The Train Read Online Free PDF Page B

had carried some cattle on one of its recent trips and smelled of the farmyard.
    Some of my companions were eating sausages or pâté. One country girl had brought a huge cheese with her and kept cutting into it with a kitchen knife.
    So far we had exchanged only inquisitive glances, which were still cautious, and only those who came from the same village or the same district were talking, generally to identify the places we were passing.
    “Look! Dede’s farm! I wonder if he’s staying. His cows are in the meadow, anyway.”
    We went through stops and deserted little stations where there were baskets of flowers hanging from the lamps and travel posters on the walls.
    “Look, Corsica! Why don’t we go to Corsica?”
    After Revin we went faster, and before arriving at Monthermé we saw a lime kiln and more rows of working-class houses.
    Just as we were entering the station, the engine gave a piercing whistle like a big express. Passing the station buildings and the platforms swarming with troops, it drew up in a setting of deserted tracks and signal boxes.
    A pump, next to our car, was oozing huge drops of water, one by one, and I felt my thirst coming on again. A peasant, jumping down from the train, urinated on the nexttrack, out in the sunshine, with one eye on the engine. This made everybody laugh. We felt a need to laugh, and some of the men started cracking jokes on purpose. Old Jules was asleep, with a half-empty bottle in one hand and his haversack, containing more bottles, on his belly.
    “They’re uncoupling the engine!” announced the man who was relieving himself.
    Two or three others got out. I still didn’t dare. It seemed to me that I had to hang on at all costs, that it was particularly important for me.
    A quarter of an hour later, another engine was pulling us in the opposite direction, but, instead of going through Monthermé, we took a side track running alongside the Semois toward Belgium.
    I had made this trip before, with Jeanne, before she became my wife. I even wonder whether it wasn’t that day, a Sunday in August, which decided our fate.
    Marriage at that time didn’t mean the same to me as to somebody normal. Has there been anything really normal in my life since that evening when I saw my mother come home naked and with her hair cropped?
    Yet it wasn’t even that event which struck me. At the time I didn’t understand or try to understand. For the past four years so many things had been put down to the war that one more mystery was not likely to upset me.
    Madame Jamais, our landlady, was a widow and earned a good living as a dressmaker. She looked after me for about a fortnight, until my father came home. I didn’t recognize him at first. He was still wearing uniform, a different uniform from the one in which he had gone away; his mustache smelled of sour wine; his eyes were shining as if he had a cold in the head.
    The fact was, I scarcely knew him, and the only photograph we had of him, on the sideboard, was the one taken with my mother on their wedding day. I still wonder why both their faces were lopsided. Perhaps Sophie finds that in our wedding photograph our features too are lopsided?
    I knew that he had worked as a clerk for Monsieur Sauveur, the dealer in seeds and fertilizers whose offices and warehouses, occupying a long stretch of the quayside, were linked by a private track to the freight station.
    My mother had pointed Monsieur Sauveur out to me in the street, a rather short, fat man with a very pale face, who must have been sixty at the time and walked slowly, cautiously, as if he were afraid of the slightest shock.
    “He’s got a heart disease. He may drop dead in the street any minute. The last time he had an attack, they only just managed to save him, and afterward they had to call in a great specialist from Paris.”
    When I was a little boy I sometimes followed him with my eyes, wondering whether the accident was going to happen in front of me. I couldn’t