2. 3
In Rear Third, Maurice Marland is pressed tight between passengers, and his eyes are stinging from the smoke. (Though it’s really no worse than the little house in Falaise when Papa and Georges have their pipes out.) On Maurice’s left is an old man in a clerical collar who told him to sit down as soon as the train started to move. On his right is the solidly built young woman with short hair who jumped on just as the guards’ whistles were sounding; Maurice thought she was a young man until his eyes went down as far as her skirt.
A grey-haired woman behind him is speaking Norman, the dialect of his dead grandparents. From schoolmates he’s picked up enough to follow, but Maman says only proper French will help her sons get ahead.
Maurice has counted eleven heads in the carriage, including his own. He squeezes his shoulder blades together to occupy a little less of the hard bench. He should have taken off his school satchel, but there isn’t room to do it now. If the carriage stays this packed, will he have to wear it till Dreux, five and a half hours away? For all the crush of bodies, the cold whistling up through the floorboards is making him shiver. He doesn’t remember the inside of a train feeling so outside-ish, but of course his previous journeys were in the summer. Or maybe it’s because he’s by himself this time, and a lone traveller feels every draught.
“All on your own, mon petit ?”
“No,” Maurice lies, squinting at the priest in the clerical collar. Then he says “Father,” for courtesy, though the Marlands, like many French families, aren’t churchgoers the way their forebears were. He adds, “My parents are in the next carriage.”
The truth is, they’re in Dreux-don’t-forget, where Papa will be outside the station at 2:16 this afternoon; he won’t be able to come inside because a thief might drive his cart away. But Maurice doesn’t want to call attention to the fact that he has no adult here to protect him.
The priest tips his wattled head to one side.
“It was too full in that carriage, so…”
“Fuller than this one, really?”
“Bursting.”
The wrinkled mouth twists. “Ah, well, we all travel under Saint Christopher’s care.”
Maurice hasn’t heard of Saint Christopher but does like the notion of a designated saint in charge of travellers.
He lifts his chin to try to see past his fellow passengers. Interesting sights unspool outside the window. Cows—pale, black-and-white, brown—all of them in one field lying down, all of them in the next standing up. (Could a noise have alarmed them?) A herd of shaggy sheep munching in a green lane so a gleaming coach-and-four can’t pass; that’s funny.
That peculiar young woman to his right is clutching the thin metal handle of her lidded lunch bucket so tightly that her knuckles are white. Maybe it’s because she nearly missed the train at Granville; sometimes after the nervousness has worn off, you still feel sick. Maurice almost whispers it: “Was it the clocks, mademoiselle?”
“What?” Her voice is gruff.
He has to explain himself now. “Ah… I only wondered if you were confused by the clocks like I was.”
“What clocks?” Deeper now, angry.
Maurice’s face is scorching. “The one outside that’s five minutes ahead. I mean, it’s on time, but it’s ahead of the one on the inside. To help passengers who are running late.”
“I wasn’t late,” she mutters. “I just couldn’t quite make up my mind to get on.”
Maurice puzzles over that. When you’re grown up, you have to decide things, he supposes. At seven and a half, he has only instructions to follow.
“Of course all clocks are wrong,” remarks the old priest.
“How’s that?” Maurice forgets to say Father this time.
“Wrong by comparison with the celestial timepiece.” The priest points his finger upwards; the end of it is flat and rather splayed.
A snort from the young woman with short hair.
Maurice guesses what timepiece the priest’s talking about: “The sun?”
The priest nods. “By solar time, Granville is actually a full sixteen minutes behind our far-off capital, did you know that?”
Maurice shakes his head.
“But for the convenience of modern folk who like to gad about at top speed, we’re obliged to deny the evidence of our senses and use so-called railway time, meaning Paris time.”
“I’m still confused about the two clocks,” Maurice confesses. “If you’re a little bit late but they pretend you’re not and hold the train so you don’t miss it, won’t you be late when you get off the train in Montparnasse?”
The priest nods, gratified. “They make this concession to their passengers’ weakness, but like sin, it must be paid for sooner or later.”
The young woman lets out a groan. “Did anyone here ask for a homily?”
A soldier agrees and says with a rattle of phlegm: “Hear, hear!”
But the grey-haired woman behind tuts at them loudly, and the priest gives her a civil nod. “I’m bringing my companion here to enrol at the Seminary of the Foreign Missions.”
What companion? Maurice leans to see who’s on the priest’s other side—a young man whose face is cratered with old pimples.
The student missionary makes an awkward bow to the company. “I’m to travel on an ocean liner to Shanghai and convert the heathen.”
The young woman laughs like a pistol shot. “What if they chop off your head?”
The missionary musters a lopsided half-smile. “There are the twelve martyrs of China already… so I suppose in that case I’d be the thirteenth.”
He must be very brave , Maurice thinks. Or very stupid. Or both?
The old priest remarks in an oddly cheerful tone, “Martyrs may be made in France too. Didn’t the Communards slaughter five holy fathers not a quarter century ago? And these days men of the cloth are being driven out of the schools so everything can be secularized .”
The young woman grunts. “About time too!”
Maurice hates when grown-ups quarrel, so he looks out the window. He longs to shrug off his school satchel and relieve his aching shoulders. A tall, striped semaphore post bears a sign that reads One Train Can Hide Another.
Mado Pelletier checks one last time that the lid of her lunch bucket is screwed on tight, then curls both hands around its handle again.
Mado is short for Madeleine, which is the name she chose for herself the day she decided never to go back to school. Legally she’s still Anne, after her wretched mother, but Mado has shed that name along with the Good Lord and all that guff.
She wrinkles her nose; sweat, wet wool, garlic, and cabbage, reminiscent of home. She holds herself slightly away from the boy on her left, who’s deep in a storybook. When she leapt into this carriage at the last minute, she didn’t know it held any children. How is she supposed to think straight while she’s right beside such a young one, today of all days? Well, she’ll have to sit tight till the next stop, Vire. There’s no way to get from one railway carriage to the next while the train is in motion, so each train car is a trap, albeit the sort people climb into willingly.
An arm’s length away, a man with an angry-looking mole on his nose is telling his neighbour about the past half-year of day-labouring. Neither of his two daughters looks more than ten years old, but the younger adds proudly, “We cleared stones off the fields and spread night soil.”
“And now you’re headed back to Belgium?” the brick-brown woman asks in a Breton accent. Her kerchief has slipped, showing cropped curls.
The hair harvesters must have been through her village recently, offering a yard of calico per head, Mado decides. Vultures . Mado’s father used to say, There’s no end to the ways we get bought and sold, used and abused. Paralysed by a stroke before she was born, Papa Pelletier was always in his chair in the corner, but he saw the world clearly enough.
“To my sister’s house, yes,” the labourer says. “And hope to return here next May.”
His skinny girls cross themselves.
It never ceases to amaze Mado that so many of her ground-down sex still cling to piety, long after the majority of their menfolk have ditched it. She finds herself brooding over the plight of these Belgians, who’ll make it back to Normandy in the spring only if that mole on the father’s face doesn’t spread and kill him. She wonders what got his wife, the children’s mother. Never mind, Mado. What difference do the specifics make?
The tanned woman’s telling the man that she’s just given up farmwork herself, “seeing as the bastards keep cutting our wages and blaming it on the price of wheat.”
Mado sighs. For every way the poor eke out a living, there’s some sleight of hand by which the bosses make it harder or the landlords or big companies charge them more. Ever since Mado discovered the public library, she’s been reading to learn how the machine of the world chugs on and how no fiddling little adjustments will ever fix it. When she came across Proudhon’s line Property is theft , the words went off like firecrackers in her brain.
“A cousin knows a soap works I can try in the city,” the tanned woman goes on hopefully.
Mado’s heart sinks for her. The city’s already clogged with workers squeezed off the land who delude themselves into thinking they’ll spot an opportunity somehow overlooked by all Parisians. She pictures this ruddy woman growing pale in a shed on the outskirts of the city, stirring chemicals with a wooden spoon.
The woman covers a small belch with her fist. Perhaps the motion of the train is upsetting her stomach. Or is her story more complicated—did some man let her down, and now she’s a month or two gone, maybe, and headed for the anonymity of Paris to have herself discreetly “put straight”?
Mado digs her thumbnail into her finger. Stop making up sad stories about these strangers. What difference does it make now?
She feels the blood slide out into the roll of rags belted to her waist. Since Mado turned fifteen, she’s bled every fourth Tuesday of the month, as if a weird clock in her belly keeps time. On the first occasion, the nun flushed red and sent her out of class for leaving a bright smear on the seat. At home behind the greengrocery, Madame Pelletier cleaned her daughter up without a word of explanation.
Mado has studied her mother’s grotesque history and concluded that Nature’s deck is stacked against females. Her mother had a healthy son, then two stillbirths, then Mado, then ten further misses, one after another—some who slid out in scarlet puddles, some quite well-formed infants who never drew breath. Whenever her mother’s time arrived, she’d press the girl into service to assist the midwife. Nothing ever came of all that labour—no more little Pelletiers, nothing but stains on the floorboards.
Ever weeping, Madame Pelletier blamed the devil. But Papa taught Mado that her mother’s losses and his own paralysis—such broken health among the hungry and worn out—could be no accident. Employers, politicians, and capitalists were to blame for the sufferings of the working classes. Pious royalist wife versus angry republican husband, the Pelletier marriage was a protracted war they waged in that stifling room behind the shop with Mado as witness. Papa gave up the argument by dying one night in his chair but not before he’d convinced his daughter that the system was rotten to the core.
Since walking out of school, Mado’s tried dozens of ways to earn, each more hopeless than the last. Twenty-one already; she’d have left home by now, like her brother, no matter what the neighbours said if she could only find a line of work in which a young woman could earn as much as a man or even enough to pay her own rent. (Except that way; Mado would rather slit her throat than do that.)
“What’s this getup for?”
Mado blinks, meets the eye of the farm woman. “I beg your pardon?”
“Why’re you going around dressed like a boy?”
She’s tempted to make a cutting remark about the woman’s own hair, cropped to sell. Instead she answers flatly, “These aren’t men’s clothes, they’re just sensible ones that keep the rain off.” Marks of liberty , she’d say if it wouldn’t cause general laughter. A proclamation of the equal worth of my soul .
“Well, they don’t look like women’s clothes.”
Barely nine in the morning, and Mado’s had enough of this day already. “They don’t show my tits, you mean?” That makes a few eyebrows go up, though the old priest pretends not to hear. “I won’t do that till men have to cut a hole in their trousers.”
The tanned woman lets out a whoop. “I know a few dirty dogs who wouldn’t mind that at all!”
A tiny voice makes Mado turn her head. Merde , here’s another child right behind her—a girl in stiff new clothes playing some kind of finger game. Beside her, a woman with very different features and bags under her eyes; probably a nurse bringing her charge back to Paris. The bourgeoisie claim it’s healthier for children to spend their first years in the countryside, but really they just prefer to pay their way out of any inconvenience, including child-rearing.
Mado’s gorge rises. She doesn’t want to know about the little girl or the nurse or any of these people whose knees are pushing against hers. Their muddy clogs, their stinks of sweat and sausage and tobacco. These people, her people—she’s not naive about them. Their ignorance, their prejudices, the daily grind, drags them down. What does it matter who these particular individuals are? Today’s random selection from the millions of working folk who shell out far more than they can afford to be trucked along the rails of France like sheep to market.
The old priest makes the sign of the cross, and so does the spotty youth, which means the two of them must have glimpsed a spire in the green landscape flicking by. Mado despises their kind, the men who dose the poor with religion to keep them quiet.
She wishes she had a book to pass the time. Why didn’t she pick up something from the woman at the stall in Granville? Then she rebukes herself for her weak impulse. The rich read on trains, escaping into made-up stories, having (they like to complain) time to kill . Don’t they realise it’s the other way around? The poor understand that old Father Time is killing all of us, little by little. Only those who work for a living understand the value of the limited time they’re granted. They sell their portion by the hour or rest to gather their forces to do it all over again the next day. No, there’s no novel that could distract Mado from reality now. She chants in her head, I come of age today.
The young missionary crosses himself again, which proves to Mado that he’s a pious idiot because that last vertical was definitely a poplar.
Her satchel is digging into her hip. The uniformed veteran beside her—blue-jawed, unshaven—rouses himself from his doze. “Bags off the seat.” He doesn’t even say mademoiselle .
She scowls. “This kid has one too.”
The young boy blinks up at her.
“Put your schoolbag up in the net,” the soldier orders the child. “We’re packed like sardines here.”
Mado considers defying him, but he doesn’t seem the kind to back down. She lowers her lunch bucket and wedges it carefully between her feet. Then she stands up, pulls off her satchel, and nudges it into the overhead net, which looks on the verge of bursting. The Belgian labourer gets up to help. “I have it,” Mado barks, and almost stumbles as the train rounds a curve.
“All right, all right,” the Belgian says.
Mado grabs the little boy’s school satchel—the narrow straps are warm from his shoulders—and tosses it into the net. She has to get away from him, and from the small girl behind, and from the Belgian girls with cracked hands; these children are distracting her. How long till Vire now? She eyes the door. Young men have been known to dare each other to climb out of their carriage and—clinging to the rail, whipped by the wind—walk along the narrow footboard to the next. That’s the kind of mischief Mado might have tried if she’d had the luck to be born a boy.
As soon as she sits down, she releases the grip of her feet on the lunch bucket, picks it up again, and holds it like a pet. Her treasure, her masterpiece, her beautiful bomb.
Since Granville, Engine 721 has been scenting danger somewhere along her flanks. Sensing that this might very well be her last ride. Now she’s tracked the evil to its source: this young woman in Rear Third.
You wonder how a train can read her passengers’ minds? Consider the circumstances of her making. Iron ore (grey streaked with red) was drawn up from the veins of France and smelted to form gigantic plates. Forty-metre-tall teak trees in the Malay Peninsula were axed and toppled, chopped into logs, then planks, and shipped around India and through the Suez Canal. Of these precious stuffs, each of this train’s parts was precisely and laboriously formed. On the day Engine 721 was born, her noisy furnace heated up her boiler and brought her to panting life. But then came the true spark of creation: She was filled with people. Human beings, their damp hands, their endless chatter. Every day Engine 721 is sent hurtling back and forth across Normandy, gorging on characters of all kinds. They ride inside her, their wandering, wondering minds no less than their soft bodies. She savours their memories and jokes, their doubts and rages, the way a worm tastes the earth.
And of all those who’ve travelled on this train over almost two decades, this awkward young person is the only one who’s plotted her destruction.
Engine 721 doesn’t take it personally. She is made of wood and metal, and her temperament is stoic. Besides, she recognises something kindred in Mado Pelletier’s iron conviction and unstoppable momentum. The bomber believes the world men have made is terrible, and so it is. Nor can the train deny that there is a certain beauty in the idea of burning, since she runs on flame herself.
That lunch bucket is an explosion waiting to happen. Its unstable elements sing out their longing so loudly, the train can hear them like a battle cry. All the force of combustion that makes an express the fastest vehicle on earth, this device has harnessed for instant havoc. It can take every part of an object, and every cell in the human body, and fire them in different directions.
So, for now, on we go.