Marathe and Kate at Ryle's (p. 776)
‘My people, we do not hit the bottoms of women. I am, shall we say, Swiss. My legs, they were lost in the teenage years being struck by a train.’ […] ‘I am in early twenty years, without the legs. Many of my friends also: without legs.’ […] ‘It is, for me, who I am weak, so painful to be without legs in the early twenty years. One feels grotesque to people; one’s freedom is restricted. I have no chances now for jobs in the mines of Switzerland.’
Context
Marathe's autobiography under cover: the train that took his legs (le Jeu du Prochain Train, unnamed), the whole legless cohort of friends, and — rarest in the book — the interior report of what leglessness feels like from inside: "One feels grotesque to people." Kate's deadpan "Must have been an awful train crash" sits between these lines, the joke the cover story has to absorb.