The Train Was On Time (17 page)

And yet this very agony teaches him to cherish life—at first (and this is part of the novella’s greatness) without his even realizing it, even though he is already starting to love more and more widely—for instance, in the space of two pages, he discovers affection toward, firstly, the exhausted, greyskinned girl who stinks of bad coffee and who is beautiful to him; secondly, Dortmund, a city which would have held no significance to him were it not for his perception that he will never pass through it again; and, thirdly, the deliciousness, which his prior habits impel him to call meaningless and even absurd, of the sausages in the air raid sandwiches which his chaplain friend made for him. (9) He seems to experience the value of all these almost exclusively through the grief and terror attendant upon their loss. But even now, before he has met Olina, his soul has already commenced to grow. And in the middle sections of the book we watch his two sad accidental soldier-companions coming to mean more and more to him, because they are
all
soon to die—and, of course, because their protection gives him a degree of solitude in which to consider his death). And so they share their goods and kindness with each other. (48) In one passage he even manages to compassionate the shrilly ignorant tin autocrats around him who believe in the final victory, and who must therefore be more complicit than he in the war, the Holocaust and his own doom.

Indeed, the subject of
The Train Was on Time
is empathy, or, if you will, imaginative projection, which shines most conspicuously in his fancy, eerily borne out by Olina when she makes a kindred thought-experiment, that we can foretell our own deaths by casting our plans and fantasies forward until the future abruptly becomes “pale, colorless thoughts devoid of weight, blood, all human substance.” (5) We gather that the blond soldier and the unshaven soldier also have premonitions of their deaths, and so even do even the most fervent Hitlerites on that troop train rolling punctually east toward
terror, destruction and defeat, which may be why Andreas can pity them. But only he has been granted the ghastly gift of apodictic certainty about this matter. Not even Olina believes for long.

Reading his death into a particular time enables Andreas to determine the place, because the punctuality of German troop trains, like that of so many other aspects of life (your cancer, her marriage), allows him to predict with increasing accuracy where he will be at the fatal hour. So he begins to imagine himself into this or that location, from the perspective of Being-toward-death. And Böll’s place-imagery throughout the novella always strikes me as a chain of beautiful specificities. Still more finely made, and almost whimsical, yet all the same concrete, are Andreas’s beautifully childish visions of Galicia, Volhynia and Lvov based on how they sound (19–20)—didn’t many of us used to play just such games with the names of unfamiliar people and places when we were children? And then: “Stryy … that terrible name is like a streak, a bloody streak across my throat!” (91)

When it comes to Olina, and particularly to the piano, the radiations of empathy may not necessarily reveal to him what he imagines they do. Yes, he falls in love in a single evening, and she with him—why not? It does happen; and they’re emotionally almost virgins, not mention on the verge of death. Then what does it mean when they kiss and feel nothing?

3

All of Böll’s novels are about the war.
The Train Was on Time
takes up a middle distance between us and the terrifying, hideous horror of violent death.
Billiards at Half-Past Nine
regards it somewhat covertly and remotely, as befits what was called “the silent generation.” The same may be said of
the underestimated, understated
Tomorrow and Yesterday
. In
Group Portrait With Lady
the war years make one long episode among many; all the same, that episode strikes me as the central one.
Where Were You, Adam?
approaches the horror much more nearly, although Feinhals frequently achieves the phlegmatism of blindness. The short stories collected in
The Casualty
, written at the same time as
Adam
and
The Train
, may come closest of all to it. They are not more gruesome than the end of
The Train Was on Time
—what could be?—or than any number of moments in
Adam;
but the most memorable of them contain
only
such moments. (See, for instance, the unblinking Holocaust tale “Cause of Death: Hooked Nose.”) Even here we frequently encounter the Feinhals type, who informs himself that “it was all nonsense, they weren’t really in Russia, they hadn’t covered all those thousands of kilometres by train to be shot up here or freeze to death. It was all a dream.”

Indeed, Böll’s protagonists sometimes share not only personality types, but specific experiences. Andreas’s instantaneous unrequited love in France, followed by a less than pleasant ending on the Eastern Front, will be familiar to any reader of
A Soldier’s Legacy
. And so Böll’s dream-symbolism can be quite consistent from book to book, especially if our decodings of it respect the reality of its day: Going east equals death. Going west, or staying put, guarantees no salvation. Golden-toothed death will get us anyhow, but putting on a uniform brings it closer. Knowledge can be terror.

Even so,
The Train
is very much its own book, and many of the most important elements resist reduction into specific meanings. The ambiguous smile of the madame when she says: “Stryy!” (117) may be interpreted through the supposition that since all the locals belong to the Resistance, she has arranged to deliver them into the power of the Partisans. Then again, she might be a more universal figure: death’s sibyl. Böll’s rapid,
contemptuous sketch of her is in and of itself grounds for suspicion, since this genius rarely incorporates one meaning where two or three will do.

As for the eyes of that unknown French girl with whom Andreas became infatuated, they might infatuate some of us, too, if we could see them; but more likely they would simply reinforce our opinions of his youth and suggestibility. After all, he parts with those eyes rather easily when he meets Olina. But how can I be sure I comprehend what they mean? How can Andreas himself understand them? “Is it such a disgrace, then, to long to know what forehead belonged to those eyes, what mouth and what breast and what hands? Would it have been asking too much to be allowed to know what heart belonged to them …?” (28) Perhaps it would, seeing that they derive from Heinrich Böll, who conceals anguish within cynicism and skepticism within subtlety.

Jung insists that experience and even expertise in the interpretation of dreams does not in the least afford
a priori
knowledge of what the cigar means in
this
dream. Andreas’s belated realization that life is beautiful, being banal as well as true, had better not be taken at face value coming from Böll; likewise the almost instant love between him and Olina. So I had better approach the central episode with care.

4

Inside that mostly shuttered brothel, whose madame is portrayed so cruelly and yet which is a house of healing for all three soldiers, and which is yet again to Andreas a place of “artificial darkness,” (78) we soon meet that so-called opera singer, “small and slight, with fine, delicate features” and golden hair (79)—a high-class whore, whose first act is to begin to strip. But this time the customer declines to have intercourse.—Who is
she? Not any one thing, evidently.—“She looked wanton in a way, but she could just as easily be innocent” (80)—more Böllian ambiguity!

They first begin to feel a bond when it comes out that both once aspired to be pianists. And at once he experiences an anguish other than his native Being-toward-death. I suppose that his late-blooming now allows him, simply through becoming aware of Olina’s kindred situation, to grieve over the loss of that particular hope which had meant so much to him. As yet he can scarcely feel much for her in and of herself; let’s say that he sees his disappointment in hers. “And I’m glad I’m suffering … because then I hope to be forgiven everything, forgiven for not praying. But where could I kneel? Nowhere on earth could I kneel in peace.” (81) This very Catholic notion that pain can be a penance offered up in atonement adds still another significance to the encounter—which still, of course, has nothing to do with Olina herself except as a figurehead. By the way, I am not implying that Andreas is narcissistic; in fact he is more giving, generous and aware than many of his Feinhals brethren; for instance, he has proven himself capable of the extreme thoughtcrime of praying for the Jews whom his people are murdering. And after all, how could it be otherwise than difficult for Andreas to distinguish Olina from himself? For it next transpires that they were both born in the same month and year. They even both know the poem “Archibald Douglas.”

But then, when he drags her life story out of her, and she becomes resentful at having to expose her sadness to him, he cheers her up “against her will.” (85) Then they begin to have a relationship of sorts. And what kind of relationship? We have just seen that he wants to feel, which is to suffer, because then, perhaps, he will be forgiven for the part which he, as opposed to his times, has played in wasting his life—and perhaps also because to feel is to live. But because the suffering is nearly
unbearable, he now wants in equal measure a fantasy. “Maybe I’m dreaming it’s 1943 and I’m sitting here in a Lvov brothel wearing the gray tunic of Hitler’s army; maybe I’m dreaming; maybe I was born the seventeenth century, or the eighteenth, and I’m sitting in my mistress’s drawing room, and she’s playing the harpsichord, just for me …” (90) Upon which, as such dreams tend to do, Andreas’s becomes sentimental. While Olina plays for him, he finds himself believing in “the seventh heaven of love.” (89–90) Could rueful-icy Böll himself possibly believe in that? Part of the achievement of this book is that it makes me, at least for a moment, want to believe in it, not for my sake but for Andreas’s; and all the while Böll reminds me that it is ridiculously false.

And so we arrive at the second of the three mystical visions from which I have quoted at the beginning of the essay. No, it’s not a dream; Olina’s hands are drying his tears—but of course you and I know by know that it
is
a dream, that he and Olina will soon die; it’s the first nightmare vision which will turn out to be reality. So isn’t this romance nothing but deception? Andreas declines to make love to, or with, this beautiful woman, because “I’ve always only desired” and “here I desire nothing,” (92) but the life-instinct will always out; and of course he does desire something: to
live
, and with her. Somewhere there may a seventh heaven of love. But doesn’t a surprise grave in a bomb crater seem more likely?

It is around here that the author begins to let us into Olina’s consciousness. “If I tell you,” she says, “it’s as if I’m telling myself, and I can’t keep anything from you any more than I can keep anything from myself!” (92) So he is, very symmetrically and plausibly,
her
figurehead. But then immediately, in still another of his careful inversions, Böll reminds us of what at least one of the two could hardly forget: that she is a Pole, a victim, and he a German oppressor. Moreover, and this had not occurred to him before now, by informing the
Resistance of whatever military matters her clients let slip, she has become a murderess of Germans, and therefore in a way
his
oppressor.

As a result of this prior political or ideological understanding of hers, which she brings to every bedroom, what she sees in him is precisely what he disbelieves in himself: his innocence. And this vision, which comes only from her, may be the key to what they now begin to feel for each other.

Back to Feinhals: Don’t expect much. Although they tell each other about their childhoods, in a single night they could never
know
each other as longterm survivors might. Böll might be alluding to this when he has Andreas realize that, having been robbed of the years in which he would have studied the piano, he cannot hope to play perfectly for her. All the same, her belief in his guiltlessness gives him part of the absolution for which he longs, and under the circumstances he can even receive it without unmediated suffering. As for what he gives
her
, that’s evidently relief from her loneliness, via the one gift which he can offer, his empathy. “If he could only play, he would be back with me again. The first note will give him back to me … He is my brother.” (95–96) And from this moment her empathy likewise begins to enlarge, though less widely and willingly than his. She would rather not save his two brother soldiers—but she tries.

Yes, brother and sister is what these two are. The flavorless kiss defies their single attempt to sexualize the situation, which we would have expected to at least attempt to present itself as romantic passion. The night continues, but sentimentalities about the seventh heaven never return. “I ought to add now: because I love you, and that would be true and it would not be true.” (104) More telling still: “her promise doesn’t attract me” (117)—her promise of life, in which he supposes he disbelieves. In other words, he deludes her with his unenthusiastic compliance and tricks himself by
pretending that he doesn’t hope, while the madame, or fate, gets the better of both of them by packing them off to Stryy. So don’t expect much—but here, as always with Böll, something remains. For me the gentle hands of Olina represent the attempts of human beings, however ignorant, ruined and doomed, to love in whichever way they can, thereby enlarging their sympathies and generosities. Then what? Olina is lucky to die quickly, and Andreas may perhaps from the blood spattering down from her hands imbibe another sip of that absolution-through-anguish which his self-loathing demands. And if he doesn’t, well, at least we can say that he tried his best to avoid wasting what little life he had.

The Essential
HEINRICH BÖLL