*
Silence, the silence and the stillness must have woken him, Max listens, a moment later metallic clangs, voices, then silence again, Max does not like it, it’s not long ago since silence like this was a direct threat to life and limb, his and those of any number of others, a silence which was a prelude to earthquake or apocalypse, depending on the ideas and beliefs of the individual, ideas and beliefs which in the coming minutes would no longer carry any weight whatsoever, the grotesque lull which turns you into a lump of meat smelling of fear, flattened to the ground, ready for the mincer.
Max listens, dispersing any remaining sleep in his state of high alert.
Creaking sounds. They come from outside, though not entirely, the creaking of metal and wood, very clear in the silence, small jolts, bustle and activity at one end of the coach. Max pulls back the curtain over his window, it’s very dark, he must be in Switzerland, he scrapes away enough frost to make a hole to see through the glass: feeble light cast by two lamp posts, a clock, nobody about, a quarter to four, no sound of any machinery, and the world, or what is left of it at this hour, has ceased turning.
On a sign Max reads Landquart, it’s the start of the Grisons, the high mountains. The coach has stopped rocking. More jolts. Max realises now that his coach is being hitched to a high-altitude train. Silence again, a voice says something in German, a lilting kind of German, and slowly the coach starts moving, accompanied by the puffing of a shorter-breathed engine than the ‘Mountain’ which Max had admired before boarding it in the Gare de l’Est. The platform slips past, then a few houses, they scowl under an uncertain moon.
He’s on his way to Küblis, from there he can get a bus or car to Waltenberg, his left shoulder aches, and it will get worse and worse, he tells himself, as he thinks of his wounds for the first time that day, of the after-effects that will be his legacy into old age.
The spring of 1929 began officially a few days ago and it is even colder here than it was in Paris, all Max can make out through the fog of his own breath are the high walls the snowplough has left along each side of the track, they’re so close to the sides of the coaches you could almost touch them with your hand. In places the sides of this corridor are lower, and permit glimpses of a landscape muffled by snow under the moon, dimpled with occasional swellings, like large bubbles: buried villages.
Even during the winters of the Great War he had never seen as much snow, under the stars the land is broken white, as far as the eye can see, a cold planet.
The train is not travelling fast, Max tries to get back to sleep, try to keep off that left shoulder, he lies on his other side, shuts his eyes, but he hears the blood thumping in his temples, a sure sign of insomnia, he is cross with himself for waking up, don’t get all het up, breathe slowly, stop thinking about it, try inventing one of those conscious dreams you use for getting off to sleep, he closes his eyes, imagines he is a policeman, a superintendent, calm temperament, and he embarks on his favourite plot, a story about a beautiful suspect who says she committed a murder but whose innocence he sets out to prove and thus unmask the husband, but the woman is strange, the more she wins Max over to her side and makes him want to get her out of trouble, the more inextricably guilty she seems, and on the contrary the superintendent’s well-meaning enquiries merely multiply the charges against the woman whose name he wants to clear.
Ordinarily, it’s a pretty effective dream, his mind, unable to break out of the labyrinth and come up with some way of saving the woman, overheats, gives up and surrenders to the security of real dreams which he can feel gradually encroaching on his initial reverie, they provoke short-circuits which last longer and longer, commotions, things that happen for no reason: the suspect he is interrogating suddenly turns into the teacher he had when he was little or a dead friend with whom he sallies forth to buy a bunch of violets in an unknown town.
Max fights against these genuine dreams, he takes back the initiative, questions his suspect with glee, brings her to the edge of a confession, then the friend returns, turns nasty, the violets disappear, his old teacher takes off her overall, the motor races wildly and Max swings into a copper-bottomed sleep.
At least that’s the theory, but in this train which will take more than another three hours to deposit him below Waltenberg, Max senses that his little subterfuge isn’t working, he is much too wide awake now, all the problems of his waking hours will start up, he’s thirsty, he knows that if he gets out of his couchette and puts the light on to pour himself a glass of water he will start something irreversible, he won’t be able to go back to bed.
Sleep? what’s the point? sleep, silence: death’s antechambers. Not feeling too cheery this morning, he gets up, drinks the glass of water, he feels another need, he opens the small cupboard, shuts it again, without using the chamber pot, he doesn’t like them, even the ones provided by the Compagnie internationale des wagons-lits et des grands express européens, with gold border and blue monogram, he smiles, Mérien’s neat observation:
‘I want a journalist to be as curious as a piss-pot.’
He pulls his coat over his pyjamas and puts on his slippers, as a young man he loathed the slippers his mother bought him, he preferred leather mules, even in winter.
One night, in the trenches, a comrade had said:
‘When it’s all over I’m going to buy myself some slippers, and I’ll kill the first bastard who laughs.’
Max steps out of his compartment and walks all the way to the toilet at the far end of the coach.
When he gets back, he is no longer sleepy nor does he want to be sleepy, he just feels stiff and sluggish, with a migraine in the offing, he opens one of the windows in the corridor, holds his face into the icy air, reaches out with one hand to snatch snow from the walls that are so close and rub it over his eyes and cheeks, not such a good idea, the roughness under the crystals, no more hand or even no more arm, it only takes a moment, like that time at Veneux, at the start of 1918, a series of appalling howls and hissings, the trench is about to collapse, they’d looked at each other: a whizzing shell bursts, just metres away! they were all there, Stéphane with his mouth hanging open, eyes like chapel hatpegs, short of one hand, he wasn’t screaming yet as he would in the seconds that followed, Max remembers that at that moment he’d thought:
‘So that’s what’s meant by looking surprised.’
Then the screams, which gangrene had turned into moans a few days later in the battalion infirmary, Stéphane whom they comfort through the smell of disinfectant and rot:
‘Thought we’d come and cheer you up, take you out of your shell.’
And the medic who sees no point in further amputations:
‘The gangrene has spread everywhere.’
Max closes the window, he looks down the length of the corridor of his sleeping-car, the designs on the lampshades overhead, he runs his hand over the grained lemonwood veneer, the discreet brass handrail, and proceeds slowly, so that he feels the thickness of the pile of the carpet under his feet, everything is so very orderly, luxurious, calm, he enters his compartment, gives up all thought of his couchette, sits on the seat opposite, somewhat put out that he’s not facing the engine, but if you’re that pernickety then you’re going to find growing old something of a strain.