The Train by Georges Simenon

us nearly all the way around the village, which was perched on a hillock.
    The church and the houses weren’t the same shape orthe same color as in our part of the world, but the congregation outside the church was behaving in accordance with an identical ritual.
    The men in their black clothes, all old because the others were at the front, were standing about in groups, and you could tell that it wouldn’t be long before they went into the inn.
    The old women were going off one by one, hurrying along and keeping close to the walls, while the girls in bright dresses and the youths stood waiting for one another, holding their missals in their hands, and the children started running immediately.
    Anna was still looking at me, and I wondered if she knew what mass on Sunday was like. Before Sophie was born, Jeanne and I used to go to high mass at ten o’clock. Afterward we went for a stroll around the town, greeting our acquaintances, before stopping at her sister’s to collect our cake.
    I paid for it. I had insisted on paying for it, accepting nothing but a discount of twenty percent. Often the cake was still warm, and on the way home I could smell the sugar on it.
    After Sophie, Jeanne got into the habit of going to the seven o’clock mass while I looked after the child, and later, when the little girl could walk, I took her with me to the ten o’clock mass while my wife cooked lunch.
    Was there a high mass that morning at Fumay? Were there still enough members of the congregation? Had the Germans bombed or invaded the town?
    “What are you thinking about? Your wife?”
    “No.”
    That was true. Jeanne figured only incidentally in thesethoughts. I was thinking just as much about old Monsieur Matray and the schoolmaster’s curly-haired little girl. Had their car managed to make its way through the chaos on the roads? Had Monsieur Reverse been to get our hens and our poor Nestor?
    I wasn’t upset. I asked myself these questions objectively, almost playfully, because everything had become possible, even, for example, the razing of Fumay to the ground and the shooting of its population.
    That was just as plausible as our driver’s death in the cab of his engine, or, in my case, making love in the middle of forty people with a young woman whom I hadn’t known two days before and who had just come out of prison.
    More and more of the others had sat down like us, looking around with vacant eyes, and a few were taking food out of their luggage. We were getting near a town. On the billboards I had read some names which were familiar to me, and when I saw that we were at Auxerre I had to make an effort to remember the map of France.
    I don’t know why I had got it into my head that we were going to go through Paris. We had avoided the capital, probably going by way of Troyes during the night.
    Now we found ourselves under the big glass roof of a station whose atmosphere was different from the one where we had stopped before.
    Here it was a real Sunday morning, a prewar Sunday, with no reception service, no nurses, no girls wearing arm bands.
    A score of people in all were waiting on the green benches on the platforms, and the sunshine, filtering through the dirty panes and reduced to light-dust, gave an unreal quality to the silence and solitude.
    “Hey there, guard, are we going to stay here long?”
    The guard looked at the front of the train, then at the clock. I don’t know why, for he replied:
    “I haven’t the faintest idea.”
    “Have we got time to go to the refreshment room?”
    “You’ve got an hour at least, I should say.”
    “Where are they taking us?”
    He went off shrugging his shoulders, indicating that this question didn’t come within his province.
    I wonder whether we weren’t rather annoyed—I say we on purpose—at not being welcomed, at finding ourselves suddenly left to our own resources. Expressing in his fashion the general feeling, somebody called out:
    “So nobody’s feeding us