The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll

by Heinrich Böll

  “Don’t be alarmed,” I said, my voice tense, and instantly I knew that was the worst way I could possibly have chosen to begin, but before I could go on she said, in a strangely composed voice: “I know all about it, he’s dead … dead.” I could only nod. I reached into my pocket to hand over his few belongings, but in the passage a furious voice shouted “Gitta!” She looked at me in despair, then flung open the door and called out shrilly, “For God’s sake, can’t you wait five minutes?” and banged the door shut again, and I could picture the man slinking off into a corner. Her eyes looked up defiantly, almost triumphantly, into mine.

  I slowly placed the wedding ring, the watch, and the paybook with the well-thumbed photographs on the green plush tablecloth. Suddenly she started to sob, wild, terrible cries like an animal’s. The outlines of her face dissolved, became soft and shapeless like a slug, and shining teardrops gushed out between her short fleshy fingers. She collapsed onto the sofa, leaning on the table with her right hand while with her left she fingered the pathetic little objects. Memory seemed to be lacerating her with a thousand swords. I knew then that the war would never be over, never, as long as somewhere a wound it had inflicted was still bleeding.

  I threw aside everything—disgust, fear, and desolation—like a contemptible burden and placed my hand on the plump, heaving shoulder, and as she turned her astonished face toward me I saw for the first time a resemblance to that photo of a pretty, smiling girl that I had had to look at so many hundreds of times, in ’45, when …

  “Where was it—please sit down—on the Russian front?” I could see she was liable to burst into tears again at any moment.

  “No, in the West, in the prisoner-of-war camp—there were more than a hundred thousand of us …”

  “And when?” Her gaze was wide and alert and extraordinarily alive, her whole face tense and young—as if her life depended on my reply. “In July ’45,” I said quietly.

  She seemed to reflect for a moment, then she smiled—a pure and innocent smile, and I guessed why she was smiling.

  Suddenly I felt as if the house were threatening to collapse about my ears, and I got up. Without a word she opened the door, she wanted to hold it open for me but I waited obstinately until she had gone ahead; and when she gave me her pudgy little hand she said, with a dry sob, “I knew it, I knew it, when I saw him off—it’s almost three years ago now—when I saw him off at the station,” and then she added almost in a whisper, “Don’t despise me.”

  I felt a spasm of pain at these words—good God, surely I didn’t look like a judge? And before she could stop me I had kissed her small, soft hand: it was the first time in my life I had ever kissed a woman’s hand.

  Outside darkness had fallen and, as if still under the spell of fear, I paused for a moment by the closed door. Then I heard her sobbing inside, loud, wild sobs, she was leaning against the front door with only the thickness of the wood between us, and at that moment I did indeed long for the house to collapse about her and bury her.

  Then, slowly and very, very carefully—for I was afraid of sinking any moment into an abyss—I groped my way back to the station. Lights were twinkling in the houses of the dead, the tiny place seemed to have grown in all directions. I could even see small lamps beyond the black wall that seemed to be illuminating vast expanses of yard. Dusk had become dense and heavy, foggy, vaporous, and impenetrable.

  In the drafty little waiting room there was only an elderly couple standing close together, shivering, in one corner. I waited a long time, my hands in my pockets, my cap pulled down over my ears, for there was a cold draft blowing in from the tracks, and night was falling lower, lower, like an enormous weight.

  “If only there were a little more bread, and a bit of tobacco,” muttered the man behind me. And I kept leaning forward to peer along the parallel lines of tracks as they converged in the distance between dim lights.

  Suddenly the door was flung open, and the man with the red cap, his face a picture of eager devotion to duty, shouted out, as if he had to make his voice carry across the waiting room of a great railroad station: “Train for Cologne—ninety-five minutes late!”

  At that moment I felt as if I had been taken prisoner for the rest of my life.

  BETWEEN TRAINS IN X

  As I awoke, I was filled with a sense of almost utter isolation; I seemed to be floating in darkness on sluggish waters, borne along by aimless currents. Like a corpse that is finally washed up by the waves to the pitiless surface, I eddied this way and that, gently swaying in a dark void. I could not feel my limbs, they had ceased to be a part of me, and my senses no longer functioned. There was nothing to see, nothing to hear, no smell to cling to; only the soft touch of the pillow under my head linked me with reality, my head was the only thing I was conscious of. My thoughts were crystal-clear, barely dimmed by the racking headache that comes from bad wine.

  Not even her breath was audible; she slept as lightly as a child, and yet I knew she must be lying beside me. There would have been no point in reaching out my hands to grope for her face or her soft hair, I had no hands. Memory was but a memory of the mind, a bloodless structure that had left no trace on my body.

  This was how I had often felt as I walked along the brink of reality with the assurance of the drunk making his way beside the narrow edge of a precipice, lurching with an unaccountable sense of balance toward a goal whose splendor is written on his mouth. I had walked along avenues lit only by sparse gray lamps, leaden lamps that seemed only to suggest reality the better to be able to deny it. With unseeing eyes I had submerged myself in somber streets crowded with people, knowing that I was alone, alone.

  Alone with my head, and not even my whole head; nose, eyes, and ears were dead. Alone with only a brain that was straining to recapture memory, as a child builds apparently meaningless objects out of apparently meaningless sticks.

  She must be lying beside me, although I had no physical consciousness of her.

  The previous day I had left the train that continued south toward the Balkans as far as Athens while I had to change at this little station and wait for a train that was to take me closer to the Carpathian passes. As I stumbled across the platform, uncertain even of the name of the station, a drunken soldier came reeling toward me, a lone figure in his gray uniform among the Hungarians in their colored civilian clothes. He was shouting insults that burned themselves into my brain like the slap in the face whose stinging pain one remembers all one’s life.

  “Bunch of whores!” he shouted. “Swine, trash—I’m sick of the whole pack!” He was shouting all this into the very faces of the foolishly smiling Hungarians, while, carrying his heavy pack, he headed for the train I had just left.

  Immediately a sinister steel-helmeted head called out from a train window, “Hey, you! You there!” The drunk drew his pistol, aimed at the steel helmet; people screamed. I made a dash for the soldier, put my arms around him, removed his weapon and hid it, keeping a firm grip on his flailing arms. The steel helmet shouted, people shouted, the drunk shouted, but the train moved off, and in most cases a moving train renders even a steel helmet powerless. I let go of the drunk, gave him back his pistol, and steered the dazed man to the exit.

  The little place had a desolate look. The bystanders had quickly dispersed; the station square was empty. A tired and dirty railroad employee directed us to a tiny bar beneath some low trees on the other side of the dusty square.

  We put down our packs, and I ordered wine, that bad wine which was responsible for my present misery. The soldier sat there mute and angry. I offered him cigarettes, we smoked, and I had a good look at him: he was wearing the usual decorations, he was young, about my age, his fair hair hanging loosely over a flat, broad forehead into dark eyes.

  “The point is, chum,” he said suddenly, “I’m sick of the whole business, see?”

  I nodded.

  “Sick to death of it, see? I’m getting out.”

  I looked at him.

  “That
’s right,” he said soberly, “I’m getting out, I’m heading for the puszta. I can handle horses, make a decent soup if I have to, they can kiss my ass for all I care. Want to come along?”

  I shook my head.

  “Scared, eh?… No?… Okay, anyway I’m getting out. So long.”

  He got up, left his pack on the floor, put some money on the table, nodded to me again, and went out.

  I waited a long time. I didn’t believe he had really quit, was really heading for the puszta. I kept an eye on his pack and waited, drank the bad wine, tried without success to strike up a conversation with the landlord, and stared at the square, across which, from time to time, wreathed in clouds of dust, dashed a cart drawn by thin horses.

  After a while I had a steak, went on drinking the bad wine, and smoked cigars. The light was beginning to fade, now and then a cloud of dust would be wafted into the room through the open door; the landlord yawned or chatted with Hungarians as they drank their wine.

  Darkness was coming on quickly; I shall never know all the things I was thinking about as I sat there and waited, drank wine, ate steak, watched the fat landlord, stared at the square, and puffed cigars …

  My brain reproduced all this quite neutrally, spewing it out while I floated giddily around on those dark waters, in that hourless night, in a house I did not know, in a nameless street, beside a girl whose face I had never seen properly …

  Later on I had hurried across to the station, found my train gone and the next one not due till the morning. I had paid my bill, left my pack lying beside the other one, and staggered out into the twilight of the little town. Gray, dark gray, flooded in on me from all sides, and only the sparse lamps gave the faces of passersby the look of living people.

  Somewhere I drank a better wine, looked forlornly into the unsmiling face of a woman behind the bar, smelled something like vinegar through a kitchen door, paid, and disappeared again into the dusk.

  This life, I thought, is not my life. I have to behave as if this were my life, but I’m no good at it. It was quite dark by now, and the mild sky of a summer evening hung over the town. Somewhere the war was going on, invisible, inaudible in these silent streets where the low houses slept beside low trees; somewhere in this absolute silence the war was going on. I was alone in this town, these people were not my people; these little trees had been unpacked from a box of toys and glued onto these soft, gray sidewalks, with the sky hovering overhead like a soundless dirigible that was about to crash …

  Somewhere under a tree there was a face, faintly lit from within. Sad eyes under soft hair that must be light brown although it looked gray in the night; a pale skin with a round mouth that must be red although it too looked gray in the night.

  “Come along,” I said to the face.

  I took hold of her arm, a human arm; the palms of our hands clung together; our fingers met and interlocked as we walked along in this unknown town and turned into an unknown street.

  “Don’t turn the light on,” I said as we entered the room I was now lying in, floating unattached in the darkness.

  I had felt a weeping face in the dark and plunged into abysses, down into abysses the way you tumble down a staircase, a dizzying staircase of velvet; on and on I plunged, down one abyss after another …

  My memory told me all this had happened, and that I was now lying on this pillow, in this room, beside this girl, without being able to hear her breath; she sleeps as lightly as a child. My God, was my brain all that was left of me?

  Often the pitch-black waters would seem to stand still, and hope would stir in me that I was going to wake up, feel my legs, hear again, smell, and not merely think; and even this modest hope was a lot, for it would gradually subside, the pitch-black waters would start eddying again, repossess my helpless corpse, and let it drift, timelessly, in total isolation.

  My memory also told me that the night could not last forever. Day had to come some time. And it told me that I could drink, kiss, and weep, even pray, although you can’t pray just with your brain. While I knew that I was awake, was lying awake in a Hungarian girl’s bed, on her soft pillow in a dark, dark night, while I knew all this, I could not help also believing that I was dead …

  It was like a dawn that comes very gently and slowly, so indescribably slowly as to be barely perceptible. First you think you’re mistaken; when you’re standing in a foxhole on a dark night you can’t believe that that’s really the dawn; that soft, soft pale strip beyond the invisible horizon; you think you must be mistaken, your tired eyes are oversensitive and are probably reflecting something from some secret reserves of light. But it actually is the dawn, growing stronger now. It actually is getting light, lighter, daylight is growing stronger, the gray patch out there beyond the horizon is slowly spreading, and now you know for certain: day has come.

  I suddenly realized I was cold; my feet had slipped out from under the blanket, bare and cold, and the sense of chill was real. I sighed deeply, could feel my own breath as it touched my chin; I leaned over, groped for the blanket, covered my feet. I had hands again, I had feet again, and I could feel my own breath.

  Then I reached down over the precipice to my left, fished up my trousers from the floor, and heard the sound of the matchbox in the pocket.

  “Don’t turn on the light, please,” said her voice next to me now, and she sighed too.

  “Cigarette?” I whispered.

  “Yes,” she said.

  In the light of the match she was all yellow. A dark yellow mouth, round, black, anxious eyes, skin like fine, soft, yellow sand, and hair like dark honey.

  It was hard to talk, to find something to say. We could both hear time trickling away, a wonderful dark flowing sound that swallowed up the seconds.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked all of a sudden. It was as if she had fired a shot, quietly and with such perfect accuracy that a dam burst inside me, and before I had time to take another look at her face in the light of the glowing cigarette tips I found myself speaking. “I was just thinking about who will be lying in this room seventy years from now, who will be sitting or lying on these six square feet of space, and how much he will know about you and me. Nothing,” I went on, “he’ll only know there was a war.”

  We each threw our cigarette ends onto the floor to the left of the bed; they fell soundlessly onto my trousers. I shook them off, and the two little glimmering dots lay side by side.

  “And then I was thinking who had been here seventy years ago, or what. Maybe there was a field, maybe corn or onions grew here, six feet over my head, with the wind blowing across, and every morning this sad dawn came up over the horizon of the puszta. Or maybe there was already a house belonging to someone.”

  “Yes,” she said softly, “seventy years ago there was a house here.”

  I was silent.

  “Yes,” she said, “I think it was seventy years ago that my grandfather built this house. That’s when they must have put the railroad through here. He worked for the railroad and built this little house with his savings. And then he went to war, ages ago, you know, in 1914, and he was killed in Russia. And then there was my father; he had some land and also worked for the railroad. He died during this war.”

  “Killed?”

  “No, he died. My mother had died before. And now my brother lives here with his wife and children. And seventy years from now my brother’s great-grandsons will be living here.”

  “Maybe so,” I said, “but they’ll know nothing about you and me.”

  “No, not a soul will ever know that you were here with me.”

  I took hold of her small hand—it was soft, so soft—and held it close to my face.

  In the square patch of window a dark-gray darkness showed now, lighter than the blackness of the night.

  I suddenly felt her moving past me, without touching me, and I could hear the light tread of her bare feet on the floor; then I heard her dressing. Her movements and the sounds were so light; only when she reach
ed behind her to do up the buttons of her blouse did I hear her breath come more strongly.

  “You’d better get dressed,” she said.

  “Let me just lie here,” I said.

  “I don’t want to put on the light.”

  “Don’t put on the light, let me just lie here.”

  “But you must have something to eat before you go.”

  “I’m not going.”

  I could hear her pause as she put on her shoes and knew she was staring in astonishment into the darkness where I was lying.

  “I see” was all she said, softly, and I couldn’t tell whether she was surprised or alarmed.

  When I turned my head to one side I could see her figure outlined in the dark-gray dawn light. She moved very quietly about the room, found kindling and paper, and took the box of matches from my trouser pocket.

  These sounds reached me almost like the thin, anxious cries of a person standing on a riverbank and calling out to someone who is being driven by the current into a great body of water; and I knew then that if I did not get up, did not decide within the next minute or so to leave this gently heaving ship of isolation, I would die in this bed as if paralyzed, or be shot to death here on this pillow by the tireless myrmidons whose eyes miss nothing.