To the Wedding (4 page)

When I take the train with Papa, he talks railway talk. When I’m alone, I see soldiers. I know why. Ever since the History Prof, told us about the accident that took place in 1917, I’ve seen them. When the train’s empty, like this morning, they are there. The ticket collector just came in and said: Ah, Miss Ninon, so this term you’re going to take your Bac! Now he’s gone and all I see on this fucking train are the soldiers.

Not officers, common soldiers. Young men like the ones I talk to in the Tout Va Bien Café. The train is packed with them, with their rifles and their haversacks. A long train packed with soldiers can change history, Papa says.

My soldiers, they’re happy, it’s nearly Christmas, the twelfth of December, they’ve left the front line and they are going home. They’ve come through our tunnel. They waited a long time in Modane.
Why Are We Waiting?
, they began to sing. The engine driver didn’t want to take the train down to Maurienne with only one locomotive and with ice on the tracks. But the commanding officer ordered him to do so.

The coaches are rolling down to the plain full of soldiers going home on leave and I’m with them. I’d give a lot not to be. I know the tragedy by heart, yet I can’t take this line without seeing them. Every time I take the train I ride down with the soldiers.

Out of the window I can see the other track, the river
and the road. Our valley is so narrow the three have to run side by side. All they can do is to change positions. The road can take a bridge over the railway. The river can go under the road. The railway can run over them both. Always the railway, the river and the road, and for me in the train, the soldiers.

They pass their bottles of pinard in front of me. The train is without lights but somebody has brought a hurricane lamp. One of them closes his eyes as he sings. By the window there’s an accordion player. The locomotive starts to whistle, as shrill and high as a circular saw cutting into wood. Nobody stops singing. Nobody doubts for an instant that they’re going home to fuck with their wives and see their children. No one is frightened of anything.

Now the train is going too fast, sparks are flying from the wheels into the night and the coach is lurching dangerously from side to side. They stop singing. They eye one another. Then they lower their heads. A man with red hair says between his teeth: We have to jump! His friends hold him back from the door. If you don’t want to die, jump! The man with red hair breaks free, gets the door open and jumps. To his death.

The wheels of trains are very close together under the coaches, closer than you’d ever guess, tucked right under, so the weight of the men being thrown around is making the coach lurch more and more violently. Stand in the centre, shouts a corporal. Keep in the fucking centre! The soldiers try. They try to move away from the windows and doors and they put their arms round each other standing in
the centre of the train, as it hurtles towards the corner by the paper factory.

For a railway it’s a sharp bend by the paper factory with a high brick escarpment. I’ve often looked at it from the road. Today there’s no sign of the accident but the bricks make me think of blood.

The first uncoupled coaches derail and hurtle into the wall. The next coaches telescope into the first. The last ones leap on top, wheels grinding on to roofs and skulls. A hurricane lamp spills and the wood and the kit bags and the wooden seats of the coaches catch fire. In the crash that night eight hundred die. Fifty survive. I don’t die of course.

I was at the memorial service held for them at Maurienne sixty years later. I went with the Widow Bosson who used to make dresses for me when I was little. A few old survivors from the crash came from Paris. They stood close together, like the Corporal told them to do in the train. The Widow Bosson and I were looking for a man with one leg. And there he was! The Widow Bosson squeezed my hand, left me and edged her way over towards him. I knew what she was going to do, she had told me. She was going to ask him whether he had ever married? And, if he had, whether he was now a widower? I thought she shouldn’t do this. I had told her so. But I was only a kid and, according to her, I hadn’t yet learnt how hard life could be.

The Widow Bosson was fifteen on the night of the accident. The whole town of St-Jean-de-Maurienne was
awakened by the noise, and hundreds of people rushed to the wreckage, guided by the flames. There was little they could do. Some soldiers who were still alive were pinioned under the iron debris, trapped in the fire. One soldier begged the bystanders to take his rifle and shoot him! Another spotted the fifteen-year-old who was to become Madame Bosson. Angel, he pleaded, fetch an axe quick! She ran home, found one, and came running back with it. Now get my leg chopped off! he ordered her. The heat of the flames was infernal. Somebody did it. Sixty years later the Widow Bosson half hoped to marry the one-legged man whose life she’d saved that night.

From the station at St-Jean-de-Maurienne to the Lycée is a few minutes’ walk. I take my time, and as I walk, I tell myself: I want to leave this murderous fucking valley, I want to see the world!

B
lindness is like the cinema, because its eyes are not either side of a nose but wherever the story demands.

On a corner where the No. 11 stops, the woman driver of the first tram of the day smiles at the smell of newly baked bread which she breathes in because she has jammed the tram windscreen open with one of her shoes. Five floors up, Zdena smells the same bread. The window of her room is open. Long and narrow, so narrow that a single bed arranged lengthwise barely leaves enough space to walk between the bed and wall, the room is like a long corridor leading to the window which gives on to an acacia tree and looks down on the tramlines.

Ever since her daughter’s visit, Zdena has called this
“corridor” Ninon’s room. From time to time she comes here to look for a book. Whilst looking for one, she picks up another. A book by a poet who was once her lover. Or the letters of Marina Tsvetayeva. Then she sits down in a chair to finish reading what she has begun. And when this happens, when she stays in the corridor room for an hour or so, it is as if she can see Ninon’s dressing gown still hanging from the hook on the door.

Zdena started sleeping on the narrow bed in this room a few days ago in the hope of feeling closer to her daughter.

I don’t know how he knew the song about my name:
Quel Joli Nom de Ninon
. But he did. He said he was a cook. I thought he was an army cook. I thought he had recently stopped being a soldier. His hair was still cropped and his ears came out sideways. I asked him whether he came from the north and he smiled with his blue eyes and didn’t answer. He certainly looked as if he did. He had a pale skin and a lot of hollows and clefts on his body—such as under his cheekbones or between the two muscles of his upper arm, or behind his knees. As though your hand might suddenly slip between two close rocks into a deep pool farther in. He was all knuckles.

I first saw him walking down the middle of a street by a quayside in Toulon. He was doing this so as to be seen. Like an actor or like drunks do. He was grinning. On the
back of his cropped head was clapped a soft hat. He was carrying two boards, joined together by webbing shoulder straps, and the boards reached to his knees. On them, back and front, was written the menu of a fish restaurant. A cheap restaurant for most of the dishes cost less than 50. The word
Moules
was written at the top, under his chin. Below were listed different ways of cooking the mussels.
Américaine, Marseillaise, Bonne Femme, A l’Indienne, Reine Mathilde, Lucifer
 … the list was funny.
Tahitienne, Rochelaise, Douceur des Isles, Pêcheur, Hongroise
 … so the Hungarians have a Hungarian way of cooking mussels! The Czechs, like my poor mother, must have one too! Our national dish, she joked one day, is knives and forks! I loved it when she laughed. It was like discovering a tree was still alive, although it had no leaves because it was winter. I never understood her knife and fork joke.
Poulette, Réunionnaise, Italienne, Grecque
 … I loved it when she laughed. Now I was laughing, too.

He saw me. He saw me laughing at his menu, and he bowed. He couldn’t bow very low because the bottom of the sandwich board hit his shins.

I was sitting on a bollard above the yachts and motor launches in the port. It was the mussel man who spoke:

We shut at four. You’ll still be here?

No, I said.

On holiday?

I work.

He took his hat off and put it farther back.

What’s your line?

Car-hire service. Hertz.

I didn’t tell him it was my first job. He nodded and readjusted his shoulder straps.

They bite into you, he said. I do this till I find something as a cook.

No joke.

Like a trip in the yacht there? He pointed at one called
Laisse Dire
.

How do the Hungarians cook mussels? I asked him.

Like a trip in the yacht there?

He was as stupid as the menu on his back.

I’m going to be late, I said, and walked off.

Zdena, lying on the narrow bed in the corridor room in Bratislava, lets out a breath—as after a sigh or a sob.

I came out of the Hertz office at 10 p.m. and the Mussel Man was standing beside the newsagents in the railway station.

How long have you been here? I couldn’t stop myself asking.

I told you, we shut at four.

And he stood there. He didn’t say anything more. He stood there smiling. I stood there. He had no hat and he was no longer carrying the boards. He wore a
T-shirt with palm trees on it, and a studded leather belt. Slowly he lifted up a plastic bag and took out a thermal packing.

I bought you some moules, he said, cooked à la Hongroise.

I’ll eat them later.

What’s your name?

I told him and that’s when he hummed my song.
Quel Joli Nom de Ninon
.

We walked down the main boulevard towards the sea. He carried the plastic bag. The sidewalk was crowded and the lights were still on in the shop windows. For five minutes he said nothing.

You walk all day with your menu? I asked him.

They turn the lights off in the shops here at 3:30 a.m., he said.

We walked on. I stopped to look at a coat in a window.

Bullet-proof glass that, he said.

I dream about coats, dresses, shoes, handbags, tights, headscarves. Shoes are my favourite. But I never stop before a jewellery shop. I hate jewellers. He stopped in front of one. I didn’t wait for him.

Hey, he said, there could be something you like here!

So?

You just need to tell me.

I hate jewellers, I said.

So do I, he said.

His face, between his cup-handle ears, broke into a smile, not quite sure of itself, and we walked down towards the sea. I ate the moules on a beach beside a stack of deck
chairs. The moules were called Hungarian because of the paprika.

Whilst I ate, he undid the laces of his trainers. He did everything deliberately, as though he couldn’t think of more than one thing at a time. The left shoe. Then the right shoe.

I’m going to swim, he said, you don’t want to swim?

I’ve just come from work. I haven’t got anything with me.

No one’ll see us here, he said, and he pulled off his T-shirt with the palm trees. His skin was so pale I could see the shadow of every rib.

I got to my feet, took off my shoes and, leaving him, walked barefoot down to the water’s edge where the small waves were breaking on the sand and shingle. It was dark enough to see the stars, and light enough to see how he was now undressed. He somersaulted down the beach towards the sea. I was surprised and then I laughed, for I had guessed something: he was somersaulting out of modesty. It was a way of coming down the beach without showing his cock. I don’t know how I knew that, and I didn’t ask him. But the idea came to me.

Whilst I was laughing, he ran into the dark sea. I should have left then. He swam a long way out. I couldn’t spot him any more.

Have you ever tried leaving a man in the sea in the dark? It’s not so simple.

I went back to where we had been sitting. His clothes were in a pile on the sand, folded. Not like recruits in the army have to fold them. They were arranged like
things you would be able to find in the dark if need be. They were arranged so that if you came back in a hurry you could gather them up quickly. One cotton T-shirt. One pair of jeans. A pair of trainers, with a hole in the sole of the left shoe, large feet, 44. A slip. And a belt with an engraved hand on the buckle. I sat and looked out to sea.

Twenty minutes must have passed. The sound of waves is like what you hear on the radio when the public claps. But it’s steadier and nobody shouts Johnny! He came up behind me, dripping wet. He stood there dripping and holding two deck chairs under one bony arm and a parasol in the other. I laughed.

So we went on, the cook and I. There was a solidity to his dumbness; it would never change.

After we’d fucked, I asked: Can you hear the waves?