The Train Read Online Free PDF

dust, who was carrying no luggage and hadn’t even a handbag.
    She climbed shyly into our car, pale-faced, sad-looking, and nobody said anything to her. One or two men justexchanged winks while she huddled in a corner.
    We couldn’t see the cars anymore and I am sure that none of us cared. Those who were near the doors looked at nothing but the piece of sky which was visible, a sky as blue as ever, wondering whether a German squadron might not appear at any moment and start bombing the station.
    Since the arrival of the Belgian train, it was rumored that some stations had been bombed on the other side of the frontier, according to certain people the station at Namur.
    I wish I could convey the atmosphere and above all the state of suspense in our car. We were beginning, in the stationary train, to form a little world on its own, but which remained, so to speak, in a state of tension.
    Cut off from the rest, it was as if our group was only waiting for a signal, a whistle, a hiss of steam, the sound of the wheels on the rails, to fall back entirely upon itself.
    And that finally happened, when we were beginning to give up hope.
    What would my companions have done if they had been told that the line was blocked, that the trains had stopped running? Would they have gone home with their bundles?
    Speaking for myself, I don’t think that I would have given up: I think I would rather have walked along the track. It was too late to turn back. The break had occurred. The idea of going back to my street, my house, my workshop, my garden, my habits, the labeled radios waiting on the shelves to be repaired, struck me as unbearable.
    The crowd on the platform started slipping slowly behind us, and for me it was as if it had never existed, as if the town itself, where, except for the four years in the sanatorium, I had spent my life, had lost its reality.
    I didn’t give a thought to Jeanne and my daughter sittingin their first-class carriage, farther from me than if they had been hundreds of miles away.
    I didn’t wonder what they were doing, how they had borne the long wait, or whether Jeanne had been sick again.
    I was more concerned about my spare pair of glasses, and every time one of my companions moved I protected my pocket with my hand.
    Just outside the town we passed, on the left, the state forest of Manise, where we had spent so many Sunday afternoons on the grass. To my eyes, it was not the same forest, possibly because I was seeing it from the railway. The broom was growing thickly and the train was moving so slowly that I could see the bees buzzing from flower to flower.
    All of a sudden the train stopped and we all looked at one another with the same fear in our eyes. A railwayman ran along the track. Finally he shouted something I didn’t understand and the train moved off again.
    I wasn’t hungry. I had forgotten my thirst. I looked at the grass passing by a few yards away, sometimes only a foot or two, and the wild flowers, white, blue, and yellow, whose names I didn’t know and which I felt I was seeing for the first time. Whiffs of Julie’s perfume reached me, especially on the bends, mingled with the strong but not unpleasant smell of her sweat.
    Her café was like my shop. It wasn’t a real café. There were curtains in the windows which, when they were drawn, made it impossible to make out anything inside.
    The bar was tiny, without either a metal top or a sink behind. The shelf, with five or six bottles on it, was just a kitchen fitting.
    I had often glanced inside when I was passing, and I remember, on the wall, next to a cuckoo clock which didn’twork and the notice about the law on drunkenness in public, a publicity calendar showing a blonde holding a glass of foaming beer. A glass shaped like a champagne glass, that was what struck me.
    That isn’t interesting, I know. I mention it because I thought of it at that moment. There were other smells in our car, not counting that of the car itself, which