With a sudden movement she tore the hard, bloody rag from my wound; I screamed and let the tears flow on. The doctor stood scowling at the edge of the circle of light, the smoke from his cigarette reaching us in sharp blue puffs. Dina’s face was quiet while she bent over me, touching my head with her fingers as she began to sponge my clotted hair.
“Shave it!” said the doctor brusquely, tossing his cigarette butt angrily onto the floor.
Now the vise of pain renewed its attacks as the Russian nurse began to shave the filthy, matted hair around the gaping wound. Once again the disks started revolving and eerily overlapping. I had moments of unconsciousness, then I would come to again, and during those waking seconds I could feel the tears flowing more and more freely, running down my cheeks and collecting between shirt and collar, compulsively, as if a well had been drilled.
“Don’t cry, damn it!” shouted the doctor from time to time, and because I neither could nor would stop, he shouted, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” But I was not ashamed, I was aware only of Dina now and again resting her hands in a caress on my neck, and I knew it was futile to try and explain to the doctor why I had to cry. What did I know of him or he of me, of filth and lice, Drüng’s face, and nine school years that came punctually to an end when the war broke out?
“Damn it,” he shouted, “for God’s sake, shut up!”
Then he suddenly came closer, his face looming unbelievably huge, fiercely stern, as he approached, and for one second I felt the first boring of the knife, then saw nothing more and gave only one shrill scream.
They had closed the door behind me, turned the key, and I found myself back in the first room. My candle was still flickering, sending its fleeting light over everything it encountered. I walked very slowly. I was scared; it was all so quiet, and I felt no more pain. Never before had I been so entirely without pain, so empty. I recognized my stretcher by the rumpled blankets, looked at the candle, still burning just as I had left it. The wick was floating in liquid wax, one tiny tip sticking up just enough for it to burn, and any moment now it would be submerged. I patted my pockets apprehensively, but they were empty. I ran back to the door, rattled the handle, shouted, rattled, shouted. Surely they couldn’t leave us in the dark! But outside no one seemed to hear; and when I went back, the candle was still burning, the wick was still floating, a tiny piece was still sticking up just enough for it to burn and produce an irregular, flickering light; this piece of wick seemed to have got smaller; in another second we would be in the dark.
“Drüng,” I called, scared, “Drüng!”
“Yes?” came his voice. “What’s the matter?”
I felt my heart stand still, and all about me there was no sound save the appallingly quiet consuming of this candle end, on the verge of going out.
“Yes?” he asked again. “What’s the matter?”
I stepped to the left, bent down, and looked at him: he was lying there laughing. He was laughing very softly and painfully, and there was gentleness too in his smile. He had thrown back the blankets, and through a great hole in his stomach I could see the green canvas of the stretcher. He was lying there quite quietly, and seemed to be waiting. I looked at him for a long time, the laughing mouth, the hole in his stomach, the hair: it was Drüng.
“Well, what’s the matter?” he asked again.
“The candle,” I whispered, looking into the light. It was still burning; I saw its radiance as, yellow and fitful, forever expiring and forever burning again, it illumined the whole room. I heard Drüng sit up, the stretcher creaked softly, the corner of a blanket was pushed aside, and now I was looking at him again.
“Don’t be scared,” he shook his head and went on, “The light won’t go out, it’ll burn forever and ever, I know it will.”
But the next instant his pale face seemed to disintegrate still further; trembling, he grasped my arm, I could feel his thin, hard fingers. “Look,” he said in a frightened whisper, “now it’s going out.”
But the anchorless wick was still floating in the cardboard holder, it was still not quite submerged.
“No,” I said, “it should have gone out long ago—there wasn’t enough to last even two minutes.”
“Oh, Christ!” he shouted, his face distorted, and he slammed his hand down onto the light, jarring the stretcher so that the iron clanged, and for one second we were enveloped in greenish darkness, but when he lifted his trembling hand the wick was still floating, it was still light, and through the hole in Drüng’s stomach I was looking at a pale-yellow spot on the wall behind him.
“It’s no use,” he said, lying back on his stretcher, “you’d better lie down too, we’ll just have to wait.”
I pushed my stretcher right up close to his so that the iron bars were touching, and as I lay down the light was between us, flickering and unsteady, always certain and always uncertain, for it ought to have gone out long ago, but it did not go out; and sometimes we raised our heads at the same time and looked at one another in fear when the convulsive flame seemed to become shorter; and before our despairing eyes was the dark oblong of the door, surrounded by a bright band of shining light …
… and so we lay there waiting, filled with fear and hope, shivering and yet warmed by the panic that seized our limbs when the flame threatened to go out and our green faces met over the cardboard holder as it stood in the midst of those moving lights that flowed around us like soundless wraiths, and suddenly we saw that the light must have gone out, for the wick was submerged, no tip stuck out over the waxen surface now, and yet it was still light—until our amazed eyes saw the figure of Dina, who had come in to us through the locked door, and we knew it was all right to smile now, and we took her outstretched hands and followed her …
THE RATION RUNNERS
In the dark vault of the sky the stars hung like muted dots of leaden silver. Suddenly what had seemed to be random constellations began to move: the gleaming dots approached each other, grouping themselves into a pointed arch whose symmetrical curves were held together at their apex by a star that outshone all the rest. Scarcely had I taken in this minor miracle when at the lower end of each arching curve a star detached itself, and the two dots slid slowly downward to sink out of sight in the unending blackness. Fear stirred and gradually spread within me, for now, two by two, left and right, they proceeded to sink into the blackness, and from time to time I seemed to hear a hiss as their light went out. And so they all fell, one star after another, each pair gleaming softly as they sank together, until only the largest star of all remained up there, the one that had held the pointed arch together. It seemed to waver, tremble, and hesitate … then it sank too, slowly and solemnly, with an oppressive solemnity; and as it approached the blackness beneath, my fear swelled like some terrible travail, and at the very moment when the great star reached the bottom and, despite my fear, I waited with bated breath for total blackness to cover the vaulted sky, at that very moment the darkness exploded with an appalling detonation …
… I woke up, I could still feel the air quivering from the real blast that had woken me. Part of the earth wall in front of our foxhole now rested on my head and shoulders, and the breath of the grenade still smoldered in the black and silent air. I brushed off the dirt, and as I leaned forward to pull the groundsheet over my head and light a cigarette, I could tell from Hans’s yawn that he had been asleep too and was now awake; he held out his forearm to show me the phosphorescent dial of his watch, saying softly, “Punctual as the devil himself, on the dot of two. You’d better get going now.” Our heads met under the groundsheet. As I held the match over Hans’s pipe, I glanced at his thin face: it betrayed no emotion whatsoever.
We smoked in silence. In the dark there was no sound save the innocuous rumble of tractors bringing up ammunition. Silence and darkness seemed to have become one, lying like some enormous weight on the backs of our necks …
When I had finished my cigarette, Hans repeated softly, “You’d better get going,
and don’t forget to take him with you, he’s lying up there by the old flak emplacement.” And when I had clambered out of my hole, he added, “There’s only half of him, you know, in a groundsheet.”
I crossed the torn-up earth, groping my way with my hands, until I reached the path that over the months had been trodden by dispatch runners and ration runners. I had slung my rifle over my shoulders and tucked the old cloth bag securely into one pocket. After a couple of hundred yards I could already make out darker patches in the darkness: trees, the remains of houses, and finally what was left of the shelled hut of the old flak emplacement. I listened nervously, hoping to hear the voices of the others, but even when I got closer and could clearly see the dark square pit where the antiaircraft gun had stood, I still couldn’t hear anything. Then I did see them, the others, squatting on old ammunition cases like great mute birds in the night, and it struck me as unspeakably depressing that they were not exchanging a single word. At their feet lay a bundle wrapped in a groundsheet, just like those bundles we used to lug off with the rest of our equipment from the uniform stores to sort the hideous camphor-reeking stuff in our dorms and try it on for size. It was strange that on this night, in the midst of the reality of war, I should recall our old barracks life more concretely and vividly than ever before, and I shuddered to think that the fellow lying there in the groundsheet, a formless mass, had once been yelled at like the rest of us when he was issued the same kind of bundle from the uniform stores. “Evening,” I said in a whisper, and I got an indistinct murmur in reply.
I squatted down beside the others on the nearest pile of twenty-millimeter cardboard shell cases: they had been lying around here for months, some of them still full, just as they had been abandoned by the flak in its confused and hurried flight.
No one moved. We all sat there, our hands in our pockets, waiting and brooding, and each one of us must have glanced from time to time at the mute, dark bundle at our feet. At last the platoon dispatch runner got up, saying, “Shall we go?”
Instead of replying, we all rose; it was so futile to go on squatting there, it didn’t make things any better for us. What difference did it make, after all, whether we squatted here or up front in our holes? And besides, we had heard there was a chocolate issue today, maybe even some schnapps, reason enough to get to the chow line as fast as possible.
“First group, how many?”
“Five,” answered a subdued voice.
“Second?”
“Six.”
“And third?”
“Four,” I answered.
“There are two of us,” counted the dispatch runner in an undertone. “Okay, let’s call it twenty-one, shall we? I hear it’s hash.”
“Okay.”
The dispatch runner was the first to go over to the bundle; we watched him bend down, then he said, “We’ll each take one corner; it’s a young sapper, half a sapper.”
We bent down too, and each of us grasped a corner of the groundsheet; then the dispatch runner said, “Let’s go,” and we lifted the bundle and trudged off toward the outskirts of the village …
Every dead man is as heavy as the whole earth, but this half-a-dead-man was as heavy as the world. It was as if he had absorbed the sum of all the pain and all the burdens of the entire universe. We panted and groaned and, by tacit consent, set down our load after a couple of dozen yards.
And the distances became shorter and shorter, the half-a-sapper became heavier and heavier, as if he were absorbing more and more burdens. It seemed as if the earth’s weak crust must collapse beneath this weight, and when in our exhaustion we lowered our bundle to the ground, I felt as if we would never manage to lift the dead man up again. At the same time I had the feeling the bundle was growing beyond all measurable limits. The three at the other corners seemed infinitely far away, so far that if I called they couldn’t possibly hear me. And I was growing too, my hands became enormous, my head assumed nightmarish proportions, but the dead man, the corpse-bundle, was puffing up like some monstrous tube, as if it would never stop drinking in the blood of all battlefields of all wars.
All the laws of gravity and dimension were suspended and extended into infinity; so-called reality was inflated by the dim and shadowy laws of another reality, one that made a mockery of them.
The half-a-sapper swelled and swelled like a monstrous sponge saturating itself with leaden blood. Cold sweat broke out over my body, mingling with that foul dirt that had accumulated over it during the long weeks. I could smell myself, and I smelled like a corpse …
As I trudged on and on, carrying the sapper, obeying that strange urge that compelled us each to take hold of one corner again at a certain instant; as we went on and on, always a dozen yards or so at a time, lugging the burden of the world toward the outskirts of the village, I almost lost consciousness under the impact of an appalling fear that flowed from that steadily growing bundle and filled my veins like poison. I saw no more, I heard nothing, and yet I was aware of every detail of what happened …
I had not heard the grenade being fired or the whine of its approach; the explosion ripped apart the whole fine mesh of dreamlike, semiconscious agony. With empty hands I stared into space, while far away, somewhere along a slope, the echo of the explosion reverberated like peals of laughter; in front, behind, on both sides, I could hear that strange, laughing echo, as if I were caught in a valley between high mountains, and the sound reached my ears like the tinny jangle of those patriotic songs that used to crawl up and down the barracks walls. With an almost disembodied curiosity I waited expectantly for pain to make itself felt somewhere on my body, or for the sensation of warm, flowing blood. Nothing, nothing at all. But suddenly I realized that my feet were standing half over an empty space, that the front half of each foot was teetering over a void, and when I looked down, with the casual curiosity of someone just waking up, I saw, blacker than the surrounding blackness, a great crater at my feet …
I stepped gamely forward into the crater, but I did not fall, I did not sink; on and on I walked, always on marvelously soft ground beneath the absolute darkness of the vaulted sky. I kept wondering, as I walked along, whether I should report twenty-one, seventeen, or fourteen to the quartermaster sergeant … until the great yellow shining star rose before me and planted itself firmly in the vault of the sky; then the other stars, softly gleaming, found their places, two by two, forming a closed triangle. I knew then that I had reached a different destination and that what I really had to report was four and a half, and as I smiled and said over to myself: Four and a half—a great kindly voice spoke: Five!
REUNION IN THE AVENUE
Sometimes, when it got really quiet, when the hoarse growl of the machine guns had died down and that hideous harsh sound of grenade launchers had ceased, when over the lines there hovered an indefinable something that our fathers might have called peace: during those hours we would interrupt our lice picking or our shallow sleep, and Lieutenant Hecker’s long hands would finger the catch of the ammunition case that was let into the wall of our dugout and known to us as our bar. He would tug at the leather strap, making the prong of the clasp snap out of its hole and disclose our property in all its glory: on the left the Lieutenant’s bottle, on the right mine, and in the middle, jointly owned, our most treasured possession, saved up for the hours when it got really quiet …
Between the gray-white bottles of potato schnapps stood two bottles of genuine French cognac, the finest we had ever tasted. In some manner that defied explanation, passing through untold opportunities for pilfering and the very heart of the jungle of corruption, genuine Hennessy would turn up at intervals in our front-line dugouts, where we were fighting dirt, lice, and despair. The youngsters, with the craving of pallid children for sweet things, shuddered at the mere mention of schnapps, so we gave them chocolate and candy in exchange for their share of this golden elixir, and seldom, I imagine, was any barter concluded with greater satisfaction to both parties.
“Come on
,” Hecker used to say, after buttoning on a clean collar—if one was available—and running his hand voluptuously over his freshly shaved chin. I would slowly get to my feet and emerge from the shadowy depths of our dugout, lethargically brush the wisps of straw from my uniform, and confine myself to the only ritual for which I could still summon enough energy: comb my hair, and slowly, with a dedication bordering on the unnatural, wash my hands in Hecker’s shaving water—some coffee dregs in a tin can. Meanwhile Hecker, patiently waiting for me to clean my nails, would first set up an ammunition case between us as a kind of table, then take out his handkerchief and wipe our two schnapps glasses: thick, solid affairs that we guarded as carefully as our tobacco. By the time he had dug the big pack of cigarettes out from the inner recesses of his pocket, I had completed my preparations.
It was usually in the afternoon, we had pushed aside the blanket hanging in front of our dugout, and sometimes a bit of modest sunshine warmed our feet …
Our eyes met, we touched glasses, drank, and smoked. Our silence had a quality of solemn rapture. The only evidence of the enemy was the sound of a sniper’s bullet striking the ground, with scrupulous punctuality and at regular intervals, just in front of the beams shoring up the earth bank at the entrance to our dugout. With a small, rather endearing “flup,” the bullet would whir into the crumbling earth. It often reminded me of the modest, barely audible scurrying of a field mouse across a path on a quiet afternoon. There was something soothing about this sound, for it reassured us that this delectable hour now about to begin was not a dream, not an illusion, but part of our real life.
Only after the fourth or fifth glass would we start to talk. Beneath the exhausted rubble of our hearts, this miraculous potion awakened something strangely precious that our fathers might have called nostalgia.
The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll Page 10