The Train

by Georges Simenon

  PRAISE FOR THE TRAIN

  “There is no false note, not one word or sigh or smile which strikes me as anything but unavoidable. This is not a writer’s romancing story of a little man caught in the war; it is the unknown history of many little men in that vast war.”

  —NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

  “One of the most poignant love affairs in twentieth century literature.”

  —THE NEW STATESMAN

  “Despite the fame and the high-class praise, Simenon’s reputation has never been quite established enough, and I think it’s because, up till now, no one book has ever clicked quite satisfactorily home. He has been a master—an acknowledged master—without a masterpiece. The Train is probably the book everyone has been expecting from Simenon. If we aren’t satisfied now, we are ingrates.”

  —BRIGID BROPHY

  PRAISE FOR GEORGES SIMENON

  “I love to read Simenon. He reminds me of Chekhov.”

  —WILLIAM FAULKNER

  “If I hadn’t read Ticket of Leave (La Veuve Couderc), I couldn’t have written The Stranger.”

  —ALBERT CAMUS

  “When they come to me to ask, ‘What should I read of his?’ I reply, ‘Everything.’ ”

  —ANDRE GIDE

  “He was a writer as comfortable with reality as with fiction, with passion as with reason. Above all, he inspired the confidence that readers reserve for novelists whom they venerate.”

  —JOHN LE CARRÉ

  “Few writers are able to express this everyday, intimate, universal realm of thought and sensation [as you]. It makes me envious … It’s what you leave out that makes your books so full of reverberations. You create a real and honest collaboration with your readers.”

  —HENRY MILLER, IN A LETTER TO SIMENON

  “Simenon is an all-round master craftsman—ironic, disciplined, highly intelligent, with fine descriptive power. His themes are timeless in their preoccupation with the interrelation of evil, guilt and good; contemporary in their fidelity to the modern context and Gallic in precision, logic and a certain emanation of pain or disquiet. His fluency is of course astonishing.”

  —FRANCIS STEEGMULLER

  “There is nothing like winter in the company of a keg of brandy and the complete works of Simenon.”

  —LUIS SEPULVEDA

  THE TRAIN

  GEORGES SIMENON (1903–1989) was born in Liège, Belgium, the son of an accountant. His father’s ill health forced him to quit school at 16, and he became a newspaperman, assigned to the crime beat. He published his first book, Au Point des arches, a year later, under his reporter’s pen-name, G. Sim. In 1922 he moved to Paris and began to write novels at a furious pace, using at least a dozen pen-names, although he created his most famous character, Commissaire Maigret of the Paris Police, under his own name. Maigret would eventually star in 75 novels. His non-Maigret novels—referred to as his roman durs (literally, “hard novels”)—were even more critically acclaimed, leading to speculation he would eventually win the Nobel. In the early thirties Simenon took up travel, living on a houseboat cruising the Belgian canal system, touring Africa and the Soviet Union, and living throughout the US and Canada. During the war years he moved to the French countryside, but was harassed by the Nazis who suspected his last name was Jewish. Nonetheless, after the war he was banned from publishing for five years for having sold film rights to German filmmakers. Married and divorced twice, Simenon was the father of four children, one of whom, his daughter Mari-Jo, committed suicide at age 25. (She would be the subject of his novel, The Disappearance of Odile.) It would darken Simenon’s later years, but he never stopped writing. Estimates are that he wrote as many as 500 books by the time of his death of natural causes at age 86.

  ROBERT BALDICK (1927–1972) was a British author and translator, in addition to being a Fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford and joint editor of the Penguins Classics series.

  THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY

  I was by no means the only reader of books on board the Neversink. Several other sailors were diligent readers, though their studies did not lie in the way of belles-lettres. Their favourite authors were such as you may find at the book-stalls around Fulton Market; they were slightly physiological in their nature. My book experiences on board of the frigate proved an example of a fact which every book-lover must have experienced before me, namely, that though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much. —HERMAN MELVILLE, WHITE JACKET

  THE TRAIN

  Originally published in French as Le Train

  The Train © 1961 Georges Simenon Limited,

  a Chorion company. All rights reserved

  Translated by Robert Baldick

  Translation © 1964 Penguin Books Ltd.

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  www.mhpbooks.com

  eISBN: 978-1-935554-73-8

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Authors

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  1

  WHEN I WOKE UP, A YELLOWISH LIGHT WHICH I knew so well was filtering into the bedroom through the Holland curtains. Our windows, on the first floor, have no shutters. None of the houses in the street has any. I could hear, on the bedside table, the ticking of the alarm clock, and, beside me, my wife’s regular breathing, which was almost as loud as that of patients, at the movies, during an operation. She was then seven and a half months pregnant. As when she was expecting Sophie, her huge belly forced her to sleep on her back.

  Without looking at the alarm clock, I slipped one leg out of bed. Jeanne stirred and stammered in a faraway voice:

  “What time is it?”

  “Half past five.”

  I have always got up early, especially after my years in the sanatorium, where, in summer, they used to bring us the thermometer at six in the morning.

  My wife had already ceased to be aware of what was happening around her and one of her arms had stretched out across the place I had just left.

  I dressed silently, carrying out, in order, the ritual movements of every morning, and glancing now and then at my daughter, whose bed at that time was still in our room. Yet we had furnished the prettiest room in the house for her, a front room communicating with ours.

  She refused to sleep in it.

  I went out of the room carrying my slippers in one hand, and put them on only at the foot of the stairs. It was then that I heard the first boats’ hooters over at Uf Lock, which is about two miles away. The regulations state that the locks must be open to barge traffic at sunrise, and every morning there is the same concert.

  In the kitchen I lit the gas and put the water on to boil. Once again, it looked like being a hot, sunny day. During the whole of that period, we had nothing but glorious days and even now I could still point out, hour by hour, the position of the pools of sunlight in the various rooms in the house.

  I opened the back door to the glass porch which we had put on so that my wife can do the washing there in all weathers and my daughter can play there. I can picture the doll’s pram, and the doll a little farther off, on the yellow tiles.

  I avoided going straight into my workshop because I wanted to obey the rules, as I used to say at that time when speaking of my timetable. A timetable w
hich had established itself, little by little, made up of habits rather than obligations.

  While the water was warming up, I poured some corn into an old blue enamel pan with a rusty bottom, which could no longer be used for anything else, and crossed the garden to go and feed the hens. We had six white hens and one cock.

  The dew was sparkling on the vegetables and on our solitary lilac, whose flowers, which were early that year, were beginning to wither, and I could still hear, not only the hooting of the boats on the Meuse, but also the panting of the diesel engines.

  I want to make it clear right away that I was not an unhappy man, nor a sad man either. At the age of thirty-two, I considered that I had gone beyond all the plans I had made, all my dreams.

  I had a wife, a house, and a four-year-old daughter who was rather high-strung, but Dr. Wilhems said that that would pass.

  I had a business of my own and my clientele grew from day to day, especially in the last few months of course. Because of what had been happening, everybody wanted to have a radio. I never stopped selling new radios and repairing old ones, and since we lived close to the quayside where the boats stopped for the night, I had the bargees as customers.

  I remember that I heard the door open in the house on the left, where the Matrays, a quiet old couple, lived. Monsieur Matray, who worked as a cashier in the Bank of France for thirty-five or forty years, is another early riser and starts every day by going into his garden for a breather.

  All the gardens in the street look the same, each as wide as the house and separated from one another by walls just so high that you can see nothing but the top of your neighbor’s head.

  For some time past, old Monsieur Matray had got into the habit of watching out for me, on account of my sets, which could pick up short waves.

  “No news this morning, Monsieur Feron.”

  That day, I went back inside before he asked me the question and I poured the boiling water onto the coffee. The familiar objects were in their places, those that Jeanne and I had allotted them or which they had ended up by taking, almost of their own accord, with the passing of time.

  If my wife had not been pregnant, I would have begun to hear her footsteps on the first floor, for she normally got up straight after me. All the same I insisted, out of habit, on making myself my first cup of coffee before going into my workshop. We observed a certain number of rites of that sort, and I suppose the same is true of every family.

  The first pregnancy had been painful, the delivery difficult. Jeanne attributed Sophie’s nervous temperament to the forceps which had had to be used and which had bruised the child’s head. Ever since her second pregnancy had started, she had been dreading a troublesome delivery and she was haunted by the idea of giving birth to an abnormal child.

  Dr. Wilhems, in whom she had absolute confidence, could not manage to reassure her, except for a few hours at a time, and at night she found it impossible to fall asleep. Long after we had gone to bed, I could hear her trying to find a comfortable position and she nearly always ended up by asking in a whisper:

  “Are you asleep, Marcel?”

  “No.”

  “I wonder if I’m suffering from a deficiency of iron. I’ve read in an article …”

  She tried to drop off to sleep, but often it was two o’clock in the morning before she succeeded and afterward it was not uncommon for her to sit up with a cry.

  “I’ve had another nightmare, Marcel.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “No, I’d rather forget about it. It’s too horrible. Forgive me for stopping you from sleeping, and when you work so hard too …”

  Recently she had been getting up about seven o’clock and coming downstairs after that to make breakfast.

  With my cup of coffee in one hand, I went into my workshop and opened the glass door which looked out onto the yard and the garden. I was entitled, at that moment, to the first ray of sunshine of the day, a little to the left of the door, and I knew exactly when it would reach my bench.

  It isn’t a real bench, but a big, heavy table which came from a convent and which I bought at a sale. There are always two or three sets on it which are in the process of being repaired. My tools, arranged in a rack on the wall, are within easy reach. All round the room the deal shelves I had put up were littered with sets, each of which bore the customer’s name on a label.

  I ended up of course by turning the knobs. It was almost a game with me to put off that moment. I used to tell myself in defiance of all the laws of logic:

  “If I wait a little longer, it may be today …”

  Straightaway, that particular morning, I realized that something was happening at last. I had never known the air so crowded. Whatever wavelength I picked, broadcasts were overlapping, voices, whistles, phrases in German, Dutch, English, and you could feel a sort of dramatic throbbing in the air.

  “During the night, the German armies launched a massive attack on …”

  So far it was not France but Holland which had just been invaded. What I could hear was a Belgian station. I tried to get Paris but Paris remained silent.

  The patch of sunshine was trembling on the gray floor, and at the bottom of the garden our six hens were fussing around the cock Sophie called Nestor. Why did I wonder all of a sudden what was going to become of our little poultry yard? I was almost moved to tears by its fate.

  I turned some more knobs, searching the short waves where everybody seemed to be talking at once. In that way I picked up, for a brief moment, a military band which I promptly lost, so that I have never known to what army it belonged.

  An Englishman was reading a message I could not understand, repeating each sentence as if he were dictating it to a correspondent, and after that I came across a station I had never heard before, a field transmitter.

  It was obviously very close, and belonged to one of the regiments which, since October, since the beginning of the phony war, had been camping in the region.

  The voices of the two men were as clear as if they had been talking to me on the telephone, and I supposed that they were in the neighborhood of Givet. Not that it matters in the slightest.

  “Where is your colonel?”

  That one had a strong southern accent.

  “All I know is that he isn’t here.”

  “He ought to be.”

  “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “You’ve got to find him. He sleeps somewhere, doesn’t he?”

  “I suppose so, but not in his bed.”

  “In whose bed, then?”

  A dirty laugh.

  “Here one night, there the next.”

  Some atmospherics prevented me from hearing the rest, and I caught sight of Monsieur Matray’s white hair and pink face over the wall, at the place where he had installed an old packing case to serve as a stepladder.

  “Any news, Monsieur Feron?”

  “The Germans have invaded Holland.”

  “Is that official?”

  “The Belgians have announced it.”

  “And Paris?”

  “Paris is playing music.”

  I heard him dash indoors shouting:

  “Germaine! Germaine! This is it! They’ve attacked!”

  I too was thinking that this was it, but the words had a different meaning for me than for Monsieur Matray. I am rather ashamed of saying this, but I felt relieved. I even wonder whether ever since October, indeed ever since Munich, I had not been waiting impatiently for this moment, whether I had not been disappointed every morning, when I turned the knobs of the radio, to learn that the armies were still facing each other without fighting.

  It was the 10th of May. A Friday, I am almost sure of that. A month earlier, at the beginning of April, the 8th or 9th, my hopes had risen when the Germans had invaded Denmark and Norway.

  I don’t know how to explain myself and I wonder if there is anybody capable of understanding me. It will be pointed out that I was in no danger, as, on account of my short
sightedness, I was exempt from military service. My prescription is sixteen diopters, which means that, without my glasses, I am as helpless as somebody in total darkness, or at least in a thick fog.

  I have always been terrified of finding myself without my glasses, for example of falling down in the street and breaking them, and I always have a spare pair in my pocket. That’s to say nothing of my health, of the four years I spent in a sanatorium, between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, of the check-ups I had to undergo until a 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.