A Time to Love and a Time to Die

by Erich Maria Remarque

  He stared at Heini's back. His mouth was dry. A dog barked from a garden gate. He started and looked around. I've had too much to drink, he thought, I must stop, all this has nothing to do with me, it's crazy—but he went on faster, silently, driven by something incomprehensible, something that seemed a compensation and a justification for all the death that lay behind him.

  He had approached within twenty yards without knowing what he was going to do. Then at the end of the street he saw a woman coming out of an opening in the hedge. She was wearing an orange blouse and carrying a basket and she was coming toward him. He went slack. Everything in him relaxed. He almost stopped and then went on very slowly. The woman swung her basket and walked at an easy pace past Heini and toward Graeber. She advanced with quiet strides; she had strong, broad breasts, a broad, tanned face and smooth, dark hair parted in the middle. The sky behind her head was pale, flickering, and unclear, she alone was clear, everything else swam together, she alone was real, she was life, she bore it on her broad shoulders, she brought it with her and it was great and good, and behind her were wilderness and murder.

  She looked at him as she passed. "Good day," she said in a friendly tone.

  Graeber nodded. He could not speak. He heard her steps behind him and the wilderness was there again, flickering, and amid the flickering he saw Heini's dark figure move around the next corner, and the street was free.1

  He looked around. The woman was walking on, calm and unconcerned. Why don't I run? he thought. I still have time to do it. But he already knew he would not do it. Something had broken. I can't do it now, he thought, the woman saw me, she would recognize me again. But would he have done it if the woman had not come? Would he not have found some other excuse? He did not know.

  He came to the crossing where Heini had turned. Heini was not in sight. He saw him again at the next corner. He was standing in the middle of the street. An S.S. man was talking to him and then walked on with him. A mail man was coming out of a gateway. A little farther on two men with bicycles stood talking together. It was past. Graeber felt as if he had suddenly awakened. He looked around. What had that been? he thought. Damn it, I was close to doing it! How did it happen? What's the matter with me? What was it that suddenly burst out of me? He walked on. I must keep watch on myself, he thought. I believed I was calm. I am not calm. I am more confused than I realize. I must keep watch on myself or I'll commit some damn foolishness!

  At a newsstand he bought a paper and stood there reading the war news. He had not done this until now. He had not wanted to be reminded of it. Now he read and he saw that the retreat had continued. On the small inset map he found the approximate place where his regiment must be. He could not determine it exactly. The war news only reported army groups; but he could estimate that they had retreated about a hundred kilometers farther.

  He stood very still for a while. For the whole time that he had been on leave he had not once thought of his comrades. Memory had fallen from him like a stone. Now it came back.

  It seemed to him as though a gray loneliness rose from the ground. It was noiseless. The war news had reported heavy fighting in Graeber's section; but the gray loneliness was noiseless and colorless as though the light and even the protest of battle had long since died in it. Shadows arose, bloodless and empty, they moved and looked at him and through him and' when they fell they were like the gray, uptorn ground and the ground was like them, as though it were moving and growing into them. The high gleaming sky above him seemed for a moment to lose its color before the gray smoke of this endless dying, which seemed to rise up out of the earth and throw an overcast across the sun. Betrayed, he thought bitterly; they have been betrayed, betrayed and befouled, their fighting and their dying have been coupled with murder and injustice and lies and might; they have been defrauded, defrauded of everything, even of their miserable, courageous, pitiful, and useless deaths.

  A woman carrying a bag in front of her collided with him. "Can't you use your eyes?" she snapped irritably.

  "I can," Graeber said without moving.

  "Then why don't you get out of my way?"

  Graeber did not answer. He suddenly knew why he had followed Heini. It was the darkness that he had so often felt in the field, the question he had never dared to answer, the pressing despair he had evaded again and again; it had finally caught up with him and brought him to bay, and he knew now what it was and he no longer wanted to evade it. He wanted clarity. He was ready for it. Pohlmann, he thought. Fresenburg wanted me to go and see him. I had forgotten. I will go and talk to him. I have to talk to someone I can trust.

  "Blockhead!" said the heavily laden woman and dragged herself on.

  Half of the Jahnplatz had been destroyed; the other half stood undamaged. Only a few of the windows were broken. The daily round went on there, with women cleaning and cooking, while, opposite, the house fronts had collapsed, revealing only fragmentary rooms where torn carpets hung down like slashed flags after a lost battle.

  The house where Pohlmann had lived was on the ruined side. The upper floors had fallen in, burying the entrance. It looked as though no one could still be living there. Grae-ber was on the point of giving up when he discovered beside the house a narrow, trodden path through the rubble. He followed it and found a passage shoveled out to the undamaged back door. He knocked. No one answered. He knocked again. After a while be heard sounds. A chain rattled and the door was cautiously opened.

  "Herr Pohlmann," Graeber said.

  An old man peered out. "Yes. What do you want?"

  "I am Ernst Graeber. A former pupil of yours."

  "Ah, yes. And what would you like?"

  "To call on you. I am here on furlough."

  "I no longer hold a teaching post," Pohlmann said shortly.

  "I know that."

  "All right. Then you know too that I was dismissed for disciplinary reasons. I no longer receive students and, in point of fact, do not have the right to do so."

  "I am no longer a student; I am a soldier and I have come from Russia and I bring you greetings from Fresenburg. He told me to come and see you."

  The old man regarded Graeber more attentively. "Fresenburg? Is he still alive?"

  "Ten days ago he was still alive."

  Pohlmann continued to regard Graeber for a moment. "All right, come in," he said then, stepping back.

  Graeber followed him. They went along a corridor that led to a kind of kitchen and from there through a second short passage. Pohlmann suddenly walked faster, opened a door and said much louder than before: "Come in here. I thought at first you were from the police."

  Graeber looked at him in surprise. Then he understood. He did not look around. Probably Pohlmann had spoken so loud in order to reassure someone.

  The room was lighted by a small oil lamp with a green shade. The windows were broken and outside the rubble was piled so high one could not see out. Pohlmann paused in the middle of the room. "Now I recognize you," he said. "Outside the light was too strong. I don't go out much and I am no longer used to it. Here I have no daylight; only the oil and there's not much of that; as a result I often sit for a long time in the dark. The electric light connections have been broken."

  Graeber looked at him. He would not have recognized him, he had grown so old. Then he glanced around, and it seemed to him as though he had come into another world. It was not only the stillness and the unexpected lamplit room that was like a catacomb after the harsh noonday sun; it was something else besides—it ' was the rows of brown and gold books on the walls, it was the reading desk, it was the steel engravings of Weimar, and it was the old man with the white hair and furrowed face which seemed in its waxen pallor like that of a man who had been imprisoned for years.

  Pohlmann noticed Graeber's glance. "I have been fortunate," he said. "I have been able to save almost all my books."

  Graeber turned around. "I haven't seen any in a long time. And in the last few years I have read very little."

  "Proba
bly you couldn't. Books are too heavy to cart around with you in a knapsack."

  "They were also too heavy to cart around with you in your head. They did not go very well with what was happening. And the ones that did go well with it were the ones you didn't want to read."

  Pohlmann gazed into the soft green light of the lamp. "Why did you come to see me, Graeber?"

  "Fresenburg told me I ought to."

  "Do you know him well?"

  "He was the only human being out there I trusted completely. He said I should come here and talk to you. You would tell me the truth."

  Graeber looked at the old man. It seemed infinitely long ago that he had been in his class; nevertheless, for the span of a heartbeat, he Suddenly had the feeling that he was once again a student facing an examination about his life—and as if in this little half-buried room with all the books and the discredited teacher of his youth his fate was now to be decided. Here was embodied the past that had once been— kindness, tolerance, and knowledge—and the rubble outside the windows was what the present had made out of it. "I would like to know how far I am involved in the crimes of the last ten years," he said. "And I would like to know what I ought to do."

  Pohlmann stared at him. Then he got up and walked across the room. He took a book from the shelves, opened it, put it back without looking at it. Finally he turned around. "Do you know what you are asking?" "Yes."

  "People are beheaded for less than that nowadays." "At the front people are killed for nothing," Graeber said.

  Pohlmann came back and sat down again. "By crime do you mean the war?"

  "I mean everything that led up to it. The lies, the oppression, the injustice, the use of force. And I mean the war. The war and the way we wage it—with slave camps, concentration camps, and the mass murder of civilians."

  Pohlmann was silent. "I have seen certain things," Graeber said. "And I have heard a good deal. I know too that the war is lost. And I know that we are only continuing to fight so that the government, the Party, and the people who caused it all can stay in power for a while longer and create still more misery."

  Pohlmann stared at Graeber again. "You know all that?" he asked.

  "I know it now. I've not always known it."

  "And you have to go out again?"

  "Yes."

  "That's dreadful."

  "It's even more dreadful to have to go out again knowing this and thereby perhaps to become an accomplice. Will I be that?"

  Pohlmann was silent. "How do you mean?" he asked after a while almost in a whisper.

  "You know what I mean. You instructed us in religion. How far shall I be an accomplice if I know not only that the war is lost but also that we have to lose it so that slavery, murder, concentration camps, S.S. and S.D., mass exterminations and inhumanity shall cease—if I know that and in two weeks I have to go out and fight for it again?"

  Pohlmann's face was suddenly gray and extinguished. Only his eyes still had color, a strange clear blue. They reminded Graeber of eyes he had seen somewhere before but he did not remember where. "Must you go out again?" Pohlmann asked finally.

  "I could refuse. Then I would be hanged or shot. Or I could desert. Then I would pretty certainly be caught in a short time—you can depend for that on the organization and the informers. And where could I hide? Anyone who gave me shelter would be risking death himself. Besides that they would take revenge on my parents. The least would be a concentration camp for them. They would die there. What else can I do? Go back to the front and do nothing to defend myself? That would be suicide."

  A clock began to strike. Graeber had not seen it before. It was an old grandfather's clock in a corner behind the door. Its deep note was suddenly a ghostly indication of time in the quiet, buried room.

  "And there is nothing besides?" Pohlmann asked.

  "There's self-mutilation. It's almost always discovered. The punishment is the same as for desertion."

  "Couldn't you be transferred? Back home?"

  "No, I am very healthy and strong. And I think, too, it would not do much to answer my question. It would be an escape but hardly a solution. One can be an accomplice in an office too, don't you think?"

  "Yes." Pohlmann pressed his hands together. "Guilt," he then said softly. "No one knows where it begins and where it ends. If you like, it begins everywhere and ends nowhere. But perhaps it is just the other way about. And complicity! Who knows about that? Only God."

  Graeber made an impatient gesture. "God should indeed know about it," he replied. "Otherwise there would be no original sin. That is complicity extending over thousands of generations. But where does personal responsibility begin? We cannot simply take refuge behind the fact that we were acting on orders. Or can we?"

  "It is compulsion. Not just orders."

  Graeber waited. "The martyrs in Christian times did not submit to compulsion," Pohlmann said hesitantly.

  "We are no martyrs. But where does complicity begin?" Graeber asked. "When does What is ordinarily called heroism become murder? When you no longer believe in the reasons for it, or in its aim? Where is the dividing line?"

  Pohlmann looked at Graeber tormentedly. "How can I tell you that? It is too great a responsibility. I cannot decide that for you."

  "Must each one decide for himself?"

  "I believe so. What else?"

  Graeber was silent. Why do I go on questioning? he thought. I am suddenly sitting here like a judge instead of one accused. Why do I torment this old man and call him to account for the things he once taught me and for the things I have learned later without him? Do I still need an answer? Haven't I already answered myself? He looked at Pohlmann. He could picture how day after day he crouched in this room, in the darkness or beside the lamp, as though in a catacomb of ancient Rome, dismissed from his position, in hourly expectation of arrest, laboriously seeking comfort in his books. "You're right," he said. 'To ask someone else always means an attempt to evade a decision. Besides I didn't really expect an answer from you. I was really only questioning myself. Sometimes you can't do that except by putting the question to someone else."

  Pohlmann shook his head. "You have the right to ask. Complicity!" he said with sudden vehemence. "What do you know of that? You were young and they poisoned you with lies before you had learned to judge. But we—we saw it and let it happen! What caused it? Hardness of heart? Indifference? Poverty? Egoism? Despair? And how could it become such a plague? Do you suppose that I don't think about it every day?"

  Graeber suddenly knew what Pohlmann's eyes reminded him of. It was the eyes of the Russian at whom he had shot. He got up. "I must go," he said. "Thanks for letting me in and talking to me."

  He took his cap. Pohlmann roused himself. "What do you intend to do, Graeber?"

  "I don't know. I still have two weeks' time to think it over. That's a lot when you're used to living from minute to minute." .

  "Come again. Come once more before you leave. Promise me to."

  "I promise."

  "Not many come," Pohlmann murmured.

  Graeber saw a small photograph standing between the books near the rubble-blocked windows. It was of a man of his own age in uniform. He remembered that Pohlmann had had a son. But in these times it was better not to ask questions about such matters.

  "Send my regards to Fresenburg if you write to him," Pohlmann said.

  "Yes. Did you talk to him the way you have just been talking to me?"

  "Yes."

  "I wish you had talked to me that way before."

  "Do you think it made things easier for Fresenburg?"

  "No," Graeber said. "Harder."

  Pohlmann nodded. "I couldn't tell you anything. But I didn't want to give you any of the many answers that are nothing but excuses. There are plenty of them. All smooth and persuasive, and all evasions."

  "Those of the Church, too?"

  Pohlmann hesitated an instant. "Those of the Church, too," he said then. "But the Church is lucky. Over against Love Thy Neighbo
r and Thou Shalt Not Kill there conveniently stands that other saying, 'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's.' Given that, a good pulpit acrobat can perform all sorts of feats."

  Graeber smiled. He recognized something of the sarcasm that Pohlmann had formerly had. Pohlmann saw him. "You're smiling," he said. "And you are so calm. Why aren't you screaming?"

  "I am screaming," Graeber replied. "You just don't hear it."

  He was standing in front of the door. Bright spears of sunlight assailed his eyes. The white mortar flickered. Slowly he walked across the square. He had the feeling of someone who, after a long, uncertain trial, has finally received judgment and to whom it is almost a matter of indifference whether it is acquittal or not. It was over; he had wanted it; it was the thing he had planned to think about during his vacation, and now he knew what it was. It was despair, and he no longer drew back from it.