We left some bread and meat on a plate for the violinist, and I spread my new green handkerchief over it to keep away the flies. After our meal, two of the parched ones fell asleep, sinking back into their chairs and closing their eyes; they were gone, sound asleep, and I thought of how hard they must have worked all week, somewhere in the forest, cutting wood or on the farms.
Finally Hubert got up and said: “We have to go now.” He went over to the bar, and the woman counted up all the strokes and did a lengthy calculation.
I made another quick trip outside to the back and thought it was nice of the handsome landlady to follow me. She looked at me sadly and said some tender words as she stroked my hand; I was sure it was some kind of nonsense, the kind of thing women say to very small children. And then all of a sudden she kissed me on the lips, and I saw her blush deeply before she quickly disappeared again into the bar.
I went out through the garden, and I found the avenue more beautiful than ever. Once again I was drunk and the Hungarian woman had given me a fleeting kiss! I think I must have been in love with her, but I no longer know whether I was in love with her or with that lovely fleeting kiss—not that it matters, I was very happy, and I suddenly felt terribly young because I was drunk and wounded, and now I could feel my whole back sticky with pus.
The avenue was beautiful, and I wished it would never end. There was a sweet and slightly dusty smell of Hungary, of summer and Sunday, and I was as pleased as Punch that my wound was festering, I just didn’t want it to heal quickly! I would go on drinking, for then it wouldn’t heal so fast because the blood goes bad—yes, they’d told me all that in hospital the first time I was wounded, but in Germany there was no booze to be had, and that time my wound had healed up quickly.
The train looked horrible, standing there all sober on the rails, in the heat of the afternoon, and I felt depressed and wanted to go back and kiss the Hungarian woman all over again.
I was pretty drunk, I realized, when suddenly the engine whistled and I had to run. In jumping up I stumbled and made a grab for something, and that made my dressing split open. I could feel the warm pus running down my back into my pants.
They all laughed when I ran my hand down my back and over the seat of my trousers as if I had shit in my pants. I got out of my tunic and pulled off my shirt.
I lay face down on a straw pallet. With a flourish, Hubert threw my shirt out of the train. “That’ll fertilize the Hungarian earth!” he cried.
The other corporal kneeled down beside me and cleaned up the rest of the goo, then put on a dressing. I had never been so skilfully bandaged. After packing a thick, clean tampon into the hole in my back, he wrapped it all up neatly with gauze and finally wound a whole roll of bandage round me, fastening it on my chest. “That’s what we call a rucksack dressing,” he told me.
Hubert looked at him. “Here,” he said, “shake, you old arsehole.” They shook hands and laughed.
“I’ll stand you all some schnapps,” my corporal called out, “and we’ll have a song.”
He passed round the bottle, and a fat infantryman asked: “What are we going to sing?”
“Come, ye harlots of Damascus!” Hubert suggested.
So we sang that fine song: “Come, ye harlots of Damascus!” It had seventeen verses and a completely unmilitary tune; between verses we drank schnapps.
The soup cauldron in my back was beginning to simmer again, slowly filling up once more with liquid, and—I must admit—it was a pleasant, ticklish feeling.
Out with the goo, I thought, now it’s all right for you to get well, as long as that lovely big hole makes you unfit for duty anyway.
Hubert was thrilled by the speed of the train. Standing in the open doorway he kept shouting: “Hurry … hurry … all the way to Germany!”
I sat down beside him, dangling my legs and looking out at the smiling Hungarian countryside. It was terrific to see colourfully dressed people standing there sometimes and waving at us.
I had a long Virginia cheroot between my lips, it tasted deliciously bitter and mild, while in my back the goo of pus and blood and shreds of cloth and hand-grenade splinters went on simmering away.
“Mate,” the infantryman said to me, “you shouldn’t have thrown away your shirt.”
“What d’you mean?”
“The thing to do is wash it,” he said, “wash it in cold water and flog it—they pay a lot here for underwear.”
“Have you been here before?”
He nodded, drew on his pipe, and puffed out the smoke.
“Yes,” he replied, “I’ve been here before, the last time I was wounded, you can buy anything you like here. All you need is pengö. And the only way to get hold of pengö is by flogging. They’ve plenty to eat and drink, but they’re always on the look-out for underwear and shoes.”
He drew again on his pipe.
“Yes,” he went on, “for a shirt like that, if it’d been washed, you’d have had no trouble getting twenty or thirty pengö, and that means at least two bottles of schnapps—three hundred cigarettes—or three women …”
“Women, too?”
“That’s right,” he said, “women are expensive here because they’re scarce. In the street you won’t find any at all.” He suddenly perked up, looked out and, leaning forward, said: “What the devil! We’re stopping.”
So we were. Waiting on the ramp of the freight platform were lorries marked with red crosses. Hubert had come right up close to me. “Now,” he said under his breath, “it’s now or never.”
A sergeant was already running along the platform, shouting: “Everybody out! Everybody out, you’re being unloaded here!”
“Oh shit,” said the fat infantryman, “we’re hardly out of Romania. This place is right close to Kronstadt.”
“D’you know it?” someone called out.
“Sure I do,” he said, “it’s called Siebenheiligegeorge. It used to be Romanian. Piss, I thought we’d be a bit nearer home by now.”
We all got out and stood on the platform until the doctor came. As each man filed past him he scribbled something on the casualty slip.
“That means either hospital or casualty assembly point,” said the fat infantryman.
Hubert stood in front of me in the queue. When it was our turn the doctor glanced up.
“You’re moving on,” he told Hubert. “There’s no point in leaving you back here with a wound like that. He’ll take the place of the double amputee we’ve unloaded here,” he instructed the sergeant.
“He’s got to move on too,” said Hubert, pointing at me.
“How’s that?”
“He’s my mate,” said the corporal. “We’ve spent seventeen assault days and twenty-five close-combat days side by side in the shit, and the lad has a huge hole in his back.”
The doctor looked at me, and I thought: This is curtains, they’re going to unload you here, and the whole mess wasn’t worth the effort, you’ve no more money, can’t buy any more booze, and it’ll all heal up in no time. Then after two months you’ll be up at the front again in some hole, and who knows whether you’ll be that lucky next time.
“Hm,” went the doctor, his eyes still on me. “Very well then, this man will take the place of the severe abdominal wound—got that?”
The sergeant nodded and indicated where we were to board the train.
I had no other luggage than my hands in my pockets, and it was glorious to saunter over to the train, but I must admit I was too ashamed to look back to where the others were being loaded onto lorries and driven into town.
“Wait a moment,” said Hubert as I was about to climb aboard. “There’s one catch to it—now we have to stay in bed and won’t be able to get hold of any booze. Come with me …”
We walked back across the rails and entered the station bar from the platform. The bar was deserted except for a few empty beer glasses and a lot of flies and heat and the reek of tepid food. He went over and tapped on the zinc counter top.
“Hallo!” he cried. “Anybody at home?”
I had crossed the room and stood looking out into the street. It was a very broad, dusty road; on either side were flat-roofed houses under small, old trees.
All was silent and empty, until suddenly one of the lorries came dashing into the street, making the dust rise in a spreading cloud. The dust covered the whole sky, enveloped the little church spire … I turned away.
Hubert was standing at the counter negotiating with a neat, elderly woman who couldn’t understand a word. They were both laughing. The woman reached under the counter and placed a bottle on it; moving closer I saw that it was a real cherry brandy.
“More,” said Hubert with a gesture. Out came the next bottle, apparently some kind of apricot brandy, then some real Scotch whisky.
After lining up six bottles in front of us, the woman wrote a figure with chalk on the kitchen door-frame, then made a quick addition and showed us the total: a hundred and ninety-two pengö. Hubert paid with two hundred-pengö notes.
“Christ,” I asked, “how did you get hold of all that money?”
“God knows!” he said with a laugh. “Maybe it was lying around in the street and I picked it up!”
Inside the hospital train everything looked so superior that I felt like a criminal. White beds and a nice, gentle nurse and background music from a radio.
We each lay on an upper bunk, close enough together for Hubert to be able to pass me the bottle.
“Just to make sure it doesn’t heal up,” he said. “Cheers!” We drank … In the bunk below me lay a man who’d had a bullet through his thigh bone; below Hubert lay a man whose left arm had been amputated. We shared our bottle with them. After two cherry brandies the man with the amputated arm grew quite talkative.
“Just imagine,” he said, “my arm had been cut right through, like with a knife. A splinter must have sliced its way through, but the arm wasn’t quite off. It still hung by a tendon, and I didn’t feel a thing. I jumped up, the lieutenant helped me out of the trench, and I ran to the doctor with my arm dangling—you know, like those little balls you used to be able to buy at a fair, and there was masses of blood, but I ran as fast as I could. The doctor went ‘snip’ with his scissors, just ‘snip’, the way a barber snips off a single hair—and there lay my arm.” He laughed. “I sometimes wonder where they buried it—let’s have another drink. The doctor tells me it was all quite straightforward, it would heal up perfectly …” He paused to drink … “Want another one too?” he asked the fellow lying beneath me.
“No, I don’t think it’s good for me. I feel sick.”
“Seems to me,” the one-armed man went on, “I ought to get the gold badge now. What d’you think? I spent three weeks at the front and right the first day I got a graze and lost some blood—that counts, doesn’t it? But I had to stay at the front, and a week later I caught another one, on my leg … I lost some more blood, so that’s two wounds, right? And now this one, that makes three, so it seems to me they have to give me the gold, eh? Let’s have the bottle again. My sergeant in the Reserve won’t believe his eyes when I rejoin his unit with the gold badge plus the Iron Cross—after four weeks the gold plus the Iron Cross, for after all they’re bound to give me the Iron Cross, too.” He laughed. “He won’t believe his eyes and he’ll keep his mouth shut—he always said I was a slob, a great big slob, that I was the worst slob he’d ever known. He won’t believe his eyes, will he!”
The windows had been blacked out, but you could hear the noise from the platform, and when I pushed aside the blind a bit there it actually was, a big platform.
“See anything?” asked the one-armed man. “On this side there’s only rails and freight cars.”
“Yes,” I said, “a platform, and officers, and Hungarians and Germans, and women—it’s dark … a few men are being carried out on stretchers.”
“What’s the station called?” asked Hubert.
First I took a swig from the bottle, then looked for the sign: it must be somewhere along the platform, but I couldn’t find it.
The nurse and an orderly came in, bringing sandwiches and cocoa. The man with the bullet through his thigh began groaning loudly. “Shit!” he shouted at the nurse. “I don’t want to be fed—get that filthy metal out of my leg! Shit on your food, shit on your cocoa, I don’t want any cocoa, any more than I wanted that metal in my leg!”
The nurse had turned pale. “But,” she whispered, “it’s not my fault—wait a moment.” She put down the tray on a chair and hurried to the middle of the car, to a small white table with medication on it. There was now complete silence: everyone was listening to the thigh casualty’s curses.
“Cocoa!” he swore, “cocoa … so they think I’d go overboard with joy because I’m lying here in a white bed and get to drink cocoa! I’ve never wanted cocoa or this rocking-chair, and I never wanted any metal in my leg—I wanted to stay home, it’s all shit, everything is shit … !” By this time he was yelling as if he’d gone out of his mind.
The nurse returned with a syringe.
“Give me a hand,” she said to the orderly, who was standing, silent and stupid, beside my bed.
The nurse looked at the temperature chart. “Grolius,” she said in a low voice, “do try and be reasonable. You’re in pain, aren’t you? I …”
“… An injection!” he yelled. “What else, an injection! But …” he suddenly groaned, “don’t think I’m going to keel over with joy just because you’re gracious enough to give me an injection … give the Führer an injection!”
You could have heard a pin drop. A voice said: “For God’s sake, give that arsehole an injection!”
No one spoke, and the nurse murmured: “He’s beside himself … really, he’s beside himself …”
“Shit,” murmured the wounded man, and once more he whispered: “Shit …” I leaned down and saw that he’d fallen asleep. His slack mouth looked bitter and almost black in the reddish stubble of his beard.
“There now!” the nurse said brightly. “Now we’ll have supper!”
She began handing round cocoa and sandwiches. The portion for the thigh casualty was placed on the one-armed man’s chair. The cocoa was really good, and the sandwiches were spread with tinned fish.
After taking care of everyone, the nurse stood in the doorway holding the empty tray. “Anyone else need anything … anything urgent?” she asked.
“Pills!” shouted someone from the far end of the car. “Pills! I can’t stand the pain!”
“What?” said the nurse. “No, not now, in half an hour you’ll all be getting pills for the night anyway.”
“Nurse dear,” asked Hubert, “where are we here?”
“We’re in Nagykaroky,” she replied.
“Shit!” Hubert cried. “Oh, goddamn shit!”
“What’s matter?” I asked.
“Because we’ll only be going as far as Debrecen after all. Half a night more at the most. Then there’ll be another fucking hospital where we won’t be allowed out.”
“But I thought we were going to Vienna, that’s what I heard,” said the one-armed man. “Aren’t we?”
“Balls,” someone shouted. “The train’s going to Dresden.”
“Nonsense … Vienna Woods …”
“You’ll see, Debrecen’s the end of the line.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said gloomily. “Here, have a drink, I’m quite sure.”
But I didn’t want a drink on top of the cocoa, I didn’t want to destroy that wonderful sense of well-being. I smoked a cigarette, lay back carefully on my pillows and looked out into the night. I had tucked the blackout curtain slightly to one side and could look into the soft, dark grey night passing by. The train was moving again, everything was quiet except for the groans of the sleeping thigh casualty. Let’s hope he sleeps all the way to Debrecen, I thought, let’s hope the one-armed fellow keeps his mouth shut about his gold
badge and his bloody sarge … and let’s hope no one at either end of the car starts yelling and screaming “shit”; and when the nurse comes I’ll ask her to take my pulse so I can feel her gentle hand, and if she has some pills for me I’ll let her put them into my mouth, like yesterday, and for a tenth of a second I’ll feel her warm, white fingers on my lips.
But after the orderly had collected the dishes, they started playing gramophone records, Beethoven, and that made me cry, simply made me cry, because it reminded me of my mother.
Hell, I thought, never mind, no one’s going to see. It was almost dark in the compartment, and we were being rocked from side to side, and I was crying … I would soon be nineteen, and I’d already been wounded three times, was already a hero, and I was crying because I was reminded of my mother.
In my mind’s eye I clearly saw our home in Severin-Strasse, the way it had been before any bombs had fallen. A comfortable living room, very snug and warm and cheerful, and the street full of people, but no one knew who they were or why they were there. My mother was holding my arm, and we were silent, it was a summer evening and we were coming out of a concert … and my mother said nothing when I suddenly lit a cigarette, although I was only fifteen. There were soldiers in the street too, since it was war and yet not war. We weren’t in the least hungry and not at all tired, and when we got home we might even drink a bottle of wine that Alfred had brought from France. I was fifteen and I would never have to be a soldier. And everything about Severin-Strasse felt so good. Beethoven, what a treat a Beethoven concert was.
I could see it all quite clearly. We had passed St Georg’s, and a few whores had been standing there in the dark beside the urinal. Now we were passing the charming little square facing St Johann’s, the small Romanesque church …
The street narrowed. We had to walk in the road and sometimes step aside for the tram; then we passed Tietz’s, and finally the street widened out: there stood the great bulk of St Severin’s tower. I could see everything so clearly: the shops with their displays—cigarettes, chocolate, kitchen spoons and leather soles. I could see it all as clear as day.
The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll Page 75