E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten
Japrisot The Sleeping Car Murders
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80533-425-5
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-80533-425-5
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Sébastien Japrisot (4 July 1931 - 4 March 2003) was a French author, screenwriter and film director, born in Marseille. His pseudonym was an anagram of Jean-Baptiste Rossi, his real name. Japrisot has been nicknamed 'the Graham Greene of France'. One Deadly Summer was made into a film starring Isabelle Adjani in 1983. A Very Long Engagement was an international bestseller, won the Prix Interallié and was later also made into a film starring Audrey Tatou in 2004.
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Berth 226
René Cabourg had been wearing the same old-fashioned, belted overcoat for eight years. A good part of the year he also wore knitted wool gloves, a long-sleeved sweater, and a heavy scarf that bulged awkwardly around his neck. He was subject to recurring attacks of the flu, and as soon as the weather turned cold, his naturally sullen disposition became even more nervous and irritable.
He left the Paris-South district branch of the Progine Company (‘Progress-in-your-kitchen-through-engineering’) every night a few minutes after 5:30. There was a bus stop on Place d’Alésia just in front of the office, but he always walked to the terminus for the No. 38 at Porte d’Orléans, to be sure of getting a seat. All the way from Porte d’Orléans to Gare de l’Est he never lifted his eyes from his newspaper. He always read Le Monde.
This particular night – which was not a night like all the others in any event, because he had returned just that morning from the only trip he had taken in ten years – several unusual things occurred. In the first place, he left his gloves in a drawer of his desk, and since he was anxious to get home as quickly as possible – his room had not been cleaned since before he went away – now that he was outside he decided not to go back and get them. After that, he stopped in a brasserie at Porte d’Orléans and drank a glass of beer, which was something he never did on ordinary days. He had been thirsty ever since leaving Marseille; the compartment on the train had been overheated, and he had slept with his clothes on, because there were women and he had not been sure his pyjamas were clean. The next thing that happened that night was that he went to three newsstands after coming out of the brasserie without finding a copy of Le Monde. The last edition hadn’t come in yet. He gave up in the end, and bought a copy of France-Soir.
Seated on the No. 38 at last, in the middle, away from the wheels and next to a window, he turned the front page without looking at it. The inside pages were more sedate, and didn’t irritate him quite so much. He had never liked shouting or loud laughter or vulgar stories, and large, black headlines had the same effect on him.
He was tired, and conscious of the pressure between his eyes, which always preceded an attack of the flu. He had slept badly on the train; he had been afraid of falling out of the upper berth, and used his sweater as a pillow because he didn’t trust those provided by the SNCF. The heat had been unbearable, and even when he had dozed off he could hear the clacking of the wheels and the intermittent burst of sound from the loudspeakers in the stations. And in addition to that, he had worried about all sorts of stupid things: an accident, an exploding steam pipe, the theft of the wallet beneath his head; God knows, all sorts of stupid things.
He had left Gare de Lyon without his scarf and with his overcoat hanging open. During the whole week he was in Marseille, it had been almost like summer. He could still see the dazzling sunlight on the Canebière one afternoon at about three o’clock, when he had walked the whole length of it down to the Old Port. There had been all the bright colours of the girls’ dresses, and the rustling sounds of their skirts as they walked, and that always disturbed him a little. Now he had the flu, all right; there was no doubt about that.
He didn’t know why it should be that way, but it always was. Probably because of the girls, because of his timidity, and his thirty-eight solitary years. Because of the envying glances he was ashamed of but could not always repress when he passed a young couple, laughing and happy. Because of the idiotic pain it caused him just to see them.
He thought of Marseille, which had been a torture worse than any springtime in Paris, and of a night in Marseille just forty-eight hours ago. The thought made him lift his eyes and look around him, like a fool. Even as a child, he had had that same reaction, wanting to be sure that no one suspected what he was thinking. Thirty-eight years old.
Two seats ahead of him on the bus, a young girl was reading Le Monde. He looked out the window, saw that they were already at Châtelet, and he had not really read a single line of his paper.
He would go to bed early. He would have dinner, as he always did, at Chez Charles, the restaurant on the ground floor of the building he lived in. He would put off the cleaning until tomorrow; he had all of Sunday morning for that.
He was still not reading the paper, but just staring at it mechanically, his eyes wandering from one paragraph to the next, and when he saw his own name he scarcely noticed it. It was not until two lines further on, when he saw a sentence that said something about night, berths, and a train, that he stopped.
He read the sentence then, but it told him only that something had happened the night before, in a compartment on the Phocéen. When he went back to the line where he had seen his name, he learned that someone named Cabourg had occupied a berth in this compartment.
He had to open the paper wide and go back to the front page to find the beginning of the article. The man sitting next to him muttered something or other, irritably.
It was the photograph above the headline that really startled him. In spite of the fuzzy quality of the newspaper picture, it had the slightly shocking reality of a face you think you have seen for the last time, thank God, and then find again on the next street corner.
Beyond the grey and black of the ink, he could see the colour of her eyes, the thickness of her hair, and the warmth of the smile that had brought on everything at the very beginning of the trip last night – the unreasoning hope he had felt for a while, and then the shame and disgrace at a quarter past twelve. A whiff of a perfume he had vaguely disliked came back to him, recalling the moment when the woman raised her voice, although she had been standing right next to him. When she turned around, the movement of her shoulders had been sharp and swift, like that of a boxer who has seen an opening, and her eyes were like that, too: one of the sharp-eyed little boxers in the preliminaries at the Central on Saturday nights.
There seemed to be a hard knot forming in his throat, beating to the rhythm of his pulse. He could feel it so clearly that he raised his left hand and touched his thumb and index finger to his neck. As he turned towards the window, instinctively looking for his own reflection, he realised that they were going down Boulevard de Strasbourg; they were almost at Gare de l’Est.
He read the caption beneath the photograph and a few lines of the beginning of the article, and then folded the paper. There were still a dozen or so people on the bus. He got off last, clutching the rumpled newspaper in his right hand.
As he walked across the busy square in front of the station, he recognised the sounds and smells that were a part of it and should be familiar to him, since he passed here every night, but which he had never really noticed before. A train whistled somewhere in the depths of the brightly lit building, and there was a noise of engines starting up.
They had found the woman strangled on one of the berths, after the train arrived in the station. Her name was Georgette Thomas. For him, last night, she had been only a gilt ‘G’ on a handbag, someone who spoke in a deep, almost husky voice and had offered him a cigarette – a Winston – when they exchanged a few words in the corridor. He didn’t smoke.
On the pavement on the other side of the square he couldn’t stand it any longer, and stopped and unfolded the newspaper again. He was nowhere near a street light, and he couldn’t see to read. Still holding the paper open in his hand, he pushed through the glass doors of a brasserie. The place was so hot and noisy that for an instant he considered turning back, but then he blinked and went in. He found an empty place on a bench at the back, next to a couple who were talking in carefully guarded tones.
He sat down without taking off his overcoat, pushed away two empty glasses on cardboard coasters, and spread the paper across the shiny red surface of the table.
The man and woman were watching him. They must have been about forty years old, the man perhaps a little more, and they had the worn, slightly sad expressions of two people who meet for an hour or so after work every day, even though their lives are centred somewhere else. René Cabourg thought they were ugly, even a little repulsive, because they were no longer young, because the woman’s chin and neck were beginning to sag, because a husband or a band of children was probably waiting for her at home, because of everything.
The waiter came and cleared the table. René Cabourg had to lift the newspaper out of the way of the damp cloth and watch for the moisture to disappear before he put it back. He ordered a beer, as he had at Porte d’Orléans, and as he had that morning in the bistro on the corner when he went home to leave his suitcase.
He was still thirsty, but he didn’t see the glass when it was brought to him. He must have known it was there, though, because he reached out and picked it up, without taking his eyes from the newspaper. When he drank from it, two drops of beer splashed across the article.
She was a representative for a cosmetics company. She had told him that. And also that she had been in Marseille for four days. He...
