The Train Read Free Page A

heard?”
    “Yes. Is it true? Are they attacking?”
    “They’ve invaded Holland.”
    And my daughter, behind her, asked:
    “What is it, Mummy?”
    “Lie down. It isn’t time to get up.”
    “What did Daddy say?”
    “Nothing. Go to sleep.”
    She came down almost at once, smelling of the bed and walking with her legs slightly apart, because of her belly.
    “Do you think they’ll let them get through?”
    “I haven’t the faintest idea.”
    “What does the government say?”
    “It hasn’t said anything yet.”
    “What do you intend to do, Marcel?”
    “I haven’t thought about it. I’m going to try to get some more news.”
    It was still from Belgium that it was coming, given out by a dramatic staccato voice. This voice announced that at one o’clock in the morning some Messerschmitts and Stukas had flown over Belgian territory and had dropped bombs at several points.
    Panzers had entered the Ardennes, and the Belgian government had addressed a solemn appeal to France to help it in its defense.
    The Dutch, for their part, were opening their dykes and flooding a large part of the country, and there was talk, if the worst came to the worst, of halting the invader in front of the Albert Canal.
    In the meantime my wife was making breakfast and setting the table, and I could hear the clatter of crockery.
    “Any more news?”
    “Tanks are crossing the Belgian frontier pretty well everywhere.”
    “But in that case …”
    For certain moments of the day, my memories are so precise that I could write a detailed account of them, whereas for others I remember above all else the sunshine, the springtime smells, the blue sky like the one on the day I took my first Communion.
    The whole street was waking up. Life was beginning in houses more or less similar to ours. My wife went to openthe street door to take in the bread and milk and I heard her talking to our next-door neighbor on the right, Madame Piedboeuf, the schoolmaster’s wife. They had an ideal little girl, curly-haired and pinkcheeked, with big blue eyes and long doll’s eyelashes, who was always dressed as if for a party, and for the past year they had had a little car in which they used to go for a drive every Sunday.
    I don’t know what the two women said to each other. From the noises I could hear, I gathered that they weren’t the only ones outside, that women were calling to one another from doorstep to doorstep. When Jeanne came back, she looked pale and even more drawn than usual.
    “They’re going!” she told me.
    “Where?”
    “South, anywhere. At the end of the street I saw more cars going past with mattresses on the roof, Belgians mostly.”
    We had already seen them go by before Munich, and in October a certain number of Belgians had once again traveled to the south of France, rich people, who could wait.
    “Do you intend to stay here?”
    “I haven’t the faintest idea.”
    I was telling the truth. I who had seen this event coming from so far away, who had waited for it for so long, I had not made any decisions in advance. It was as if I were waiting for a sign, as if I wanted Fate to decide for me.
    I wasn’t responsible anymore. Perhaps that’s the word, perhaps that’s what I was trying to explain just now. Only the day before, it had been up to me to manage my life and that of my family, to earn a living, to arrange for things to happen in the way things have to happen.
    But not now. I had just lost my roots. I was no longer Marcel Feron, radio engineer in a newish district of Fumay,not far from the Meuse, but one man among millions whom superior forces were going to toss about at will.
    I was no longer firmly attached to my house, to my habits. From one moment to the next, I had, so to speak, jumped into space.
    From now on, decisions were no longer any concern of mine. Instead of my own palpitations, I was beginning to feel a sort of general palpitation. I wasn’t living at my tempo anymore, but at the tempo of the