The Train by Georges Simenon Page B

a patient from his bed, sometimes in the middle of the night. We knew what that meant.
    There was a special room for dying, and another, in the basement, where the body was kept until the relatives claimed it or it was buried in the little local cemetery.
    Those deaths were different. There wasn’t the sunshine, the grass, the flowers, the cackling hens, the flies buzzing around our heads.
    “We can’t leave him there.”
    The men looked at one another. Two of them, both elderly, volunteered to lend the fireman a hand.
    I don’t know where they put the engineer. Walking back along the train, I noticed holes in the sides of the cars, long scores which showed the wood as bare as when you fell a tree.
    A woman had been wounded, one shoulder, we were told, practically torn off.
    It was she whom we could hear groaning as if she were in labor. There were just a few other women around her, old women for the most part, for the men, embarrassed, had moved away in silence.
    “It isn’t a pretty sight.”
    “What are we going to do? Stay here until they come back to snipe at us?”
    I saw an old man sitting on the ground, holding a bloodstained handkerchief to his face. A bottle, hit by a bullet,had shattered in his hand and splinters of glass had scored his cheeks. He didn’t complain. I could see only his eyes, which were expressing nothing but a sort of amazement.
    “They’ve found somebody to attend to her.”
    “Who?”
    “A midwife on the train.”
    I caught sight of her, a sour-faced little old woman with a sturdy figure and her hair arranged in a bun on top of her head. She didn’t belong to our car.
    Without realizing, we gathered together in groups corresponding to the carriages, and in front of ours the man with the pipe went on protesting halfheartedly. He was one of the few who had not been to see the dead engineer.
    “What the hell are we waiting for? Isn’t there a single bastard here who can make that damned engine work?”
    I remember somebody climbing up onto the track carrying a dead chicken by the feet, and sitting down to pluck it. I didn’t try to understand. Seeing that nothing was happening as it did in ordinary life, everything was natural.
    “The fireman wants a hefty fellow to feed the boiler while he tries to take the engineer’s place. He thinks he can manage. It isn’t as if the traffic was normal.”
    Contrary to all expectations, the horse dealer volunteered, without making a song and dance about it. It seemed to amuse him, like those members of an audience who go up onto the stage in response to an appeal by a conjuror.
    He took off his jacket, his tie, and his wristwatch, which he handed over to Julie before making for the engine.
    The half-plucked chicken was hanging from a bar in the ceiling. Three of our companions, sweating and out of breath, came back with some bales of straw.
    “Make room, you fellows!”
    The young fellow of fifteen, for his part, had brought an aluminum saucepan and a frying pan from the abandoned farm.
    Were others doing the same in my house?
    I can remember some amusing exchanges which made us laugh in spite of ourselves.
    “Let’s hope he doesn’t run the train down the embankment.”
    “What do you think the rails are for, you idiot?”
    “Trains can run off the rails, even in peacetime, can’t they? So which of us two is the idiot?”
    A group of people went on fussing around the engine for some time, and it came as a surprise to hear it whistle in the end like an ordinary train. We moved off slowly, almost at a walking pace, without any jolting, before gradually picking up speed.
    Ten minutes later we passed a road which crossed the line and which was crowded with carts and cattle, with cars here and there trying to get through. Two or three peasants waved to us, more solemn and serious than we were, and it seemed to me that they looked at us enviously.
    Later on, we saw a road which ran parallel with the line for some time, with army trucks