Read The Train for Free Online Page A

into the habit of reading up to two books a day, and I kept it up. Every month, then every three months, I went to a specialist at Mézières to be examined, never trusting his reassuring words.
    I had returned to Fumay in 1926. My father died in 1934, from a clot of blood, while Monsieur Sauveur was still going strong. I had just met Jeanne, who was an assistant in Choblet’s glove shop, two doors away from where I worked.
    I was twenty-six; she was twenty-two. We walked along the streets in the twilight. We went together to the movies, where I held her hand, then, on Sunday afternoon, I obtained permission to take her into the country.
    That struck me as incredible. For me, she was not just a woman, but the symbol of a normal regular life.
    And it was, I would swear to it, in the course of that outing in the Semois valley, for which I had had to ask her father’s permission, that I acquired the assurance that it was possible, that she was ready to marry me, to start a family with me.
    I was speechless with gratitude. I would gladly have gone on my knees at her feet. If I talk about it at such length, it is in order to emphasize Jeanne’s importance in my eyes.
    Now, in my cattle car, I didn’t give a thought to her, a woman seven and a half months pregnant, for whom this journey must have been particularly difficult. My thoughts were elsewhere. I wondered why we were being shunted down a side track which led nowhere, except to a place more dangerous than the one we had just left.
    As we were stopping in the open country, near a gradecrossing which cut across a minot road, I heard someone say:
    “They’re clearing the lines to let the troop trains through. They must need reinforcements out there.”
    The train didn’t move. We couldn’t hear anything except, all of a sudden, birds singing and the murmur of a spring. One man jumped onto the bank, followed by another.
    “Hey there, guard, are we going to stay here long?”
    “An hour or two. Unless we spend the night here.”
    “The train isn’t likely to move off without warning, is it?”
    “The engine is going back to Monthermé, and they’re sending us another from there.”
    I made sure that the engine really was being uncoupled; then, when I saw it go off by itself in a landscape of woods and meadows, I jumped down onto the ground, and, before doing anything else, went to have a drink at the spring, in the hollow of my hand, as I used to when I was little. The water had the same taste as it had then, the taste of grass and my own hot body.
    People were getting out of all the carriages. Hesitant at first, then more self-assured, I started walking alongside the train, trying to see inside.
    “Daddy!”
    My daughter was calling me and waving.
    “Where’s your mother?”
    “Here.”
    Two elderly women were blocking the view and would not have moved for all the gold in the world, scowling disapprovingly at my daughter’s excitement.
    “Open the door, Daddy. I can’t manage. Mummy wants to talk to you.”
    The carriage was an old model. I succeeded in openingthe door and was confronted with eight people in two rows, as grim and motionless as in a dentist’s waiting room. My wife and daughter were the only ones under sixty, and an old man in the far corner was clearly a nonagenarian.
    “Are you all right, Marcel?”
    “Yes. What about you?”
    “I’m all right. I was wondering what you were going to eat. Luckily, we’ve stopped. You see, we’ve got all the food.”
    Wedged between two women with monumental hips, she could scarcely move, and she had some difficulty in handing me a thin loaf of bread together with the whole sausage.
    “But what about you two?”
    “You know perfectly well we can’t stand garlic.”
    “Is there some garlic in it?”
    That morning, at the grocer’s, I hadn’t bothered to make sure.
    “How are you fixed?”
    “All right.”
    “You couldn’t get me some water, could you? They gave me a bottle before we left, but