The Train Was On Time

HEINRICH BÖLL

In 1972,
Heinrich Böll
became the first German to win the Nobel Prize for literature since Thomas Mann in 1929. Born in Cologne, in 1917, Böll was reared in a liberal Catholic, pacifist family. Drafted into the Wehrmacht, he served on the Russian and French fronts and was wounded four times before he found himself in an American prison camp. After the war he enrolled at the University of Cologne, but dropped out to write about his shattering experiences as a soldier. His first novel,
The Train Was on Time
, was published in 1949, and he went on to become one of the most prolific and important of post-war German writers. His best-known novels include
Billiards at Half-Past Nine
(1959),
The Clown
(1963),
Group Portrait with Lady
(1971), and
The Safety Net
(1979). In 1981 he published a memoir,
What’s to Become of the Boy? or: Something to Do with Books
. Böll served for several years as the president of International P.E.N. and was a leading defender of the intellectual freedom of writers throughout the world. He died in June 1985.

William T. Vollmann
is the author of seven novels, three collections of stories, and a seven-volume critique of violence,
Rising Up and Rising Down
, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction. He is also the author of
Poor People
, a worldwide examination of poverty through the eyes of the impoverished;
Riding Toward Everywhere
, an examination of the train-hopping hobo lifestyle; and
Imperial
, a panoramic look at one of the poorest areas in America. His most recent novel,
Europe Central
, won the National Book Award in 2005. He has won the PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction, a Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize and a Whiting Writers’ Award. His journalism and fiction have been published in
The New Yorker, Esquire, Spin
and
Granta
. Vollmann lives in California.

The Essential
HEINRICH BÖLL

The Clown

The Safety Net

Billiards at Half-Past Nine

The Train Was on Time

Irish Journal

Group Portrait with Lady

What’s to Become of the Boy? Or:
Something to Do with Books—A Memoir

The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll

Translator’s Acknowledgment

I am deeply indebted to my husband, William Vennewitz, for his never-failing advice and assistance in this translation.
Leila Vennewitz

The Train Was On Time
Originally published in German in 1949 as
Der Zug war pünklich
by Heinrich Böll
© 1977, 1996, 2003 by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG, Cologne, Germany
Translated by Leila Vennewitz.
Afterword © William T. Vollmann, 2010

Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.mhpbooks.com

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Böll, Heinrich, 1917-1985.
 [Zug war pünktlich. English]
 The train was on time / Heinrich Böll; translated from the German by Leila Vennewitz.
        p. cm.
 Previously published: London : Secker and Warburg, 1970. With new afterword by William T. Vollmann.
 eISBN: 978-1-935554-95-0
 1. World War, 1939-1945–Fiction. 2. Germany–Fiction. I. Vennewitz, Leila. II. Title.
 PT2603.O394Z4513 2011
 833′.914–dc22

2011000503

v3.1

CONTENTS

Cover

About the Author

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

THE TRAIN
WAS ON TIME

AFTERWORD
by William T. Vollmann

I have known many adventures in my time: the creation of postal routes, Sahara rebellions, South America … but war is not really an adventure at all, it is only a substitute for adventure.… War is a disease. Like typhus.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,
Pilote de Guerre

As they walked through the dark underpass they could hear the train rumbling up to the platform overhead, and the resounding voice came smoothly over the loudspeaker: “The troop-train now arriving from Paris will depart for Przemysl via.…”

Then they had climbed the steps to the platform and were standing by the leave-train from which beaming soldiers were emerging, weighed down with huge packages. The platform quickly emptied, it was the usual scene. At some of the windows stood girls or women or a very silent, grim-faced father … and the resounding voice was telling people to hurry. The train was on time.

“Why don’t you get on?” the chaplain asked the soldier anxiously.

“Get on?” asked the soldier, amazed. “Why, I might want to hurl myself under the wheels, I might want to desert … eh? What’s the hurry? I might go crazy, I’ve a perfect right to, I’ve a perfect right to go crazy. I don’t want to die, that’s what’s so horrible—that I don’t want to die.” His voice was cold and hard, as if the words were pouring from his lips like ice. “Don’t say any more! I’ll get on all right, there’s always a spot somewhere … yes … yes, don’t mind me, pray for me!” He grasped his pack, boarded the train through the nearest door, let down the window from inside, and leaned out, while overhead the resounding voice hung like a cloud of mucus: “The train is now leaving.…”

“I don’t want to die!” he shouted. “I don’t want to die, but the terrible thing is that I’m going to die … soon!” The black figure on that cold gray platform retreated farther and farther into the distance … farther and farther, until the station was swallowed up by night.

Now and again what appears to be a casually spoken word will suddenly acquire a cabalistic significance. It becomes charged and strangely swift, races ahead of the speaker, is destined to throw open a chamber in the uncertain confines of the future and to return to him with the deadly accuracy of a boomerang. Out of the smalltalk of unreflecting speech, usually from among those halting, colorless goodbyes exchanged beside trains on their way to death, it falls back on the speaker like a leaden wave, and he becomes aware of the force, both frightening and intoxicating, of the workings of fate. To lovers and soldiers, to men marked for death and to those filled with the cosmic force of life, this power is sometimes given, without warning; a sudden revelation is conferred on them, a bounty and a burden … and the word sinks, sinks down inside them.

As Andreas was slowly groping his way back into the center of the car, the word
soon
entered him like a bullet, painlessly and almost imperceptibly penetrating flesh, tissue, cells, nerves, until at some point it caught, like a barbed hook, exploded, and ripped open a savage wound, making blood pour out … life, pain.…

Soon, he thought, and felt himself turning pale. At the same time he did all the usual things, almost unconsciously. He struck a match, lighting up the heaps of sitting, stretched out, sleeping soldiers who lay around, across, under, and on top of their luggage. The smell of stale tobacco smoke was mixed with the smell of stale sweat and that strangely gritty dirt which clings to all soldiers in the mass. The flame of the dying matchstick flared up with a final hiss, and in that last glow he saw, over by the narrowing corridor, a small empty
space. He carefully picked his way toward it, his bundle tucked under one arm, his cap in his hand.

Soon, he thought, and the shock of fear lay deep, deep. Fear and absolute certainty. Never again, he thought, never again will I see this station, never again the face of my friend, the man I abused right up to the last moment … never again. Soon! He reached the empty space, set his pack carefully on the floor in order not to wake the sleeping men around him, and sat down on it so he could lean back against a compartment door. Then he tried to arrange his legs as comfortably as possible; he stretched the left one carefully past the face of one sleeping soldier, and placed the right one across a piece of luggage that was shielding the back of another. In the compartment behind him a match flared up, and someone began to smoke silently in the dark. By turning slightly to one side he could see the glowing tip of the cigarette, and sometimes, when the unknown man drew on it, the reflection spread over an unfamiliar soldier’s face, gray and tired, with bitter creases in it, starkly and terribly sober.

Soon, he thought. The rattle of the train, it was all so familiar. The smell, the desire to smoke, the feeling he had to smoke. The last thing he wanted to do was sleep. The somber outlines of the city moved past the window. Somewhere in the distance searchlights were raking the sky, like long spectral fingers parting the blue cloak of the night … from far away came the firing of antiaircraft guns … and those darkened, mute, somber houses. When would this Soon be? The blood flowed out of his heart, flowed back into his heart, circling, circling, life was circling, and all this pulse beat said was: Soon! He could no longer say, no longer even think: “I don’t want to die.” As often as he tried to form the sentence he thought: I’m going to die … soon.

Behind him a second gray face now showed up in the glow of a cigarette, and he could hear a subdued, weary murmuring. The two unknown men were talking.

“Dresden,” said one voice.

“Dortmund,” the other.

The murmuring continued, became more animated. Then another voice swore, and the murmuring subsided again; it petered out, and again there was only one cigarette behind him. It was the second cigarette, and finally this one went out too, and again there was this gray darkness behind and beside him, and facing him the black night with the countless houses, all mute, all black. Only in the distance those silent, uncannily long, spectral fingers of the searchlights, still groping across the sky. It seemed as if the faces belonging to those fingers must be grinning, eerily grinning, cynically grinning like the faces of usurers and swindlers. “We’ll get you,” said the thin-lipped, gaping mouths belonging to those fingers. “We’ll get you, we’ll grope all night long.” Maybe they were looking for a bedbug, a tiny bug in the cloak of the night, those fingers, and they would find the bug.…

Soon. Soon. Soon. Soon. When is Soon? What a terrible word: Soon. Soon can mean in one second, Soon can mean in one year. Soon is a terrible word. This Soon compresses the future, shrinks it, offers no certainty, no certainty whatever, it stands for absolute uncertainty. Soon is nothing and Soon is a lot. Soon is everything. Soon is death.…

Soon I shall be dead. I shall die, soon. You have said so yourself, and someone inside you and someone outside you has told you that this Soon will be fufilled. One thing is sure, this Soon will be in wartime. That’s a certainty, that’s a fact.

How much longer will the war go on?

It can last for another year before everything finally collapses in the East, and if the Americans in the West don’t attack, or the British, then it will go on for another two years before the Russians reach the Atlantic. They will attack, though. But all in all it will last another year at the very least, the war won’t be over before the end of 1944. The way this whole apparatus
is built up, it’s too obedient, too cowardly, too docile. So I may still have anything from one second to one year. How many seconds are there in a year? Soon I’m going to die, before the war is over. I shan’t ever know peacetime again. No more peacetime. There’ll be no more of anything, no music … no flowers … no poetry … no more human joy; soon I’m going to die.

This Soon is like a thunderclap. This little word is like the spark that sets off the thunderstorm, and suddenly, for the thousandth part of a second, the whole world is bright beneath this word.