The Road Back (7 page)

"Did you know Councillor Pleister was dead?" asks my father.

I shake my head. "When was that?"

"In July—about the twentieth, I think. . . ."

The water is singing in the kettle. I toy with the tassels along the fringe of the tablecloth. So—July, I think to myself—July—we lost thirty-six men during the last five days of July. And I hardly remember the names of three of them now, there were so many more joined them as time went on—"What was it?" I ask, feeling sleepy from the unaccustomed warmth of the room, "H.E. or machine-gun?"

"But he wasn't a soldier, Ernst," protests my father, rather mystified. "He had inflammation of the lung."

"Oh, yes, of course," I say, setting myself upright in my chair again, "I forgot about that."

They recount all the rest that has happened since my last leave. The butcher at the corner was half killed by a mob of hungry women. At one time, the end of August, there had been as much as a whole pound of fish to a family. The dog at Doctor Knott's has been taken away, to be worked up into soap, like as not. Miss Mentrup is going to have a baby. Potatoes are dearer again. Next week, perhaps, one may be able to buy some bones at the slaughter-yard. Aunt Grete's second daughter was married last month— and to a captain, too!

My sister stops short. "But you aren't listening at all, Ernstl" she says in astonishment.

"O yes, yes," I reassure her, and pull myself together, "a captain, quite, she married a captain, you said."

"Yes, just think of it! Such luckl" my sister runs on eagerly, "and her face simply covered with freckles, too! What do you say to that now?"

What should I say?—if a captain stops a shrapnel bullet in the nut, he's a .goner, same as any other sort of man.

They talk on. But I cannot marshal my thoughts, they will keep wandering.

I get up and look out the window. A pair of underpants is dangling on the line. Grey and limp, they flap to and fro in the twilight. The dim, uncertain light in the drying-yard flickers—then suddenly, like a shadow, remote, another scene rises up away beyond it—fluttering linen, a solitary mouth organ in the evening, a march up in the dusk—and scores of dead negroes in faded blue greatcoats, with burst lips and bloody eyes: gas. The scene stands out clearly for a moment, then it wavers and vanishes; the underpants flap through it, the drying-yard is there again, and again behind me I feel the room with my parents, and warmth and security. That is over, I think to myself with a sense of relief, and turn away.

"What makes you so fidgety, Ernst?" asks my father. "You haven't sat still for ten minutes together."

"Perhaps he is overtired," suggests my mother.

"No," I answer, a little embarrassed, "it's not that. I think perhaps I've forgotten how to sit on a chair for so long at a stretch. We didn't have them out at the Front; there we just lay about on the floor or wherever we happened to be. I've lost the habit, I suppose, that's all."

"Funny," says my father.

I shrug my shoulders. My mother smiles. "Have you been to your room yet?" she asks.

"Not yet," I reply, getting up and going over. My heart is beating fast as I open the door and sense the smell of the books in the darkness. I switch on the light hastily and look about me. "Everything has been left exactly as it was," says my sister behind me.

"Yes, yes," I reply in self-defence; for I would rather be left alone now. But already the others have come too, and are standing there in the doorway watching me expectantly. I sit down in the armchair and place my hands on the top of the table. It is smooth and cool to the touch. Yes, everything just as it was. The brown marble letter-weight that Karl Vogt gave me—there in its old place beside the compass and the inkstand. But Karl Vogt was killed at Mount Kemmel.

"Don't you like your room any more?" asks my sister.

"O yes," I say hesitantly, "but it's so small——"

My father laughs. "Its just the same size that it used to be."

"Of course, it must be," I agree, "but I had an idea it
was so much bigger, somehow——"

"It is so long since you were here," says my mother.

I nod. "The bed is freshly made," she goes on—"but you won't be thinking of that yet."

I feel for my tunic pocket. Adolf Bethke gave me a packet of cigars when he left us. I must smoke one of them now. Everything around me seems to have come loose, as if I were a bit giddy. I inhale the smoke deep into my lungs and begin to feel better already.

"Smoke cigars, do you?" asks my father in surprise and almost reprovingly.

I look at him with a certain wonderment. "But of course," I reply. "They were part of the ration out there. We got three or four every day. Will you have one?"

He takes it, shaking his head meanwhile. "You used not to smoke at all, before."

"O yes, before——" I say, and cannot help smiling that he should make such a song about it. There are a lot of things I used not to do, before, that's a fact. But up the line there one soon lost any diffidence before one's elders. We were all alike there.

I steal a glance at the clock. I have only been here a couple of hours, yet it feels like a couple of weeks since I last saw Willy and Ludwig. I should like to get up and go to them at once. I am quite unable to realise that now I must stay here in the family for good. I still have the feeling that to-morrow, or maybe the next day, but surely some time we shall be marching again, side by side, cursing or resigned, but all together.

At last I get up and fetch my greatcoat from where it hangs in the passage.

"Aren't you going to stay with us this evening?" asks my mother.

"I have to go and report myself yet," I lie—I have not the heart to tell her the truth.

She comes with me to the stairs. "Wait a moment," she says, "it is very dark; I'll bring a light."

I stop in surprise. A light! For those few steps? Lord, and through how many shell-holes, along how many gloomy duckboard walks have I had to find my way at night all these years without light and under fire? And now a light for a few stairs! Ah, mother! But I wait patiently till she comes with the lamp and holds a light for me, and it is as if she stroked me in the darkness.

"Be careful, Ernst, that no harm comes to you out there," she calls after me.

"But what harm could come to me at home here, mother, in peace time?" I say smiling, and look up at her. She leans over the banister. Her small, timorous face has a golden light upon it from the lamp shade. The lights and shadows dance fantastically over the wall behind her. And suddenly a strange agitation takes hold on me, almost like pain—as if there were nothing like that face in all the world, as if I were a child again that must be lighted down the stairs, a youngster that may come to some harm out on the street—and as if all else that has been between were but phantasm and dream.

But the light of the lamp concentrates to a flashing point in the buckle of my belt. The moment has passed. I am no child, I am wearing a uniform. Quickly I run down the stairs, three steps at a time, I fling open the outer door and hurry out, eager to come to my comrades.

I call first on Albert Trosske. His mother's eyes are red from weeping; but that is merely because of today, it is not anything serious. But Albert is not his old self either, he is sitting there at the table like a wet hen. Beside him is his elder brother. It is an age since I saw him last; all I know is that he has been in hospital a long time. He has grown stout and has lovely, red cheeks.

"Hullo, Hans, fit again?" I say heartily. "How goes it? Nothing like being up on your pins again, eh?"

He mumbles something incomprehensible. Frau Trosske bursts into sobs and goes out. Albert makes me a sign with his eyes. I look around mystified. Then I notice a pair of crutches lying beside Hans's chair. "Not finished with yet?" I ask.

"Oh, yes," he replied. "Came out of hospital last week." He reaches for the crutches, lifts himself up and with two jerks swings across to the stove. Both feet are missing. He has an iron artificial foot on his right leg and on the left just a frame with a shoe attachment.

I feel ashamed at my stupid talk. "I didn't know, Hans," I say.

He nods. His feet were frost-bitten in the Carpathians, then gangrene set in, and in the end they both had to be amputated.

"It is only his feet, thank God," says Frau Trosske, bringing a cushion and settling it under the artificial limb. "Never mind, Hans, we will soon put it right, you'll soon learn to walk again." She sits down beside him and strokes his hands.

"Yes," I say, only to say something, "you still have your legs, anyway."

"That's what I say," he answers.

I offer him a cigarette. What should one do at such mo
ments?—anything seems brusque, however well it is meant. 
We talk a while, halting and painfully, but whatever Al
bert or I get up and move about, we see Hans watching 
our feet with a gloomy, anguished gaze, and his mother's
eyes following his in the same direction—always only at 
the feet—back and forth—You have feet—I have none

He still thinks of nothing else—and his mother is wholly taken up with him. She does not see that Albert is suffering under it—No one could stick that for long.

"Albert, we ought to be going along to report now," I say, to give him a pretext for escape.

"Yes," he says eagerly.

Once outside, we begin to breathe again. The night reflects softly in the wet pavement. Street lights flicker in the wind. Albert stares straight ahead. "There's nothing I can do about it," he begins; "but when I sit there between them like that and see him and my mother, in the end I get to feel as if it were all my fault, and am ashamed at still having my two feet. A man begins to think he is scum just for being whole. Even an arm-wound like Ludwig's would do; then perhaps one wouldn't seem such an eyesore standing about there."

I try to console him; but he will not have it. What I say does not convince him, but it gives me at least some relief. It is always so with comfort.

We go to find Willy. His room is a wilderness. The bed has been dismantled and stands up-ended against the wall.

It has to be made larger—Willy has grown so much in the army he does not fit it any more. Planks, hammers, saws lie strewn all around. And on a chair there glistens an immense dish of potato salad. He is not there himself. His mother explains that he has been out in the scullery a whole hour scrubbing himself clean.

Frau Homeyer is on her knees before Willy's pack, rummaging through it. Shaking her head she hauls out some dirty rags that were once a pair of socks. "Dreadful holes!" she murmurs, looking up at Albert and me disapprovingly.

"Cheap stuff," I say with a shrug.

"Cheap, indeed!" she protests bitterly. "Shows how little you know about it! Its the best wool, let me tell you, young man. Eight days I was running up and down before I got it. And now see! through already! And you won't find their like anywhere." She contemplates the ruins with an aggrieved air. "I'm sure there must have been time at the war just to pull on a pair of clean socks quickly at least once a week! Four pairs of them he had last time he went out. And now he has brought back only two—and look at them!" She passes her hand through the holes.

I am just about to take up his defence when he himself enters in triumph, announcing at the top of his voice: "Here's a piece of luck for you! Another aspirant for the Order of the Dixie! There's going to be fricasseed chicken tonight, lads!"

Waving in his hand like a flag is a fat cock. The green-golden tail feathers gleam, its comb glows crimson and from its beak there hang a few drops of blood. Though I have had a good meal, water begins to gather in my mouth.

Willy swings the creature to and fro blissfully. Frau Homeyer straightens up and utters a shriek. "Willy! But where did you get it from?"

Willy announces with pride that he saw it behind the shed, caught it and killed it, all inside two minutes. He slaps his mother on the back. "We did learn something out there, you see. Willy wasn't acjting-deputy-chief-cook for nothing, I tell you."

She looks at him as if he had murdered a child. Then she calk to her husband. "Oscar!" she moans in a broken voice, "come and look at this—He has killed Binding's pedigree cock!"

"Binding? What Binding?" asks Willy.

"The cock belongs to Binding, the milkman next door. O my God, how could you do such a thing?" Frau Homeyer sinks down on a chair.

"I wasn't going to leave a fine roast like that just running about," says Willy in astonishment, "not when I had him as good as in my hand already."