The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (40 page)

They had been stationed here for three years now, these soldiers, always eight men, doing nothing. They strolled along the river, crossed over in her boat, strolled through the woods as far as Tzenkoshik, came back, crossed the river again, walked past along the bank, then partway down to Tesarzy, and were relieved. They ate well, slept a lot, and had plenty of money, and she often thought that maybe Wenzel Suchan had been taken away, all those years ago, to do nothing in another country—Wenzel, whom she badly needed, who could work and liked
to work. They had most likely taken him away to do nothing in that country called Rumania, to wait around doing nothing until he was killed by a bullet. But these soldiers under her roof didn’t get hit by bullets: as long as they had been here they had only fired their rifles a few times. Each time there was great excitement, and each time it had turned out to be a mistake—usually they had shot at game that was moving in the forest and hadn’t halted when challenged, but even that didn’t happen very often, only four or five times in these three years, and once they had shot at a woman who had come down the river at night from Tzenkoshik and then run through the forest to get a doctor in Tesarzy for her child, they had shot at this woman too, but luckily they hadn’t hit her, and afterward they had helped her into the boat and even rowed her across—and the professor, who hadn’t gone to bed yet and was sitting in the bar reading and writing, the professor had gone with her to Tesarzy. But in these three years they hadn’t found a single partisan. Everybody knew there were none left here now that the Svortchik boys had gone; even in Szarny, where the big railroad bridge was, no partisans were ever seen …

Although she was making money from the war, it was bitter for her to imagine that Wenzel Suchan had probably done nothing in that country called Rumania, that he hadn’t been able to do anything. Most likely that’s what war meant, men doing nothing and going to other countries so no one could see them at it. Anyway, she found it both disgusting and ridiculous to watch these men doing nothing for three years but steal time, and getting well paid to shoot once a year, at night, by mistake, at game or some poor woman who was trying to fetch a doctor for her child; disgusting and ridiculous for these men to have to loaf around while she had so much to do she didn’t know which way to turn. She had to cook, look after the cows and pigs and chickens, and many of the soldiers even paid her to clean their boots, darn their socks, and wash their underclothes; she had so much to do that she had to take on a hired hand again, a man from Tesarzy, for Maria had been doing nothing ever since she got pregnant. She treated this sergeant as if he were her husband: slept in his room, got him his breakfast, kept his clothes clean, and sometimes scolded him.

But one day, after almost exactly three years, a very high-ranking officer turned up, with red stripes down his pants and a gold-braided
collar—she heard later that he was a real general—this high-ranking officer arrived with a few others in a very fast car from Tesarzy. His face was all yellow, he looked sad, and in front of her house he bawled out Sergeant Peter because Peter hadn’t been wearing his belt and pistol when he came out to report—and the officer stood there, furious, and waited. She saw him stamping his foot, his face seemed to shrink and get even yellower, and he barked at another officer standing beside him and saluting with a trembling hand, a gray-haired, tired-looking man of over sixty whom she knew because sometimes he would ride down from Tesarzy on his bicycle and chat in a very nice friendly way with the sergeant and the soldiers in the bar—and then later, wheeling his bicycle and accompanied by the professor, walk slowly back to Tesarzy. At last Peter came out, wearing his belt and pistol, and walked with the men to the river. They crossed over in the boat, walked through the forest, returned, and stood for a long time beside the bridge. Then they went up into the attic, and finally the officers drove off again, and Peter stood outside the house with two soldiers; they raised their arms in salute and stayed that way for a long time, until the car was almost back in Tesarzy. Then Peter went into the house again, furious, threw his cap onto the table, and the only thing he said to Maria was “Looks like they’re going to rebuild the bridge.”

And two days later another vehicle, a truck, came dashing up from Tesarzy, and out of this truck jumped seven young soldiers and a young officer who strode into the house and spent half an hour with the sergeant in his room. Maria tried to join in this conversation, walking right into the room, but the young officer waved her out, and she went in again, and again the young officer impatiently waved her out; she stayed at the top of the stairs, crying, and had to look on while the old soldiers collected their packs and the young ones moved into their rooms. She waited for half an hour, crying, flew into a rage when the professor patted her on the shoulder, and clung shrieking and sobbing to Peter when he finally came out of the room carrying his pack and with a very red face tried to calm her down, to comfort her—she clung to him until he had climbed into the truck. Then, still weeping, she stood on the steps and watched the truck dash off toward Tesarzy. She knew he would never be back, although he had promised her he would …

Feinhals arrived in Berczaba two days before the rebuilding of the bridge began. The tiny hamlet consisted of a tavern and two houses, one of which was abandoned and falling into decay, and when he got out with the others, the whole place was enveloped in the bitter smoke from the potato fires smoldering in the fields. It was quiet and peaceful, nowhere any sign of war …

It was only during the return trip in the red furniture van that he was found to have a splinter in his leg, a glass splinter, as the operation revealed, a minute fragment of a bottle of Tokay, and there had been an odd and embarrassing negotiation because he might have been in line for the silver medal for wounds except that the senior medical officer did not award silver medals for wounds caused by glass splinters, and for a few days the suspicion of self-mutilation hung over him, until Lieutenant Brecht, whom he named as a witness, sent in his report. The wound healed quickly, although he drank a lot of schnapps, and after a month he was sent to some redeployment center that packed him off to Berczaba. He waited downstairs in the tavern until the room Gress had chosen for them became free. He drank some wine, thought about Ilona, and heard the noise in the house made by the men getting ready to leave. The old soldiers were hunting for their belongings; the landlady stood behind the counter dourly taking in the scene, a middle-aged woman, quite pretty, still quite pretty, and in the passageway beyond her another woman was bawling her head off.

Then he heard the woman wailing and sobbing more lustily than ever, and heard the truck take off for the village they had just come from. Gress appeared and took him up to his room. The room was low, the plaster flaking off in places, black beams supported the ceiling, and it smelled stuffy; the air outside was close, and the window gave onto a garden: a grassy plot with old fruit trees, flowerbeds along the sides, stables, and at the end, outside a shed, a boat on blocks, its paint peeling off. It was quiet outside. To the left across the hedge he could see the bridge, rusty iron girders stuck out of the water, and the concrete piers were overgrown with moss. The little river seemed to be some forty or fifty yards wide.

So now he was sharing a room with Gress. He had met him yesterday at the redeployment center and decided not to say one word more than necessary to him. Gress had four decorations on his chest, and he
liked telling tales—never stopped, in fact—about the Polish, Rumanian, French, and Russian girls he claimed to have left behind, all with broken hearts. Feinhals didn’t feel like listening, it was a nuisance as well as a bore, embarrassing too, and Gress seemed to be one of those men who believed people would listen to them because they had decorations on their chest, more decorations than most.

Feinhals himself had only one decoration, a single medal, and he was a born listener because he never said anything, or hardly ever, and asked for no explanations. He was glad to learn that he and Gress were to take turns manning the observation post: this would mean he would be rid of him during the daytime at least … He lay down on the bed the minute Gress announced his intention of breaking the heart of a Slovak girl, any Slovak girl.

He was tired, and every night when he lay down to sleep somewhere, he hoped to dream about Ilona, but he never did. He would recapture every word he had exchanged with her, think about her very hard, but when he fell asleep she did not come. Often he felt, before falling asleep, that he needed only to turn over to feel her arm, but she was not there beside him, she was a long way away, and it was useless to turn over. He was a long time falling asleep because he was thinking so hard about her and imagining the room that had been intended to receive them—and when he did drop off, he slept badly, and in the morning he had forgotten what he had dreamed about. He had not dreamed about Ilona.

He prayed in bed at night too, and thought about the talks he used to have with her before they had to leave; she had invariably blushed, and she seemed embarrassed by his presence in the room, among stuffed animals, rock specimens, maps, and health charts. But maybe it had only embarrassed her to talk about religion—she had always gone fiery red—it seemed to distress her to state her beliefs, and she stated her belief in faith, hope, and charity, and was shocked when he said he couldn’t go to church because the faces and sermons of most priests were more than he could stand. “We have to pray to console God,” she had said …

He never thought she would let herself be kissed, but he had kissed her, and she him, and he knew she would have gone with him to that room he now saw so often in his mind’s eye: none too clean, water still standing in the bluish wash basin, the wide brown bed, and the view
into the neglected orchard where windfalls lay decaying under the trees. He always pictured himself lying in bed with her and talking, but he never dreamed about it …

Next morning the regular routine began. He sat perched up there in the armchair on the wobbly table, in the fusty attic of this house, looking with the field glasses out through the dormer window into the mountains, into the forest, scanning the riverbank and sometimes back toward the hamlet they had driven over from in the truck. He couldn’t find any partisans—maybe the farmers in the fields were partisans, only you couldn’t tell this with field glasses. It was so quiet that it hurt, and he felt as though he had been perched up here for years, and he raised the field glasses, adjusting the screw, and looked out across the forest, past the yellow church spire, into the mountains. The air was very clear, and way up there among craggy rocks he could see a herd of goats; the animals were scattered like tiny white hard-edged cloudlets, very white against that gray, soft-green background, and he could feel himself capturing the silence through the field glasses, and the loneliness too. The animals moved very slowly, very seldom—as if they were being pulled along on short strings. With the field glasses he could see them as he would have donewith the naked eye at two or three miles; they seemed very far away, infinitely far away, silent and lonely, those animals; he could not see the goatherd. It was a shock to put down the glasses and find he could no longer see them, not a trace of them, although he gazed intently beyond the church spire up at the mountain. Not even their whiteness was visible; they must be a long way off. He picked up the glasses again and looked at the white goats, whose loneliness he could feel—but the sound of commands being given down in the garden startled him, and he lowered the glasses, looked first without them into the garden and watched the men drilling. Lieutenant Mück himself was in command. Feinhals lifted the glasses to his eyes, adjusted the lenses, and studied Mück closely; he had known him only two days, but he had already seen that Mück took matters seriously. His fine, dark profile was like a mask, deadly serious, the hands behind his back did not move, and the muscles of the thin neck twitched. Mück did not look well, his complexion was pasty, almost gray, the lips were bloodless and barely moved when they uttered “Left turn,” “Right turn,” and “About turn.” At the moment Feinhals could see
only Mück’s profile, that deadly serious, rigid half of his face, the lips that barely moved, the sorrowful left eye that seemed to be looking not at the drilling soldiers but far away, somewhere—maybe back into the past. Then he looked at Gress: his face was swollen, he looked in some way upset.

When—again without the glasses—he looked down into the garden where the soldiers were doing left turns, right turns, and about turns on that lush, wonderful expanse of grass, he saw a woman hanging out the washing on a line strung between the stables. It must be the daughter who had been crying and carrying on in the passageway yesterday. She looked grave, somber—so somber that she was not pretty but beautiful, a fine-drawn, very dark face with tightly pressed lips. She did not even glance at the four soldiers and the lieutenant.

When he went up to the attic next morning, just before eight, he felt as if he had been there for months, years almost. The silence and loneliness seemed quite natural: the gentle mooing of the cows in the stable and the smell of the potato fires still hanging in the air, a few fires were still smoldering, and when he adjusted the glasses, aiming them at a point far off in the distance in line with the tip of the yellow church spire, all they captured in the lenses was loneliness. Up there it was empty—a gray, soft-green surface dotted with black rocks …

Mück had gone with the four soldiers to the riverbank to practice sighting. The sound of his brief, sad commands came softly across, too faint to disturb the silence—they enhanced it almost; and downstairs in the kitchen the young woman was singing a halting Slovak folk song. The old woman had gone into the field with the hired hand to dig potatoes. Across the street in the other farmhouse it was quiet too. Although he scanned the mountains for quite a time, his eyes saw nothing but silent, lonely expanses, steep rocks, except to the right where a train’s white vapor came puffing out of the forest and quickly drifted apart; through the field glasses the vapor looked like dust settling over the treetops. There was not a sound to be heard except for Mück’s brief commands at the riverbank and the young woman’s haunting song from downstairs …