“How about that,” said Schmitz, “the truck really did turn up. Feinhals, go up into the attic, maybe you can see something from there.”
Feinhals walked over to the south wing. The janitor was leaning on a window sill in the administrator’s quarters, watching the men. His wife could be heard moving about inside, there was a faint tinkle, she appeared to be counting glasses.
“Let’s load the stuff,” said Schmitz. The driver gestured impatiently; he looked very tired. “Balls,” he said, “climb in and leave the crap behind.” He picked up a pack from the table, ripped it open, and lit a cigarette.
“Start loading,” said Schmitz. “We’ve got to wait anyway till Feinhals gets back.”
The driver shrugged his shoulders, sat down at the table, and ladled some soup from the pail into Schneider’s mess bowl.
The rest of the men loaded the truck with everything that had been left behind in the building: a few beds, an officer’s barrack box, his name printed on it in black paint, LT. GRECK, a stove, and a pile of soldiers’ packs, knapsacks, kit bags, and a few rifles; then a pile of underwear: bundled shirts, underpants, socks, and some fur-lined vests.
Feinhals called down from the attic, “I can’t see a thing. There’s a row of poplars in the village blocking my view. Can you hear them? I can, quite clearly.”
“Yes,” called Schmitz, “we can hear them. Come on down.”
“Okay,” said Feinhals. His head vanished from the skylight.
“Someone ought to go down to the railroad embankment,” said Schmitz, “he’d be sure to see them from there.”
“It’s no use,” said the truck driver, “they’re not in sight yet.”
“How can you tell?”
“By listening. I can hear they’re not in sight yet. Besides, they’re coming from two directions.”
He pointed toward the southwest, and his gesture seemed to conjure up the rumble over there too: he was right, they could hear it now.
“Hell,” said Schmitz. “What do we do now?”
“Get going,” said the driver. He stepped aside and, shaking his head, looked on as the others finished off the job of loading the table onto the truck, as well as the bench he had been sitting on.
Feinhals came out of the building. “One of the patients is yelling,” he said.
“I’ll go,” said Schmitz. “You fellows get going.”
They stood there, hesitating. Then they slowly followed him, all except the driver. Schmitz turned around, saying quietly, “Get going, I tell you, I have to stay behind anyway, with the patients.” Again they hesitated, then promptly followed him again.
“Damn it all,” Schmitz called back to them, “get going, I tell you. You need to get a head start on this damned plain.”
This time they halted and did not follow. Only Schneider walked slowly after him as he disappeared into the building. The rest moved slowly toward the truck. Feinhals hesitated a moment. It was a brief pause, then he entered the building and came face to face with Schneider.
“D’you need something?” Schneider asked. “Everything’s already on the truck.”
“Unload some bread, and some margarine—and cigarettes.” The door to the sickroom opened. Feinhals looked in and exclaimed, “My God, the captain.”
“D’you know him?” asked Schmitz.
“Yes,” said Feinhals, “I once spent half a day in his battalion.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know what the place was called.”
“Get out of here, you two,” cried Schmitz, “and quit fooling around.”
Feinhals said, “Be seeing you,” and left.
“What made you stay behind?” asked Schmitz, but he did not seem to expect a reply, and Schneider gave none. They both stood listening to the noise of the departing truck, the motor sounding hollow as the truck drove through the entrance; then it was outside on the road to the station—and even beyond the station they could still hear it, until it gradually became very faint.
The rumbling of the tanks had stopped. They heard firing.
“Heavy flak,” said Schmitz. “We really should go down to the embankment.”
“I’ll go,” said Schneider. Inside the room the captain said “Byelyogorshe.” He said it almost without emphasis, yet with a certain pleasure. His face was dark, with a dense black growth of beard, his head was firmly bandaged. Schneider looked at Schmitz. “Hopeless,” he said. “If he gets better, comes through this, well …” He shrugged his shoulders.
“Byelyogorshe,” said the captain. Then he started to cry. He cried soundlessly, without the least alteration in his expression, but even through his tears he said, “Byelyogorshe.”
“There’s a court-martial proceeding against him,” said Schmitz. “He was thrown off a motorcycle and wasn’t wearing a steel helmet. He was a captain.”
“I’ll just run down to the embankment,” said Schneider, “maybe I can see something from there. If any more troops come back, I’ll join them … so …”
Schmitz nodded.
“Byelyogorshe,” said the captain.
When Schneider came out into the courtyard, he saw that at the far end the janitor had run up a flag in the administrator’s quarters, a pathetic red rag with a clumsy yellow sickle and white hammer stitched to it. Now the rumbling in the southeast was also becoming more distinct again. The firing seemed to have ceased. He walked slowly past the planted beds, only stopping when he reached the cesspool. Beside the cesspool lay the dud shell. It had been lying there for months. Months ago, SS units that had been dug in along the railroad tracks had been fighting Hungarian rebels holed up in the school, but it had been only a very brief skirmish: the traces of firing had almost disappeared from the façade. Only the dud had remained where it was, a rusty piece of iron, the length of an arm and tapering to a round point, scarcely noticeable. It looked almost like a piece of rotting wood. In the high grass it was hardly visible, but the administrator’s wife had made numerous protests against its existence, and reports had been submitted that never received a reply.
Schneider’s pace slackened a little while he had to pass the dud. In the grass he saw the footprints of Otten and Feinhals, who had thrown the machine gun into the cesspool, but the surface of the cesspool was smooth again, a green, greasy smoothness. Schneider continued on past the beds, through the tree farm, across the meadow, and climbed up onto the railroad embankment. Those four or five feet seemed to raise him to an immense height above the ground. He looked beyond the village out onto the broad plain to the left of the tracks and saw nothing. But the sound had become more distinct. He listened carefully for any firing. Nothing. The rumbling came from exactly the same direction as the tracks. Schneider sat down and waited. The village was absolutely silent; it lay there as if dead, with its trees, the little houses, the square church tower. It looked very small because to the left of the embankment there was not a single house. Schneider began to smoke.
Indoors, Schmitz was sitting beside the man who said “Byelyogorshe.” Over and over again. His tears had dried up. The man stared straight ahead with his dark eyes and repeated “Byelyogorshe,” like a beautiful melody, Schmitz thought—anyway, he could have listened forever to this one word. The other patient was asleep.
The man who kept saying “Byelyogorshe” was called Bauer, Captain Bauer. He had previously been a textile agent, and before that a student, but before he became a student he had been a lieutenant, for almost four years, and later, as a textile agent, things had not been easy for him. It all depended on whether people had money, and people hardly ever did have money. At least, not the people who might have bought his sweaters. Expensive sweaters always sold well, so did cheap ones, but his particular line, the medium-priced range, were always very hard to sell … He hadn’t managed to pick up an agency for cheap sweaters, or for expensive ones—those were the good agencies, and good agencies went to the people who didn’t need them. Fifteen years he had spent as an agent for those slow-s
elling sweaters; the first twelve years had been a loathsome, never-ending, horrible struggle, chasing from store to store, from building to building, the kind of life that wore a man down. It had put years on his wife. When he first met her she had been twenty-three and he twenty-six—he was still a student, fond of a drink, while she was a slender, fair-haired girl who couldn’t drink any wine at all. But she had never uttered a cross word to him, a quiet woman who had held her tongue even when he sacrificed his university career to sell sweaters. He had often been surprised himself at his own stamina—to have been selling those sweaters for twelve years!—and at his wife’s calm acceptance of everything. Then for three years things had gone a bit better, and suddenly, after fifteen years, the whole situation had changed: he acquired the agency for both the expensive and the cheap sweaters and kept the agency for the medium-priced range. Business had been booming, and now others were doing the legwork for him. He could spend all his time at home, telephoning and signing; he had a warehouseman, a bookkeeper, and a stenographer. Now he had money, but now his wife—who was never really well and had had five miscarriages in quick succession—had cancer. It had finally been confirmed. And besides, these halcyon days had lasted only four months—until the war broke out.
“Byelyogorshe,” said the captain.
Schmitz looked at him; he would have liked to know what the man was thinking about. He felt an ungovernable curiosity to know the whole man, that large and rather hollow face, deathly pale under its stubble, those staring eyes that seemed to say “Byelyogorshe”—for now his mouth barely moved. Then the man started crying again, his tears running soundlessly down his cheeks. He was no hero, and it had been pretty rough to have the lieutenant colonel shout into the phone telling him to find out what his bunch were doing, that something was wrong at Horse Droppings, and to have to drive up to the front line with that steel helmet on his head, knowing what a fool he looked in it. He was no hero, he had never said he was, in fact he knew he wasn’t. And when he was close to the front line he had taken off the steel helmet because he didn’t want to look like a fool when he got to the front and had to start shouting. He held the steel helmet in his hand and thought: What the hell, why not take a chance, and the closer he got to that stupid mess up front, the less scared he was. Hell, they all knew there wasn’t a thing he could do, that anyone could do, because they had too few guns and no tanks. So why start shouting like an idiot? Every officer knew that too many tanks and too many guns had been ordered back to cover staff quarters. Shit, he thought, unaware that he was being brave. And then he was thrown off the machine and his whole skull was ripped open, and the only thing left inside him was the word “Byelyogorshe.” That was all. It seemed to be enough to keep him talking for the whole of the rest of his life, it was a world for him, a world that no one knew or ever would know.
He had no idea, of course, that a court-martial had been instituted against him on grounds of self-mutilation because he had removed his steel helmet while under fire and, what was more, while on a motorcycle. He had no idea of this—and he never would have. The drawing up of the paper bearing his name and serial number, and all the other documents, had been so much wasted effort—he would never find out about them, they would never reach him now. He merely said, every fifty seconds, “Byelyogorshe.”
Schmitz never took his eyes off him. He would willingly have gone out of his mind himself to know what was going on inside this man’s mind. And at the same time he envied him.
He jumped when Schneider opened the door. “What is it?” asked Schmitz.
“They’re coming,” said Schneider. “They’re here. No more of our troops managed to get through.”
Schmitz had heard nothing. Now he heard them. They were there. To the left they were already in the village. Now he understood what the driver had meant: “I can hear they’re not in sight yet.” Now you could hear they were in sight—clearly in sight.
“The flag,” said Schmitz, “we should have hung out the flag with the red cross—it would have been worth a try.”
“We still can.”
“Here it is,” said Schmitz. He pulled it out from under his pack on the table. Schneider took it.
“Coming?” he asked.
They left. Schneider stuck his head out the window and pulled it back in again immediately. His face was white.
“They’re right there,” he said, “by the embankment.”
“I’ll go and meet them,” said Schmitz.
Schneider shook his head. He raised the flag high above his head and went out through the door. He swung round to the right and made straight for the embankment. It was very quiet, even the tanks were quiet as they stood parked at the edge of the village. The school was the last building before the station. It was in that direction that their gun barrels were pointing, but Schneider didn’t see them. He didn’t see the tanks at all, he saw nothing. He felt ridiculous, holding the flag like that in front of himself as if he were in a parade, and he could feel that his blood was fear. Just plain fear. He walked stiffly, straight ahead, almost like a puppet, holding the flag in front of himself. He walked slowly until he stumbled. That woke him up. He had stumbled over a wire connecting the vinestocks in a model plantation. Now he saw everything. There were two tanks, they were parked behind the embankment, and the one in front was slowly veering its turret to aim at him. Then, when he had passed the trees, he saw there were more. They were standing behind and beside one another in formation across the field, and the red stars painted on them seemed repulsive and very alien to him. He had never seen them before. Next came the cesspool. Now he had only to pass the beds, cross the tree farm, climb up the embankment—but at the cesspool he hesitated; he was suddenly scared again, worse than before. Before he hadn’t realized; he had thought his blood was turning to ice, he hadn’t realized it was fear. Now his blood was like fire, and he saw nothing but red—nothing else—gigantic red stars that struck terror into him. Just then he stepped on the dud, and the dud exploded.
At first nothing happened. In the silence the explosion was staggeringly loud. The Russians knew only that the shell had not come from them, and that the man with the flag had suddenly vanished in a cloud of dust. Shortly after that they started pounding away at the building in a frenzy. They swung all their gun barrels around, redeployed themselves for firing, fired first into the south wing, then into the central building and the north wing, where the janitor’s tiny flag hung limply from the window. It fell into the dirt that crumbled down from the building—and finally they fired again into the south wing, this time long and furiously; they had not fired their guns for a long time, and they sawed through the thin façade until the building toppled forward. It was not until later that they noticed there had not been a single shot from the other side.
IV
Only two big patches of color were left: one green, a cucumber vendor’s great mound, the other pinkish-yellow, apricots. In the middle of the market square stood the swingboats. They were there permanently. Their colors had faded, their blue and red as dingy and dirty as the colors of a venerable old ship anchored in the harbor and patiently waiting to be scrapped. The swingboats hung down stiffly, not one was moving, and smoke curled up from the chimney of the trailer parked alongside them.
The patches of color were slowly breaking up: the dark and light greens of the intertwined mosaic of cucumbers dwindled rapidly; Greck could see from a long way off that two people were busy breaking it up. The apricots took longer, much longer: a woman, all by herself, was picking the apricots up one by one and carefully placing them in baskets. Cucumbers were evidently not as fragile as apricots. Greck slowed his pace. Deny it, he thought, simply deny everything. That’s the only thing to do if they find out. The only thing. Life was worth a denial, after all. But they wouldn’t find out, he was sure of that. It did surprise him, though, to find that there were so many Jews still around here.
The paving between the low trees and little houses was uneven, but he d
id not notice it. He was pretty scared, and he had the feeling: The faster I get away from there, the less chance there is of attracting attention, and most likely I won’t have to deny anything. But I must hurry. He was walking faster again now, hurrying along. He had almost reached the square; the cart with the cucumbers was already passing him, and beyond it there was still that woman painstakingly packing away her apricots. Her pile had not yet been reduced by half.
Greck saw the swingboats. Never in his life had he gone for a ride on a swingboat. Such pleasures had not been for him; they were forbidden in his family, first because he was never really well, and then because that was no way to behave, in public, swinging through the air like some silly monkey. And he had never done anything that was forbidden—today had been the first time, and right off something so terrible, almost the worst thing you could do, something that automatically cost you your life.
Greck could feel the panic in his throat, and he lurched quickly, reeling in the sunshine, across the empty square toward the swingboats. Smoke was puffing more vigorously now from the trailer’s chimney. They must have put some more coal on, he thought: no, wood. He didn’t know what they put on stoves in Hungary. And he didn’t care. He knocked on the trailer door: a man appeared, naked to the waist, he was blond, unshaven, and big-boned, his face had something almost Dutch about it; only the nose was strikingly narrow, and he had very dark eyes.
The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll Page 23