The Train Was on Time
Page 14
As for the eyes of that unknown French girl with whom Andreas became infatuated, they might infatuate some of us, too, if we could see them; but more likely they would simply reinforce our opinions of his youth and suggestibility. After all, he parts with those eyes rather easily when he meets Olina. But how can I be sure I comprehend what they mean? How can Andreas himself understand them? “Is it such a disgrace, then, to long to know what forehead belonged to those eyes, what mouth and what breast and what hands? Would it have been asking too much to be allowed to know what heart belonged to them …?” (28) Perhaps it would, seeing that they derive from Heinrich Böll, who conceals anguish within cynicism and skepticism within subtlety.
Jung insists that experience and even expertise in the interpretation of dreams does not in the least afford a priori knowledge of what the cigar means in this dream. Andreas’s belated realization that life is beautiful, being banal as well as true, had better not be taken at face value coming from Böll; likewise the almost instant love between him and Olina. So I had better approach the central episode with care.
4
Inside that mostly shuttered brothel, whose madame is portrayed so cruelly and yet which is a house of healing for all three soldiers, and which is yet again to Andreas a place of “artificial darkness,” (78) we soon meet that so-called opera singer, “small and slight, with fine, delicate features” and golden hair (79)—a high-class whore, whose first act is to begin to strip. But this time the customer declines to have intercourse.—Who is she? Not any one thing, evidently.—“She looked wanton in a way, but she could just as easily be innocent” (80)—more Böllian ambiguity!
They first begin to feel a bond when it comes out that both once aspired to be pianists. And at once he experiences an anguish other than his native Being-toward-death. I suppose that his late-blooming now allows him, simply through becoming aware of Olina’s kindred situation, to grieve over the loss of that particular hope which had meant so much to him. As yet he can scarcely feel much for her in and of herself; let’s say that he sees his disappointment in hers. “And I’m glad I’m suffering … because then I hope to be forgiven everything, forgiven for not praying. But where could I kneel? Nowhere on earth could I kneel in peace.” (81) This very Catholic notion that pain can be a penance offered up in atonement adds still another significance to the encounter—which still, of course, has nothing to do with Olina herself except as a figurehead. By the way, I am not implying that Andreas is narcissistic; in fact he is more giving, generous and aware than many of his Feinhals brethren; for instance, he has proven himself capable of the extreme thoughtcrime of praying for the Jews whom his people are murdering. And after all, how could it be otherwise than difficult for Andreas to distinguish Olina from himself? For it next transpires that they were both born in the same month and year. They even both know the poem “Archibald Douglas.”
But then, when he drags her life story out of her, and she becomes resentful at having to expose her sadness to him, he cheers her up “against her will.” (85) Then they begin to have a relationship of sorts. And what kind of relationship? We have just seen that he wants to feel, which is to suffer, because then, perhaps, he will be forgiven for the part which he, as opposed to his times, has played in wasting his life—and perhaps also because to feel is to live. But because the suffering is nearly unbearable, he now wants in equal measure a fantasy. “Maybe I’m dreaming it’s 1943 and I’m sitting here in a Lvov brothel wearing the gray tunic of Hitler’s army; maybe I’m dreaming; maybe I was born the seventeenth century, or the eighteenth, and I’m sitting in my mistress’s drawing room, and she’s playing the harpsichord, just for me …” (90) Upon which, as such dreams tend to do, Andreas’s becomes sentimental. While Olina plays for him, he finds himself believing in “the seventh heaven of love.” (89–90) Could rueful-icy Böll himself possibly believe in that? Part of the achievement of this book is that it makes me, at least for a moment, want to believe in it, not for my sake but for Andreas’s; and all the while Böll reminds me that it is ridiculously false.
And so we arrive at the second of the three mystical visions from which I have quoted at the beginning of the essay. No, it’s not a dream; Olina’s hands are drying his tears—but of course you and I know by know that it is a dream, that he and Olina will soon die; it’s the first nightmare vision which will turn out to be reality. So isn’t this romance nothing but deception? Andreas declines to make love to, or with, this beautiful woman, because “I’ve always only desired” and “here I desire nothing,” (92) but the life-instinct will always out; and of course he does desire something: to live, and with her. Somewhere there may a seventh heaven of love. But doesn’t a surprise grave in a bomb crater seem more likely?
It is around here that the author begins to let us into Olina’s consciousness. “If I tell you,” she says, “it’s as if I’m telling myself, and I can’t keep anything from you any more than I can keep anything from myself!” (92) So he is, very symmetrically and plausibly, her figurehead. But then immediately, in still another of his careful inversions, Böll reminds us of what at least one of the two could hardly forget: that she is a Pole, a victim, and he a German oppressor. Moreover, and this had not occurred to him before now, by informing the Resistance of whatever military matters her clients let slip, she has become a murderess of Germans, and therefore in a way his oppressor.
As a result of this prior political or ideological understanding of hers, which she brings to every bedroom, what she sees in him is precisely what he disbelieves in himself: his innocence. And this vision, which comes only from her, may be the key to what they now begin to feel for each other.
Back to Feinhals: Don’t expect much. Although they tell each other about their childhoods, in a single night they could never know each other as longterm survivors might. Böll might be alluding to this when he has Andreas realize that, having been robbed of the years in which he would have studied the piano, he cannot hope to play perfectly for her. All the same, her belief in his guiltlessness gives him part of the absolution for which he longs, and under the circumstances he can even receive it without unmediated suffering. As for what he gives her, that’s evidently relief from her loneliness, via the one gift which he can offer, his empathy. “If he could only play, he would be back with me again. The first note will give him back to me … He is my brother.” (95–96) And from this moment her empathy likewise begins to enlarge, though less widely and willingly than his. She would rather not save his two brother soldiers—but she tries.
Yes, brother and sister is what these two are. The flavorless kiss defies their single attempt to sexualize the situation, which we would have expected to at least attempt to present itself as romantic passion. The night continues, but sentimentalities about the seventh heaven never return. “I ought to add now: because I love you, and that would be true and it would not be true.” (104) More telling still: “her promise doesn’t attract me” (117)—her promise of life, in which he supposes he disbelieves. In other words, he deludes her with his unenthusiastic compliance and tricks himself by pretending that he doesn’t hope, while the madame, or fate, gets the better of both of them by packing them off to Stryy. So don’t expect much—but here, as always with Böll, something remains. For me the gentle hands of Olina represent the attempts of human beings, however ignorant, ruined and doomed, to love in whichever way they can, thereby enlarging their sympathies and generosities. Then what? Olina is lucky to die quickly, and Andreas may perhaps from the blood spattering down from her hands imbibe another sip of that absolution-through-anguish which his self-loathing demands. And if he doesn’t, well, at least we can say that he tried his best to avoid wasting what little life he had.
The Essential
HEINRICH BÖLL
“His work reaches the highest level of creative originality and stylistic perfection.” —The Daily Telegraph
THE CLOWN
Translated by Leila Vennewitz / Afterword by Scott Esposi
to 978-1-935554-17-2 | $16.95 / $19.95 CAN
“Moving … highly charged … filled with gentleness, high comic spirits, and human sympathy.”—Christian Science Monitor
BILLIARDS AT HALF-PAST NINE
Translated by Patrick Bowles / Afterword by Jessa Crispin 978-1-935554-18-9 | $16.95 / $19.95 CAN
“The claim that Böll is the true successor to Thomas Mann can be defended by his novel Billiards at Half-past Nine.”
—The Scotsman
IRISH JOURNAL
Translated by Leila Vennewitz / Afterword by Hugo Hamilton 978-1-935554-19-6 | $14.95 US / $16.95 CAN
“Irish Journal has a beguiling … charm that perfectly suits the landscape and temperament of its subject.”
—Bill Bryson, The New York Times Book Review
THE SAFETY NET
Translated by Leila Vennewitz / Introduction by Salman Rushdie 978-1-935554-31-8 | $16.95 US / $19.95 CAN
“The strongest response to modern terrorism by a serious novelist; an artful, gripping novel.” —Kirkus Reviews
THE TRAIN WAS ON TIME
Translated by Leila Vennewitz / Afterword by William T. Vollmann 978-1-935554-32-5 | $14.95 / $16.95 CAN
“Böll has feelingly symbolized a guilty Germany doing penance for its sins through suffering and death.” —Time
GROUP PORTRAIT WITH LADY
Translated by Leila Vennewitz 978-1-935554-33-2 | $18.95 / $21.50 CAN
“His most grandly conceived [novel] … the magnum opus which so far crowns his work.” —The Nobel Prize Committee
WHAT’S TO BECOME OF THE BOY? OR, SOMETHING TO DO WITH BOOKS
Translated by Leila Vennewitz / Introduction by Anne Applebaum 978-1-61219-001-3 | $14.95 US / $16.95 CAN
“The depth of Böll’s vision into the human soul can be breathtaking.”
—The Washington Post
COLLECTED STORIES
Translations by Leila Vennewitz, Breon Mitchell, Patrick Bowles 978-1-61219-002-0 | $29.95 US / $34.00 CAN
“This is a most impressive collection, confirming Böll’s standing as one of the best writers of our time. It would form an admirable introduction to his work for those who don’t yet know it. It is the work of affirmation, for it proclaims the values of humanity and the unquenchable vitality of the spirit.” —The Scotsman