The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (11 page)

My memory told me all this had happened, and that I was now lying on this pillow, in this room, beside this girl, without being able to hear her breath; she sleeps as lightly as a child. My God, was my brain all that was left of me?

Often the pitch-black waters would seem to stand still, and hope would stir in me that I was going to wake up, feel my legs, hear again, smell, and not merely think; and even this modest hope was a lot, for it would gradually subside, the pitch-black waters would start eddying again, repossess my helpless corpse, and let it drift, timelessly, in total isolation.

My memory also told me that the night could not last forever. Day had to come some time. And it told me that I could drink, kiss, and weep, even pray, although you can’t pray just with your brain. While I knew that I was awake, was lying awake in a Hungarian girl’s bed, on her soft pillow in a dark, dark night, while I knew all this, I could not help also believing that I was dead …

It was like a dawn that comes very gently and slowly, so indescribably slowly as to be barely perceptible. First you think you’re mistaken; when you’re standing in a foxhole on a dark night you can’t believe that that’s really the dawn; that soft, soft pale strip beyond the invisible horizon; you think you must be mistaken, your tired eyes are oversensitive and are probably reflecting something from some secret reserves of light. But it actually is the dawn, growing stronger now. It actually is getting light, lighter, daylight is growing stronger, the gray patch out
there beyond the horizon is slowly spreading, and now you know for certain: day has come.

I suddenly realized I was cold; my feet had slipped out from under the blanket, bare and cold, and the sense of chill was real. I sighed deeply, could feel my own breath as it touched my chin; I leaned over, groped for the blanket, covered my feet. I had hands again, I had feet again, and I could feel my own breath.

Then I reached down over the precipice to my left, fished up my trousers from the floor, and heard the sound of the matchbox in the pocket.

“Don’t turn on the light, please,” said her voice next to me now, and she sighed too.

“Cigarette?” I whispered.

“Yes,” she said.

In the light of the match she was all yellow. A dark yellow mouth, round, black, anxious eyes, skin like fine, soft, yellow sand, and hair like dark honey.

It was hard to talk, to find something to say. We could both hear time trickling away, a wonderful dark flowing sound that swallowed up the seconds.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked all of a sudden. It was as if she had fired a shot, quietly and with such perfect accuracy that a dam burst inside me, and before I had time to take another look at her face in the light of the glowing cigarette tips I found myself speaking. “I was just thinking about who will be lying in this room seventy years from now, who will be sitting or lying on these six square feet of space, and how much he will know about you and me. Nothing,” I went on, “he’ll only know there was a war.”

We each threw our cigarette ends onto the floor to the left of the bed; they fell soundlessly onto my trousers. I shook them off, and the two little glimmering dots lay side by side.

“And then I was thinking who had been here seventy years ago, or what. Maybe there was a field, maybe corn or onions grew here, six feet over my head, with the wind blowing across, and every morning this sad dawn came up over the horizon of the
puszta
. Or maybe there was already a house belonging to someone.”

“Yes,” she said softly, “seventy years ago there was a house here.”

I was silent.

“Yes,” she said, “I think it was seventy years ago that my grandfather built this house. That’s when they must have put the railroad through here. He worked for the railroad and built this little house with his savings. And then he went to war, ages ago, you know, in 1914, and he was killed in Russia. And then there was my father; he had some land and also worked for the railroad. He died during this war.”

“Killed?”

“No, he died. My mother had died before. And now my brother lives here with his wife and children. And seventy years from now my brother’s great-grandsons will be living here.”

“Maybe so,” I said, “but they’ll know nothing about you and me.”

“No, not a soul will ever know that you were here with me.”

I took hold of her small hand—it was soft, so soft—and held it close to my face.

In the square patch of window a dark-gray darkness showed now, lighter than the blackness of the night.

I suddenly felt her moving past me, without touching me, and I could hear the light tread of her bare feet on the floor; then I heard her dressing. Her movements and the sounds were so light; only when she reached behind her to do up the buttons of her blouse did I hear her breath come more strongly.

“You’d better get dressed,” she said.

“Let me just lie here,” I said.

“I don’t want to put on the light.”

“Don’t put on the light, let me just lie here.”

“But you must have something to eat before you go.”

“I’m not going.”

I could hear her pause as she put on her shoes and knew she was staring in astonishment into the darkness where I was lying.

“I see” was all she said, softly, and I couldn’t tell whether she was surprised or alarmed.

When I turned my head to one side I could see her figure outlined in the dark-gray dawn light. She moved very quietly about the room, found kindling and paper, and took the box of matches from my trouser pocket.

These sounds reached me almost like the thin, anxious cries of a person standing on a riverbank and calling out to someone who is
being driven by the current into a great body of water; and I knew then that if I did not get up, did not decide within the next minute or so to leave this gently heaving ship of isolation, I would die in this bed as if paralyzed, or be shot to death here on this pillow by the tireless myrmidons whose eyes miss nothing.

While I listened to her humming as she stood there by the stove gazing at the fire, its warm light growing with quiet wingbeats, I felt divided from her by more than a world. There she stood, somewhere on the periphery of my life, quietly humming and enjoying the growing fire; I understood all that, I could see it, smell the singeing of scorched paper, and yet nowhere could she have been further removed from me.

“Please get up, will you?” said the girl from across the room. “You must leave now.” I heard her put a saucepan on the fire and begin to stir; it was a soothing sound, the gentle scraping of the wooden spoon, and the smell of browning flour filled the room.

I could see everything now. The room was very small. I was lying on a low wooden bed; next to it was a closet, brown, quite plain, that took up the whole wall as far as the door. Somewhere behind me there must be a table, chairs, and the little stove by the window. It was very quiet, and the early light still so opaque that it lay like shadows in the room.

“Please,” she said in a low voice, “I have to go now.”

“You have to go?”

“Yes, I have to go to work, and first you must leave, with me.”

“Work?” I asked. “Why?”

“What a thing to ask!”

“But where?”

“On the railroad tracks.”

“Railroad tracks?” I asked. “What do you do there?”

“We shovel stones and gravel so that nothing will happen to the trains.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to the trains,” I said. “Where do you work? Toward Nagyvárad?”

“No, toward Szeged.”

“That’s good.”

“Why?”

“Because then I won’t have to pass you in the train.”

She laughed softly. “So you’re going to get up after all.”

“Yes,” I said. I shut my eyes again and let myself drop back into that swaying void whose breath was without smell and without trace, whose gentle rippling touched me like a quiet, barely perceptible waft of air; then I opened my eyes with a sigh and reached for my trousers, now lying neatly beside the bed on a chair.

“Yes,” I repeated, and got out of bed.

She stood with her back to me while I went through the familiar motions, drew on my trousers, did up my shoes, and pulled on my gray tunic.

I stood there for a while, saying nothing, my cigarette cold between my lips, looking at her figure, small and slight and now outlined clearly against the window. Her hair was beautiful, soft as a quiet flame.

She turned round and smiled. “What are you thinking about now?” she asked.

For the first time I looked into her face. It was so simple that I could not take it in: round eyes, in which fear was fear, joy was joy.

“What are you thinking about now?” she asked again, and this time she was not smiling.

“Nothing,” I said. “I can’t think at all. I must go. There’s no escape.”

“Yes,” she said, and nodded. “You must go. There’s no escape.”

“And you must stay.”

“I must stay,” she said.

“You have to shovel stones and gravel so that nothing will happen and the trains can safely go where things do happen.”

“Yes,” she said, “that’s what I have to do.”

We walked down a silent street leading to the station. All streets lead to stations, and from stations you go off to war. We stepped aside into a doorway and kissed, and I could feel, as my hands lay on her shoulders, I could feel as I stood there that she was mine. And she walked away with drooping shoulders without once looking round at me.

She is all alone in this town, and although my way lies along the same street, to the station, I cannot go with her. I must wait till she has disappeared round that corner, beyond the last tree in this little avenue now lying remorselessly in full daylight. I must wait, I can only follow her at a distance, and I shall never see her again. I have to catch that train, go off to that war …

I have no pack now as I walk to the station; all I have is my hands in my pockets and my last cigarette between my lips, and that I shall soon spit out. But it is easier to be carrying nothing when you are once more walking slowly but unsteadily toward the edge of an abyss over which, at a given second, you are going to plunge, down to where we shall meet again …

And it was comforting when the train pulled in on time, cheerfully puffing steam between tall heads of corn and pungent tomato plants.

The burning pain in my head let me pass smoothly into the reality of time and space from a dream in which dark figures in gray-green coats had been pounding my skull with hard fists. I was lying in a low room in a farmhouse, and the ceiling seemed to be sinking down on me out of the green dimness like the lid of a tomb. The few traces of light that made the room barely discernible were green: a soft, yellow-frosted green with a black door sharply outlined by a bright band of light, a steadily deepening green that became the color of old moss in the shadows above my face.

I awoke fully as a sudden, strangling nausea made me jerk upright, lean over, and vomit onto the invisible floor. The contents of my stomach seemed to drop into unplumbed depths, a bottomless well, before eventually penetrating my senses as liquid splashing on wood. I vomited again, bent painfully over the edge of the stretcher, and as I leaned back in relief the connection with the past became so clear that I at once remembered a roll of lemon drops, left over from last night’s rations, that must still be in one of my pockets. My grimy fingers groped around in my greatcoat pockets, let a few loose cartridges fall clattering into the green abyss, and turned over every item—a pack of cigarettes, pipe, matches, handkerchief, a crumpled letter—and when I couldn’t find what I was looking for in my coat pockets, I undid my belt, the buckle clanking as it struck the iron stretcher bar. I found the roll at last in one of my trouser pockets, ripped off the paper, and stuck one of the tart-flavored drops into my mouth.

At certain moments, when the pain flooded every level of my consciousness, relationships between time, space, and events would become confused again: the abyss on either side seemed to fall still further away, and the stretcher I was suspended on felt like a towering pedestal rising closer and closer toward the green ceiling. There were moments when I even thought I was dead, relegated to an agonizing limbo of uncertainty,
and the door—outlined by its bright band—was like a gateway to light and enlightenment that some kindly hand must surely open; for at such moments I lay motionless as a statue, dead, and the only living thing was the burning pain spreading out from the wound in my head and associated with a sickening, all-pervading nausea.

Then the pain would ebb away again, as if someone were loosening a vise, and reality would become less brutal: the various shades of green were balm to my tormented eyes, the absolute silence soothing to my racked ears, and memory unwound within me like a roll of film in which I played no part. Everything seemed to lie in an infinitely remote past, whereas in fact not more than an hour could have gone by.

I tried to revive memories from my childhood, days spent in deserted parks instead of school, and these experiences seemed closer, and to involve me more directly, than what had happened an hour ago, although the pain in my head derived from these recent events and should have made me feel otherwise.

What had happened an hour ago I was now able to see very clearly, but distantly, as if I were looking from the edge of our globe into another world divided from ours by a vast abyss of glassy clarity. There I saw someone, who must be me, creeping over churned earth in nocturnal darkness, the lonely silhouette at intervals starkly illuminated by a distant tracer bullet. I watched this stranger, who must be me, struggling on visibly sore feet over the broken ground, often on all fours, then on his feet again, then back on all fours, up on his feet again, and finally heading for a dark valley where a group of similar dark figures stood gathered round a vehicle. In this spectral corner of the globe, where all was anguish and darkness, the stranger mutely took his place in a line of men whose mugs were being filled from metal cauldrons with coffee or soup by someone they did not know, had never seen, someone hidden by dense shadows, wordlessly ladling; the owner of a scared voice, also invisible, doled out bread, cigarettes, sausage, and candies into the waiting hands. And suddenly this mute, somber spectacle on the valley floor was luridly lit up by a red flame followed by screams, whimpering, and the terrified neighing of a wounded horse; more dusky red flames kept shooting up out of the ground, stench and noise filled the air; then the horse screamed—I heard it pull away and dash off, dragging
the clattering field kitchen—and a fresh burst of fierce fire covered the figure that must be me.