The Train Was On Time (15 page)

More Polish twittering. Olina smiled at him over her shoulder: “When do you have to leave?”

“At four.”

She closed the door, without locking it, came back, and said: “At four the general’s car is coming to pick me up.”

Her trembling hands had spilled wine over the cheese, so she cleared it away, gathered up the soiled tablecloth, and rearranged the things. The cigar had not gone out, thought Andreas, who was watching her. The world had nearly come to an end, but the cigar had not gone out, and her hands were quieter than ever. “Coming?”

Yes, he sat down opposite her, laid aside the cigar, and for a few minutes they looked past one another, in silence and almost blushing, because they were both terribly ashamed at the knowledge that they were praying, that they were both praying, here in this brothel, on this couch.…

“It’s midnight now,” she said as they began eating. It’s Sunday now, thought Andreas, Sunday, and he abruptly set down his glass and the cookie he had just begun; a frightful
cramp paralyzed his jaws and hands and seemed even to blind his eyes; I don’t want to die, he thought and, without realizing it, he stammered, like a weeping child: “I … I don’t want to die.”

I must be mad to think I can smell paint so vividly … I was barely seven at the time they painted the garden fence: it was the first day of school holidays, and Uncle Hans was away, it had rained in the night, and now the sun was shining in that moist garden … it was so wonderful … so beautiful, and as I lay in bed I could distinctly smell the garden and the paint, for the painters had already started painting the fence green … and I was allowed to stay in bed a while … because school was out, Uncle Hans was away, and I was to get hot chocolate for breakfast, Aunt Marianne had promised me the night before because she had just opened a new account … whenever we opened a new account, a brand-new one, we began by buying something special. And that paint, I can smell it as plainly as anything, but I must be mad … there can’t possibly be a smell of green paint here. That pale face across from me, that’s Olina, a Polish prostitute and spy … nothing here in this room can smell so cruelly of paint and conjure up that day in my childhood so vividly. “I don’t want to die,” stammered his mouth. “I don’t want to leave all this behind … no one can force me to get onto that train going to … Stryy, no one on earth. My God, maybe it would be a mercy if I did lose my mind. But don’t let me lose it! No, no! Even though it hurts like hell to smell that green paint now, let me rather savor this pain than go mad … and Aunt Marianne’s voice telling me I can stay in bed a while … since Uncle Hans is away.…”

“What’s that?” he asked, startled. Olina had risen, without his noticing it; she was sitting at the piano, and her lips were quivering in her pale face.

“Rain,” she said softly, and it seemed to cost her an unspeakable effort to open her mouth, she hardly had the strength to nod toward the window.

Yes, that soft rushing sound that roused him with the power of a sudden burst of organ music … that was rain … it was raining in the brothel garden … and on the treetops where he had seen the sun for the last time. “No!” he cried as Olina touched the keys, “no,” but then he felt the tears, and he knew he had never cried before in his life … these tears were life, a raging torrent formed from countless streams … all flowing together and welling up into one agonizing outburst … the green paint that smelled of holidays … and the terrible corpse of Uncle Hans laid out in its coffin in the study, shrouded in the heavy air of candles … many, many evenings with Paul and the hours of exquisite torment spent trying to play the piano … school and war, war … war, and the unknown face he had desired, had … and in that blinding wet torrent there floated, like a quivering disk, pale and agonizing, the sole reality: Olina’s face.

All this because of a few bars of Schubert, making it possible for me to cry as I have never cried in my life, to cry as maybe I only cried when I was born, when that dazzling light threatened to cut me in two.… Suddenly a chord struck his ear, a chord that shook him to the depths of his being, it was Bach, yet she had never been able to play Bach.…

It was like a tower that was spiraling upward from within, piling level upon level. The tower grew and pulled him with it, as if it had been hurled up from the bowels of the earth by a gushing spring that was fiercely shooting its way past the gloom of centuries into the light, into the light. An aching happiness filled him as, against his will yet knowingly and consciously, he was borne upward on level after level of that pure, upthrusting tower; as if borne on a cloud of fantasy, wreathed in what seemed a weightless, poignant felicity, he was yet made to experience all the effort and all the pain of the climber; this was spirit, this was clarity, little remained of human aberration; a fantastically clean, clear playing of compelling force. It was Bach, yet she had never been able to play Bach … perhaps
she wasn’t playing at all … perhaps it was the angels … the angels of clarity, singing in towers each more ethereal and radiant than the last … light, light, O God … that light.…

“Stop!” he cried out, and Olina’s hands recoiled from the keys as if his voice had torn them away.…

He rubbed his aching forehead, and he saw that the girl sitting there in the soft lamplight was not only startled by his voice: she was exhausted, she was weary, infinitely weary, the towers she had had to climb with her frail hands had been unimaginably high. She was just tired, the corners of her mouth twitched like those of a child that is too tired even to cry; her hair had loosened … she was pale, and deep shadows encircled her eyes.

Andreas moved toward her, took her in his arms, and laid her on the sofa; she closed her eyes and sighed; gently, very gently she shook her head as if to say: just let me rest … all I want is to rest a little.… Peace, and it was good to see her fall asleep; her face sank to one side.

Andreas rested his head in his hands on the little table and was also aware of an infinite weariness. It’s Sunday, he thought, one o’clock in the morning, three more hours to go, and I must not sleep, I will not sleep, I shall not sleep; and he looked at her ardently and tenderly. That pure, gentle, small, wan girlish face, now faintly smiling in the bliss of sleep. I must not sleep, thought Andreas, yet he could feel his weariness bearing relentlessly down on him. I must not sleep. God, don’t let me fall asleep, let me look at her face.… I needed to come to this brothel in Lvov, I needed to come here to find out that there is such a thing as love without desire, the way I love Olina … I must not fall asleep, I must look at that mouth … that forehead and those exhausted, golden, delicate wisps of hair over her face and the dark shadows of indescribable exhaustion around her eyes. She played Bach, to the very limits of human capacity. I must not fall asleep … it’s cold … the cruel hostility
of the morning is already waiting behind the dark curtains of the night. It’s cold, and I have nothing to cover her with … I’ve flogged my coat, and we made a mess of the tablecloth … it’s lying around somewhere stained with wine. My tunic, I could put my tunic over her … I could cover the open neck of her dress with my tunic, but even as he thought this he simply felt too tired to get up and take off his tunic … I can’t even lift my arm, and I must not fall asleep; I’ve still got so many things to do, so many things to do. Just let me rest here a bit with my arms on the table, then I’ll get up and put my tunic over her, and I’ll pray, pray, kneel by this couch that has seen so many sins, kneel by that pure face from which I had to learn that there is such a thing as love without desire … I must not fall asleep … no, no, I must not fall asleep.…

His awakening gaze was like a bird that suddenly dies high up in the air in flight and plunges, plunges into the infinity of despair; but Olina’s smiling eyes caught him as he fell. He had been desperately afraid that it was too late … too late to hurry to the appointed place. Too late to hurry to the only rendezvous that mattered. Her smiling gaze caught him, and she answered the unspoken yet anguished question, saying softly:

“It’s three-thirty … don’t worry!” And only now did he feel her light hand resting on his head.

Her face lay on the same level as his, and he hardly needed to move his head to kiss her. It’s a pity, he thought, that I don’t desire her, a pity that it’s no sacrifice for me not to desire her, no sacrifice not to kiss her and not to long to sink down into that seemingly sullied womb.…

And he touched her lips with his, and there was nothing. They exchanged smiles of amazement. There was nothing. It was like an ineffectual bullet bouncing off armor of which they themselves were not aware.

“Come on,” she said softly, “I’d better see you get something for your feet, hadn’t I?”

“No,” said Andreas, “don’t leave me, you mustn’t leave me for a single second. Never mind the shoes. I can just as well die in my socks, lots of men have died in their socks. Fled in panic when they were suddenly confronted by the Russians, and died wounded in the back, facing Germany, wounded in the back, the worst disgrace that could befall the Spartans. Many died like that, never mind the shoes, I’m so tired.…”

“No,” she said, glancing at her watch. “I could have given up my watch, and you would have kept your boots. One always thinks one has no more to give, and I honestly had forgotten my watch. I’ll trade my watch for your boots, we won’t be needing it any more … or anything else.”

“Or anything else,” he repeated under his breath, and he raised his eyes and looked around the room, and for the first time he saw how pitiful it was, the ancient wallpaper and meager furniture: old armchairs over there by the window, and a dingy couch.

“Yes,” Olina murmured, “I’m going to get you away. Don’t look so scared!” She smiled, her eyes close to his white, tired face. “That car of the general’s is a gift from heaven. Just trust me and believe me: no matter where I take you, it will be life. Do you believe me?” Andreas nodded in bewilderment, and she repeated, her face close to his as if in solemn entreaty: “No matter where I take you, it will be life. Trust me!” She clasped his head. “There are tiny little places in the Carpathians where no one will ever find us. A few houses, a little chapel, no partisans even. I used to go to one, I would try to say a few prayers and play on the priest’s old baby grand. D’you hear?” She sought his eyes, but his gaze was still roaming the soiled wallpaper against which bottles had been smashed and sticky fingers had been wiped. “We’ll have music, d’you hear?”

“Yes,” he groaned. “But the others, those other two. I can’t leave them now. It’s impossible.”

“That’s out!”

“And the driver,” he asked, “what did you intend doing with the driver?” They stood face to face, and there was something like hostility between their eyes. Olina tried to smile. “Starting today,” she said softly, “starting today I’m not going to hand over any more innocent men to the executioner. You must trust me! It wouldn’t have been too difficult just with you. Simply have the driver stop somewhere, and then we’d run away … disappear! Free, just disappear! But with your two friends it won’t work.”

“All right, then you’ll have to leave me. No,” he raised his arm to silence her. “I’m simply telling you there’s to be no bargaining. It’s either—or. You must understand, you must,” he said, looking deep into her serious eyes, “because you loved them, some of them, didn’t you? You must understand.”

Slowly, heavily, Olina’s head drooped. Andreas did not realize this was a nod until she said: “All right, I’ll try.…”

While Olina, her hand on the door, waited for him, he cast one more look around that dirty little Polish bar, then followed her out into the ill-lit corridor. But the room, the bar, was palatial compared with that corridor in the early morning. That mocking, chill, dingy half-light in a brothel corridor at four in the morning. Those doors, like doors in a barracks, all alike. All equally shabby. And that dreary, dreary squalor.

“In here,” said Olina. She pushed open one of the doors and there was her room: scantily furnished with the necessities of her trade; a bed, a small table and two chairs, and a washbasin on a spindly, three-legged stand, next to the stand a pitcher, and a small closet against the wall. Only the bare necessities, like in a barracks.…

It was all so unreal, sitting on the bed and watching Olina wash her hands, take her shoes out of the closet, remove her red slippers, and put on her shoes. Oh yes, there was a mirror too, for her to refurbish her beauty. Those traces of tears must
be wiped away and fresh powder put on, there being nothing ghastlier than a red-eyed whore. Lipstick and eyebrow pencil had to be reapplied, nails cleaned, and all this was carried out as deftly as a soldier preparing for the alert.

“You must trust me,” she said in a chatty, matter-of-fact tone. “I’m going to get you away, d’you hear? It won’t be easy if you insist on taking along the other two, but it can be done. A lot can be done.…”

Don’t let me go out of my mind, Andreas prayed, don’t let me go out of my mind in this brutal attempt to grasp reality. The whole thing is impossible, this room in a brothel, shabby and faded in the gray dawn, full of revolting smells, and that girl over there by the mirror, crooning softly, crooning to me, while her fingers skillfully touch up the red on her lips. This is impossible, and this tired heart of mine that wishes for nothing, and these limp senses of mine that desire nothing, neither to smoke nor eat nor drink, and my soul that is deprived of all longing and wants only to sleep, to sleep.…

Maybe I’m already dead. Who can grasp all this, these bedclothes I automatically pushed aside, the way one always does if one has to sit down on a bed, these sheets that are not dirty and yet not clean, these horribly mysterious sheets, not dirty and not clean … and that girl over there by the mirror, busy coloring her eyebrows, black, fine-drawn eyebrows on a pale forehead.

“A-hunting and fishing we will go, like in the good old days! D’you know that one?” asked Olina with a smile. “It’s a German poem. ‘Archibald Douglas.’ It’s about a man who was exiled from his native land. And we Poles, we have been exiled
into
our native land, into the midst of one’s native land; no one knows what that means. Born 1920. A-hunting and fishing we will go, like in the good old days. Listen!” She was actually crooning that old ballad, and it seemed to Andreas that now
the limit had been reached, a gray cold morning in a Polish brothel, and a ballad, set to music by Löwe, being crooned for his benefit.…