The Train Was on Time Read online

  HEINRICH BÖLL

  In 1972, Heinrich Böll became the first German to win the Nobel Prize for literature since Thomas Mann in 1929. Born in Cologne, in 1917, Böll was reared in a liberal Catholic, pacifist family. Drafted into the Wehrmacht, he served on the Russian and French fronts and was wounded four times before he found himself in an American prison camp. After the war he enrolled at the University of Cologne, but dropped out to write about his shattering experiences as a soldier. His first novel, The Train Was on Time, was published in 1949, and he went on to become one of the most prolific and important of post-war German writers. His best-known novels include Billiards at Half-Past Nine (1959), The Clown (1963), Group Portrait with Lady (1971), and The Safety Net (1979). In 1981 he published a memoir, What’s to Become of the Boy? or: Something to Do with Books. Böll served for several years as the president of International P.E.N. and was a leading defender of the intellectual freedom of writers throughout the world. He died in June 1985.

  William T. Vollmann is the author of seven novels, three collections of stories, and a seven-volume critique of violence, Rising Up and Rising Down, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction. He is also the author of Poor People, a worldwide examination of poverty through the eyes of the impoverished; Riding Toward Everywhere, an examination of the train-hopping hobo lifestyle; and Imperial, a panoramic look at one of the poorest areas in America. His most recent novel, Europe Central, won the National Book Award in 2005. He has won the PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction, a Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize and a Whiting Writers’ Award. His journalism and fiction have been published in The New Yorker, Esquire, Spin and Granta. Vollmann lives in California.

  The Essential

  HEINRICH BÖLL

  The Clown

  The Safety Net

  Billiards at Half-Past Nine

  The Train Was on Time

  Irish Journal

  Group Portrait with Lady

  What’s to Become of the Boy? Or:

  Something to Do with Books—A Memoir

  The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll

  Translator’s Acknowledgment

  I am deeply indebted to my husband, William Vennewitz, for his never-failing advice and assistance in this translation.

  Leila Vennewitz

  The Train Was On Time

  Originally published in German in 1949 as Der Zug war pünklich by Heinrich Böll

  © 1977, 1996, 2003 by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG, Cologne, Germany

  Translated by Leila Vennewitz.

  Afterword © William T. Vollmann, 2010

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  www.mhpbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Böll, Heinrich, 1917-1985.

  [Zug war pünktlich. English]

  The train was on time / Heinrich Böll; translated from the German by Leila Vennewitz.

  p. cm.

  Previously published: London : Secker and Warburg, 1970. With new afterword by William T. Vollmann.

  eISBN: 978-1-935554-95-0

  1. World War, 1939-1945–Fiction. 2. Germany–Fiction. I. Vennewitz, Leila. II. Title.

  PT2603.O394Z4513 2011

  833′.914–dc22

  2011000503

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  THE TRAIN

  WAS ON TIME

  AFTERWORD

  by William T. Vollmann

  I have known many adventures in my time: the creation of postal routes, Sahara rebellions, South America … but war is not really an adventure at all, it is only a substitute for adventure.… War is a disease. Like typhus.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,

  Pilote de Guerre

  As they walked through the dark underpass they could hear the train rumbling up to the platform overhead, and the resounding voice came smoothly over the loudspeaker: “The troop-train now arriving from Paris will depart for Przemysl via.…”

  Then they had climbed the steps to the platform and were standing by the leave-train from which beaming soldiers were emerging, weighed down with huge packages. The platform quickly emptied, it was the usual scene. At some of the windows stood girls or women or a very silent, grim-faced father … and the resounding voice was telling people to hurry. The train was on time.

  “Why don’t you get on?” the chaplain asked the soldier anxiously.

  “Get on?” asked the soldier, amazed. “Why, I might want to hurl myself under the wheels, I might want to desert … eh? What’s the hurry? I might go crazy, I’ve a perfect right to, I’ve a perfect right to go crazy. I don’t want to die, that’s what’s so horrible—that I don’t want to die.” His voice was cold and hard, as if the words were pouring from his lips like ice. “Don’t say any more! I’ll get on all right, there’s always a spot somewhere … yes … yes, don’t mind me, pray for me!” He grasped his pack, boarded the train through the nearest door, let down the window from inside, and leaned out, while overhead the resounding voice hung like a cloud of mucus: “The train is now leaving.…”

  “I don’t want to die!” he shouted. “I don’t want to die, but the terrible thing is that I’m going to die … soon!” The black figure on that cold gray platform retreated farther and farther into the distance … farther and farther, until the station was swallowed up by night.

  Now and again what appears to be a casually spoken word will suddenly acquire a cabalistic significance. It becomes charged and strangely swift, races ahead of the speaker, is destined to throw open a chamber in the uncertain confines of the future and to return to him with the deadly accuracy of a boomerang. Out of the smalltalk of unreflecting speech, usually from among those halting, colorless goodbyes exchanged beside trains on their way to death, it falls back on the speaker like a leaden wave, and he becomes aware of the force, both frightening and intoxicating, of the workings of fate. To lovers and soldiers, to men marked for death and to those filled with the cosmic force of life, this power is sometimes given, without warning; a sudden revelation is conferred on them, a bounty and a burden … and the word sinks, sinks down inside them.

  As Andreas was slowly groping his way back into the center of the car, the word soon entered him like a bullet, painlessly and almost imperceptibly penetrating flesh, tissue, cells, nerves, until at some point it caught, like a barbed hook, exploded, and ripped open a savage wound, making blood pour out … life, pain.…

  Soon, he thought, and felt himself turning pale. At the same time he did all the usual things, almost unconsciously. He struck a match, lighting up the heaps of sitting, stretched out, sleeping soldiers who lay around, across, under, and on top of their luggage. The smell of stale tobacco smoke was mixed with the smell of stale sweat and that strangely gritty dirt which clings to all soldiers in the mass. The flame of the dying matchstick flared up with a final hiss, and in that last glow he saw, over by the narrowing corridor, a small empty space. He carefully picked his way toward it, his bundle tucked under one arm, his cap in his hand.

  Soon, he thought, and the shock of fear lay deep, deep. Fear and absolute certainty. Never again, he thought, never again will I see this station, never again the face of my friend, the man I abused right up to the last moment … never again. Soon! He reached the empty space, set his pack carefully on the floor in order not to wake the sleeping men around him, and sat down on it so he could lean back against a compartment door. Then he tried to arrange his legs as comfortably as
possible; he stretched the left one carefully past the face of one sleeping soldier, and placed the right one across a piece of luggage that was shielding the back of another. In the compartment behind him a match flared up, and someone began to smoke silently in the dark. By turning slightly to one side he could see the glowing tip of the cigarette, and sometimes, when the unknown man drew on it, the reflection spread over an unfamiliar soldier’s face, gray and tired, with bitter creases in it, starkly and terribly sober.

  Soon, he thought. The rattle of the train, it was all so familiar. The smell, the desire to smoke, the feeling he had to smoke. The last thing he wanted to do was sleep. The somber outlines of the city moved past the window. Somewhere in the distance searchlights were raking the sky, like long spectral fingers parting the blue cloak of the night … from far away came the firing of antiaircraft guns … and those darkened, mute, somber houses. When would this Soon be? The blood flowed out of his heart, flowed back into his heart, circling, circling, life was circling, and all this pulse beat said was: Soon! He could no longer say, no longer even think: “I don’t want to die.” As often as he tried to form the sentence he thought: I’m going to die … soon.

  Behind him a second gray face now showed up in the glow of a cigarette, and he could hear a subdued, weary murmuring. The two unknown men were talking.

  “Dresden,” said one voice.

  “Dortmund,” the other.

  The murmuring continued, became more animated. Then another voice swore, and the murmuring subsided again; it petered out, and again there was only one cigarette behind him. It was the second cigarette, and finally this one went out too, and again there was this gray darkness behind and beside him, and facing him the black night with the countless houses, all mute, all black. Only in the distance those silent, uncannily long, spectral fingers of the searchlights, still groping across the sky. It seemed as if the faces belonging to those fingers must be grinning, eerily grinning, cynically grinning like the faces of usurers and swindlers. “We’ll get you,” said the thin-lipped, gaping mouths belonging to those fingers. “We’ll get you, we’ll grope all night long.” Maybe they were looking for a bedbug, a tiny bug in the cloak of the night, those fingers, and they would find the bug.…

  Soon. Soon. Soon. Soon. When is Soon? What a terrible word: Soon. Soon can mean in one second, Soon can mean in one year. Soon is a terrible word. This Soon compresses the future, shrinks it, offers no certainty, no certainty whatever, it stands for absolute uncertainty. Soon is nothing and Soon is a lot. Soon is everything. Soon is death.…

  Soon I shall be dead. I shall die, soon. You have said so yourself, and someone inside you and someone outside you has told you that this Soon will be fufilled. One thing is sure, this Soon will be in wartime. That’s a certainty, that’s a fact.

  How much longer will the war go on?

  It can last for another year before everything finally collapses in the East, and if the Americans in the West don’t attack, or the British, then it will go on for another two years before the Russians reach the Atlantic. They will attack, though. But all in all it will last another year at the very least, the war won’t be over before the end of 1944. The way this whole apparatus is built up, it’s too obedient, too cowardly, too docile. So I may still have anything from one second to one year. How many seconds are there in a year? Soon I’m going to die, before the war is over. I shan’t ever know peacetime again. No more peacetime. There’ll be no more of anything, no music … no flowers … no poetry … no more human joy; soon I’m going to die.

  This Soon is like a thunderclap. This little word is like the spark that sets off the thunderstorm, and suddenly, for the thousandth part of a second, the whole world is bright beneath this word.

  The smell of bodies is the same as ever. The smell of dirt and dust and boot polish. Funny, wherever there are soldiers there’s dirt. The spectral fingers had found the bug.…

  He lit a fresh cigarette. I’ll try and picture the future, he thought. Maybe it’s an illusion, this Soon, maybe I’m overtired, maybe it’s tension or nerves. He tried to imagine what he would do when the war was over. He would … he would … but there was a wall he couldn’t get over, a totally black wall. He couldn’t imagine anything. Of course he could force himself to complete the sentence in his mind: I’ll go to university … I’ll take a room somewhere … with books … cigarettes … go to university … music … poetry … flowers. But even as he forced himself to complete the sentence in his mind he knew it wouldn’t happen. None of it would happen. Those aren’t dreams, those are pale, colorless thoughts devoid of weight, blood, all human substance. The future has no face now, it is cut off somewhere; and the more he thought about it the more he realized how close he was to this Soon. Soon I’m going to die, that’s a certainty that lies between one year and one second. There are no more dreams.…

  Soon. Maybe two months. He tried to imagine it in terms of time, to discover whether the wall rose this side of the next two months, that wall he would not be going beyond. Two months, that meant the end of November. But he can’t grasp it in terms of time. Two months: an image that has no power. He might just as well say: three months or four months or six, the image evokes no echo. January, he thought. But the wall isn’t there at all. A strange, unquiet hope awakens: May, he thought with a sudden leap ahead. Nothing. The wall is silent. There’s no wall anywhere. There’s nothing. This Soon … this Soon is only a frightening bogey. November, he thought. Nothing! A fierce, terrible joy springs to life. January: January of next year, a year and a half away—a year and a half of life! Nothing! No wall!

  He sighed with relief and went on thinking, his thoughts now racing across time as over light, very low hurdles. January, May, December! Nothing! And suddenly he was aware that he was groping in a void. The place where the wall rose up couldn’t be grasped in terms of time. Time was irrelevant. Time had ceased to exist. And yet hope still remained. He had leaped so splendidly over the months. Years.…

  Soon I’m going to die, and he felt like a swimmer who knows he is near the shore and finds himself suddenly flung back into the tide by the surf. Soon! That’s where the wall is, the wall beyond which he will cease to exist, will cease to be on this earth.

  Krakow, he thought suddenly, and his heart missed a beat as if an artery had twisted itself into a knot, blocking off the blood. He is on the right track—Krakow! Nothing! Farther. Przemysl! Nothing! Lvov! Nothing! Then he starts racing: Cernauti, Jassy, Kishinev, Nikopol! But at the last name he already senses that this is only make-believe, make-believe like the thought: I’ll go to university. Never again, never again will he see Nikopol! Back to Jassy. No, he won’t see Jassy again either. He won’t see Cernauti again, Lvov! Lvov he’ll see again, Lvov he’ll reach alive! I’m mad, he thought, I’m out of my mind, this means I’ll die between Lvov and Cernauti! What a crazy idea … he forced himself to switch off his thoughts and started smoking again and staring into the face of the night. I’m hysterical, I’m crazy, I’ve been smoking too much, talking, talking for nights on end, days on end, with no sleep, no food, just smoking, it’s enough to make anyone lose their mind.…

  I must have something to eat, he thought, something to drink. Food and drink keep body and soul together. This damn smoking all the time! He started fumbling with his pack, but while he peered toward his feet in the dark, trying to find the buckle, and then began rummaging around in his pack where sandwiches and underwear, tobacco, cigarettes, and a bottle of schnapps all lay in a heap, he became aware of a leaden, implacable fatigue that clogged his veins … he fell asleep … his hands on the open pack, one leg—the left—next to a face he had never seen, one leg—the right—across someone’s luggage, and with his tired and by now dirty hands resting on his pack he fell asleep, his head on his chest.…

  He was awakened by someone treading on his fingers. A stab of pain, he opened his eyes; someone had passed by in a hurry, bumped him in the back and trodden on his hands. He saw it was daylight
and heard another resounding voice hospitably announcing a station name, and he realized it was Dortmund. The man who had spent the night behind him smoking and murmuring was getting out, cursing as he barged along the corridor; for that unknown gray face, this was home. Dortmund. The man next to him, the one whose luggage his right leg had been resting on, was awake and sat up on the cold floor of the corridor, rubbing his eyes. The man on the left, whose face his left foot was resting against, was still asleep. Dortmund. Girls carrying steaming pots of coffee were hurrying up and down the platform. The same as ever. Women were standing around weeping; girls being kissed, fathers … it was all so familiar: he must be crazy.

  But, to tell the truth, all he knew was that the instant he opened his eyes he knew that Soon was still there. Deep within him the little barb had drawn blood, it had caught and would never let go now. This Soon had grabbed him like a hook, and he was going to squirm on it, squirm until he was between Lvov and Cernauti.…

  Like lightning, in the millionth part of a second it took him to wake up, came the hope that this Soon would have disappeared, like the night, a bogey in the wake of endless talking and endless smoking. But it was still there, implacably there.…

  He sat up, his eye fell on his pack, still half open, and he stuffed back a shirt that had slipped out. The man on his right had let down a window and was holding out a mug into which a thin, tired girl was pouring coffee. The smell of the coffee was horrible, thin steam that made him feel queasy; it was the smell of barracks, of army cookhouses, a smell that had spread all over Europe … and that was meant to spread all over the world. And yet (so deep are the roots of habit) and yet he also held out his mug for the girl to fill; the gray coffee that was as gray as a uniform. He could smell the stale exhalation from the girl; she must have slept in her clothes, gone from train to train during the night, lugging coffee.…

  She smelled penetratingly of that vile coffee. Perhaps she slept right up close to the coffeepot as it stood on a stove to keep hot, slept until the next train arrived. Her skin was gray and rough like dirty milk, and wisps of her scanty, pale-black hair crept out from under a little cap, but her eyes were soft and sad, and when she bent over to fill his mug he saw the charming nape of her neck. What a pretty girl, he thought: everyone will think she’s ugly, and she’s pretty, she’s beautiful … she has delicate little fingers too … I could spend hours watching her pour my coffee; if only the mug had a hole, if only she would pour and pour, I would see her soft eyes and that charming nape, and if only that resounding voice would shut up. Everything bad comes from those resounding voices; those resounding voices started the war, and those resounding voices regulate the worst war of all, the war at railway stations. To hell with all resounding voices!