A Time to Love and a Time to Die

by Erich Maria Remarque

  "I wanted something too."

  "That was different. I mean favors."

  Binding took the bottle of armagnac, drove in the cork with the palm of his hand and offered it to Graeber. "Here, Ernst! Take this along. It's good schnapps. I'm sure you'll be able to use it. Wait a minute!" He opened the door. "Frau Kleinen! A piece of paper! Or a bag!"

  Graeber held the bottle in his hand. "This isn't necessary, Alfons—"'

  Binding brushed his words aside stormily. "Take it! I have a whole cellar full of the stuff." He took the paper bag which his housekeeper had brought and put the bottle in it. "Take care of yourself, Ernst! And keep your chin up! Till tomorrow."

  Graeber went to Hakenstrasse. He had been a trifle overwhelmed by Alfons. An S.A. commander, he thought. The first human being who wants to help me unreservedly and offers me food and lodging has to be an S.A. commander! He put the bottle in his coat pocket.

  It was early evening. The sky was mother-of-pearl and the trees stood out clear against its bright expanse. Twilight hung blue over the ruins.

  Graeber stopped in front of the door that served as the Ruins Journal. His notice was missing. He thought at first the wind had torn it off; but in that case the thumbtacks would still have been there. They, too, were gone. Someone had taken the notice down.

  He felt the blood rush suddenly to his heart. Eagerly he examined the door for some message. But he found none. Then he ran across to his parents' house. The second notice was still stuck there between the stones. He plucked it out and stared at it. It had not been touched. There was no message on it.

  Uncomprehending, he straightened up and looked around. Then far down the street he saw something drifting in the wind like a white feather. He ran after it. It was his notice. He picked it up and loked at it. Someone had torn it off. On the margin was written in a pedantic hand: Thou shall not steal. At first he did not understand what it meant. Then he remembered the two missing thumbtacks and realized that the appeal from "Mother" had all four tacks again. Mother had taken back her property and imparted a lesson. Suffering seemed not always to produce generosity.

  He found two flat stones, laid his notice on. the ground beside the door, and weighted it down with them. Then he went back to his parents' house.

  He stood in front of the ruins and looked up. The green armchair was missing. Someone must have taken it. In the place where it had stood a few newspapers protruded from the ruins. He climbed up and pulled them out. They were old papers filled with victories and famous names, faded, torn, and dirty. He threw them away and went on searching. After a while, between two beams, he saw a little book, yellow and wilted, lying open as though someone had just left it there. He pulled it out and recognized it. It was one of his school-books. He leafed through the pages to the front and saw his name in pale writing on the first page. He must have written it there when he was twelve or thirteen years old. It was a school catechism, a book containing hundreds of questions and the answers to them. The pages were spotted and on some of them were notes he himself had written. He stared at them absently. For a moment everything seemed to tremble and he did not know what was trembling—the ruined city with the quiet mother-of-pearl sky above it or the little yellow book in his hands that contained the answers to all the questions of mankind.

  He put it aside and continued his search. But he found nothing more—no other books nor anything else from his parents' home. It would have been unlikely in any case; they had lived on the third floor and their things must have been buried much deeper under the rubble. Probably in the explosion the catechism had been blown high in the air and then, because it was light, had slowly fluttered down. Like a dove, he thought, a lonely white dove of assurance and peace, with all its questions and answers, in a night full of fire and smoke and suffocation and screams and death.

  He sat a while longer on the ruins. The evening wind sprang up and turned the pages of the book. God is merciful, he read, all-bountiful, all-mighty, all-wise, all-knowing; He is infinitely kind and just—

  Graeber felt for the bottle Binding had given him. He opened it and took a^swallow. Then he climbed down to the street. He did not take the catechism with him.

  It had grown dark. There was no light anywhere. Graeber was walking across the Karlsplatz. At the corner by the air raid shelter he almost ran into someone. It was a young officer who was walking very fast in the opposite direction. "Watch where you're going!" he growled angrily.

  Graeber looked at him. "All right, Ludwig," he said. "Next time I'll watch."

  The Lieutenant stared at him. Then his face broke into a broad grin. "You, Ernst!"

  It was Ludwig Wellmann. "What are you up to? Furlough?" he asked.

  "Yes. And you?"

  "All over. I'm just going back. That's why I'm in such a rush."

  "How was it?"

  "So-so. You know. Next time I'm going to arrange things differently. I'll not tell anyone and I'll go somewhere else. Not home!"

  "Why?"

  Wellmann made a face. "My family, Ernst! My parents! It just doesn't work. They ruin your whole leave for you. How long have you been here?"

  "Four days."

  "Just wait. You'll soon see how it is!"

  Wellmann tried to light a cigarette. The wind blew out his match. Graeber handed him his lighter. The flame illuminated for a moment Wellmann's thin, energetic face. "They think you're still a child," he said, exhaling smoke. "If you want to disappear for so much as an evening, right off there are reproachful looks. You're supposed to spend your time only with them. For my mother I'm still fifteen. She was swimming in tears all through the first half of my leave because I had come home—and all through the second because I had to go away. What can you do?"

  "And your father? He was a soldier himself in the first war, wasn't he?"

  "He's forgotten that. At least part of it. For my old man I'm the hero. He's proud of my hardware. Wanted to be seen with me. Touching old fellow from the gray dawn of time. They don't understand us any more, Ernst. Take care that yours don't catch you."

  "I'll take care, all right," Graeber said.

  "They mean well. It's all fhoughtfulness and love. But that's just the damnable part of it. You can't do anything about it. You always feel like a heartless criminal."

  Wellmann glanced after a girl whose bright stockings glimmered in the windy night. "Your leave goes right down the drain," he said. "All I managed to accomplish was their not coming with me to the station. And I'm not even sure that they won't turn up there after all!" He laughed. "Handle it ri«ht from the beginning Ernst. Clear out at !east in the evenings. Invent something. A course, or something like thatl Duty! Otherwise it will be the way it was with me and you'll have a leave like a schoolboy's."

  "I believe in my case it will be different."

  Wellmann shook Graeber's hand. "I hope so! Then you'll have better luck than I. Have you been to our old fleabag of a school yet?"

  "No."

  "Don't go. I went there. It was a great mistake. Makes you want to vomit. The one decent teacher has been kicked out. Pohlmann, the one we had in religion. You remember him, don't you?"

  "Of course. I'm even supposed to go and see him."

  "Watch out. He's been blacklisted. Better steer clear of the whole mess! One should never go back anywhere. Well, take care of yourself, Ernst! Our short, glorious life, eh?"

  "Yes, Ludwig. With free board, foreign travel, and a state funeral."

  "Hot shit! God knows when well see each other again." Wellmann laughed and disappeared into the dark.

  Graeber walked on. He did not know what to do. The city was dark as a grave. He could not go on searching and he realized he would have to be patient. The long evening terrified him. He did not want to go back to the barracks yet; nor to his few acquaintances. He could not bear their embarrassed sympathy and he knew that anyhow they would be glad when he left.

  He stared at the gnawed roofs of the houses. Just what had he expected? An island be
hind the fronts? Home, security, refuge, comfort? Perhaps. But the islands of hope had long since silently sunk under the monotony of pointless death, the fronts were shattered and the war was everywhere. Everywhere, even in the brain and the heart.

  He came to a moving picture theater and went in. It was less dark inside than on the street. At any rate sitting there was better than continuing to wander through the black city or sitting and getting drunk in some tavern.

  CHAPTER XI

  THE cemetery lay in the bright sun. Graeber saw that a bomb had hit the gate. A few crosses and granite headstones were strewn over the paths and graves. The weeping willows had been turned upside down; as a result the roots seemed to be branches, and the boughs long, trailing green roots. They looked like some strange growth that had been thrown up, decked with seaweed from a subterranean sea. Most of the bones from the bomb-wrecked graves had been gathered up and heaped in a tidy pile; only small splinters and fragments of decaying coffins hung in the willows. No longer any skulls.

  A shed had been put up beside the chapel. An overseer and his two helpers were at work there. The overseer was sweating. When he heard what Graeber wanted he waved him away. "No time, man! Twelve more burials before lunch! Dear God, how should we know whether your parents are here? There are dozens of graves without headstones and without names. This has turned into mass productionl How can we know about everybody?"

  "Don't you keep lists?"

  "Lists!" the overseer replied bitterly, turning to the two assistants. "Lists he wants to see, did you hear that? Lists! Do you know how many corpses are still lying outside? Three hundred. Do you know how many were brought in after the last air raid? Seven hundred. How many after the one before? Five hundred. There were just four day in between. How are we going to catch up with that? We're not equipped to do it! We need steam shovels instead of grave diggers to handle what's still lying out there. And can you tell me when the next attack is coming? Tonight? Tomorrow? And he wants to have lists!"

  Graeber made no reply. He took a package of cigarettes out of his pocket and laid it on the table. The overseer and his helpers exchanged glances. Graeber waited for a moment. Then he laid down three cigars as well. He had brought them back from Russia for his father.

  "Well, all right," the overseer said. "We'll see what we can do. Write down the name. One of us will ask at the cemetery office. Meanwhile you can take a look at the dead that haven't been recorded yet. Those rows over there by the church wall."

  Graeber went over. Some of the dead bore names. Others had coffins, stretchers, blankets, flowers, shrouds, or were covered with white sheets. He read the names, lifted the sheets over those that were unnamed and then walked across to the rows of the unknown who lay side by side under a narrow temporary roof that had been put up against the wall. The eyes of some had been closed, the hands of some had been folded, but most of them lay the way they had been found; only their arms had been pressed close to their bodies and their legs straightened so they would take up less room. A silent procession was moving past. Bent over, they examined the pale, rigid faces, searching for their own dead.

  Graeber took his place in line. A few steps ahead of him a woman suddenly sank to the ground beside one of the corpses and began to sob. The rest walked silently around her and proceeded, bent over and with faces so intent they seemed empty, without any expression except anxious expectation. Only as they neared the end of the row a pale gleam of covert, uneasy hope gradually appeared, and one could see them sigh with relief when they were through.

  Graeber walked back. "Have you been in the chapel yet?" the overseer asked.

  "No."

  "The badly mutilated ones are there." The overseer looked at Graeber. "It takes strong nerves. But you're a soldier after all."

  Graeber went into the chapel. Then he came back. The overseer was standing outside. "Horrible, isn't it?" He glanced at Graeber searchingly. "Several people have folded up on us looking at them," he went on. "Only yesterday a troop leader from the concentration camp, a giant of a fellow."

  Graeber did not answer. He had seen so many dead that he found nothing out of the ordinary here. Not even the fact that here they were civilians, and many of them women and children. He had seen that, too, often enough, and the mutilations of the Russians and Dutch and French had been no less hideous than those he now saw. It even seemed to him that the corpses frozen in the Russian winter in every stage of decomposition and dismemberment and a group of fifty hanged men, with bloated heads, burst, protruding eyes, split lips and thick black tongues, had been more horrible than these fragments of humanity in the chapel.

  "There's no record in the cemetery office," the overseer announced. "But there are two more big mortuaries in the city. Have you been there yet?"

  "Yes."

  "They still have ice," the overseer said almost enviously.

  "They are better off than we are."

  "They're overcrowded."

  "Yes, but they're refrigerated. That's something we don't have. And it's getting warmer and warmer. If a couple more attacks come close together and we have more sunny days on top of that, there'll be a catastrophe. It will mean that well have to resort to mass graves."

  Graeber nodded. He did not consider that a catastrophe. The catastrophe was what caused the mass graves.

  "We work as hard as we can," the overseer explained. "We have as many grave diggers as we can hire, but even so they're not nearly enough. The procedure here is out of date in this age. Of course religious requirements are a complication." He rubbed his forehead worriedly. "The only institutions that are really modern in every respect are the concentration camps. They can dispose of hundreds of corpses a day. All the newest methods. But, of course, they use a crematorium and that's out of the question for us—"

  For a moment he stared out thoughtfully over the wall. Then he waved to Graeber briefly and strode rapidly back to his shed— a loyal, conscientious officer of death.

  Graeber had to wait for a few minutes; two funerals blocked the exit. He looked around once more. Priests were praying over the graves, relatives were kneeling beside the headstones, there was a smell of faded flowers and fresh earth, birds were singing, the procession of searchers continued to move along the wall, grave diggers were swinging their picks in half-dug graves, stonecutters and undertakers were wandering about—the abode of death had become the busiest spot in the city.

  Binding's little white house lay in the early twilight of its garden. On the lawn stood a bird bath into which water was splashing. Jonquils and tulips were in bloom in front of the lilac, bushes and under the birch trees stood the marble statue of a girl.

  The housekeeper opened the door. She was a gray-haired woman, wearing a large white apron. "You are Herr Graeber, are you not?"

  "Yes."

  "The Commander is not here. He had to attend an in> portant Party meeting. But he left a message for you."

  Graeber followed her into the house with its antlers and paintings. The Rubens shone of itself in the twilight. On the copper smoking stand stood a bottle already wrapped. Beside it lay a letter. Alfons wrote that he had not been able to find out much so far; but Graeber's parents had not been reported as dead or wounded anywhere in the city. Probably they had been evacuated or had moved. Graeber could come again tomorrow. The vodka was for him to use tonight to celebrate the fact that he was far from Russia.

  He put the bottle and the letter into his pocket. Frau Kleinen had remained in the doorway. "The Commander sends his warmest greetings."

  "Give him mine too. Tell him I'll be back tomorrow. And many thanks for the bottle. I can use it."

  Frau Kleinen smiled. "He will be pleased. He is. such a kind man."

  Graeber walked back through the garden. A kind man, he thought. But had Alfons been kind to Burmeister, their mathematics teacher, whom he had sent to the concentration camp? Probably everyone was a kind person for somebody. And, for somebody else, the opposite.

  He felt for the
note and the bottle. To celebrate, he thought. What? The hope that his parents were not dead? And with whom? With the men in Room Forty-eight at the barracks? He stared into the twilight that had grown bluer and deeper. He might take the bottle to Elisabeth Kruse, he thought. She could use it as well as he could. For himself he still had the armagnac.

  The woman with the blurry face opened the door. "I'd like to see Fräulein Kruse," Graeber said determinedly and tried to pass her.

  She did not move from the doorway. "Fräulein Kruse is not in," she replied. "You ought to know that."

  "What do you mean I ought to know that?"

  "Didn't she tell you?"

  "I forgot. When will she be back?"

  At seven."

  Graeber had not reckoned on Elisabeth's being out. He debated where to leave the vodka; but who knew what this informer would make of it? Perhaps she would even drink it herself. "All right, I'll come back then," he said.