The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll

by Heinrich Böll

  While I listened to her humming as she stood there by the stove gazing at the fire, its warm light growing with quiet wingbeats, I felt divided from her by more than a world. There she stood, somewhere on the periphery of my life, quietly humming and enjoying the growing fire; I understood all that, I could see it, smell the singeing of scorched paper, and yet nowhere could she have been further removed from me.

  “Please get up, will you?” said the girl from across the room. “You must leave now.” I heard her put a saucepan on the fire and begin to stir; it was a soothing sound, the gentle scraping of the wooden spoon, and the smell of browning flour filled the room.

  I could see everything now. The room was very small. I was lying on a low wooden bed; next to it was a closet, brown, quite plain, that took up the whole wall as far as the door. Somewhere behind me there must be a table, chairs, and the little stove by the window. It was very quiet, and the early light still so opaque that it lay like shadows in the room.

  “Please,” she said in a low voice, “I have to go now.”

  “You have to go?”

  “Yes, I have to go to work, and first you must leave, with me.”

  “Work?” I asked. “Why?”

  “What a thing to ask!”

  “But where?”

  “On the railroad tracks.”

  “Railroad tracks?” I asked. “What do you do there?”

  “We shovel stones and gravel so that nothing will happen to the trains.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to the trains,” I said. “Where do you work? Toward Nagyvárad?”

  “No, toward Szeged.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Why?”

  “Because then I won’t have to pass you in the train.”

  She laughed softly. “So you’re going to get up after all.”

  “Yes,” I said. I shut my eyes again and let myself drop back into that swaying void whose breath was without smell and without trace, whose gentle rippling touched me like a quiet, barely perceptible waft of air; then I opened my eyes with a sigh and reached for my trousers, now lying neatly beside the bed on a chair.

  “Yes,” I repeated, and got out of bed.

  She stood with her back to me while I went through the familiar motions, drew on my trousers, did up my shoes, and pulled on my gray tunic.

  I stood there for a while, saying nothing, my cigarette cold between my lips, looking at her figure, small and slight and now outlined clearly against the window. Her hair was beautiful, soft as a quiet flame.

  She turned round and smiled. “What are you thinking about now?” she asked.

  For the first time I looked into her face. It was so simple that I could not take it in: round eyes, in which fear was fear, joy was joy.

  “What are you thinking about now?” she asked again, and this time she was not smiling.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I can’t think at all. I must go. There’s no escape.”

  “Yes,” she said, and nodded. “You must go. There’s no escape.”

  “And you must stay.”

  “I must stay,” she said.

  “You have to shovel stones and gravel so that nothing will happen and the trains can safely go where things do happen.”

  “Yes,” she said, “that’s what I have to do.”

  We walked down a silent street leading to the station. All streets lead to stations, and from stations you go off to war. We stepped aside into a doorway and kissed, and I could feel, as my hands lay on her shoulders, I could feel as I stood there that she was mine. And she walked away with drooping shoulders without once looking round at me.

  She is all alone in this town, and although my way lies along the same street, to the station, I cannot go with her. I must wait till she has disappeared round that corner, beyond the last tree in this little avenue now lying remorselessly in full daylight. I must wait, I can only follow her at a distance, and I shall never see her again. I have to catch that train, go off to that war …

  I have no pack now as I walk to the station; all I have is my hands in my pockets and my last cigarette between my lips, and that I shall soon spit out. But it is easier to be carrying nothing when you are once more walking slowly but unsteadily toward the edge of an abyss over which, at a given second, you are going to plunge, down to where we shall meet again …

  And it was comforting when the train pulled in on time, cheerfully puffing steam between tall heads of corn and pungent tomato plants.

  REUNION WITH DRÜNG

  The burning pain in my head let me pass smoothly into the reality of time and space from a dream in which dark figures in gray-green coats had been pounding my skull with hard fists. I was lying in a low room in a farmhouse, and the ceiling seemed to be sinking down on me out of the green dimness like the lid of a tomb. The few traces of light that made the room barely discernible were green: a soft, yellow-frosted green with a black door sharply outlined by a bright band of light, a steadily deepening green that became the color of old moss in the shadows above my face.

  I awoke fully as a sudden, strangling nausea made me jerk upright, lean over, and vomit onto the invisible floor. The contents of my stomach seemed to drop into unplumbed depths, a bottomless well, before eventually penetrating my senses as liquid splashing on wood. I vomited again, bent painfully over the edge of the stretcher, and as I leaned back in relief the connection with the past became so clear that I at once remembered a roll of lemon drops, left over from last night’s rations, that must still be in one of my pockets. My grimy fingers groped around in my greatcoat pockets, let a few loose cartridges fall clattering into the green abyss, and turned over every item—a pack of cigarettes, pipe, matches, handkerchief, a crumpled letter—and when I couldn’t find what I was looking for in my coat pockets, I undid my belt, the buckle clanking as it struck the iron stretcher bar. I found the roll at last in one of my trouser pockets, ripped off the paper, and stuck one of the tart-flavored drops into my mouth.

  At certain moments, when the pain flooded every level of my consciousness, relationships between time, space, and events would become confused again: the abyss on either side seemed to fall still further away, and the stretcher I was suspended on felt like a towering pedestal rising closer and closer toward the green ceiling. There were moments when I even thought I was dead, relegated to an agonizing limbo of uncertainty, and the door—outlined by its bright band—was like a gateway to light and enlightenment that some kindly hand must surely open; for at such moments I lay motionless as a statue, dead, and the only living thing was the burning pain spreading out from the wound in my head and associated with a sickening, all-pervading nausea.

  Then the pain would ebb away again, as if someone were loosening a vise, and reality would become less brutal: the various shades of green were balm to my tormented eyes, the absolute silence soothing to my racked ears, and memory unwound within me like a roll of film in which I played no part. Everything seemed to lie in an infinitely remote past, whereas in fact not more than an hour could have gone by.

  I tried to revive memories from my childhood, days spent in deserted parks instead of school, and these experiences seemed closer, and to involve me more directly, than what had happened an hour ago, although the pain in my head derived from these recent events and should have made me feel otherwise.

  What had happened an hour ago I was now able to see very clearly, but distantly, as if I were looking from the edge of our globe into another world divided from ours by a vast abyss of glassy clarity. There I saw someone, who must be me, creeping over churned earth in nocturnal darkness, the lonely silhouette at intervals starkly illuminated by a distant tracer bullet. I watched this stranger, who must be me, struggling on visibly sore feet over the broken ground, often on all fours, then on his feet again, then back on all fours, up on his feet again, and finally heading for a dark valley where a group of similar dark figures stood gathered round a vehicle. In this spectral corner of the globe, where all was anguish
and darkness, the stranger mutely took his place in a line of men whose mugs were being filled from metal cauldrons with coffee or soup by someone they did not know, had never seen, someone hidden by dense shadows, wordlessly ladling; the owner of a scared voice, also invisible, doled out bread, cigarettes, sausage, and candies into the waiting hands. And suddenly this mute, somber spectacle on the valley floor was luridly lit up by a red flame followed by screams, whimpering, and the terrified neighing of a wounded horse; more dusky red flames kept shooting up out of the ground, stench and noise filled the air; then the horse screamed—I heard it pull away and dash off, dragging the clattering field kitchen—and a fresh burst of fierce fire covered the figure that must be me.

  And now here I was, lying on my stretcher, looking at the deepening shades of green in the dimness of this Russian farmhouse room where the only brightness was the light outlining the oblong of the door.

  Meanwhile the nausea had subsided, the lemon drop had spread soothingly through the horrible muck filling my mouth; the vise of pain attacked less and less often, and I dug into my greatcoat pocket, pulled out cigarettes and matches, and struck a light. The flare revealed dark, damp walls, lit here and there by the flickering sulfur-yellow flame, and as I tossed aside the dying match I saw for the first time that I was not alone.

  I saw beside me the gray, green-stained folds of a carelessly drawn-up blanket, saw the peak of a cap like an intense black shadow over a pale face; then the match went out.

  At the same moment it occurred to me that there was nothing wrong with my hands or feet, so I kicked my blanket aside, sat up, and was startled to see how close I was to the ground: that apparently bottomless pit was scarcely more than knee-deep. I struck another match. My neighbor lay motionless, his face the color of crepuscular light filtering through thin green glass; but before I could get any closer to have a good look at his face under the shadow of his cap, the match went out again, and I remembered that in one of my pockets there must still be a candle end.

  The vise of pain made another assault, and I just managed to stagger to the edge of my stretcher in the dark. I sat down, dropping my cigarette onto the floor, and since I now had my back to the door I could see only darkness, a green opaque darkness containing just enough shadows to give me the feeling it was revolving, while the pain in my head seemed to be the motor making it revolve; the more the pain in my head swelled, the more violently did these darknesses revolve like separate disks overlapping as they revolved, until once more everything came to a standstill.

  As soon as the attack was over, I fingered my bandage. My head felt bulky and swollen; there was the hard, lumpy crust of clotted blood, and the ultrasensitive spot where the splinter must be. I knew now that the stranger over there was dead. There is a kind of silence and muteness going beyond sleep or unconsciousness, something infinitely icy, hostile, contemptuous, that in the darkness seemed doubly malevolent.

  I finally found the candle end and lit it. The glow was yellow and soft; it seemed to spread slowly and diffidently before unfolding its flame to its utmost limits, and when the candle had achieved its full radius I saw the beaten earth floor, the bluish whitewashed walls, a bench, and the dead stove with a pile of ashes lying in front of its sagging door.

  I stuck the candle onto the edge of my stretcher so that the center of its radiance fell on the dead man’s face. I was not surprised to see Drüng. Rather, I was surprised at my own lack of surprise, for it should have been a great shock: I had not seen Drüng for five years, and even then so briefly that we had exchanged only the barest civilities. We had been classmates for nine years, but there had been such a deep antipathy—not animosity, merely indifference—between us that during those nine years we had spoken to each other for a total of scarcely an hour.

  It was so unmistakably Drüng’s spare face, his pointed nose, thrusting upward now, still and greenish, from the spare flatness of his face, his narrow-lidded eyes, always somewhat protruding, now closed by a stranger’s hand; so unquestionably was it Drüng’s face that there was really no need for me to confirm it by bending down and reaching in under the blanket folds for the label tied with string to one of his greatcoat buttons. On it I read by candlelight: “Drüng, Hubert, Corporal,” the number of his regiment, and under the heading TYPE OF INJURY, “Multiple shell splinters, abdomen.” Under this an academic hand had scrawled the word “Deceased.”

  So Drüng was really dead, or would I ever have doubted the hasty scrawl of an academic hand? Again I read the number of his regiment, one I had never heard of; then I took off Drüng’s cap, whose black, sardonic shadow gave his face a cruel look, and there was that fairish, lackluster hair which at various times during those fluctuating nine years had been right in front of me.

  I was sitting quite close to the candle as its flickering glow swung round the room, the strongest core of its yellow flame always centered on Drüng’s face as its feebler offshoots roamed ceiling, walls, and floor. I was sitting so close to Drüng that my breath brushed the ashen skin on which a stubble of beard proliferated, unsightly and reddish-brown, and suddenly for the first time I saw Drüng’s mouth. During our daily encounters over so many years, the rest of his appearance had become so familiar that I would have recognized him in a crowd—although probably unconsciously—but now I realized I had never really looked at his mouth. It was as if I had never seen it before: fine-drawn, narrow-lipped, pain still clinging to its pinched corners, a pain so alive that I thought I must be mistaken. This mouth seemed, even now, to be still fighting back the pent-up cries of pain to keep them from gushing out in a red spurt that would drown the world.

  Beside me flickered the warm breath of the candle as it flared up, died down, then slowly fanned out, over and over again. I was looking at Drüng’s face now without seeing him. I saw him alive, a sickly, shy fourth-grader, heavy satchel on thin shoulders, shivering as he waited for the school doors to open. Then he would rush past the burly janitor and, still wearing his overcoat, plant himself beside the stove, standing guard over it with a defensive look in his eyes. Drüng had always felt the cold, he was of poor physique, poor in every way, the son of a widow whose husband had been killed in the war. He had been ten at the time, and he stayed like that for nine years, shivering, of poor physique, poor in every way, the son of a widow whose husband had been killed in the war. Never once did he have time for those foolish things that memory alone makes memorable, while we often look back on humorless obsession with duty as a foolish thing; never once did he talk back to the teacher, for nine years he remained well behaved, hardworking, always “of average ability.” At fourteen he developed acne, at sixteen his skin was smooth again, at eighteen he had acne again, and he always felt the cold, even in summer, for he was of poor physique, poor in every way, the son of a widow whose husband had been killed in the war. He had a few friends, also of average ability, with whom he worked hard and was well behaved. I hardly ever spoke to him, or he to me. Occasionally, as is to be expected over a period of nine years, he had sat in front of me, his lackluster, fairish hair had been in front of me, quite close, and he had always prompted me—now for the first time I realized he had always prompted me, faithfully and reliably; and when he didn’t know the answer, he had his own special way of obstinately shrugging his shoulders.

  I had been crying for some time, and the candle was now casting its wider light around the room, sighing gently so that the barren little room seemed to rock like the cabin of a ship on the high seas. For some time—without being conscious of it—I had felt the tears running down my face, warm and soothing on my cheeks, and lower down, on my chin, cold drops that I automatically wiped away with my hand like a tearful child. But now that I remembered how he had always loyally prompted me, with never a word of thanks, faithfully and reliably, with none of the spitefulness of others who put too high a price on their knowledge to give it away—now I sobbed aloud, and the tears dripped through my matted beard into my muddy fingers.

  A
nd then I remembered about Drüng’s father. During history lessons, when the teachers told us in edifying tones about World War I—assuming the topic fell within the curriculum and that Verdun fell within the topic—then all eyes would turn toward Drüng, and at such times Drüng acquired a special, fleeting glory, for it was not often that we had history, or that World War I fell within the curriculum, and still less often was it permitted or appropriate to talk about Verdun …

  The candle was hissing now, hot wax bubbling in the cardboard holder; then the unsupported wick toppled over into the melted remains—but suddenly the room was filled with light and I was ashamed of my tears, a light that was cold and naked and gave the drab room a spurious clarity and cleanliness …

  It was not until I felt myself grasped by the shoulders that I realized the door had opened and two people had been sent to carry me into the operating room. I shot another glance at Drüng, lying there with pinched lips; then they had laid me back on the stretcher and were carrying me out.

  The doctor looked tired and irritable. He watched without interest as the stretcher bearers placed me on a table under a glaring lamp; the rest of the room was shrouded in ruddy darkness. The doctor came closer, and I could see him more clearly: his coarse skin was sallow, with purple shadows, and his thick black hair covered his head like a cap. As he read the label attached to my chest, I noticed the cigarette smell on his breath, and I could see the whitish rolls of fat on his neck and the mask of weary despair over his face.

  “Dina,” he called softly, “take it off.”

  He stepped back, and from the ruddy darkness emerged a woman’s figure in a white smock; her hair was all wrapped up in a pale-green cloth, and now that she was close, leaning over me and carefully cutting the bandage over my forehead, I saw from the serene, pale oval of her kindly face that she must be blond. I was still crying, and through my tears her face appeared melting and blurred, and her great soft light-brown eyes seemed to be weeping too, while the doctor seemed hard and dry even through my tears.