The Train by Georges Simenon Read Free Book Online

carriages and on the other there was ours, the world of the cattle cars and the freight cars. Jeanne and my daughter belonged to the first world, I to the second, and I unconsciously showed some haste in taking Sophie back.
    “Aren’t you going to eat?”
    I ate my bread and sausage, on the track, in front of the open door. We could not say very much to one another, with those two rows of frozen faces whose eyes kept moving from my wife to me and my daughter.
    “Do you think we’ll set off again soon?”
    “They have to let the troop trains through. Once the line is clear, it will be our turn. Look! The engine’s arriving.”
    We could hear it, then see it, all by itself, with its white smoke, following the bends of the valley.
    “Hurry back to your place. I’m so frightened that somebody might have taken it!”
    Relieved to get away, I kissed Sophie but didn’t dare to kiss Jeanne in front of everybody. A spiteful voice called after me:
    “You might at least shut the door!”
    Nearly every Sunday in summer, first with Jeanne, then with her and my daughter, I used to go into the country tohave a snack and sometimes lunch on the grass.
    But it wasn’t the smell or the taste of that countryside which I was rediscovering today but the smell and the taste of my childhood memories.
    For years I had sat down every Sunday in a clearing, I had played there with Sophie, I had picked flowers to make garlands for her, but all that was, so to speak, neutral.
    Why was it that today the world had recovered its savor?
    Even the buzzing of the wasps reminded me of the buzzing I heard when I used to hold my breath and watch a bee circling around my bread and butter.
    The faces, when I got back into the car, seemed more familiar. A sort of complicity was growing up between us, making us wink, for instance, after watching the antics of Julie and her horse dealer.
    I say horse dealer without knowing. People’s names didn’t matter, nor their occupation. He looked like a horse dealer and that was what I called him to myself.
    The couple were holding each other around the waist, and the man’s big hand was squeezing Julie’s breast when the train started moving again after a few jolts.
    The woman in black, who was still pressed against the side of the car, a few feet away from me, had nothing to sit on. It is true that, like so many others, she could have sat down on the floor. There were even four people in one corner who were playing cards as if they were sitting around a table in an inn.
    We returned to Monthermé, and a little later I caught a glimpse of Leversy Lock, where a dozen motor barges were vibrating on the dazzling water. The bargees had no need of a train, but the locks were there to stop them and I could imagine their impatience.
    The sky was turning pink. Three planes went over, flying very low, with reassuring tricolor roundels. They were so close that we could make out the face of one of the pilots. I could have sworn that he waved to us.
    When we arrived at Mézières, dusk had fallen, and our train, instead of going into the station, drew up in a wilderness of tracks. A soldier whose rank I didn’t see went along the train shouting:
    “Nobody must get out! It is absolutely forbidden to leave the train.”
    There was no platform anyway, and a little later some guns mounted on open trucks went past us at full speed. They had scarcely disappeared before the siren sounded an air-raid warning while the same voice went on shouting:
    “Stay where you are. It’s dangerous to get off the train. Stay where you are …”
    Now we could hear the drone of a certain number of planes. The town was in darkness and in the station, where all the lights were out, the passengers were probably running into the subways.
    I don’t think that I was frightened. I sat perfectly still, staring at the faces opposite me, and listening to the sound of the engines, which grew louder and then seemed to fade away.
    There was complete