The Casino supermarket had never seen so many customers. The stocks of bottled water had all been sold within a few hours. Toward the end of the afternoon, Stéphanie stopped checking the bottles through the register, instead distributing them personally on the steps of the train. No one made a distinction anymore between first and second class. Everyone was outside, in the shade of the train, around the tracks. The SNCF ticket inspectors and driver had disappeared at the same time.
Once the passengers realized that the train wasn’t going anywhere, cars started to arrive, belonging to neighbors and friends. Some travelers phoned from our place to be collected. Others used the phone box. Within a few hours, the train and its surroundings had emptied.
All traffic in Malgrange-sur-Nancy was cut off. People came as far as the closed barrier, picked up the passengers, and turned back. By 9 P.M., the Grand-Rue was silent, and the Casino was closing its doors. When Stéphanie lowered the shutters, she was bright red. In the distance, all you could hear now were the voices of the strikers. They were going to sleep right there, behind their barricade.
When night had already fallen and Philippe Toussaint had long since gone for a ride, I noticed that, inside the front carriage, there were still two passengers: a woman and a little girl, who must have been Léonine’s age. I asked the woman if there was someone who could come and pick her up, but she replied that she lived seven hundred and twenty kilometers from Malgrange, that it was very complicated, that she was coming from Germany where she had just collected her granddaughter, and was going to Paris. She couldn’t contact anyone before the following day, and even that wasn’t certain.
I invited her to come and have supper at my house. She declined. I insisted. I took their suitcases without asking what she thought, and they followed me.
Léo was already sound asleep.
I opened all the windows, for once; it could get warm inside the house.
I gave some supper to little Emmy, who was exhausted. During the meal, she played with one of Léo’s dolls, and then I lay her down beside Léo. Watching them sleeping side by side, I thought how I would like to have a second child. But Philippe Toussaint wouldn’t agree to it. I could already hear him telling me that our place was too small to have a second kid. I thought how it was our love that was too confined to welcome a new child, not the house.
I told Emmy’s grandmother, who was called Célia, that she must sleep at my place, that I wouldn’t let her return to an empty train, that it was too dangerous. And I also told her that, for the first time in years, thanks to this strike, I was on holiday, that I had a guest, and that I hoped this railway line would be down for as long as possible, that at last I would be able to sleep more than eight hours in a row without being disturbed by the barrier alarm.
Célia asked me if I lived alone with my daughter. That made me smile. Instead of replying, I opened a very good bottle of red wine that I was keeping for “a special occasion,” but until that day, there had never been one.
We started drinking. After two glasses, Célia accepted my invitation to sleep over. I would put her in our bedroom and we, my husband and I, would sleep on the sofa bed. We slept on the sofa bed when Philippe Toussaint’s parents visited us—twice a year since our marriage. They would come to collect Léo to take her on holiday. One week between Christmas and the New Year, and ten days in the summer to go to the seaside.
After the third glass, my guest said that she accepted my invitation on the condition that she slept on the sofa bed.
Célia was around fifty. She had beautiful, very gentle blue eyes. She spoke softly, with a reassuring voice and a lovely Midi accent.
I said, “O.K. for the sofa bed,” and I was right to. When Philippe Toussaint finally returned, he made a beeline for our room to collapse on the bed. He didn’t even look in our direction.
I said to Célia, as Philippe Toussaint went past, “That’s my husband.” She smiled at me, without comment.
Célia and I carried on talking in the sitting room until one in the morning. The windows were still open. It was the first time since our arrival that the rooms had been so warm. Célia lived in Marseilles. I told her she must’ve brought the sun right into the house. That usually, the heat didn’t get in, that there was an invisible barrier that prevented it from doing so.
When we had finished the bottle of wine, I told her that she could sleep on my sofa bed on condition that I sleep with her, because I had never had a female friend or sister, and that apart from my daughter when she was a baby, I had never slept with a girlfriend like real girlfriends do. Célia replied, “OK, girlfriend, we’ll sleep together.”
That night, I made a wish come true by making up a little for what I’d missed of friendship. All those nights when I would have liked to sleep at a best friend’s, with her parents nearby, all those nights when I would have liked to jump over the wall with her to meet up with boys sitting on their mopeds at the end of the road, I made up for them a little.
I think we spoke until six in
