The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (10 page)

On my left was a small, squat cottage, the kind workmen build in their spare time; I swayed, stumbled, toward it. Passing through a pitiful little gate with a leafless briar rose growing above it, I saw the number, and knew I had come to the right house.

The faded green shutters, their paint long washed away by the rain, were firmly closed, as if glued tight; the low roof—I could reach the gutter with my hand—had been patched with rusty corrugated sheets. The silence was absolute: it was the hour when twilight pauses for breath before welling up, gray and inexorable, over the edge of the horizon. I hesitated for a moment or two at the front door, wishing I had died in ’45 when … instead of standing here about to enter this house. Just as I was going to raise my hand to knock, I heard a cooing sound, a woman’s laugh, from inside; that mysterious, indefinable laugh that, depending on our mood, can either soothe us or wring our hearts. Only a woman who was not alone could laugh like that; again I hesitated, and again the burning, rending desire rose up in me to plunge into the gray infinity of the falling twilight that now hung over the broad fields and was beckoning, beckoning me … and with my last ounce of strength I pounded on the door.

First silence, then whispers—and footsteps, soft, slippered footsteps; the door opened, and I saw a fair, pink-cheeked woman who immediately put me in mind of that kind of indescribable radiance that illumines the farthest corners of a shadowy Rembrandt. Golden-red she glowed like a lamp before my eyes in this eternity of gray and black.

With a low cry she stepped back, holding the door open with trembling hands, but when I had taken off my army cap and said, hoarsely, “Good evening,” the rigid lines of fear slackened in that strangely shapeless face, and she smiled uneasily and said, “Yes.” In the background a muscular male figure loomed up and melted into the obscurity of the narrow passage. “I’d like to see Frau Brink,” I said in a low voice. “Yes,” the woman repeated tonelessly, and nervously pushed open a door. The male figure disappeared in the gloom. I entered a small room, crammed with shabby furniture, where the odor of bad food and excellent cigars seemed to have settled permanently. Her white hand went up to the switch: now that the light fell on her she seemed pale and amorphous, almost corpselike, only her fair, reddish hair was alive and warm. Her hands still trembling, she clutched her dark-red dress to her heavy
breasts although it was closely buttoned—almost as if she were afraid I might stab her. The look in her watery blue eyes was wary, alarmed, as if, certain that some terrible sentence was awaiting her, she were facing a judge. Even the cheap sentimental prints seemed to have been stuck on the walls like indictments.

“Don’t be alarmed,” I said, my voice tense, and instantly I knew that was the worst way I could possibly have chosen to begin, but before I could go on she said, in a strangely composed voice: “I know all about it, he’s dead … dead.” I could only nod. I reached into my pocket to hand over his few belongings, but in the passage a furious voice shouted “Gitta!” She looked at me in despair, then flung open the door and called out shrilly, “For God’s sake, can’t you wait five minutes?” and banged the door shut again, and I could picture the man slinking off into a corner. Her eyes looked up defiantly, almost triumphantly, into mine.

I slowly placed the wedding ring, the watch, and the paybook with the well-thumbed photographs on the green plush tablecloth. Suddenly she started to sob, wild, terrible cries like an animal’s. The outlines of her face dissolved, became soft and shapeless like a slug, and shining teardrops gushed out between her short fleshy fingers. She collapsed onto the sofa, leaning on the table with her right hand while with her left she fingered the pathetic little objects. Memory seemed to be lacerating her with a thousand swords. I knew then that the war would never be over, never, as long as somewhere a wound it had inflicted was still bleeding.

I threw aside everything—disgust, fear, and desolation—like a contemptible burden and placed my hand on the plump, heaving shoulder, and as she turned her astonished face toward me I saw for the first time a resemblance to that photo of a pretty, smiling girl that I had had to look at so many hundreds of times, in ’45, when …

“Where was it—please sit down—on the Russian front?” I could see she was liable to burst into tears again at any moment.

“No, in the West, in the prisoner-of-war camp—there were more than a hundred thousand of us …”

“And when?” Her gaze was wide and alert and extraordinarily alive, her whole face tense and young—as if her life depended on my reply. “In July ’45,” I said quietly.

She seemed to reflect for a moment, then she smiled—a pure and innocent smile, and I guessed why she was smiling.

Suddenly I felt as if the house were threatening to collapse about my ears, and I got up. Without a word she opened the door, she wanted to hold it open for me but I waited obstinately until she had gone ahead; and when she gave me her pudgy little hand she said, with a dry sob, “I knew it, I knew it, when I saw him off—it’s almost three years ago now—when I saw him off at the station,” and then she added almost in a whisper, “Don’t despise me.”

I felt a spasm of pain at these words—good God, surely I didn’t look like a judge? And before she could stop me I had kissed her small, soft hand: it was the first time in my life I had ever kissed a woman’s hand.

Outside darkness had fallen and, as if still under the spell of fear, I paused for a moment by the closed door. Then I heard her sobbing inside, loud, wild sobs, she was leaning against the front door with only the thickness of the wood between us, and at that moment I did indeed long for the house to collapse about her and bury her.

Then, slowly and very, very carefully—for I was afraid of sinking any moment into an abyss—I groped my way back to the station. Lights were twinkling in the houses of the dead, the tiny place seemed to have grown in all directions. I could even see small lamps beyond the black wall that seemed to be illuminating vast expanses of yard. Dusk had become dense and heavy, foggy, vaporous, and impenetrable.

In the drafty little waiting room there was only an elderly couple standing close together, shivering, in one corner. I waited a long time, my hands in my pockets, my cap pulled down over my ears, for there was a cold draft blowing in from the tracks, and night was falling lower, lower, like an enormous weight.

“If only there were a little more bread, and a bit of tobacco,” muttered the man behind me. And I kept leaning forward to peer along the parallel lines of tracks as they converged in the distance between dim lights.

Suddenly the door was flung open, and the man with the red cap, his face a picture of eager devotion to duty, shouted out, as if he had to make his voice carry across the waiting room of a great railroad station: “Train for Cologne—ninety-five minutes late!”

At that moment I felt as if I had been taken prisoner for the rest of my life.

As I awoke, I was filled with a sense of almost utter isolation; I seemed to be floating in darkness on sluggish waters, borne along by aimless currents. Like a corpse that is finally washed up by the waves to the pitiless surface, I eddied this way and that, gently swaying in a dark void. I could not feel my limbs, they had ceased to be a part of me, and my senses no longer functioned. There was nothing to see, nothing to hear, no smell to cling to; only the soft touch of the pillow under my head linked me with reality, my head was the only thing I was conscious of. My thoughts were crystal-clear, barely dimmed by the racking headache that comes from bad wine.

Not even her breath was audible; she slept as lightly as a child, and yet I knew she must be lying beside me. There would have been no point in reaching out my hands to grope for her face or her soft hair, I had no hands. Memory was but a memory of the mind, a bloodless structure that had left no trace on my body.

This was how I had often felt as I walked along the brink of reality with the assurance of the drunk making his way beside the narrow edge of a precipice, lurching with an unaccountable sense of balance toward a goal whose splendor is written on his mouth. I had walked along avenues lit only by sparse gray lamps, leaden lamps that seemed only to suggest reality the better to be able to deny it. With unseeing eyes I had submerged myself in somber streets crowded with people, knowing that I was alone, alone.

Alone with my head, and not even my whole head; nose, eyes, and ears were dead. Alone with only a brain that was straining to recapture memory, as a child builds apparently meaningless objects out of apparently meaningless sticks.

She must be lying beside me, although I had no physical consciousness of her.

The previous day I had left the train that continued south toward the Balkans as far as Athens while I had to change at this little station and wait for a train that was to take me closer to the Carpathian passes. As I stumbled across the platform, uncertain even of the name of the station, a drunken soldier came reeling toward me, a lone figure in his gray uniform among the Hungarians in their colored civilian clothes. He was shouting insults that burned themselves into my brain like the slap in the face whose stinging pain one remembers all one’s life.

“Bunch of whores!” he shouted. “Swine, trash—I’m sick of the whole pack!” He was shouting all this into the very faces of the foolishly smiling Hungarians, while, carrying his heavy pack, he headed for the train I had just left.

Immediately a sinister steel-helmeted head called out from a train window, “Hey, you! You there!” The drunk drew his pistol, aimed at the steel helmet; people screamed. I made a dash for the soldier, put my arms around him, removed his weapon and hid it, keeping a firm grip on his flailing arms. The steel helmet shouted, people shouted, the drunk shouted, but the train moved off, and in most cases a moving train renders even a steel helmet powerless. I let go of the drunk, gave him back his pistol, and steered the dazed man to the exit.

The little place had a desolate look. The bystanders had quickly dispersed; the station square was empty. A tired and dirty railroad employee directed us to a tiny bar beneath some low trees on the other side of the dusty square.

We put down our packs, and I ordered wine, that bad wine which was responsible for my present misery. The soldier sat there mute and angry. I offered him cigarettes, we smoked, and I had a good look at him: he was wearing the usual decorations, he was young, about my age, his fair hair hanging loosely over a flat, broad forehead into dark eyes.

“The point is, chum,” he said suddenly, “I’m sick of the whole business, see?”

I nodded.

“Sick to death of it, see? I’m getting out.”

I looked at him.

“That’s right,” he said soberly, “I’m getting out, I’m heading for the puszta. I can handle horses, make a decent soup if I have to, they can kiss my ass for all I care. Want to come along?”

I shook my head.

“Scared, eh?… No?… Okay, anyway I’m getting out. So long.”

He got up, left his pack on the floor, put some money on the table, nodded to me again, and went out.

I waited a long time. I didn’t believe he had really quit, was really heading for the
puszta
. I kept an eye on his pack and waited, drank the bad wine, tried without success to strike up a conversation with the landlord, and stared at the square, across which, from time to time, wreathed in clouds of dust, dashed a cart drawn by thin horses.

After a while I had a steak, went on drinking the bad wine, and smoked cigars. The light was beginning to fade, now and then a cloud of dust would be wafted into the room through the open door; the landlord yawned or chatted with Hungarians as they drank their wine.

Darkness was coming on quickly; I shall never know all the things I was thinking about as I sat there and waited, drank wine, ate steak, watched the fat landlord, stared at the square, and puffed cigars …

My brain reproduced all this quite neutrally, spewing it out while I floated giddily around on those dark waters, in that hourless night, in a house I did not know, in a nameless street, beside a girl whose face I had never seen properly …

Later on I had hurried across to the station, found my train gone and the next one not due till the morning. I had paid my bill, left my pack lying beside the other one, and staggered out into the twilight of the little town. Gray, dark gray, flooded in on me from all sides, and only the sparse lamps gave the faces of passersby the look of living people.

Somewhere I drank a better wine, looked forlornly into the unsmiling face of a woman behind the bar, smelled something like vinegar through a kitchen door, paid, and disappeared again into the dusk.

This life, I thought, is not my life. I have to behave as if this were my life, but I’m no good at it. It was quite dark by now, and the mild sky of a summer evening hung over the town. Somewhere the war was going on, invisible, inaudible in these silent streets where the low houses slept beside low trees; somewhere in this absolute silence the war was going on. I was alone in this town, these people were not my people; these little trees had been unpacked from a box of toys and glued onto these soft, gray sidewalks, with the sky hovering overhead like a soundless dirigible that was about to crash …

Somewhere under a tree there was a face, faintly lit from within. Sad eyes under soft hair that must be light brown although it looked gray in the night; a pale skin with a round mouth that must be red although it too looked gray in the night.

“Come along,” I said to the face.

I took hold of her arm, a human arm; the palms of our hands clung together; our fingers met and interlocked as we walked along in this unknown town and turned into an unknown street.

“Don’t turn the light on,” I said as we entered the room I was now lying in, floating unattached in the darkness.

I had felt a weeping face in the dark and plunged into abysses, down into abysses the way you tumble down a staircase, a dizzying staircase of velvet; on and on I plunged, down one abyss after another …