The Train Was On Time (5 page)

But only the bone was broken. I was a hero, wounded on the fields of France, not far from Amiens, not far from the wall that charged madly up the hill, and a mere five minutes from that face, of which I had been allowed to see only the eyes.…

For only a tenth of a second was I allowed to see my only love, who was perhaps no more than an apparition, and now
I must die, between Lvov and Cernauti, facing the wide Polish horizon.

And didn’t I promise them, those eyes, to pray for them every day, every day, and today is almost over? It’s already getting dark, and yesterday I gave her only a passing thought while I was playing cards, the girl whose name I don’t know and whose mouth I never kissed.…

It shocked Andreas to find he was suddenly hungry. It was Thursday evening, and on Sunday he was going to die, and he was hungry, he was so hungry his head ached, he was so hungry he was exhausted. It was very quiet in the corridor, and not so crowded now. He sat down beside the unshaven soldier, who promptly made room for him, and all three men were silent. Even the blond fellow was silent: he had a mouth organ between his lips and was playing it on the closed side. It was a little mouth organ, and he slid the closed side gently back and forth across his lips, and you could tell from his expression that he was hearing the tunes in his head. The unshaven soldier was drinking, drinking systematically and silently at regular intervals, and his eyes were beginning to glisten. Andreas finished the last package of air-raid sandwiches. They had got a bit dry, but his hunger welcomed them eagerly, and they tasted marvelous; he ate six whole sandwiches and asked the blond fellow for the flask of coffee. The sandwiches were really delicious, they tasted wonderful, and afterward he felt disgracefully relaxed, shockingly content. He was very glad the other two weren’t talking, and the regular rattle of the train, of which they could feel the least movement, was rather soothing. Now I’ll pray, he thought, I’ll say all the prayers I know by heart, and a few more as well. First he said the Credo, then a Paternoster and Ave Maria, de Profundis … ut pupillam oculi—Come Holy Ghost; then the Credo again because it was so wonderfully complete; then the Good Friday intercession, because it was so wonderfully all-embracing, it even included
the unbelieving Jews. That made him think of Cernauti, and he said a special prayer for the Jews of Cernauti and for the Jews of Lvov, and no doubt there were Jews in Stanislav too, and in Kolomyya … then another Paternoster, and then a prayer of his own; it was a great place to pray, sitting beside those two silent men, one soundlessly and intently playing the wrong side of his mouth organ, the other steadily drinking schnapps.…

Outside it had got dark, and he prayed a long time for the eyes, a terribly long time, much longer than for all the others. And for the unshaven soldier too, and the blond fellow, and for the one who had said yesterday: Practically speaking, practically speaking we’ve already won the war, especially for him.

“Breslau,” said the unshaven soldier suddenly, and his voice had a strangely heavy, almost metallic sound, as if he were beginning to get a bit drunk again. “Breslau, we must soon be getting into Breslau.…”

Andreas now recited the poem to himself: “Once there was a belfryman, in Breslau Town of old.…” To his mind it was a magnificent poem, and he greatly regretted not knowing quite all of it by heart. No, he thought, I’m not going to die right away. I shall die on Sunday morning or during the night, between Lvov and Cernauti, facing that immense Polish horizon.

After that he said the poem “Archibald Douglas” over to himself, thought about the sorrowful eyes, and fell asleep with a smile.…

Waking up was always terrible. The night before someone had stepped on his fingers, and tonight 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, and this sky was slowly sinking onto the plain, getting closer and closer, closer and closer, the sky was sinking very slowly, and he couldn’t run away, and he couldn’t scream because he knew it was no use screaming. The futility of it paralyzed him.
Where would there be a soul hereabouts to hear his screams? Yet he couldn’t let himself be crushed by that descending sky. He didn’t even know whether the plain was grass, wet grass, or just earth or only mud … he couldn’t move, he refused to hop forward on his hands like a lame bird, and where to anyway? The horizon was endless, endless, wherever he looked, and the sky was sinking, and then suddenly something very cold and wet splashed onto his head, and for a millionth of a second he thought the black sky was only rain and that it would open now, that was what he thought in the millionth of a second, and he tried to scream … but he awoke and instantly saw that the unshaven soldier was standing over him, the bottle raised to his mouth, and knew that a drop from the bottle had splashed onto his forehead.…

It all came back to him right away. Sunday morning … now it was Friday. Two more days. It all came back. The blond fellow was asleep, the unshaven soldier was drinking in fierce gulps, and it was cold in the compartment; there was a draft under the door, and the prayers had expired, and the thought of the eyes no longer aroused that poignant bliss, just sorrow and loneliness. It all came back, and in the morning everything looked different, everything was glamorless and everything was futile, and it would be wonderful, too wonderful for words, if in the morning this Soon could expire too, this Soon that had now become quite definite, quite certain. But this Soon was there, it was always there right away, as if it had been waiting to pounce; ever since he had uttered the word it had lain on him like second sight. For two days now it had been as close to him, as inseparably linked to him, as his soul, his heart. This Soon was just as strong and sure in the morning. Sunday morning.…

The unshaven soldier had also noticed that Andreas was awake. He was still standing over him, drinking from the bottle. In the dim gray light it was frightening, that bulky outline,
leaning forward as if to pounce, the bottle at his lips, and the glittering eyes, and the strange, menacing gurgle from the bottle.

“Where are we?” Andreas asked in a hoarse whisper. He was scared, it was cold and still almost totally dark.

“Not far from Przemysl now,” said the man. “Want a drink?”

“Yes.” The schnapps tasted good. It ran into him like sharp fire, driving his blood around as fire under a kettle brings water to the boil. The schnapps tasted good, it warned him. He handed the bottle back.

“Go on, have another drink,” said the man roughly. “I got myself some more in Krakow.”

“No.”

The man sat down beside him, and it felt good to know there was someone there who wasn’t asleep, when you were awake and utterly miserable. Everyone was asleep, the blond fellow was snoring again, soft whistling sounds coming from his corner, and the others, the terribly silent and the terribly talkative, they were all asleep. The air in the corridor was foul—sour and grimy, full of sweat and steam.

Suddenly he realized they were already in Poland. His heart stood still for a moment, missed another beat as if the artery had suddenly knotted, blocking off the blood. Never again will I be in Germany, Germany’s gone. The train left Germany while I was asleep. Somewhere there was a line, an invisible line across a field or right through the middle of a village, and that was the border, and the train passed callously over it, and I was no longer in Germany, and no one woke me so I could have one more look out into the night and at least see a piece of the night that hung over Germany. Of course no one knows I shan’t see it again, no one knows I’m going to die, no one on the train. Never again will I see the Rhine. The Rhine! The Rhine! Never again! This train is simply taking me along, carting me off to Przemysl, and there’s Poland,
hopeless hapless Poland, and I’ll never see the Rhine, never smell it again, that exquisite tang of water and seaweed that coats and clings to every stone along the banks of the Rhine. Never again the avenues along the Rhine, the gardens behind the villas, and the boats, so bright and clean and gay, and the bridges, those splendid bridges, spare and elegant, leaping over the water like great slender animals.

“Pass me the bottle again,” he said huskily. His companion handed it to him, and he drank long and deep of that fire, that liquid fire that burns out the bleak misery of the heart. Then he lit a cigarette, and he wished his friend would say something. But first he wanted to pray, just because he felt so miserable, that was why he wanted to pray. He said the same prayers as the evening before, but this time he prayed first for the eyes, so he wouldn’t forget them. The eyes were always with him, but not always with the same clarity. Sometimes they submerged for months and were only there in the sense that his lips were there and his feet, which were always with him and of which he was only occasionally aware, only when they hurt; and sometimes, at irregular intervals, often after months, the eyes would surface like some new burning pain, and on days like that he prayed in the evening for the eyes; today he had to pray for the eyes in the morning. He also prayed again for the Jews of Cernauti, and for the Jews of Stanislav and Kolomyya; there were Jews all over Galicia, Galicia, the word was like a snake with tiny feet and shaped like a knife, a snake with glittering eyes gliding smoothly over the ground and slicing, slicing the ground in two. Galicia … a dark, beautiful word, filled with anguish, and in this country I am going to die.

There was a lot of blood in that word, blood made to flow by the knife. Bucovina, he thought, that’s a good solid word, I shan’t die there, I shall die in Galicia, in Eastern Galicia. I must have a look, when it gets light, and see where the province of Bucovina begins, I won’t see it any more now; I’m getting
closer and closer. Cernauti is already in Bucovina, I won’t see that.

“Kolomyya,” he asked his companion, “is that in Galicia?”

“Don’t know. Poland, I think.”

Every border has a terrible finality. There’s a line, and that’s it. And the train goes across it just as it would go across a dead body, or a live body. And hope is dead, the hope of being sent back once more to France and finding the eyes again and the lips belonging to the eyes, and the heart and the breast, a woman’s breast that must belong to those eyes. That hope is quite dead, completely cut off. For ever and ever those eyes will only be eyes, they will never surround themselves again with body and clothes and hair, no hands, no human hands, no woman’s hands that might one day caress you. That hope had always been there, for after all it was a human being, a living human being, to which those eyes belonged, a girl or a woman. But not now. Now there were only eyes, no lips now, never again a mouth, a heart, never again to feel a living heart under a soft skin beating against your hand, never again … never … never. Sunday morning between Lvov and Kolomyya. Cernauti was far away now, as far as Nikopol and Kishinev. That Soon had narrowed down even more, it was very narrow now. Two days, Lvov, Kolomyya. He knew he might get barely as far as Kolomyya, but certainly no farther. No heart, no mouth, only eyes, only the soul, that unhappy lovely soul that had no body; wedged between two elbows like a witch pinned to her stake before they burn her.…

The border had cut off a lot of things. Paul was finally gone too. Only memory, hope, and dream. “We live on hope,” Paul had once said. As if one were to say: “We live on credit.” We have no security … nothing … only eyes, and don’t know whether three and a half years of prayer have coaxed those eyes over to the place we may hope to reach.…

Yes, later on he did limp up that hill, from the hospital in Amiens, and nothing was the same. The road was not gray as it ran up the hill, it was just an ordinary road. The hill carried the road on its back, and the wall had no intention of swaying and charging; the wall just stood there. And there was the house, which he hadn’t recognized, only the wall, he had recognized that, a wall made of bricks with gaps in them where bricks had been left out to make a kind of pattern. A Frenchman was standing there, a real lower-middle-class type, his pipe between his teeth, his eyes full of that truly French derision—ponderous, bourgeois—and the man had known nothing. He knew only that they had all gone, fled, and that the Germans had looted everything although a banner had been strung right across the road saying: Looting punishable by death. No, no eyes, only the man’s wife, an obese matron who kept her hand tucked in the top of her dress, a face rather like a rabbit’s. No child, no daughter, no sister, no sister-in-law, nothing! Just poky rooms full of kitsch and stale air and the couple’s derisive looks as they watched him searching helplessly, agonizingly.

That glass cabinet: the Germans had smashed it up. And burned holes in the carpet with their cigarette butts, and slept on the couch with their whores and messed it all up. He spat with contempt. But that had all happened later, not during the battle while Amiens was smoking, much later, after the pilot had crashed in the wheatfield over there where you could see the tail of the aircraft sticking in the earth. The pipe pointed out of the window … yes, there it was, sticking in the earth, the tail with the emblem, and on the French steel helmet on the grave right next to it the sun was glinting; it was all real, as real as the smell from the kitchen of the roast in the oven, and the smashed glass cabinet and, down there in the valley, the cathedral in Amiens. “A fine example of French Gothic architecture.…”

No eyes. Nothing, nothing at all.…

“Maybe,” said the man, “maybe it was a whore.” But the man pitied him, it was a miracle that this bourgeois little man could feel pity, pity for a German soldier who belonged to the same army as the ones who had stolen his knives and forks and his clocks, and had slept on his couch with their whores, messing it all up, ruining it.

The pain was so overpowering that he just stood there in the doorway, looking at the spot on the road where he had passed out, the pain was so great that he didn’t feel it. The man shook his head, perhaps he had never seen such unhappy eyes as those of this soldier leaning heavily on his cane.