The Train Was on Time

by Heinrich Böll

  Shortly after Dresden the unshaven soldier woke too. His face was ashen under the stubble, and his eyes sadder than ever. Without a word he opened a can and began eating the meat inside, spearing lumps of it onto his fork; with it he ate some bread. His hands were dirty, and from time to time scraps of meat would fall to the floor, the floor where he would be sleeping again tonight, with its litter of cigarette butts and that accumulation of impersonal grime which every soldier seems to attract like a magnet. The blond fellow was eating too.

  Andreas stood at the window and saw nothing; it was light outside and the sunshine still mild, but he saw nothing. His thoughts were seething as the train sped by the pleasant garden suburbs around Dresden. He waited impatiently for his unshaven friend to finish his meal so that he could ask him for the map. He had no idea what it was like between Lvov and Cernauti. Nikopol he could imagine, even Lvov and Przemysl … Odessa and Nikolayev … and Kerch, but Cernauti was only a name; it made him think of Jews and onions, of gray streets with flat-roofed houses, wide streets, and traces of administration buildings of the old Austrian Empire, neglected gardens around crumbling Imperial façades that might now be sheltering hospitals or first-aid posts; and those boulevards of Eastern Europe with their brooding charm, their squat trees, cropped to prevent the flat-roofed houses from being crushed by treetops. No treetops.…

  That’s what Cernauti would be like, but what came first, what came between Lvov and Cernauti, was something he couldn’t picture at all. It must be Galicia, Lvov being the capital of Galicia. And somewhere there was Volhynia—all dark, somber names smelling of pogroms and vast gloomy estates where brooding women dreamed of adultery since they had begun to find their blubber-necked husbands repulsive.…

  Galicia, a dark word, a terrible word, and yet a splendid word. It sounded something like a knife cutting very quietly … Galicia.…

  Lvov is all right, Lvov he can visualize. Splendid and gloomy and without lightness, those cities, with bloody pasts and untamed back streets, silent and untamed.

  The soldier who needed a shave threw his can out of the window, returned the loaf, from which he had been biting off mouthfuls, to his pack, and lit a cigarette. His face was sad, sad, full of remorse somehow, as if he were ashamed of the orgy of cards and boozing; he joined Andreas at the window, leaning his elbows on it, and Andreas sensed that he wanted to talk.

  “Look at that, a factory,” he said, “a chair factory.”

  “Yes,” said Andreas. He saw nothing, nor did he want to see anything, only the map. “Might I,” he made a great effort, “might I have a look at the map?”

  “What map?” Andreas felt a deep stab of fear and knew he turned pale. Supposing this fellow didn’t have any map?

  “The map of Poland,” he stammered, “the map of where we’re going.”

  “Oh, that one,” said the man. He bent down at once, fumbled in his pack, and handed him the folded map.

  It was horrible to have the man leaning over the map with him. Andreas could smell the canned meat on his breath, which was still not quite free of the odor of digested, partially acidulated schnapps. He could smell the sweat and grime and was too wrought up to see anything; then he saw the man’s finger, a thick, red, dirty, yet very good-natured finger, and the man said: “That’s where I have to go.” Andreas read the name of the place: “Kolomyya.” Strange, now that he looked closer he could see that Lvov was not far at all from this Kolomyya … he went back … Stanislav, Lvov … Lvov … Stanislav, Kolomyya, Cernauti. Strange, he thought; Stanislav, Kolomyya … these names evoked no definite echo. That voice inside him, that wakeful, sensitive voice, oscillated and trembled like a compass needle which cannot settle. Kolomyya, shall I get as far as Kolomyya? Nothing definite … a strange wavering of the ever-vibrating needle … Stanislav? The same quivering. Nikopol! he thought suddenly. Nothing.

  “Yes,” said the man, “that’s where my unit is. Repair depot. I’m lucky.” But it sounded as if he really meant: I’m having a terrible time.

  Funny, thought Andreas. I had imagined there would be a plain in that area, a green patch with a few black dots, but the map is whitish-yellow there. Foothills of the Carpathians, he thought suddenly, and in his mind’s eye he instantly saw his school, all of it, the corridors and the bust of Cicero and the narrow playground squeezed in between tenements, and in summertime the women leaning out of the windows in their bras, and the janitor’s room downstairs where you could get a mug of cocoa, and the big storeroom, dry as a bone, where they used to go for a quick smoke during recess. Foothills of the Carpathians.…

  Now the man’s finger was lying farther to the southeast. “Kherson,” he said, “that’s where we were last, and now we’re moving farther back, probably as far as Lvov or right into the Hungarian Carpathians. The front’s collapsing in Nikopol—I guess you heard that on the news, eh? They’re wading through the mud, a retreat through mud! Must be a madhouse, all the vehicles get stuck, and when three happen to get stuck one behind the other everything on the road behind them has had it, there’s no going back and no going forward, and they blow up the lot … they blow up the lot, and everyone has to foot-slog it, the generals too, I hope. But I bet they get flown out.… They ought to go on foot, on foot like the Führer’s beloved infantry. Are you with the infantry?”

  “Yes,” said Andreas. He had not taken in much. His gaze was resting almost tenderly on this section of the map, it was yellowish-white with only four black dots, one big fat one: Lvov, and one slightly smaller: Cernauti, and two very little ones: Kolomyya and Stanislav.

  “Let me keep the map,” he said huskily, “let me keep it,” without looking at the other man. He could not bear to part with the map, and he trembled at the thought that the man might say no. Many people are like that, an object suddenly becomes valuable to them because someone else would like to have it. An object that the very next moment they might throw away becomes precious and valuable and they wouldn’t dream of selling it, just because someone else would like to own it and use it.

  Many people are like that, but the unshaven soldier wasn’t.

  “Sure,” he said, surprised, “it’s not worth anything. Twenty pfennigs. Besides, it’s an old one. Where’re you heading for anyway?”

  “Nikopol,” said Andreas, and again he was aware of that appalling void as he uttered the word, he felt as if he had cheated his companion. He dared not look at him.

  “Well, by the time you get down there Nikopol will be gone, maybe Kishinev … that’s as far as you’ll get.”

  “Think so?” Andreas asked. Kishinev didn’t mean anything to him either.

  “Sure. Maybe even Kolomyya,” laughed the man. “How long will it take you to get down there? Let’s see. Tomorrow morning Breslau. Tomorrow night Przemysl. Thursday, Friday night, maybe sooner. Then: Lvov. Let’s see, Saturday evening I’ll be in Kolomyya; you’ll need a few days longer, another week if you’re smart, in a week they’ll have left Nikopol, in a week Nikopol will be gone for good as far as we’re concerned.”

  Saturday, Andreas thought. Saturday feels quite safe, no emptiness there. Saturday I’ll still be alive. He hadn’t dared think that close. Now he understood why his heart had been silent when he thought in months, let alone years. That had been a leap, far far beyond the goal, a shot in the void that had no echo, into the no-man’s-land that no longer existed for him. It’s quite close, the end is staggeringly close. Saturday. A fierce, exquisite, painful vibration. Saturday I’ll still be alive, all of Saturday. Three more days. But by Saturday evening this fellow plans to be in Kolomyya, so I should be in Cernauti by late Saturday night, and it isn’t going to be in Cernauti but between Lvov and Cernauti, and not Saturday. Sunday: he thought suddenly. Nothing … not much … a gentle, very, very sad and uncertain feeling. On Sunday morning I’m going to die between Lvov and Cernauti.

  Now for the first time he looked at his unshaven friend. He was shocked by his face, chalk-white under the black stubble. And there
was fear in the eyes. Yet he’s going to a repair depot and not to the front, thought Andreas. Why this fear, why this sorrow? This was more than just a hangover. Now he looked the man straight in the eye, and he was even more shocked by that yawning abyss of despair. This was more than just fear and emptiness, something ghastly was draining him, and he knew why the man had to drink, had to drink, to pour something, anything, into that abyss.…

  “The funny part is,” the man burst out hoarsely, “the funny part is that I’m on leave. Till next Wednesday, a whole week. But I just cleared out. My wife is … my wife,” he was choking on something terrible between a sob and rage. “My wife, you see,” he said, “has got someone else. Yes,” he laughed abruptly, “that’s right, she’s got someone else, my friend. Funny thing, you go all over Europe, sleep with a French girl here and a Rumanian whore there, and in Kiev you chase the Russian girls; and when you go on leave and stop over in some place like Warsaw or Krakow, you can’t resist the pretty Polish girls either. It’s impossible … and … and … and—” again he choked down that horrible mass of something between a sob and rage as if it were offal—“and then you get home, no warning of course, after fifteen months, and there’s a guy lying on your sofa, a man, a Russian, that’s right, a Russian’s lying on your sofa, the phonograph’s playing a tango, and your wife’s sitting at the table wearing red pajamas and mixing something … yes that’s how it was, exactly. God knows I sent home enough schnapps and liqueurs … from France, Hungary, Russia. The guy’s so scared he half swallows his cigarette, and your wife screams like an animal … I tell you, like an animal!” A shudder passed over his massive shoulders. “Like an animal, I tell you, that’s all I know.” Andreas looked back in alarm, just one brief glance. But the blond fellow couldn’t hear anything. He was calmly sitting there, quite calmly, almost comfortably, and spreading scarlet jam from an immaculate glass jar onto white bread. He spread the jam neatly and calmly, taking bites like a civil servant, almost like a chief inspector. Maybe the blond fellow was an inspector. The unshaven soldier was silent, and something made him shiver. Nobody could have heard what he said. The train had torn away his words … they had flown away, flown off inaudibly with the rush of air … maybe they had flown back to Dresden … to Radebeul … where the little fly was perched somewhere and the girl in the yellow dress was leaning against her bicycle … still leaning … still leaning.…

  “Yes,” said the unshaven soldier, speaking rapidly, almost impersonally, as if he wanted to reel off a tape he had begun. “I cleared out, simply cleared out. On the way there I had put on my work pants, I wanted to save my new black Panzer ones with the creases in them for my leave. I had been looking forward to seeing my wife … God, I was looking forward to it … not only to … not only to that. No, no!” He shouted: “It’s something quite different, the thing you look forward to. It’s at home, it’s your wife, see? What you do with the other women is nothing, you’ve forgotten it after an hour … and now, now a Russian’s sitting there, a tall guy, I could see that much, and the way he was lying there and smoking … nowhere else in the world can a man lounge around and smoke that way. Besides, I could tell by his nose he was a Russian … you can always tell by their noses.…”

  I must pray more, Andreas thought, I’ve hardly prayed since I left home. His companion fell silent again, looking out into the gentle countryside with the sunlight lying over it like a golden shimmer. The blond fellow was still sitting there, he drank some coffee from a flask; now he was eating white bread and butter, the butter was in a brand-new container; he was eating very methodically, very neatly. I must pray more, Andreas thought, and just as he was about to begin the unshaven soldier started up again. “Yes, I cleared out. By the next train, and took the whole lot back with me. Booze and meat and money, all that money I’d taken along, everything was for her, don’t you see? Why else would I have lugged all that stuff along? Just for her. What I need now is a drink … where can a fellow get some booze now, I’ve been racking my brains; these people are daft here, they don’t have any black market here.…”

  “I’ve got some schnapps,” said Andreas, “d’you want some?”

  “Schnapps … God, man, schnapps!”

  Andreas smiled. “I’ll let you have the schnapps in exchange for the map, okay?” His companion hugged him. His face was almost happy. Andreas bent over his pack and dug out a bottle of schnapps. For a moment he thought: I’ll ration him, I won’t give him the second bottle till he needs it or till he wakes up from the stupor he’s going to drink himself into. But then he rummaged in the pack again and brought out the second bottle.

  “There you are,” he said, “you drink it, I don’t want any!”

  Soon I’m going to die, he was thinking … soon, soon, and this Soon was no longer quite so blurred, he had already groped his way up to this Soon, circled it and sniffed it, and already he knew that he was going to die during the night of Saturday to Sunday, between Lvov and Cernauti … in Galicia. Down there was Eastern Galicia, where he would be quite close to Bucovina and Volhynia. Those names were like unfamiliar drinks. Bucovina—that sounded like a sturdy plum schnapps, and Volhynia—that sounded like a very thick, swampy beer, like the beer he had once drunk in Budapest, a real soupy beer.

  He glanced back once more through the glass pane and saw the unshaven soldier lifting the bottle to his mouth, and the blond fellow shake his head when the other man offered it to him. Then he looked out again but saw nothing … only that Polish horizon, away in the distance beyond an endless plain, that intoxicating, wide horizon that he would see when the hour came.…

  It’s a good thing I’m not alone, he thought. Nobody could go through this alone, and he was glad he had agreed to join in the game and had met these two fellows. That one who needed a shave—he had liked him from the start, and the blond fellow, well, he didn’t seem as effete as he looked. Or maybe he really was effete, but he was a human being. It is not good for man to be alone. It would be terribly difficult to be alone with the others now filling up the corridor again, those fellows nattering about nothing but leave and heroism, promotions and decorations, food and tobacco and women, women, all those women who had been madly in love with every man jack of them.… No girl will cry over me, he thought, how strange. How sad. If only somewhere a girl would think of me! Even if she were unhappy. God is with those who are unhappy. Unhappiness is life, pain is life. It would be nice if somewhere a girl were thinking of me and crying over me … I would pull her after me … I would drag her along behind me by her tears, she shouldn’t wait for me for ever and ever. There’s no such girl. A strange thought. No girl I’ve kissed. It’s just possible, though not probable, that there is one girl who still thinks of me; but she can’t be thinking of me. For a tenth of a second our eyes held each other’s, maybe even less than a tenth of a second, and I can’t forget her eyes. For three and a half years I’ve had to think about them and haven’t been able to forget them. Only a tenth of a second or less, and I don’t know her name, I don’t know a thing about her, her eyes are all I know, very gentle, almost pale, sad eyes the color of sand dark with rain; unhappy eyes, much that was animal in them and all that was human, and never, never forgotten, not for a single day in three and a half years, and I don’t know her name, I don’t know where she lives. Three and a half years! I don’t know whether she was tall or short, I didn’t even see her hands. If I had at least seen her hands! Only her face, and not even that clearly; dark hair, maybe black, maybe brown, a slender, long face, not pretty, not smooth, but the eyes, almost slanting, like dark sand, full of sorrow, and those eyes belong to me, only to me, and those eyes rested on me and smiled for a tenth of a second.… There was just a wall and beyond that a house, and on the wall rested two elbows, and between those elbows rested that face, rested those eyes in some French hamlet near Amiens; beneath the scorching summer sky burned gray by the heat. And there was a country road ahead of me running uphill between scrawny trees, and on the right was a
wall running alongside, and behind us lay Amiens steaming as if in a cauldron; smoke hung over the town, and the murky smoke of battle smoldering like a thunderstorm; on the left motorbikes drove by with hysterical officers, tanks rumbled past on their broad tracks and showered us with dust, and somewhere up front cannon were roaring. The road going uphill suddenly made me feel giddy, it tilted before my eyes, and the wall charging madly up the hill beside the road suddenly tipped over, it simply tipped over, and I fell over with the wall, as if my life were the life of the wall. The whole world turned upside down, and all I saw of it was a plane crashing, but the plane didn’t crash from above downward, from sky to ground, it crashed from ground to sky, and now I saw that the sky was the ground, I was lying on the gray-blue pitilessly hot surface of the sky. Then someone tipped brandy over my face, rubbed me, tipped some brandy down my throat, and I could raise my eyes and above me I saw the wall, that wall, that wall made of bricks with gaps in between, and on that wall rested two pointed elbows, and between the elbows I saw those eyes for a tenth of a second. Just at that moment the lieutenant shouted: “Keep going! Keep going! Get up!” And someone grabbed me by the collar and thrust me into the road, and the road pulled me away, and once again I was crammed into the column and couldn’t turn around, couldn’t even turn around.…