The Train Read Free

few years ago. None of that has anything to do with the impatience I am trying to describe.
    I had little hope, at first, of leading a normal life, still less of getting a decent job and starting a family.
    Yet I had become a happy man, I want to make that perfectly clear. I loved my wife. I loved my daughter. I loved my house, my habits, and even my street, which, quiet and sunny, ran down to the Meuse.
    The fact remains that on the day war was declared I felt a sense of relief. I found myself saying out loud:
    “It was bound to happen.”
    My wife looked at me in astonishment.
    “Why?”
    “I don’t know. I felt certain about it, that’s all.”
    It wasn’t France and Germany, or Poland, England, Hitler, Nazism, or Communism which, to my mind, were involved. I have never taken any interest in politics and I don’t know anything about it. It would have been as much as I could do to quote the names of three or four French Ministers from having heard them on the radio.
    No. This war, which had suddenly broken out after a year of spurious calm, was a personal matter between Fate and me.
    I had already experienced one war, in the same town, Fumay, when I was a child, for I was six years old in 1914. I saw my father go off, in uniform, one morning when the rain was pouring down, and my mother was red-eyed all day. I heard the sound of gunfire for nearly four years,especially when we went up in the hills. I remember the Germans and their pointed helmets, the officers’ capes, the posters on the walls, rationing, the poor bread, the shortage of sugar, butter, and potatoes.
    One November evening I saw my mother come home naked, her hair cropped short, screaming insults and foul words at some youths who were trooping after her.
    I was ten years old. We lived in the center of the town, in a first-floor flat.
    She dressed without taking any notice of me, a mad look in her eyes, still muttering words I had never heard her use before, and suddenly, ready to go out, with a shawl around her head, she seemed to remember that I was there.
    “Madame Jamais will look after you until your father comes home.”
    Madame Jamais was our landlady and lived on the ground floor. I was too terrified to cry. She didn’t kiss me. At the door she hesitated, then she went out without saying anything else and the street door slammed.
    I am not trying to explain. I mean that all this may have nothing to do with my feelings in 1939 or 1940. I am putting down the facts as they came back to me, without any falsification.
    I contracted tuberculosis four years later. I had two or three other illnesses one after another.
    Altogether, my impression, when war broke out, was that Fate was playing another trick on me and I was not surprised for I was practically certain that that was going to happen one day.
    This time it wasn’t a microbe, a virus, a congenital deformity of heaven knows what part of the eye—the doctors have never been able to agree about my eyes. It was awar which was hurling men against one another in tens of millions.
    The idea was ridiculous, I realize that. But the fact remains that I knew, that I was ready. And that waiting, ever since October, was becoming unbearable. I didn’t understand. I kept wondering why what was bound to happen didn’t happen.
    Were they going to tell us, one fine morning, as at Munich, that everything had been settled, that life was going back to normal, that this great panic had just been a mistake?
    Wouldn’t such a turn of events have meant that something had gone wrong with my personal destiny?
    The sunshine was growing warmer, invading the yard, falling on the doll. Our bedroom window opened and my wife called out:
    “Marcel!”
    I stood up, went out of the workshop, and leaned my head back. My wife looked as if she were wearing a mask, as she had during her first pregnancy. Her face, with the skin all taut, struck me as touching but almost unfamiliar.
    “What’s happening?”
    “You