Free The Train by Georges Simenon Page A

sincerity—had satisfied me completely.
    Now I was there, in the dark, with the song of the train, red and green lights passing by, telegraph wires, other bodies stretched out in the straw, and close beside me, within reach of my hand, what the Abbé Dubois called the carnal act was taking place.
    Against my own body, a woman’s body pressed itself, tense, vibrant, and a hand moved to pull up the black dress, to push the panties down to the feet which kicked them off with an odd jerking movement.
    We still hadn’t kissed each other. It was Anna who drew me toward her, on top of her, both of us as silent as snakes.
    Julie’s breathing grew quicker and louder just as Anna was helping me to enter her, and I suddenly found myself there.
    I didn’t cry out. But I came close to doing so. I came close to talking incoherently, saying thank you, telling of my happiness, or else complaining, for that happiness hurt me. Hurt me with the attempt to reach the unattainable.
    I should have liked to express all at once my affection for this woman whom I hadn’t known the day before, but who was a human being, who in my eyes was becoming
the
human being.
    I bruised her unconsciously, my hands trying to grasp the whole of her.
    “Anna …”
    “Hush!”
    “I love you.”
    “Hush!”
    For the first time in my life I had said “I love you” likethat, from the depths of my heart. Perhaps it wasn’t she that I loved, but life? I don’t know how to put it: I was inside her life, and I should have liked to stay there for hours, never to think of anything else, to become like a plant in the sun.
    Our lips met, each mouth as moist as the other. I didn’t think of asking her, as I used to during my experiences as a young man:
    “Can I?”
    I could, seeing that she wasn’t worried, seeing that she didn’t push me away but on the contrary held me inside her.
    Finally our lips parted at the same time as our arms and legs relaxed.
    “Don’t move,” she whispered.
    And, with both of us invisible to each other, she stroked my forehead gently, following the lines of my face with her hand, like a sculptor.
    Still in a whisper, she asked me:
    “Did you enjoy that?”
    Hadn’t I been right in thinking that I had an appointment with Fate?

4
    AS USUAL, I WOKE UP AT DAWN, ABOUT HALF past five in the morning. Several of my companions, mostly peasants, were already sitting, wide awake, on the floor of the car. So as not to wake the others, they just said good morning to me with their eyes.
    Although one of the sliding doors had been shut for the night, you could feel the biting cold which always precedes sunrise, and, afraid that Anna might catch cold, I spread my jacket over her shoulders and her chest.
    So far I hadn’t really looked at her. I took advantage of her being asleep to examine her solemnly, somewhat disturbed by what I saw. I was rather inexperienced. Until then I had scarcely seen anybody except my wife and daughter, and I knew how both of them looked in the early morning.
    When she wasn’t pregnant and oppressed by the weight of her body, Jeanne seemed younger at dawn than she did during the day. With her features erased as it were, she took on the pouting expression of a little girl, roughly the same as Sophie, innocent and satisfied.
    Anna was younger than my wife, I put her down as twenty-two, twenty-three at the most, but her face was that of someone much older, as I noticed that morning. I also realized, looking at her more closely, that she was a foreigner.
    Not only because she came from another country, I didn’t know which, but because she had a different life, different thoughts, different feelings from the people at Fumay and all the others I knew.
    Instead of letting herself go, to get rid of her weariness, she had curled up, on the defensive, with a crease in the middle of her forehead, and now and then the corners of her mouth twitched as if she felt a pain or experienced a disagreeable mental picture.
    Her