Our bedroom window opened and my wife called out:

“Marcel!”

I stood up, went out of the workshop, and leaned my head back. My wife looked as if she were wearing a mask, as she had during her first pregnancy. Her face, with the skin all taut, struck me as touching but almost unfamiliar.

“What’s happening?”

“You heard?”

“Yes. Is it true? Are they attacking?”

“They’ve invaded Holland.”

And my daughter, behind her, asked:

“What is it, Mummy?”

“Lie down. It isn’t time to get up.”

“What did Daddy say?”

“Nothing. Go to sleep.”

She came down almost at once, smelling of the bed and walking with her legs slightly apart, because of her belly.

“Do you think they’ll let them get through?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“What does the government say?”

“It hasn’t said anything yet.”

“What do you intend to do, Marcel?”

“I haven’t thought about it. I’m going to try to get some more news.”

It was still from Belgium that it was coming, given out by a dramatic staccato voice. This voice announced that at one o’clock in the morning some Messerschmitts and Stukas had flown over Belgian territory and had dropped bombs at several points.

Panzers had entered the Ardennes, and the Belgian government had addressed a solemn appeal to France to help it in its defense.

The Dutch, for their part, were opening their dykes and flooding a large part of the country, and there was talk, if the worst came to the worst, of halting the invader in front of the Albert Canal.

In the meantime my wife was making breakfast and setting the table, and I could hear the clatter of crockery.

“Any more news?”

“Tanks are crossing the Belgian frontier pretty well everywhere.”

“But in that case …”

For certain moments of the day, my memories are so precise that I could write a detailed account of them, whereas for others I remember above all else the sunshine, the springtime smells, the blue sky like the one on the day I took my first Communion.

The whole street was waking up. Life was beginning in houses more or less similar to ours. My wife went to open
the street door to take in the bread and milk and I heard her talking to our next-door neighbor on the right, Madame Piedboeuf, the schoolmaster’s wife. They had an ideal little girl, curly-haired and pinkcheeked, with big blue eyes and long doll’s eyelashes, who was always dressed as if for a party, and for the past year they had had a little car in which they used to go for a drive every Sunday.

I don’t know what the two women said to each other. From the noises I could hear, I gathered that they weren’t the only ones outside, that women were calling to one another from doorstep to doorstep. When Jeanne came back, she looked pale and even more drawn than usual.

“They’re going!” she told me.

“Where?”

“South, anywhere. At the end of the street I saw more cars going past with mattresses on the roof, Belgians mostly.”

We had already seen them go by before Munich, and in October a certain number of Belgians had once again traveled to the south of France, rich people, who could wait.

“Do you intend to stay here?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

I was telling the truth. I who had seen this event coming from so far away, who had waited for it for so long, I had not made any decisions in advance. It was as if I were waiting for a sign, as if I wanted Fate to decide for me.

I wasn’t responsible anymore. Perhaps that’s the word, perhaps that’s what I was trying to explain just now. Only the day before, it had been up to me to manage my life and that of my family, to earn a living, to arrange for things to happen in the way things have to happen.

But not now. I had just lost my roots. I was no longer Marcel Feron, radio engineer in a newish district of Fumay,
not far from the Meuse, but one man among millions whom superior forces were going to toss about at will.

I was no longer firmly attached to my house, to my habits. From one moment to the next, I had, so to speak, jumped into space.

From now on, decisions were no longer any concern of mine. Instead of my own palpitations, I was beginning to feel a sort of general palpitation. I wasn’t living at my tempo anymore, but at the tempo of the radio, of the street, of the town which was waking up much faster than usual.

We ate in silence, in the kitchen, as usual, listening hard to the noises outside, without appearing to do so, on account of Sophie. Anyone would have thought that our daughter herself was hesitating to ask us any questions and she watched us in silence, one after the other.

“Drink your milk.”

“Will we have any milk there?”

“What do you mean, there?”

“Why, where we are going …”

Tears started running down my wife’s cheeks. She turned her head away while I looked sadly at the familiar walls, at the furniture which we had chosen piece by piece five years earlier, before we got married.