I don’t know what we wanted. We walked very slowly along that dark, uneven road on the outskirts of the city. Between unlighted, low houses, the night was contained by a few rotting fence posts, and somewhere beyond lay what seemed to be a wasteland, wasteland just like at home, where people believe a road is going to be built, where they dig sewers and fiddle around with surveying instruments, and nothing ever comes of it, and they toss out rubbish, cinders, and garbage, and grass grows again, coarse, wild grass, and rank weeds, and the sign saying “No Dumping” is hidden by all the rubbish they have dumped around it.…
We walked along very slowly because it was still so early. In the darkness we met soldiers heading for the barracks, and there were others coming from the barracks who overtook us. We were scared of the patrols and would have liked to turn back, but we knew that once we were back in barracks we would really be desperate, and it was better to be scared than merely desperate inside those black, grimy barrack walls, where they were forever carrying coffee around and unloading bread for the front, forever unloading bread for the front, and where the paymasters got themselves up in fur coats while we shivered with cold.
Now and again a house to the left or right showed a dim yellow light, and we could hear shrill voices, high-pitched, foreign, scary. And suddenly in the darkness there was a brightly lit window, a lot of noise came from inside, and we heard soldiers’ voices singing: “Ah, the sunshine of Mexico!”
We pushed open the door and went in: the air was warm and blue with smoke, and there were soldiers, eight or ten of them, some with women, and they were all drinking and singing, and one of the soldiers burst out laughing as we entered. We were young, and short, the shortest in the whole company; our uniforms were brand-new, the synthetic fibers pricked our arms and legs and the long underwear made our bare skin itch terribly, and the sweaters were brand-new and prickly too.
Kurt, the shortest, went ahead and picked a table; he was an apprentice in a leather factory, and he had told us where the hides came from, although that was a trade secret, and he had even told us the profit they made, although that was a really strict trade secret. We sat down beside him.
A very dark, fat woman, with a good-natured face, came out from behind the bar and asked us what we wanted to drink; since we heard that everything was very expensive in Odessa we first asked how much the wine was.
“Five marks in the carafe,” she replied, and we ordered three carafes. We had lost a lot of money at cards and had divided up what we had left: each of us had ten marks. Some of the soldiers were eating too, roast meat, still steaming, on slices of white bread, and sausages smelling of garlic; we suddenly realized we were hungry, and when the woman brought the wine we asked the price of food. She told us the sausages were five marks and meat on bread eight; it was fresh pork, she said, but we ordered three sausages. Some of the soldiers were kissing the women or quite openly hugging them, and we didn’t know where to look.
The sausages were hot and greasy, and the wine was very sour. When we had finished the sausages we didn’t know what to do next. We had nothing more to say to each other; for two weeks we had lain side by side in the troop train and exchanged confidences. Kurt had been in a leather factory, Erich was from a farm, and I had come straight from school. We were still scared, but we weren’t cold anymore.…
The soldiers who had been kissing the women now buckled on their belts and went out with the women—three girls with round, friendly faces, giggling and twittering, but they went off now with six soldiers, I think it was six, five anyway. The only soldiers left were the drunk ones who had been singing: “Ah, the sunshine of Mexico!” One of them, who was standing at the bar, a tall, fair-haired corporal, turned round and laughed at us again; as I remember, we were sitting there at our table, very quiet and well-behaved, hands on knees, the way we did during instruction periods in barracks. The corporal then said something to the woman behind the bar and she brought us some clear schnapps in quite big glasses. “We must drink to him now,” said Erich, nudging us with his knees, and I kept on calling “Corporal!” until he realized I meant him; then Erich nudged us again and we stood up and shouted in unison: “Prost, Corporal!” The other soldiers all roared with laughter, but the corporal raised his glass and called across to us: “Prost, grenadiers.…”
The schnapps was sharp and bitter, but it warmed us, and we would have liked another.
The fair-haired corporal beckoned to Kurt, and Kurt went over to him and beckoned to us after a few words with the corporal. The corporal told us we were crazy not to have any money, we ought to sell something; and he asked us where we came from and where we were being sent, and we told him we were waiting at the barracks and were to be flown out to the Crimea. His face became serious, and he said nothing. Then I asked him what we could sell, and he said: anything.
We could flog anything here, he said, coats and caps, long underwear, watches, fountain pens.
We didn’t want to sell our coats, we were too scared, it was against regulations, and besides we felt the cold very much, that time we were in Odessa. We emptied our pockets: Kurt had a fountain pen, I had a watch, and Erich a brand-new leather wallet he had won at a lottery back at barracks. The corporal took all three and asked the woman what she would give for them; she examined everything very minutely, said it was poor stuff, and offered two hundred and fifty marks, a hundred and eighty for the watch alone.
The corporal said that wasn’t much, two hundred and fifty, but he also told us she wouldn’t be likely to offer more, and if we had to fly to the Crimea next day maybe it didn’t make any difference, we might as well take it.
Two of the soldiers who had been singing: “Ah, the sunshine of Mexico!” came over and tapped the corporal on the shoulders; he nodded to us and they all left together.
The woman had handed all the money to me, so I ordered for each of us two portions of roast pork on bread and a large schnapps, then we each had another two portions of roast pork and another schnapps. The meat was fresh and juicy, hot and almost sweet, the bread was soaked with fat, and we had another schnapps. Then the woman told us she had no more roast pork, only sausages, so we each had a sausage and ordered a beer to go with it, thick, dark beer, and we had another schnapps and ordered cakes, flat dry cakes made of ground nuts; then we had some more schnapps and were not drunk at all; we felt warm and snug and forgot all about our prickly long underwear and sweaters; and some more soldiers came in and we all sang: “Ah, the sunshine of Mexico!…”
By six o’clock we had spent all our money, and still we weren’t drunk; we went back to barracks because we had nothing else to sell. Along the dark, uneven road there were no more lights, and when we reached the gates the sentry told us to report to the guardhouse. The guardhouse was hot and dry, dirty, and smelled of tobacco, and the sergeant shouted at us and told us we needn’t think we could get away with it. But that night we slept very well, and the next morning we again drove in the great rattling trucks along cobbled streets to the airfield, and it was cold there in Odessa, the weather was gloriously clear, and at last we were boarded onto the planes; and as they rose into the sky we suddenly knew that we would never come back, never.…
“STRANGER, BEAR WORD TO THE SPARTANS WE …”
After the truck stopped, the engine kept on throbbing for a while; somewhere outside a big gate was flung open. Light fell through the shattered window into the truck, and I saw that the light in the roof was smashed too; only its metal screw was left sticking out of the socket, with a few quivering wires and shreds of glass. Then the engine stopped, and outside a voice shouted, “The dead over here—got any dead in there?”
“For Chrissake,” the driver called back, “don’t you bother about the blackout any more?”
“What the hell good is a blackout when the whole town’s burning like a torch?” shouted the other voice. “Well? Got any dead in there?”
“Dunno.”
“The dead over here, d’you hear? And the oth
ers up the stairs into the art room, right?”
“Okay, okay.”
But I wasn’t dead yet, I was one of the others, and they carried me up the stairs. First came a long, dimly lit corridor, green oil paint on the walls; bent, black, old-fashioned clotheshooks had been let into the walls, and there were doors with little enamel plaques—VIA and VIB—and between these doors, shining softly under glass in a black frame, Feuerbach’s Medea gazed into the distance; then came doors with VA and VB, and between them hung a photograph of the boy plucking a thorn from his foot, its marvelous russet sheen framed in brown.
The great central column at the foot of the stairs was there too, and behind it, long and narrow, a beautiful plaster reproduction of the Parthenon frieze, creamy yellow, genuine, antique, and everything was all there just as it should be: the ancient Greek warrior, resplendent and formidable, plumed like a cock; and there along the staircase wall—yellow oil paint here—they all hung: from the Hohenzollern rulers down to Hitler …
And over in the narrow passageway, where at last I could lie level on my stretcher for a few paces, there was the finest, biggest, most colorful picture of all: old Frederick the Great with his sky-blue uniform, lively eyes, and the great shining gold star on his chest.
Once again I was lying tilted on the stretcher and being carried past the racial paradigms, including the Nordic captain with the eagle eye and the stupid mouth, the Rhine maiden, a bit bony and severe, the East Prussian with his broad grin and bulbous nose, and the Alpine profile with lantern jaw and Adam’s apple; then came another corridor, again I lay level on my stretcher for a few paces, and just before the stretcher bearers swung round onto the second staircase I caught a glimpse of it: the war memorial surmounted by the great gilded Iron Cross and the stone laurel wreath.
This all happened very quickly: I am not heavy, and the stretcher bearers were in a great hurry. Yet it might all be a hallucination, I was running a high fever and my whole body hurt—head, arms, and legs, and my heart was thumping like crazy. You see a lot of funny things when you’re feverish.
But after the Nordic faces came all the other things: the three busts of Caesar, Cicero, and Marcus Aurelius, superb reproductions, standing sedately side by side against the wall, yellowed and genuine, antique and dignified, and then as we swung round the corner came the Hermes column, and way at the end of the corridor—painted pink here—way, way at the end of the corridor Zeus’ big ugly mug hung over the entrance to the art room; but that was still a long way off. To the right, through the window, I could see fire reflected, the whole sky was red, and dense black clouds of smoke filed past in solemn procession … And again my eyes turned to the left and I saw the little plaques over the doors, IA and IB, and between the musty brown doors I saw just the tip of Nietzsche’s nose and his mustache in a gilt frame because the other half of the picture had a sign stuck over it saying MINOR SURGERY.
I wonder, I thought fleetingly … I wonder … and there it was: the picture of Togoland, large, highly colored, flat as an old engraving, a thing of beauty, and in the foreground in front of the colonial houses, in front of the Africans and the soldier standing pointlessly around with his rifle, in the very foreground was the huge, lifelike bunch of bananas: one bunch on the left, one on the right, and on the middle banana in the right-hand bunch something had been scribbled, I could just make it out. I must have written it myself …
But just at that moment the door to the art room was flung open, and I floated in under Zeus’ whiskers and shut my eyes. I didn’t want to see any more. The art room smelled of iodine, excrement, bandages, and tobacco, and it was noisy. As they set me down I asked the stretcher bearers, “Light me a cigarette, will you, top left-hand pocket.”
I could feel one of them fumbling in my pocket, a match hissed, and the lighted cigarette was stuck between my lips. I took a long pull. “Thanks,” I said.
All this, I thought, doesn’t prove a thing. Logically speaking, every high school has an art room, corridors with bent old clotheshooks let into green- and yellow-painted walls; logically speaking, the fact that Medea hangs between VIA and VIB and Nietzsche’s mustache between Ia and Ib is no proof that I’m in my old school. No doubt there’s some regulation requiring it to hang there. Rule for Prussian High Schools: Medea between VIA and VIB, Boy with a Thorn on that wall, Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, and Cicero in the corridor, and Nietzsche upstairs where they’re already taking philosophy. Parthenon frieze, colored print of Togoland. Boy with a Thorn and Parthenon frieze are, after all, good old stand-bys, traditional school props, and no doubt I wasn’t the only boy who had been moved to write on a banana “Long live Togoland.” And the jokes, too, that boys tell each other in school are always the same. Besides, maybe I’m feverish, maybe I’m dreaming.
The pain had gone now. In the truck it had still been pretty bad; I had yelled every time they drove through the small potholes, the shell craters had been better: the truck rose and sank like a ship in a wave trough. But now the injection they had stuck in my arm somewhere in the dark seemed to be working: I had felt the needle boring through the skin and my leg lower down getting all hot.
It can’t be true, I thought, the truck couldn’t have driven that far: nearly twenty miles. Besides, I feel nothing. Apart from my eyes, nothing tells me I’m in my school, in my old school that I left only three months ago. Eight years in the same school is a pretty long time—is it possible that after eight years only your eyes recognize the place?
Behind my closed lids I saw it all again, reeling off like a film: downstairs corridor, painted green, up the stairs, painted yellow, war memorial, corridor, up more stairs, Caesar, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius … Hermes, Nietzsche’s mustache, Togoland, Zeus’ ugly mug …
I spat out my cigarette and yelled. It always felt good to yell; but you had to yell loud, it was a glorious feeling, I yelled like mad. When someone bent over me, I still didn’t open my eyes; I smelled someone’s breath, hot and fetid with tobacco and onions, and a quiet voice asked, “What’s the matter?”
“I want a drink,” I said, “and another cigarette, top pocket.”
Once more someone fumbled in my pocket, once more a match hissed, and someone stuck a burning cigarette between my lips.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“In Bendorf.”
“Thanks,” I said, and drew on my cigarette.
So at least I really was in Bendorf, in my hometown, that is, and unless I had an exceptionally high fever there seemed to be no doubt that I was in a high school with a classics department; it was certainly a school. Hadn’t that voice downstairs shouted, “The others into the art room”? I was one of the others, I was alive; the living were evidently the others. The art room was there, then, and if I could hear properly why shouldn’t I be able to see properly, so that it was probably true that I had recognized Caesar, Cicero, and Marcus Aurelius, and that could only happen in a classics high school. I didn’t think they stood those fellows up against the wall in any other kind of school.
At last he brought me some water: again I smelled the tobacco-and-onion breath and, without wanting to, I opened my eyes. They saw a weary, elderly, unshaven face above a fireman’s uniform, and an old man’s voice whispered, “Drink, lad!”
I drank; it was water, but water is glorious. I could taste the tin mug against my lips, and it was wonderful to feel how much water was still waiting to be drunk, but the fireman whisked the mug from my lips and took off. I yelled, but he didn’t turn round, just gave a weary shrug of the shoulders and walked on. A man lying next to me said quietly, “No use yelling, they haven’t any more water. The town’s burning, you can see for yourself.”
I could see it through the blackout curtains: there were flares and booms behind the black material, red behind black like in a stove when you throw on fresh coal. I could see it all right: the town was burning.
“What town is it?” I asked the man lying next to me.
“Bendorf,” he said.
/> “Thanks.”
I looked straight ahead at the row of windows, and sometimes at the ceiling. The ceiling was still in perfect condition, white and smooth, with a narrow antique stucco border; but all schools have antique stucco borders on their art-room ceilings, at least the good old traditional classics high schools. No doubt about that.
I had to accept the fact that I was in the art room of a classics high school in Bendorf. Bendorf has three of these schools: the Frederick the Great School, the Albertus School, and—perhaps I need hardly add—the last, the third, was the Adolf Hitler School. Hadn’t old Frederick’s picture on the staircase wall at the Frederick the Great School been the biggest, the most colorful and resplendent of all? I had gone to that school for eight years, but why couldn’t the same picture hang in exactly the same place in other schools, so clear and noticeable that it couldn’t fail to catch your eye whenever you went up the first flight of stairs?
Outside, I could hear the heavy artillery firing now. There was hardly any other sound; just occasionally you could hear flames consuming a house and somewhere in the dark a roof would cave in. The artillery was firing quietly and regularly, and I thought: Good old artillery! I know that’s a terrible thing to think, but I thought it. God, how reassuring the artillery was, how soothing: dark and rugged, a gentle, almost refined organ sound, aristocratic somehow. To me there is something aristocratic about artillery, even when it’s firing. It sounds so dignified, just like war in picture books … Then I thought of how many names there would be on the war memorial when they reconsecrated it and put an even bigger gilded Iron Cross on the top and an even bigger stone laurel wreath, and suddenly I realized that if I really was in my old school, my name would be on it too, engraved in stone, and in the school yearbook my name would be followed by “Went to the front straight from school and fell for …”
The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll Page 4