The Train Was on Time

by Heinrich Böll

  All at once the soldier who needed a shave began speaking very rapidly. It was lighter now, and the first of the sleeping men began to stir, to turn over in their sleep, and it seemed as if he must speak before they were fully awake. He wanted to speak into the night, into a listening ear in the night.…

  “The terrible part is that I shall never see her again, I know I won’t,” he said in a low voice, “and I don’t know what’ll become of her. It’s three days now since I left, three days. What’s she been doing in those three days? I don’t believe that Russian is still with her—because she screamed like an animal, like an animal facing the muzzle of a hunter’s gun. There’s no one with her. She’s waiting. God, I wouldn’t want to be a woman. Always waiting … waiting … waiting … waiting.”

  The unshaven soldier screamed softly, but it was a scream all right, a terribly soft scream. “She’s waiting … she can’t live without me. There’s no one with her, and no one will ever go to her now. She’s waiting only for me, and I love her. Now she’s as innocent as a girl that’s never thought of kissing, and that innocence is all for me. That ghastly, terrible shock has completely cleansed her, I know it has … and no one, no one on earth can help her but me, no one, and here I am on a train heading for Przemysl … I’m going to Lvov … to Kolomyya … and never again will I cross the German border. That’s something no one would ever be able to understand, why I don’t take the next train back to her … why don’t I? No one would ever be able to understand that. But I’m scared of that innocence … and I love her very much, and I’m going to die, and all she’ll ever get from me now will be an official letter saying: Fallen for Greater Germany.…” He took a long, deep drink.

  “How slowly the train’s going, mate, don’t you think? I want to get away, far away … and quickly, and I don’t know why I don’t change trains and go back, I’ve still got time … I wish the train would go faster, much faster.…”

  Some of the men had woken and were blinking morosely into the false light rising from the plain.…

  “I’m scared,” whispered the unshaven soldier into Andreas’ ear, “I’m scared, that’s what, scared of dying but even more scared of going back, going back to her … that’s why I’d rather die … maybe I’ll write to her.…”

  The men who had woken up were combing back their hair, lighting cigarettes, and looking contemptuously out of the windows, where dark huts stood among what seemed to be barren fields; there were no people in this country … somewhere over there were some hills … everything was gray … Polish horizon.…

  The unshaven soldier was silent. There was hardly any life left in him. He had not been able to sleep all night; the spark in him had gone out, and his eyes were like blind mirrors, his cheeks yellow and cavernous, and what had been the need for a shave was now a beard, a reddish-black beard below the thick hair on his forehead.

  “Those are precisely the advantages of the 37 antitank weapon,” came a clipped voice, “those are precisely the advantages … mobility … mobility.…”

  “And no louder than a knock at the door,” laughed an equally clipped voice.

  “Not really?”

  “Yes, he got the Knight’s Cross for that … and all we did was shit in our pants.…”

  “They ought to listen to the Führer, that’s what I say. Get rid of the aristocrats. Von Kruseiten he was called. What a name. A damned know-it-all.…” Lucky fellow, that one with the beard, asleep now when the nattering starts up and able to stay awake when everything’s quiet. I must be grateful, I’ve still got two more nights, thought Andreas … two long, long nights; I’d like to be alone then. If they knew I’d prayed for the Jews in Cernauti and Stanislav and Kolomyya, they’d arrest me on the spot or stick me in the madhouse.… 37 antitank weapon.

  The blond fellow rubbed his narrow, hideously filmy eyes for a very long time. There was something scaly in the corners of them, something disgusting, but it didn’t stop him offering Andreas bread, white bread and jam. And he still had some coffee in the flask. It felt good to eat; Andreas realized he was very hungry again. It was almost a craving, and he could no longer control his eyes as they embraced the great loaf of bread. That white bread was unbelievably good.

  “Yes,” sighed the blond fellow, “my mother baked it for me just before I left.” Later on Andreas sat for a long time in the john, smoking. The john was the only place where you could be really alone. The only place in the whole world, in the whole of Hitler’s great-and-glorious army. It was good to sit there and smoke, and he felt he had once again got the better of his depression. Depression was only a bogey that haunted you just after you woke up; here he was alone, and he had everything. When he wasn’t alone he had nothing. Here he had everything, Paul and the eyes of the girl he loved … the blond fellow and the man who needed a shave, and the one who had said: Practically speaking, practically speaking we’ve already won the war, and the one who had just said: Those are precisely the advantages of the 37 antitank weapon—they were all there, and the prayers were alive too, very close and warm, and it felt good to be alone. When you were alone you didn’t feel so lonely any more. This evening, he thought, I’ll pray for a long time again, this evening in Lvov. Lvov is the springboard … between Lvov and Kolomyya … the train was getting closer and closer to the goal, and the wheels that had rumbled through Paris, the Gare Montparnasse, maybe through Le Havre or Abbeville, were going as far as Przemysl … till they got quite close to the springboard.…

  It was full daylight now, but the sun didn’t seem to be coming through today; somewhere in the thick gray mass of clouds hung a pale spot with a soft gray light streaming from it that lit up the forests, distant hills … villages and the dark-clad figures who shaded their eyes to follow the train out of sight. Galicia … Galicia.… He stayed in the john until the deafening thumping and swearing on the other side of the door drove him out.

  The train arrived in Przemysl on time. It was almost pleasant there. They waited until everyone had left the train, then woke up the man with the beard. The platform was already empty. The sun had come through and was beating down on dusty piles of rock and sand. The man with the beard knew at once what to do.

  “Yes,” was all he said. Then he stood up and cut the wire so they could get out right there. Andreas had the least luggage, just his pack, which was very light now that the heavy air-raid sandwiches had all been eaten. He had only a shirt and a pair of socks and some writing paper and his flask, which was always empty, and his steel helmet, since he had left his rifle behind in Paul’s clothes closet where it stood propped up behind the raincoat.

  The blond fellow had a Luftwaffe rucksack and a suitcase, and the bearded soldier had two cartons and a knapsack; both men also had pistols. Stepping out into the sunshine, they saw for the first time that the bearded soldier was a sergeant. The dull braid showed up now against his gray collar. The platform was deserted, the place looked like a freight yard. To the right lay army huts, hut after hut, delousing huts, cookhouse huts, recreation huts, dormitory huts, and no doubt a brothel hut where everything was guaranteed fully sanitary. Huts wherever you looked, but they walked to the left, way over to the left where there was a dead, overgrown track and an overgrown loading ramp by a fir tree. There they lay down, and in the sunshine behind the army huts they could see the old towers of Przemysl on the River San.

  The bearded soldier did not sit down. He merely set his baggage on the ground and said: “I’ll go and pick up our rations and find out when the train leaves for Lvov, eh? You fellows try and get some sleep.” He took their leave passes and disappeared very slowly down the platform. He ambled along at a terribly slow, maddeningly slow, pace, and they saw that his blue work pants were soiled, full of stains and torn places as if from barbed wire; he walked very slowly, with almost a rolling gait, and from a distance he might have been taken for a sailor.

  It was noon, very hot, and the shade of the fir tree was already drenched with heat, a dry shade without gentle
ness. The blond fellow had spread out his blanket, and they lay with their heads on their packs, looking toward the city across the hot steaming roofs of all those army huts. At some point the bearded soldier vanished between two huts, walking as if he didn’t care where he was going.…

  Alongside another platform stood a train about to leave for Germany. The locomotive already had steam up, and bareheaded soldiers were looking out of the windows. Why don’t I get on, thought Andreas, it’s really very odd. Why don’t I find a seat in that train and go back to the Rhine? Why don’t I buy myself a leave pass in this country where you can buy anything, and go back to Paris, the Gare Montparnasse, and comb the streets, one by one, hunt through every house and look for one little tender gesture from the hands that must belong to those eyes? Five million, that’s one eighth, why shouldn’t she be among them … why don’t I go to Amiens, to the house with the pierced brick wall, and put a bullet through my head at the spot where her gaze, very close and tender, true and deep, rested in my soul for a quarter of a second? But these thoughts were as leaden as his legs. It felt great to stretch your legs, your legs got longer and longer, and he felt as though he could stretch them all the way to Przemysl.

  They lay there smoking, sluggish and weary as only men can be who have been sleeping and sitting in a cramped railway car.

  The sun had made a wide arc by the time Andreas awoke. The bearded soldier still was not back. The blond fellow was awake and smoking.

  The train for Germany had left, but already there was another train for Germany standing there, and from the large delousing hut on the other side emerged gray figures with their parcels and knapsacks, rifles slung around their necks, bound for Germany. One of them started running, then three ran, then ten, then they were all running, bumping into one another, knocking parcels out of hands … and the whole gray weary wretched column of men was running because one of them had begun to panic.…

  “Where did you put the map?” asked the blond fellow. These were the first words spoken by either of them in a long while.

  Andreas pulled the map out of his tunic pocket, unfolded it, and sat up, spreading it out on his knees. His eyes went to where Galicia was, but the blond fellow’s finger was lying much farther to the south and east, it was a long, shapely finger, with fine hair on it, a finger that not even the dirt had deprived of any of its good breeding.

  “There,” he said, “that’s where I’m heading. With any luck it’ll take me another ten days.” His finger with its flat, still glossy, blue-sheened nail filled the whole bay between Odessa and the Crimea. The edge of the nail lay beside Nikolayev.

  “Nikolayev?” Andreas asked.

  “No,” the blond fellow winced, and his nail slid lower down, and Andreas noticed that he was staring at the map but seeing nothing and thinking of something else. “No,” said the blond fellow. “Ochakov. I’m with the antiaircraft; before that we were in Anapa, in the Kuban, you know, but we got out of there. And now it’s Ochakov.

  Suddenly the two men looked at one another. For the first time in the forty-eight hours they had been cooped up together, they looked at one another. They had played cards together by the hour, drunk and eaten and slept leaning against each other, but now for the first time they looked at one another. A strangely repellent, whitish-gray, slimy film coated the blond fellow’s eyes. To Andreas it looked as though the man’s gaze were piercing the faint first scab that closes over a festering wound. Now all at once he realized what that repulsive aura was which emanated from this man who at one time, when his eyes were still clear, must have been handsome, fair and slender with well-bred hands. So that’s it, thought Andreas.

  “Yes,” said the blond fellow very quietly, “that’s it,” as if he realized what Andreas was thinking. He went on speaking, his voice quiet, uncannily quiet. “That’s it. He seduced me, that sergeant major. I’m totally corrupted now, rotten to the core, life holds no more pleasure for me, not even eating, it just looked as if I enjoyed that, I eat automatically, I drink automatically, I sleep automatically. It’s not my fault, they corrupted me!” he cried, then his voice subsided again.

  “For six weeks we lay in a gun emplacement, way up along the Sivash River … not a house in sight … not even a broken wall. Marshes, water … willow shrubs … and the Russians flew over it when they wanted to attack our planes flying from Odessa to the Crimea. For six weeks we lay there. Words can’t describe it. We were just one cannon with six men and the sergeant major. Not a living soul for miles. Our food supplies were trucked in as far as the edge of the marsh, and we had to pick them up from there and carry them across log-walks to our emplacement; the rations were always for two weeks, no shortage of grub. Eating was the only break in the monotony, that and catching fish and chasing mosquitoes … those fantastic swarms of mosquitoes, I don’t know why we didn’t go out of our minds. The sergeant major was like an animal. Filth poured from his mouth all day long, those first few days, and his eating habits were foul. Meat and fat, hardly any bread.” A terrible sigh was wrenched from his breast: “Any man who doesn’t eat bread is a hopeless case, I tell you. Yes.…” Terrible silence, while the sun stood golden and warm and fair over Przemysl.

  “My God,” he groaned, “so he seduced us, what else is there to say? We were all like that … except one. He refused. He was an old fellow, married and with a family; in the evening he used often to show us snapshots of his kids, and weep … that was before. He refused, he would hit out, threaten us … he was stronger than the five of us put together; and one night when he was alone on sentry duty, the sergeant major shot him. He crept out and put a bullet through him—from behind. With the man’s own pistol; then he yanked us out of our bunks and we had to help him throw the body into the marshes. Corpses are heavy … I’m telling you, the bodies of dead men weigh a ton. Corpses are heavier than the whole world, the six of us could scarcely carry him; it was dark and raining, and I thought: This is what hell must be like. And the sergeant major sent in a report that the old fellow had mutinied and threatened him with his weapon, and he took along the old fellow’s pistol as proof—there was one bullet missing from it, of course. And they sent his wife a letter saying he had fallen for Greater Germany in the Sivash marshes … yes; and a week later the first food truck arrived with a telegram for me saying our factory had been destroyed and I was to go on leave; and I didn’t even go back to the emplacement, I just took off!” There was a fierce joy in his voice: “I just took off! He must have hit the roof! And they first interrogated me in the office about the old fellow, and I gave them exactly the same story as the sergeant major’s. And then I was off … off! From the battery to the section in Ochakov, then Odessa and then I took off.…” Terrible silence, while the sun still shone, fair and warm and gentle; Andreas felt an appalling nausea. That’s the worst, he thought, that’s the worst.…

  “After that I never enjoyed anything again, and I never will. I’m scared to look at a woman. The whole time I was home I just lay around in a kind of stupor, crying away like some idiot child, and my mother thought I had some awful disease. But how could I tell her about it, it was something you can’t tell anyone.…”

  How crazy for the sun to shine like that, Andreas thought, and a dreadful nausea lay like poison in his blood. He reached for the blond fellow’s hand, but the man shrank back in horror. “No,” he cried, “don’t!” He threw himself onto his stomach, hid his head in his arms, and sobbed. It sounded as if the ground would burst open, and above his sobbing the sky was smiling, above the army huts, above all those huts and above the towers of Przemysl on the River San.…

  “Let me die,” he sobbed, “I just want to die, then it’ll be all over. Let me die.…” His words were stifled by a choking sound, and now Andreas could hear him crying, crying real tears, wet tears.

  Andreas saw no more. A torrent of blood and dirt and slime had poured over him; he prayed, prayed desperately, as a drowning man shouts who is struggling all alone out in the middle of a
lake and can see no shore and no rescuer.…

  That’s wonderful, he thought, crying is wonderful, crying is good for you, crying, crying, what wretched creature has never cried? I should cry too, that’s what I should do. The sergeant cried, and the blond fellow cried, and I haven’t cried for three and a half years, not one tear since I walked back down that hill into Amiens and was too lazy to walk those extra three minutes as far as the field where I had been wounded.

  The second train had left too, the station was empty now. Funny, thought Andreas, even if I wanted to I couldn’t go back now. I could never leave these two fellows alone. Besides, I don’t want to go back, I never want to go back.…

  The station with all its various tracks was deserted now. A heat haze danced between the rails, and somewhere back there by the entrance a group of Poles were working, shoveling ballast onto the tracks, and coming along the platform was an odd figure wearing the pants of the unshaven soldier. From way off you could see it was no longer the bearded, fierce, desperate fellow who had been cooped up in the train and drinking to drown his sorrows. This was a different person, only the pants were still those of the unshaven soldier. His face was all smooth and pink, his cap at a slight angle, and in his eyes, as he came closer, could be seen something of the real sergeant, a mixture of indifference, mockery, cynicism, and militarism. Those eyes seemed to have done with dreaming, the unshaven soldier was now shaved and washed, his hair was combed, his hands were clean, and it was just as well to know that his name was Willi, for it was impossible to think of him any more as the unshaven soldier, you had to think of him as Willi. The blond fellow was still lying on his blanket, his face on his folded arms, and from his heavy breathing you couldn’t tell whether he was sleeping, groaning, or crying.