The Train Was On Time (13 page)

We have all night, all night. Dusk has only just fallen in the garden, the door is locked, and nothing can disturb us; the whole chateau is ours; wine and candles and a harpsichord! Eight hundred and fifty marks without the matches; millions lying around Nikopol! Nikopol! Nothing! … Kishinev? Nothing! … Cernauti? Nothing! … Kolomyya? Nothing! … Stanislav? Nothing! Stryy … Stryy … that terrible name that is like a streak, a bloody streak across my throat! In Stryy I’m going to be murdered. Every death is a murder, every death in war is a murder for which someone is responsible. In Stryy!

I’m dancing with you into heaven, the seventh heaven of love!

It was not a dream at all, a dream ending with the last note of that melodic paraphrase, it merely tore the frail web that had been cast over him, and now for the first time, by the open window, in the cool of the dusk, he realized he had been crying. He had neither known it nor felt it, but his face was wet, and Olina’s hands, soft and very small, were drying his face; the rivulets had run down his face and collected in the closed collar of his tunic; she undid the hook and dried his neck with her handkerchief. She dried his cheeks and around his eyes, and he was grateful that she said nothing.…

A strangely sober joy filled him. The girl switched on the light, closed the window with averted face, and it was possible she had been crying too. This chaste happiness is something
I have never known, he thought, as she crossed to the closet. I’ve always only desired, I’ve desired an unknown body, and I’ve desired that soul too, but here I desire nothing.… How strange that I have to find this out in a Lvov brothel, on the last evening of my life, on the threshold of the last night of my earthly existence that is to come to an end tomorrow morning in Stryy with a bloody streak.…

“Lie down,” said Olina. She indicated the little sofa, and he noticed that she had switched on an electric kettle in that mysterious closet.

“I’ll make some coffee,” she said, “and until it’s ready I’ll go on with my story.”

He lay down, and she sat beside him. They smoked, the ashtray lying conveniently on a stool so they could both reach it. He barely needed to stretch out his hand.

“I needn’t tell you,” she began quietly, “that you musn’t ever speak to anyone about it. Even if you … if you were not to die—you would never betray my secret. I know that. I had to swear by God and all the saints and by our beloved Poland that I would never tell a soul, but if I tell you it’s as if I were telling myself, and I can’t keep anything from you any more than I can keep anything from myself!” She stood up and poured the bubbling water very slowly and tenderly into a small coffeepot. Each time she paused for a few seconds she would smile at him before continuing to pour, very slowly, and now he could see she had been crying too. Then she filled the cups that were standing beside the ashtray.

“The war broke out in 1939. In Warsaw my parents were buried under the ruins of our big house, and there I was all alone in the garden of the Conservatory, where I had been flirting, and the director was taken away because he was a Jew. Well, I just didn’t feel like going on with the piano. The Germans had somehow or other raped us all, every single one of us.” She drank some coffee, he took a sip too. She smiled at him.

“It’s funny that you’re a German and I don’t hate you.” She fell silent again, smiling, and he thought, it’s remarkable how quickly she’s surrendered. When she went to the piano she wanted to seduce me, and the first time she played I’m dancing with you into heaven, the seventh heaven of love, it was still far from clear. While she was playing she cried.…

“All Poland,” she went on, “is a resistance movement. You people have no idea. No one suspects how big it is. There is hardly a single unpatriotic Pole. When one of you Germans sells his pistol anywhere in Warsaw or Krakow, he should realize that in doing so he’s selling as many of his comrades’ lives as there is ammunition in that pistol. When anywhere, anywhere at all,” she went on passionately, “a general or a lance-corporal sleeps with a girl and so much as tells her they didn’t get any rations near Kiev or Kishinev or some such place, or that they retreated only two miles, he never suspects that this is jotted down, and that this gladdens the girl’s heart more than the twenty or two hundred and fifty zlotys she’s been paid for her seeming surrender. It’s so easy to be a spy among you people that I soon got disgusted with it. All one had to do was get on with it. I don’t understand it.”

She shook her head and gave him a look almost of contempt.

“I don’t understand it. You’re the most garrulous people in the world, and sentimental down to your fingertips. Which army are you with?”

He told her the number.

“No,” she said, “he was from a different one. A general who used to come and see me here sometimes. He talked like a sentimental schoolboy who’s had a bit too much to drink. ‘My boys,’ he would groan, ‘my poor boys!’ And a little later on the old lecher would be babbling away to me about all kinds of things that were vitally important. He’s got a lot of his poor boys on his conscience … and he told me a lot of things. And then … then,” she hesitated, “then I’d be like ice.…”

“And were there some you loved?” asked Andreas. Funny, he thought, that it should hurt to know there were some she might have loved.

“Yes,” she said, “there were some I really loved, not many.” She looked at him, and he saw she was crying again. He took her hand, sat up, and poured coffee with his free hand.

“Soldiers,” she said softly. “Yes. There were some soldiers I loved … and I knew it made no difference that they were Germans whom actually I ought to have hated. You know, when I gave myself to them I felt I was no longer part of the terrible game we’re all playing, the game I had an especially big part in. The game of sending others to their death, men one didn’t know. You see,” she whispered, “some fellow, a lance-corporal or a general, tells me something here, and I pass on the information—machinery is set in motion, and somewhere men die because I passed on that information, do you see what I mean?” She looked at him out of frantic eyes. “Do you see what I mean? Or take yourself: you tell some fellow at the station: Take that train, bud, rather than that one—and that’s the very train the partisans attack, and your buddy dies because you told him: Take that train. That’s why it was so wonderful just to give oneself to them, just abandon oneself, and forget everything else. I asked them nothing for our mosaic and told them nothing, I had to love them. And what’s so terrible is that afterwards they’re always sad.…”

“Mosaic,” asked Andreas huskily, “what’s that?”

“The whole espionage system is a mosaic. Everything’s assembled and numbered, every smallest scrap we get hold of, until the picture’s complete … it slowly fills out … and many of these mosaics make up the whole picture … of you people … of your war … your army.…”

“You know,” she went on, looking at him very seriously, “the terrible part is that it’s all so senseless. Everywhere it’s only the innocent who are murdered. Everywhere. By us too.
Somehow I’ve always known that—” she looked away from him—“but, you know what frightens me is that I didn’t grasp it fully till I walked into this room and saw you. Your shoulders, the back of your neck, there in the golden sunshine.” She pointed to the window where the two chairs were.

“I know that now. When they sent me here, when Madame told me: ‘There’s someone waiting for you in the bar, I don’t think you’ll get much out of him but at least he pays well’—as soon as she said that I thought: I’ll get something out of him all right. Or it’s someone I can love. Not one of the victims, because there are only victims and executioners. And when I saw you standing over there by the window, your shoulders, the back of your neck, your stooping young figure as if you were thousands of years old, it came to me for the first time that we also only murder the innocent … only the innocent.…”

The soundlessness of that crying was terrible. Andreas rose, stroked the nape of her neck in passing, and went to the piano. Her eyes followed him in astonishment. Her tears dried up at once, she watched him as he sat there, on the piano stool, staring at the keys, his hands spread apprehensively, and across his forehead there was a terrible furrow, an anguished furrow.

He’s forgotten me, she thought, he’s forgotten me, how awful it is that they always forget us at the very moment when they are really themselves. He’s not thinking about me any more, he’ll never think about me any more. Tomorrow morning he will die in Stryy … and he’ll waste no more thoughts on me.

He is the first and only one I’ve loved. The first. He is absolutely alone now. He is unbelievably sad and alone. That furrow across his forehead, it cuts him in two, his face is pale with terror, and he has spread his hands as if he had to grasp some dreadful animal.… If he could only play, if he could only play, he would be with me again. The first note will give him
back to me. To me, to me, he belongs to me … he is my brother, I am three days older than he is. If he could only play. There’s some monstrous cramp inside him, spreading his hands, turning him deathly pale, making him fearfully unhappy. There’s nothing left of all I wanted to give him with my playing … with my story, there’s nothing of all that with him now. It’s all gone, he’s alone now with his pain.

And indeed, when all at once he attacked the keys with a fierce rage in his face, he raised his eyes, and his eyes went straight to her. He smiled at her, and she had never seen such a happy face as that face of his above the black surface of the piano in the soft yellow lamplight. Oh how I love him, she thought. How happy he is, he’s mine, here in this room till morning.…

She had imagined he would play something crazy, some wild piece by Tchaikovsky or Liszt or one of those glorious lilting Chopin pieces, because he had attacked the keys like a madman.

No, he played a sonatina by Beethoven. A delicate little piece, very tricky, and for a second she was afraid he would “mess it up.” But he played very beautifully, very carefully, perhaps a shade too carefully, as if he did not trust his own strength. How tenderly he played, and she had never seen such a happy face as that soldier’s face above the polished surface of the piano. He played the sonatina a little uncertainly, but purely, more purely than she had ever heard it, very clear and clean.

She hoped he would go on playing. It was wonderful; she had lain down on the sofa, where he had been lying, and she saw the cigarette gradually burning away in the ashtray: she longed to draw on it but dared not move; the slightest movement might destroy that music; and the best part of all was that very happy soldier’s face above the black, shining surface of the piano.…

“No,” he said with a laugh as he got to his feet. “There’s not much left. It’s no use. The fact is, you have to have studied, and I never did.” He bent over her and dried her tears, and he was glad she had cried. “No,” he said softly, “stay where you are. I was going to tell you my story too, remember?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Tell me, and give me some wine.”

This is happiness, he thought, as he went to the closet. This is bliss, although I’ve just discovered that I’m no good at the piano. There’s been no miracle. I haven’t suddenly become a pianist. It’s done with now, and yet I’m happy. He looked into the closet and asked over his shoulder: “Which would you like?”

“Red,” she said with a smile, “a red one now.”

He took a less slender bottle out of the closet, then he saw the sheet of paper and the pencil and studied the paper. At the top was something in Polish: that would be the matches; then came “Mosel” in German, and in front of that a Polish word no doubt meaning bottle. What charming handwriting she has, he thought, pretty, feminine handwriting, and under “Mosel” he wrote “Bordeaux,” and below the Polish word for bottle he made two dots. “Did you really put it down?” she asked, smiling, as he poured the wine.

“Yes.”

“You wouldn’t even cheat a madame.”

“Yes I would,” he said, and he suddenly remembered Dresden station, and the taste of Dresden station, painfully distinct, was in his mouth, and he saw the fat, red-faced lieutenant. “Yes I would, I once tricked a lieutenant.” He told her the story. She laughed. “But that isn’t so bad.”

“Yes it is,” he said, “it’s very bad. I shouldn’t have done that, I should have called out after him: I’m not deaf. I said nothing, because I have to die soon and because he yelled at me like that … because I was full of pain. Besides, I was too lazy. Yes,” he said softly, “I actually was too lazy to do
it because it was so wonderful to have the taste of life in my mouth. I wanted to get it clear, I remember exactly, I thought: You must never let someone feel humiliated on your account, even if it’s a brand-new lieutenant, not even if he has brand-new medals on his chest. You must never let that happen, I thought, and I can still see him walking off, embarrassed and smarting, crimson in the face, followed by his grinning flock of subordinates. I can see his fat arms and his pathetic shoulders. When I think of those pathetic, stupid shoulders of his I almost have to weep. But I was too lazy, just too lazy, to open my mouth. It wasn’t even fear, just plain laziness. God, I thought, how beautiful life is after all, all these people milling about on the platform. One’s going to his wife, the other to his girl, and that woman’s going to her son, and it’s autumn, how wonderful, and that couple over there going toward the barrier, this evening or tonight they’ll be kissing under the soft trees down by the Elbe.” He sighed. “I’ll tell you all the people I’ve cheated!”

“Oh no,” she said, “don’t. Tell me something nice … and pour me some more!” She laughed. “Who could you ever have cheated?”

“I’ll tell you the truth. Everything I’ve stolen and all the people I’ve cheated.…” He poured more wine, they raised their glasses, and in that second while they looked at each other, smiling, over the rims of their glasses, he drew her lovely face deep within himself. I mustn’t lose it, he thought, I must never lose it, she is mine.

I love him, she thought, I love him.…

“My father,” he said quietly, “my father died from the effects of a serious wound that plagued him for three years after the war. I was a year old when he died. And my mother soon followed him. That’s all I know about it. I learned about all this one day when I had to be told that the woman I had
always thought of as my mother wasn’t my mother at all. I grew up with an aunt, a sister of my mother’s who had married an attorney. He made good money, but we were always terribly poor. He drank. I took it so much for granted that a man should come to the breakfast table with a thick head and in a foul temper that later on, when I got to know other men, fathers of my friends, it seemed to me they weren’t men at all. That there were men who weren’t stewed every evening, and who didn’t make hysterical scenes every morning at breakfast, was something I couldn’t conceive. A ‘thing which is not,’ as Swift’s Houyhnhnms say. I thought we were born to be yelled at, that women were born to be yelled at, to grapple with bailiffs, to fight terrible pitched battles with shopkeepers and go off and open a new account somewhere else. My aunt was a genius. She was a genius at opening new accounts. When things were at their blackest she would become very quiet, take an aspirin, and dash off, and by the time she came back she had money. And I thought she was my mother; and I thought that fat bloated monster with burst blood vessels all over his cheeks was my respected begetter. His eyes had a yellowish tinge, and his breath reeked of beer, he stank like stale yeast. I thought he was my father. We lived in a very grand villa, with a maid and all that, and often my aunt didn’t even have small change for a short streetcar ride. And my uncle was a famous attorney. Isn’t that boring?” he asked abruptly, getting up to refill the glasses.