The Train Was On Time (16 page)

“Olina!” came that level voice again outside the door.

“Yes?”

“The bill. Hand it out to me, please. And get ready to leave, the car’s at the door.…”

So this is the reality, the girl handing out the bill through the door, with tapering fingers, a bill on which everything had been written down, beginning with the matches, which he still had in his pocket, those matches he had been given yesterday evening at six. That’s how fantastically fast time goes, this time we cannot grasp, and I’ve done nothing, nothing, in that time, and there’s nothing I can do but follow this refurbished beauty, down the stairs to settle the account.…

“These Polish tarts,” said Willi, “simply terrific! That’s what I call passion, eh?”

“Yes.”

The room downstairs was just as meagerly furnished. A few rickety chairs, a bench, a threadbare carpet that looked like frayed paper, and Willi was smoking. He was completely unshaven and was searching his luggage for more cigarettes.

“You were certainly the most expensive, my lad. My bill wasn’t much less either. But this young friend of ours, he cost almost nothing. Hey there!” He dug the blond fellow, who was still asleep, in the ribs. “A hundred and forty-six marks.” He snorted with laughter. “It seems he actually did sleep with the girl, literally slept. There were two hundred marks left over, so I slid them under the door of his girl’s room, as a tip, see? Because she made him happy so cheaply. D’you happen to have a cigarette left?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks.”

What an incredibly long time Olina was taking to settle the account, over there in the madame’s office, at four in the morning. That was an hour when the whole world slept. Even in the girls’ rooms all was quiet, and downstairs in the big reception room it was quite dark. The door from which the music had come was dark, and one could see and smell that dark room. The only sound was the discreet engine purring away outside. Olina was behind that reddish door, and it was all reality. It had to be reality.…

“So you think this general’s whore-car will take us too?”

“Yes!”

“Hm. A Maybach, I can tell by the engine. Nifty job. Mind if I go ahead and speak to the driver? He’s sure to be a noncom.”

Willi shouldered his luggage and opened the door, and there it really was, the night, the gray-veiled night and the dim headlamps of a waiting car out there by the entrance. As coldly and inescapably real as all war-nights, full of cold menace, full of horrible mockery; out there in the dirty holes … in the cellars … in the many, many towns cowering in fear … summoned up, those appalling nights that at four in the morning have achieved their most deadly power, those ghastly, indescribably terrible war-nights. One of these was there outside the door, a night full of terror, a night with no home, not even the smallest, smallest warm corner to hide in … those nights that had been summoned up by the resounding voices.…

So she really believes she can rescue me. Andreas smiled. She believes it is possible to slip through the fine mesh of this net. This child believes there is such a thing as escape … she believes she will find ways to avoid Stryy. That word has been cradled within me since my birth. It has lain deep, deep down, unacknowledged and unawakened; it was with me when I was still a child, and maybe a dark shudder rippled through me, many years ago in school, when we learned about the foothills of the Carpathians and I read the words Galicia and Lvov and
Stryy on the map, in the middle of that yellow-white patch. And I’ve forgotten that shudder. Maybe, often and often, the barb of death and summons was cast into me without ever catching in anything down there, and only that tiny little word had been set up and saved up for it, and finally the barb caught.…

Stryy … that tiny little word, terrible and bloody, has surfaced and expanded into an ominous cloud that now overshadows everything. And she believes she will find ways of avoiding Stryy.…

Besides, her promise doesn’t attract me. I’m not attracted by that little village in the Carpathians where she proposes to play on the priest’s piano. I’m not attracted by that seeming security … all we have is promises and pledges and a dark uncertain horizon over which we have to plunge to find security.…

At last the door opened, and Andreas was surprised by the rigid pallor of Olina’s face. She had put on a fur coat, a charming little cap was perched on her beautiful loose hair, and there was no watch on her wrist, for he was wearing his boots again. The account had been settled. The old woman was smiling so mysteriously. Her hands were folded across her desiccated body, and after the soldiers had picked up their luggage and Andreas was opening the door she smiled and uttered a single word: “Stryy,” she said. Olina did not hear it, she was already outside.

“I too,” said Olina in a low voice as they sat side by side in the car, “I too am condemned. I too have betrayed my country because I spent all last night with you instead of sounding out the general.” She took his hand and smiled at him: “But don’t forget what I told you: no matter where I take you, it will be life. Right?”

“Right,” said Andreas. The whole night ran through his memory like a smooth thread being reeled off, yet there was
one knot that left him no peace. Stryy, the old woman had said, and how can she know that Stryy … he hadn’t said anything about it to her, and still less would Olina have mentioned that word.…

So this is supposed to be reality: a discreetly purring car with its subdued headlamps lighting up the nameless road. Trees, and now and again houses, all saturated with gray darkness. In front of him those two necks, encircled by sergeants’ braid almost identical, solid German necks, and the cigarette smoke drifting back from the driver’s seat. Beside him the blond fellow, sleeping like a child worn out by playing, and on the right the steady gentle contact with Olina’s fur coat and the smooth thread of the memory of that lovely night sliding by, faster and faster, and always stopping short at that strange knot, at the place where the old woman had said: Stryy.…

Andreas leaned forward to look at the softly lit clock on the dashboard, and he saw it was six o’clock, just on six. An icy shock ran through him, and he thought: God, God, what have I done with my time, I’ve done nothing, I’ve never done anything, I must pray, pray for them all, and at this very moment Paul is walking up the altar steps at home and beginning to recite: Introibo. And on his own lips too the word began to form: Introibo.

But now an invisible giant hand passed over the softly gliding car, a terrible, silent stirring of the air, and into this silence came Willi’s dry voice, asking: “Where are you taking us, bud?” “To Stryy!” said a disembodied voice.

And then the car was slashed by two raging knives that rasped with savage hatred, one from the front, the other from behind, tearing into that metal body which reared and turned, filled with the shriek of fear of its occupants.…

In the silence that followed there was no sound but the passionate devouring of the flames.

My God, thought Andreas, are they all dead? … and my legs … my arms, is only my head left? … is no one there? … I’m lying on this bare road, on my breast lies the weight of the world, so heavily that I can find no words to pray.…

Am I crying? he thought suddenly, for he could feel something moist running down his cheeks: no, something was dripping onto his cheeks; and in that ashen morning light, which was still without the yellow mildness of the sun, he saw that Olina’s hand was hanging down over his head from a fragment of the car, and that blood was dripping onto his face from her hands, and he was past knowing that now he was really beginning to cry.…

AFTERWORD:
THE HANDS OF OLINA

by William T. Vollmann

 … he had a terrible dream: he was sitting somewhere on a wet, very cold plain and had no legs, no legs at all, he was sitting on the stumps of his thighs, and the sky over this plain was black and lowering … then suddenly something cold and wet splashed onto his head … (30–31)

It was not a dream at all … he realized that 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 … She dried his cheeks and around his eyes, and he was grateful that she said nothing.… (91)

My God, thought Andreas, are they all dead? … and my legs … my arms, is only my head left? … Am I crying? he thought suddenly, for he could feel something moist running down his cheeks; no, something was dripping onto
his cheeks; and in that ashen morning light … he saw that Olina’s hand was hanging down over his head from a fragment of the car, and that blood was dripping onto her face from his hands, and he was past knowing that now he was really beginning to cry … (119)

1

The preceding three excerpts exemplify in miniature the workings of this novella’s eerie dream-power. The scene remains essentially constant, although its blurry parameters ooze into arbitrary alterations. In the second version, when “it was not a dream at all,” the elements pass from a minor into a major key, but the leitmotiv expresses itself as recognizably as ever. In all three, Andreas is maimed, and in the process of passing from one kind of consciousness into another. Moreover, Olina is always there, although it is not until we reach that the third that we can recognize her in the first, as the source of the cold wet liquid dripping on his head (never mind that when he awakes, her blood and tears disguise themselves as a drop of liquor from the bottle being drunk by the unshaven soldier). So these three instants share a ghastly coherence.

Many years ago, when I first read
The Train Was on Time
, it was the fundamental situation in which the protagonist found himself which haunted me. Like many young people in peacetime, I believed my death to be far away, and in my own dreams might still have hoped through some trick to evade it. And so I thought: If only he had looked more carefully into Olina’s travel arrangements! But of course there is no escape for any of us, and the tale of Andreas is simply a recapitulation of that old parable about the man who hears that Death will come for him in three days, and therefore flees all the way to Samarkand, where, of course, Death thanks him for his
punctuality. Hence, in the fashion of most oracles, the premonitions which afflict him are too distorted, incomplete, even treacherous to extend life. His knowledge of the future proves as limited as anyone’s knowledge of himself. In short, there is nothing he could have done—and anyhow, until he meets Olina he never considers the possibility of flight.

So now we know that any semblance of rescue from Stryy is a fraud, Andreas’s doom diminishes into a given, a narrative hook if you will. But as for the knowledge, fulfillment, or hope, or whatever else one might call it, which he seems to receive from his evening with Olina, how does Böll expect us to understand it? For me, that is the central issue of
The Train Was on Time
.

2

To any reader who has journeyed about even a trifle within the Böllian
oeuvre
, Andreas will be familiar: inconspicuous, cautious, sufficiently attractive and compliant to earn preferential treatment, but far from trustful that whatever moderately good luck comes his way will lead to any great future. Hence this character is resignedly realistic, both to the unpleasant world in which he finds himself, and to his own shortcomings. In the companion novella
And Where Were You, Adam?
, which was originally published in 1949 together with
The Train Was on Time
(and I much regret this arrangement was not adhered to in the present edition), he appears as Feinhals, the retreating soldier who wants only to get home. “Once he had dreamed of building houses such as nobody had ever built, but later he had built houses that were almost the same as the ones other people built. He had become a very mediocre architect, and he knew it … The important thing was not to take oneself too seriously—that was all.” That this attitude sometimes achieves
a perfection of stoic German irony (when the Allied bombs destroyed his apartment, Feinhals “hadn’t even gone there when he was granted leave to check the damage; he couldn’t see why he should go there just to see that there was nothing left”) is perhaps its only virtue. Feinhals is not contemptible, but he is far from noble, either. He takes advantage where he can, puts the suffering of others out of mind—after all, what can he do about it?—and commits minute sins of omission against others and himself. The father-and-son protagonists of what may be Böll’s greatest (and ambiguously happier) novel,
Billiards at Half-Past Nine
, carries this attitude still farther. Architects like Feinhals, but unlike him survivors into the post-war period, they try not to remember what one did to the other during the war. All the same, “disaster came sneaking in like something from the grave, in golden shoes, with golden hair and golden teeth, grinning like a skeleton.”

Now, what distinguishes Andreas from several of his brothers of the Feinhals stamp is that he has in fact begun to take himself seriously. In
Being and Time
, Heidegger writes that two crucial aspects of our existence are, firstly, the inevitable guilt and regret we experience for taking a particular path in life as opposed to any others, and, secondly, Being-toward-death, whose ominous meaning gets nowhere better expressed than in
The Train Was on Time
. The Buddhists inform us that there is no particular reward for being enlightened, or not; and it seems to me that the same could be said regarding consciousness of our Being-toward-death. After all, don’t we shield young children from it? Feinhals, doomed to die a hideous, meaningless death at the end of
Adam
, may well be better off for not attaching overmuch significance to anything, and striving carefully and modestly to return to the house of his parents (where, as usual, death is waiting). After all, if were we to characterize the consciousness of Andreas by any one word, it would be
agony
. Wouldn’t he too be better off ignorant?