The Train Was On Time (7 page)

Andreas pulled the map out of his tunic pocket, unfolded it, and sat up, spreading it out on his knees. His eyes went to where Galicia was, but the blond fellow’s finger was lying much farther to the south and east, it was a long, shapely finger, with fine hair on it, a finger that not even the dirt had deprived of any of its good breeding.

“There,” he said, “that’s where I’m heading. With any luck it’ll take me another ten days.” His finger with its flat, still glossy, blue-sheened nail filled the whole bay between Odessa and the Crimea. The edge of the nail lay beside Nikolayev.

“Nikolayev?” Andreas asked.

“No,” the blond fellow winced, and his nail slid lower down, and Andreas noticed that he was staring at the map but seeing nothing and thinking of something else. “No,” said the blond fellow. “Ochakov. I’m with the antiaircraft; before that we were in Anapa, in the Kuban, you know, but we got out of there. And now it’s Ochakov.

Suddenly the two men looked at one another. For the first time in the forty-eight hours they had been cooped up together, they looked at one another. They had played cards together by the hour, drunk and eaten and slept leaning against each other, but now for the first time they looked at one another. A strangely repellent, whitish-gray, slimy film coated the blond fellow’s eyes. To Andreas it looked as though the man’s gaze were piercing the faint first scab that closes over a festering wound. Now all at once he realized what that repulsive aura was which emanated from this man who at one time, when his eyes were still clear, must have been handsome, fair and slender with well-bred hands. So that’s it, thought Andreas.

“Yes,” said the blond fellow very quietly, “that’s it,” as if he realized what Andreas was thinking. He went on speaking, his voice quiet, uncannily quiet. “That’s it. He seduced me, that sergeant major. I’m totally corrupted now, rotten to the core, life holds no more pleasure for me, not even eating,
it just looked as if I enjoyed that, I eat automatically, I drink automatically, I sleep automatically. It’s not my fault, they corrupted me!” he cried, then his voice subsided again.

“For six weeks we lay in a gun emplacement, way up along the Sivash River … not a house in sight … not even a broken wall. Marshes, water … willow shrubs … and the Russians flew over it when they wanted to attack our planes flying from Odessa to the Crimea. For six weeks we lay there. Words can’t describe it. We were just one cannon with six men and the sergeant major. Not a living soul for miles. Our food supplies were trucked in as far as the edge of the marsh, and we had to pick them up from there and carry them across log-walks to our emplacement; the rations were always for two weeks, no shortage of grub. Eating was the only break in the monotony, that and catching fish and chasing mosquitoes … those fantastic swarms of mosquitoes, I don’t know why we didn’t go out of our minds. The sergeant major was like an animal. Filth poured from his mouth all day long, those first few days, and his eating habits were foul. Meat and fat, hardly any bread.” A terrible sigh was wrenched from his breast: “Any man who doesn’t eat bread is a hopeless case, I tell you. Yes.…” Terrible silence, while the sun stood golden and warm and fair over Przemysl.

“My God,” he groaned, “so he seduced us, what else is there to say? We were all like that … except one. He refused. He was an old fellow, married and with a family; in the evening he used often to show us snapshots of his kids, and weep … that was before. He refused, he would hit out, threaten us … he was stronger than the five of us put together; and one night when he was alone on sentry duty, the sergeant major shot him. He crept out and put a bullet through him—from behind. With the man’s own pistol; then he yanked us out of our bunks and we had to help him throw the body into the marshes. Corpses are heavy … I’m telling you, the bodies of dead men weigh a ton.
Corpses are heavier than the whole world, the six of us could scarcely carry him; it was dark and raining, and I thought: This is what hell must be like. And the sergeant major sent in a report that the old fellow had mutinied and threatened him with his weapon, and he took along the old fellow’s pistol as proof—there was one bullet missing from it, of course. And they sent his wife a letter saying he had fallen for Greater Germany in the Sivash marshes … yes; and a week later the first food truck arrived with a telegram for me saying our factory had been destroyed and I was to go on leave; and I didn’t even go back to the emplacement, I just took off!” There was a fierce joy in his voice: “I just took off! He must have hit the roof! And they first interrogated me in the office about the old fellow, and I gave them exactly the same story as the sergeant major’s. And then I was off … off! From the battery to the section in Ochakov, then Odessa and then I took off.…” Terrible silence, while the sun still shone, fair and warm and gentle; Andreas felt an appalling nausea. That’s the worst, he thought, that’s the worst.…

“After that I never enjoyed anything again, and I never will. I’m scared to look at a woman. The whole time I was home I just lay around in a kind of stupor, crying away like some idiot child, and my mother thought I had some awful disease. But how could I tell her about it, it was something you can’t tell anyone.…”

How crazy for the sun to shine like that, Andreas thought, and a dreadful nausea lay like poison in his blood. He reached for the blond fellow’s hand, but the man shrank back in horror. “No,” he cried, “don’t!” He threw himself onto his stomach, hid his head in his arms, and sobbed. It sounded as if the ground would burst open, and above his sobbing the sky was smiling, above the army huts, above all those huts and above the towers of Przemysl on the River San.…

“Let me die,” he sobbed, “I just want to die, then it’ll be all over. Let me die.…” His words were stifled by a choking sound, and now Andreas could hear him crying, crying real tears, wet tears.

Andreas saw no more. A torrent of blood and dirt and slime had poured over him; he prayed, prayed desperately, as a drowning man shouts who is struggling all alone out in the middle of a lake and can see no shore and no rescuer.…

That’s wonderful, he thought, crying is wonderful, crying is good for you, crying, crying, what wretched creature has never cried? I should cry too, that’s what I should do. The sergeant cried, and the blond fellow cried, and I haven’t cried for three and a half years, not one tear since I walked back down that hill into Amiens and was too lazy to walk those extra three minutes as far as the field where I had been wounded.

The second train had left too, the station was empty now. Funny, thought Andreas, even if I wanted to I couldn’t go back now. I could never leave these two fellows alone. Besides, I don’t want to go back, I never want to go back.…

The station with all its various tracks was deserted now. A heat haze danced between the rails, and somewhere back there by the entrance a group of Poles were working, shoveling ballast onto the tracks, and coming along the platform was an odd figure wearing the pants of the unshaven soldier. From way off you could see it was no longer the bearded, fierce, desperate fellow who had been cooped up in the train and drinking to drown his sorrows. This was a different person, only the pants were still those of the unshaven soldier. His face was all smooth and pink, his cap at a slight angle, and in his eyes, as he came closer, could be seen something of the real sergeant, a mixture of indifference, mockery, cynicism, and militarism. Those eyes seemed to have done with dreaming, the unshaven soldier was now shaved and washed, his hair was combed, his
hands were clean, and it was just as well to know that his name was Willi, for it was impossible to think of him any more as the unshaven soldier, you had to think of him as Willi. The blond fellow was still lying on his blanket, his face on his folded arms, and from his heavy breathing you couldn’t tell whether he was sleeping, groaning, or crying.

“Is he asleep?” Willi asked.

“Yes.” Willi unpacked the rations and arranged everything neatly in two piles. “Three days’ supply,” he said. For each man there was a whole loaf of bread and a large sausage, its wrapping paper wet with the moisture oozing from it. For each man there was slightly less than half a pound of butter, eighteen cigarettes, and three rolls of fruit drops.

“Nothing for you?” Andreas asked.

Willi looked at him in surprise, almost offended. “But I’ve still got my ration cards for sixteen days!” Strange to think that all that hadn’t been a dream, all those things Willi had talked about during the night. It had been the truth, it had been the same person as this man facing him now, smoothly shaven, the quiet eyes holding no more than a modicum of pain; the same person who was now standing in the shade of the fir tree and, very carefully, so as not to spoil the creases, pulling on the pants of his black Panzer uniform. Brand-new pants that suited him down to the ground. He now looked every inch a sergeant.

“There’s some beer here too,” said Willi. He unpacked three bottles of beer, and they set up Willi’s carton between them as a table and began to eat. The blond fellow did not stir, he lay there on his face as many a dead man lies on the battlefield. Willi had some Polish bacon, white bread, and onions. The beer was excellent, it was even cool.

“These Polish barbers,” said Willi, “they’re tremendous. For six marks, everything included, they make a new man of you, they even shampoo your hair! Just tremendous, and can
they ever cut hair!” He took off his peaked cap and pointed to the well-contoured back of his head. “That’s what I call a haircut.” Andreas was still looking at him in amazement. In Willi’s eyes there was now something sentimental, some sergeant-like sentimentality. It was very pleasant eating like this as if at a proper table, well away from those army huts.

“You fellows,” said Willi, chewing and clearly enjoying his beer, “you fellows should go and have a wash, or get yourselves washed, makes you feel like a new man. You get rid of everything, all that dirt. And then the shave! You could use one.” He glanced at Andreas’ chin. “You could certainly use one. I tell you, it’s tremendous, you don’t feel tired any more, you … you—” he was groping for the right word—“all I can say is, you feel like a new man. You’ve still got time, our train doesn’t leave for two hours. We’ll be in Lvov this evening. From Lvov we take the civilian express, the courier train, the one that goes direct from Warsaw to Bucharest. It’s a terrific train, I always take it, all you need is to get your pass stamped, and we’ll see to that,” he guffawed, “we’ll see to that, but I’m not letting on how!”

But surely we won’t need twenty-four hours to get from Lvov to that place where it’s going to happen, thought Andreas. Something’s wrong there. We won’t be leaving Lvov as early as five tomorrow morning. The sandwiches tasted marvelous. He spread the butter thickly on the bread and ate it with chunks of the juicy sausage. That’s really strange, he thought, this is Sunday’s butter and maybe even part of Monday’s, I’m eating butter I’m no longer entitled to. I’m not even entitled to Sunday’s butter. Rations are calculated from noon to noon, and starting Sunday noon I’m not entitled to any more butter. Perhaps they’ll court-martial me … they’ll lay my body on a desk before a tribunal and say: He ate Sunday’s butter and even part of Monday’s, he robbed the great-and-glorious German Wehrmacht. He knew he was going to die, but that
didn’t stop him from eating the butter and bread and sausage and candy and from smoking the cigarettes. We can’t enter that anywhere, there’s no place to enter rations for the dead. We’re not heathens, after all, who place food in graves for their dead. We are positive Christians, and he has robbed the positive-Christian, glorious Greater German Wehrmacht. We must find him guilty.…

“In Lvov,” Willi laughed, “that’s where I’ll get that rubber stamp, in Lvov. You can get anything in Lvov, I know my way around there.”

Andreas had only to say one word, only to ask, and he would have found out how and where one obtained the rubber stamp in Lvov. Willi was just itching to tell him. But Andreas didn’t care about finding out. It was fine with him if they got the stamp. The civilian express was fine with him. It was wonderful to travel by civilian train. They weren’t for soldiers only, for men only. It was terrible to be always among men, men were so womanish. But in that train there would be women … Polish women … Rumanian women … German women … women spies … diplomats’ wives. It was nice to ride on a train with women … as far as … as … where he was going to die. What would happen? Partisans? There were partisans all over the place, but why would partisans attack a train carrying civilians? There were plenty of leave-trains carrying whole regiments of soldiers with weapons, luggage, food, clothing, money, and ammunition.

Willi was disappointed that Andreas did not ask where he could get hold of the stamp in Lvov. He wanted so badly to talk about Lvov. “Lvov,” he cried with a laugh. And since Andreas still did not ask, he launched out anyway: “In Lvov, you know, we always flogged the cars.”

“Always?” Andreas was listening now. “You always flogged them?”

“I mean, when we had one to flog. We’re a repair depot, see, and often there’s a wreck left over, often it’s a wreck that’s not really a wreck at all. You just have to say it’s scrap, that’s all. And the superintendent has to close both eyes because he’s been going to bed all the time with that Jewish girl from Cernauti. But it isn’t scrap at all, that car, see? You can take two or three and make a terrific car out of them, the Russians are terrific at that. And in Lvov they’ll give you forty thousand marks for it. Divided by four. Me and three men from my column. It’s damn dangerous, of course, you’re taking a hell of a risk.” He sighed heavily. “You sweat blood, I can tell you. You never know whether the fellow you’re dealing with mightn’t be from the Gestapo, you can never tell, not till it’s all over. For two whole weeks you sweat blood. If after two weeks there’s been no report and none of the bunch have been arrested, that means you’ve come out on top again. Forty thousand marks.” He took a drink of beer with obvious enjoyment.

“When I think of all that stuff lying in the mud around Nikopol. It’s worth millions, I tell you, millions! And not a bloody soul gets a thing out of it, only the Russians. You know,” he lit a cigarette, savoring it, “now and again we could flog something that wasn’t so dangerous. One day a spare part, another day a motor or some tires. Clothing too. They’re keen as hell to get hold of clothing. Coats, now … they’ll fetch a thousand marks, a good coat will. Back home, you know, I’ve built myself a little house, a nice little house with a workshop … for … for … what did you say?” he asked abruptly. But Andreas had said nothing, he shot him a quick glance and saw that his eye had darkened, he was frowning, and that he hurriedly finished his beer. Even without the beard, the old face was there again … the sun was still shining golden above the towers of Przemysl on the River San, and the blond fellow was stirring.
It was obvious he had only been pretending to be asleep. Now he was pretending to wake up. He stretched his limbs very deliberately, turned over, and opened his eyes, but he didn’t know that the traces of tears in his grimy face were still plainly visible. There were proper furrows, furrows in the grime as on the face of a very little girl who has had her sandwich pinched on the playground. He didn’t know this, maybe he had even forgotten that he had been crying. His eyes were red-rimmed and unsightly; he really did look as if he might have venereal disease.…