Read The Train for Free Online Page B

it’s so hot here that we’ve already drunk it all.”
    She handed me a bottle and I ran to the spring to fill it. There, on her knees, washing her face, I found the young woman in the black dress who had got in on the wrong side of the car after the arrival of the Belgian train.
    “Where did you find a bottle?” she asked me.
    Her accent was neither Belgian nor German.
    “Somebody gave it to my wife.”
    She didn’t press the point, but wiped her face with her handkerchief, and I went off toward the first-class carriage.
    On the way I stumbled over an empty beer bottle andturned back to pick it up as if it were a precious object. My wife jumped to the wrong conclusion.
    “Are you drinking beer?”
    “No. It’s to put some water in.”
    It was curious. We were talking to each other like strangers. Not exactly: rather, like distant relatives who haven’t seen each other for a long time and don’t know what to say. Perhaps it was because of the presence of the old women.
    “Can I get out, Daddy?”
    “If you like.”
    My wife looked worried.
    “What if the train starts moving?”
    “We haven’t got an engine anymore.”
    “You mean we’re going to stay here?”
    At that moment we heard the first explosion, a muffled, distant sound, but one which nonetheless made us jump, and one of the old women made the sign of the cross and shut her eyes as if she had heard a clap of thunder.
    “What’s that?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You can’t see any planes?”
    I looked at the sky, which was as blue as it had been that morning, with just two gilded clouds floating slowly along.
    “Don’t let her go far, Marcel.”
    “I won’t let her out of my sight.”
    Holding Sophie by the hand, I walked along the tracks looking for another bottle, and I was lucky enough to find one, bigger than the first.
    “What are you going to do with it?”
    I told a half lie.
    “I’m collecting them.”
    For I was just picking up a third bottle which hadcontained some wine. My intention was to give at least one to the young woman in black.
    I could see her from a distance, standing in front of our car, and her dusty satin dress, her figure, her tousled hair seemed foreign to everything around her. She was stretching her legs without paying any attention to what was happening and I noticed her high, pointed heels.
    “Your mother hasn’t been sick?”
    “No. There’s a woman who talks all the time and she says the train is sure to be bombed. Is that true?”
    “She doesn’t know anything about it.”
    “You don’t think it’ll be bombed?”
    “I’m sure it won’t.”
    “Where are we going to sleep?”
    “In the train.”
    “There aren’t any beds.”
    I went and washed the three bottles, rinsing them several times to remove as far as possible the taste of the beer and the wine, and filled them with fresh water.
    I went back to my car, still accompanied by Sophie, and handed one of the bottles to the young woman.
    She looked at me in surprise, looked at my daughter, thanked me with a nod of her head, and climbed up into the car to put it in a safe place.
    There was only one house in sight, apart from the one belonging to the grade-crossing keeper: a tiny farm, a fair way away, on the hillside, and in the yard a woman with a blue apron was feeding the hens as if the war didn’t exist.
    “Is that where you are? On the floor?”
    “I sit on the trunk.”
    Julie was at grips with a red-faced man with thick, gray hair who was giving her meaningful looks, and every nowand then the two of them burst into the sort of laughter you hear in the arbors of tavern gardens. The man had a bottle of red wine in his hand and kept giving his companion a swig from it. There were purple stains on her blouse, inside of which her big breasts bounced about with every burst of laughter.
    “Let’s go back to your mother.”
    “Already?”
    New subdivisions were beginning to take shape. On one side there was the world of the passenger