“Yes.”
“Thanks.”
What an incredibly long time Olina was taking to settle the account, over there in the madame’s office, at four in the morning. That was an hour when the whole world slept. Even in the girls’ rooms all was quiet, and downstairs in the big reception room it was quite dark. The door from which the music had come was dark, and one could see and smell that dark room. The only sound was the discreet engine purring away outside. Olina was behind that reddish door, and it was all reality. It had to be reality.…
“So you think this general’s whore-car will take us too?”
“Yes!”
“Hm. A Maybach, I can tell by the engine. Nifty job. Mind if I go ahead and speak to the driver? He’s sure to be a noncom.”
Willi shouldered his luggage and opened the door, and there it really was, the night, the gray-veiled night and the dim headlamps of a waiting car out there by the entrance. As coldly and inescapably real as all war-nights, full of cold menace, full of horrible mockery; out there in the dirty holes … in the cellars … in the many, many towns cowering in fear … summoned up, those appalling nights that at four in the morning have achieved their most deadly power, those ghastly, indescribably terrible war-nights. One of these was there outside the door, a night full of terror, a night with no home, not even the smallest, smallest warm corner to hide in … those nights that had been summoned up by the resounding voices.…
So she really believes she can rescue me. Andreas smiled. She believes it is possible to slip through the fine mesh of this net. This child believes there is such a thing as escape … she believes she will find ways to avoid Stryy. That word has been cradled within me since my birth. It has lain deep, deep down, unacknowledged and unawakened; it was with me when I was still a child, and maybe a dark shudder rippled through me, many years ago in school, when we learned about the foothills of the Carpathians and I read the words Galicia and Lvov and Stryy on the map, in the middle of that yellow-white patch. And I’ve forgotten that shudder. Maybe, often and often, the barb of death and summons was cast into me without ever catching in anything down there, and only that tiny little word had been set up and saved up for it, and finally the barb caught.…
Stryy … that tiny little word, terrible and bloody, has surfaced and expanded into an ominous cloud that now overshadows everything. And she believes she will find ways of avoiding Stryy.…
Besides, her promise doesn’t attract me. I’m not attracted by that little village in the Carpathians where she proposes to play on the priest’s piano. I’m not attracted by that seeming security … all we have is promises and pledges and a dark uncertain horizon over which we have to plunge to find security.…
At last the door opened, and Andreas was surprised by the rigid pallor of Olina’s face. She had put on a fur coat, a charming little cap was perched on her beautiful loose hair, and there was no watch on her wrist, for he was wearing his boots again. The account had been settled. The old woman was smiling so mysteriously. Her hands were folded across her desiccated body, and after the soldiers had picked up their luggage and Andreas was opening the door she smiled and uttered a single word: “Stryy,” she said. Olina did not hear it, she was already outside.
“I too,” said Olina in a low voice as they sat side by side in the car, “I too am condemned. I too have betrayed my country because I spent all last night with you instead of sounding out the general.” She took his hand and smiled at him: “But don’t forget what I told you: no matter where I take you, it will be life. Right?”
“Right,” said Andreas. The whole night ran through his memory like a smooth thread being reeled off, yet there was one knot that left him no peace. Stryy, the old woman had said, and how can she know that Stryy … he hadn’t said anything about it to her, and still less would Olina have mentioned that word.…
So this is supposed to be reality: a discreetly purring car with its subdued headlamps lighting up the nameless road. Trees, and now and again houses, all saturated with gray darkness. In front of him those two necks, encircled by sergeants’ braid almost identical, solid German necks, and the cigarette smoke drifting back from the driver’s seat. Beside him the blond fellow, sleeping like a child worn out by playing, and on the right the steady gentle contact with Olina’s fur coat and the smooth thread of the memory of that lovely night sliding by, faster and faster, and always stopping short at that strange knot, at the place where the old woman had said: Stryy.…
Andreas leaned forward to look at the softly lit clock on the dashboard, and he saw it was six o’clock, just on six. An icy shock ran through him, and he thought: God, God, what have I done with my time, I’ve done nothing, I’ve never done anything, I must pray, pray for them all, and at this very moment Paul is walking up the altar steps at home and beginning to recite: Introibo. And on his own lips too the word began to form: Introibo.
But now an invisible giant hand passed over the softly gliding car, a terrible, silent stirring of the air, and into this silence came Willi’s dry voice, asking: “Where are you taking us, bud?” “To Stryy!” said a disembodied voice.
And then the car was slashed by two raging knives that rasped with savage hatred, one from the front, the other from behind, tearing into that metal body which reared and turned, filled with the shriek of fear of its occupants.…
In the silence that followed there was no sound but the passionate devouring of the flames.
My God, thought Andreas, are they all dead? … and my legs … my arms, is only my head left? … is no one there? … I’m lying on this bare road, on my breast lies the weight of the world, so heavily that I can find no words to pray.…
Am I crying? he thought suddenly, for he could feel something moist running down his cheeks: no, something was dripping onto his cheeks; and in that ashen morning light, which was still without the yellow mildness of the sun, he saw that Olina’s hand was hanging down over his head from a fragment of the car, and that blood was dripping onto his face from her hands, and he was past knowing that now he was really beginning to cry.…
AFTERWORD:
THE HANDS OF OLINA
by William T. Vollmann
… he had a terrible dream: he was sitting somewhere on a wet, very cold plain and had no legs, no legs at all, he was sitting on the stumps of his thighs, and the sky over this plain was black and lowering … then suddenly something cold and wet splashed onto his head … (30–31)
It was not a dream at all … he realized that he had been crying. He had neither known it nor felt it, but his face was wet, and Olina’s hands, soft and very small, were drying his face; the rivulets had run down his face … She dried his cheeks and around his eyes, and he was grateful that she said nothing.… (91)
My God, thought Andreas, are they all dead? … and my legs … my arms, is only my head left? … Am I crying? he thought suddenly, for he could feel something moist running down his cheeks; no, something was dripping onto his cheeks; and in that ashen morning light … he saw that Olina’s hand was hanging down over his head from a fragment of the car, and that blood was dripping onto her face from his hands, and he was past knowing that now he was really beginning to cry … (119)
1
The preceding three excerpts exemplify in miniature the workings of this novella’s eerie dream-power. The scene remains essentially constant, although its blurry parameters ooze into arbitrary alterations. In the second version, when “it was not a dream at all,” the elements pass from a minor into a major key, but the leitmotiv expresses itself as recognizably as ever. In all three, Andreas is maimed, and in the process of passing from one kind of consciousness into another. Moreover, Olina is always there, although it is not until we reach that the third that we can recognize her in the first, as the source of the cold wet liquid dripping on his head (never mind that when he awakes, her blood and tears disguise themselves as a drop of liquor from the bottle being drunk by the unshaven soldier). So these three instants share a ghastly
coherence.
Many years ago, when I first read The Train Was on Time, it was the fundamental situation in which the protagonist found himself which haunted me. Like many young people in peacetime, I believed my death to be far away, and in my own dreams might still have hoped through some trick to evade it. And so I thought: If only he had looked more carefully into Olina’s travel arrangements! But of course there is no escape for any of us, and the tale of Andreas is simply a recapitulation of that old parable about the man who hears that Death will come for him in three days, and therefore flees all the way to Samarkand, where, of course, Death thanks him for his punctuality. Hence, in the fashion of most oracles, the premonitions which afflict him are too distorted, incomplete, even treacherous to extend life. His knowledge of the future proves as limited as anyone’s knowledge of himself. In short, there is nothing he could have done—and anyhow, until he meets Olina he never considers the possibility of flight.
So now we know that any semblance of rescue from Stryy is a fraud, Andreas’s doom diminishes into a given, a narrative hook if you will. But as for the knowledge, fulfillment, or hope, or whatever else one might call it, which he seems to receive from his evening with Olina, how does Böll expect us to understand it? For me, that is the central issue of The Train Was on Time.
2
To any reader who has journeyed about even a trifle within the Böllian oeuvre, Andreas will be familiar: inconspicuous, cautious, sufficiently attractive and compliant to earn preferential treatment, but far from trustful that whatever moderately good luck comes his way will lead to any great future. Hence this character is resignedly realistic, both to the unpleasant world in which he finds himself, and to his own shortcomings. In the companion novella And Where Were You, Adam?, which was originally published in 1949 together with The Train Was on Time (and I much regret this arrangement was not adhered to in the present edition), he appears as Feinhals, the retreating soldier who wants only to get home. “Once he had dreamed of building houses such as nobody had ever built, but later he had built houses that were almost the same as the ones other people built. He had become a very mediocre architect, and he knew it … The important thing was not to take oneself too seriously—that was all.” That this attitude sometimes achieves a perfection of stoic German irony (when the Allied bombs destroyed his apartment, Feinhals “hadn’t even gone there when he was granted leave to check the damage; he couldn’t see why he should go there just to see that there was nothing left”) is perhaps its only virtue. Feinhals is not contemptible, but he is far from noble, either. He takes advantage where he can, puts the suffering of others out of mind—after all, what can he do about it?—and commits minute sins of omission against others and himself. The father-and-son protagonists of what may be Böll’s greatest (and ambiguously happier) novel, Billiards at Half-Past Nine, carries this attitude still farther. Architects like Feinhals, but unlike him survivors into the post-war period, they try not to remember what one did to the other during the war. All the same, “disaster came sneaking in like something from the grave, in golden shoes, with golden hair and golden teeth, grinning like a skeleton.”
Now, what distinguishes Andreas from several of his brothers of the Feinhals stamp is that he has in fact begun to take himself seriously. In Being and Time, Heidegger writes that two crucial aspects of our existence are, firstly, the inevitable guilt and regret we experience for taking a particular path in life as opposed to any others, and, secondly, Being-toward-death, whose ominous meaning gets nowhere better expressed than in The Train Was on Time. The Buddhists inform us that there is no particular reward for being enlightened, or not; and it seems to me that the same could be said regarding consciousness of our Being-toward-death. After all, don’t we shield young children from it? Feinhals, doomed to die a hideous, meaningless death at the end of Adam, may well be better off for not attaching overmuch significance to anything, and striving carefully and modestly to return to the house of his parents (where, as usual, death is waiting). After all, if were we to characterize the consciousness of Andreas by any one word, it would be agony. Wouldn’t he too be better off ignorant?
And yet this very agony teaches him to cherish life—at first (and this is part of the novella’s greatness) without his even realizing it, even though he is already starting to love more and more widely—for instance, in the space of two pages, he discovers affection toward, firstly, the exhausted, greyskinned girl who stinks of bad coffee and who is beautiful to him; secondly, Dortmund, a city which would have held no significance to him were it not for his perception that he will never pass through it again; and, thirdly, the deliciousness, which his prior habits impel him to call meaningless and even absurd, of the sausages in the air raid sandwiches which his chaplain friend made for him. (9) He seems to experience the value of all these almost exclusively through the grief and terror attendant upon their loss. But even now, before he has met Olina, his soul has already commenced to grow. And in the middle sections of the book we watch his two sad accidental soldier-companions coming to mean more and more to him, because they are all soon to die—and, of course, because their protection gives him a degree of solitude in which to consider his death). And so they share their goods and kindness with each other. (48) In one passage he even manages to compassionate the shrilly ignorant tin autocrats around him who believe in the final victory, and who must therefore be more complicit than he in the war, the Holocaust and his own doom.
Indeed, the subject of The Train Was on Time is empathy, or, if you will, imaginative projection, which shines most conspicuously in his fancy, eerily borne out by Olina when she makes a kindred thought-experiment, that we can foretell our own deaths by casting our plans and fantasies forward until the future abruptly becomes “pale, colorless thoughts devoid of weight, blood, all human substance.” (5) We gather that the blond soldier and the unshaven soldier also have premonitions of their deaths, and so even do even the most fervent Hitlerites on that troop train rolling punctually east toward terror, destruction and defeat, which may be why Andreas can pity them. But only he has been granted the ghastly gift of apodictic certainty about this matter. Not even Olina believes for long.
Reading his death into a particular time enables Andreas to determine the place, because the punctuality of German troop trains, like that of so many other aspects of life (your cancer, her marriage), allows him to predict with increasing accuracy where he will be at the fatal hour. So he begins to imagine himself into this or that location, from the perspective of Being-toward-death. And Böll’s place-imagery throughout the novella always strikes me as a chain of beautiful specificities. Still more finely made, and almost whimsical, yet all the same concrete, are Andreas’s beautifully childish visions of Galicia, Volhynia and Lvov based on how they sound (19–20)—didn’t many of us used to play just such games with the names of unfamiliar people and places when we were children? And then: “Stryy … that terrible name is like a streak, a bloody streak across my throat!” (91)
When it comes to Olina, and particularly to the piano, the radiations of empathy may not necessarily reveal to him what he imagines they do. Yes, he falls in love in a single evening, and she with him—why not? It does happen; and they’re emotionally almost virgins, not mention on the verge of death. Then what does it mean when they kiss and feel nothing?
3
All of Böll’s novels are about the war. The Train Was on Time takes up a middle distance between us and the terrifying, hideous horror of violent death. Billiards at Half-Past Nine regards it somewhat covertly and remotely, as befits what was called “the silent generation.” The same may be said of the underestimated, understated Tomorrow and Yesterday. In Group Portrait With Lady the war years make one long episode among many; all the same, that episode strikes me as the central one. Where Were You, Adam? approaches the horror much more nearly, although Feinhals frequently achieves the phlegmatism of blindness. The short stories collected in The Casualty, written at the same time as Adam
and The Train, may come closest of all to it. They are not more gruesome than the end of The Train Was on Time—what could be?—or than any number of moments in Adam; but the most memorable of them contain only such moments. (See, for instance, the unblinking Holocaust tale “Cause of Death: Hooked Nose.”) Even here we frequently encounter the Feinhals type, who informs himself that “it was all nonsense, they weren’t really in Russia, they hadn’t covered all those thousands of kilometres by train to be shot up here or freeze to death. It was all a dream.”
Indeed, Böll’s protagonists sometimes share not only personality types, but specific experiences. Andreas’s instantaneous unrequited love in France, followed by a less than pleasant ending on the Eastern Front, will be familiar to any reader of A Soldier’s Legacy. And so Böll’s dream-symbolism can be quite consistent from book to book, especially if our decodings of it respect the reality of its day: Going east equals death. Going west, or staying put, guarantees no salvation. Golden-toothed death will get us anyhow, but putting on a uniform brings it closer. Knowledge can be terror.
Even so, The Train is very much its own book, and many of the most important elements resist reduction into specific meanings. The ambiguous smile of the madame when she says: “Stryy!” (117) may be interpreted through the supposition that since all the locals belong to the Resistance, she has arranged to deliver them into the power of the Partisans. Then again, she might be a more universal figure: death’s sibyl. Böll’s rapid, contemptuous sketch of her is in and of itself grounds for suspicion, since this genius rarely incorporates one meaning where two or three will do.
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