The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll Read online

  It was only during the return trip in the red furniture van that he was found to have a splinter in his leg, a glass splinter, as the operation revealed, a minute fragment of a bottle of Tokay, and there had been an odd and embarrassing negotiation because he might have been in line for the silver medal for wounds except that the senior medical officer did not award silver medals for wounds caused by glass splinters, and for a few days the suspicion of self-mutilation hung over him, until Lieutenant Brecht, whom he named as a witness, sent in his report. The wound healed quickly, although he drank a lot of schnapps, and after a month he was sent to some redeployment center that packed him off to Berczaba. He waited downstairs in the tavern until the room Gress had chosen for them became free. He drank some wine, thought about Ilona, and heard the noise in the house made by the men getting ready to leave. The old soldiers were hunting for their belongings; the landlady stood behind the counter dourly taking in the scene, a middle-aged woman, quite pretty, still quite pretty, and in the passageway beyond her another woman was bawling her head off.

  Then he heard the woman wailing and sobbing more lustily than ever, and heard the truck take off for the village they had just come from. Gress appeared and took him up to his room. The room was low, the plaster flaking off in places, black beams supported the ceiling, and it smelled stuffy; the air outside was close, and the window gave onto a garden: a grassy plot with old fruit trees, flowerbeds along the sides, stables, and at the end, outside a shed, a boat on blocks, its paint peeling off. It was quiet outside. To the left across the hedge he could see the bridge, rusty iron girders stuck out of the water, and the concrete piers were overgrown with moss. The little river seemed to be some forty or fifty yards wide.

  So now he was sharing a room with Gress. He had met him yesterday at the redeployment center and decided not to say one word more than necessary to him. Gress had four decorations on his chest, and he liked telling tales—never stopped, in fact—about the Polish, Rumanian, French, and Russian girls he claimed to have left behind, all with broken hearts. Feinhals didn’t feel like listening, it was a nuisance as well as a bore, embarrassing too, and Gress seemed to be one of those men who believed people would listen to them because they had decorations on their chest, more decorations than most.

  Feinhals himself had only one decoration, a single medal, and he was a born listener because he never said anything, or hardly ever, and asked for no explanations. He was glad to learn that he and Gress were to take turns manning the observation post: this would mean he would be rid of him during the daytime at least … He lay down on the bed the minute Gress announced his intention of breaking the heart of a Slovak girl, any Slovak girl.

  He was tired, and every night when he lay down to sleep somewhere, he hoped to dream about Ilona, but he never did. He would recapture every word he had exchanged with her, think about her very hard, but when he fell asleep she did not come. Often he felt, before falling asleep, that he needed only to turn over to feel her arm, but she was not there beside him, she was a long way away, and it was useless to turn over. He was a long time falling asleep because he was thinking so hard about her and imagining the room that had been intended to receive them—and when he did drop off, he slept badly, and in the morning he had forgotten what he had dreamed about. He had not dreamed about Ilona.

  He prayed in bed at night too, and thought about the talks he used to have with her before they had to leave; she had invariably blushed, and she seemed embarrassed by his presence in the room, among stuffed animals, rock specimens, maps, and health charts. But maybe it had only embarrassed her to talk about religion—she had always gone fiery red—it seemed to distress her to state her beliefs, and she stated her belief in faith, hope, and charity, and was shocked when he said he couldn’t go to church because the faces and sermons of most priests were more than he could stand. “We have to pray to console God,” she had said …

  He never thought she would let herself be kissed, but he had kissed her, and she him, and he knew she would have gone with him to that room he now saw so often in his mind’s eye: none too clean, water still standing in the bluish wash basin, the wide brown bed, and the view into the neglected orchard where windfalls lay decaying under the trees. He always pictured himself lying in bed with her and talking, but he never dreamed about it …

  Next morning the regular routine began. He sat perched up there in the armchair on the wobbly table, in the fusty attic of this house, looking with the field glasses out through the dormer window into the mountains, into the forest, scanning the riverbank and sometimes back toward the hamlet they had driven over from in the truck. He couldn’t find any partisans—maybe the farmers in the fields were partisans, only you couldn’t tell this with field glasses. It was so quiet that it hurt, and he felt as though he had been perched up here for years, and he raised the field glasses, adjusting the screw, and looked out across the forest, past the yellow church spire, into the mountains. The air was very clear, and way up there among craggy rocks he could see a herd of goats; the animals were scattered like tiny white hard-edged cloudlets, very white against that gray, soft-green background, and he could feel himself capturing the silence through the field glasses, and the loneliness too. The animals moved very slowly, very seldom—as if they were being pulled along on short strings. With the field glasses he could see them as he would have donewith the naked eye at two or three miles; they seemed very far away, infinitely far away, silent and lonely, those animals; he could not see the goatherd. It was a shock to put down the glasses and find he could no longer see them, not a trace of them, although he gazed intently beyond the church spire up at the mountain. Not even their whiteness was visible; they must be a long way off. He picked up the glasses again and looked at the white goats, whose loneliness he could feel—but the sound of commands being given down in the garden startled him, and he lowered the glasses, looked first without them into the garden and watched the men drilling. Lieutenant Mück himself was in command. Feinhals lifted the glasses to his eyes, adjusted the lenses, and studied Mück closely; he had known him only two days, but he had already seen that Mück took matters seriously. His fine, dark profile was like a mask, deadly serious, the hands behind his back did not move, and the muscles of the thin neck twitched. Mück did not look well, his complexion was pasty, almost gray, the lips were bloodless and barely moved when they uttered “Left turn,” “Right turn,” and “About turn.” At the moment Feinhals could see only Mück’s profile, that deadly serious, rigid half of his face, the lips that barely moved, the sorrowful left eye that seemed to be looking not at the drilling soldiers but far away, somewhere—maybe back into the past. Then he looked at Gress: his face was swollen, he looked in some way upset.

  When—again without the glasses—he looked down into the garden where the soldiers were doing left turns, right turns, and about turns on that lush, wonderful expanse of grass, he saw a woman hanging out the washing on a line strung between the stables. It must be the daughter who had been crying and carrying on in the passageway yesterday. She looked grave, somber—so somber that she was not pretty but beautiful, a fine-drawn, very dark face with tightly pressed lips. She did not even glance at the four soldiers and the lieutenant.

  When he went up to the attic next morning, just before eight, he felt as if he had been there for months, years almost. The silence and loneliness seemed quite natural: the gentle mooing of the cows in the stable and the smell of the potato fires still hanging in the air, a few fires were still smoldering, and when he adjusted the glasses, aiming them at a point far off in the distance in line with the tip of the yellow church spire, all they captured in the lenses was loneliness. Up there it was empty—a gray, soft-green surface dotted with black rocks …

  Mück had gone with the four soldiers to the riverbank to practice sighting. The sound of his brief, sad commands came softly across, too faint to disturb the silence—they enhanced it almost; and downstairs in the kitchen the young woman was singing a
halting Slovak folk song. The old woman had gone into the field with the hired hand to dig potatoes. Across the street in the other farmhouse it was quiet too. Although he scanned the mountains for quite a time, his eyes saw nothing but silent, lonely expanses, steep rocks, except to the right where a train’s white vapor came puffing out of the forest and quickly drifted apart; through the field glasses the vapor looked like dust settling over the treetops. There was not a sound to be heard except for Mück’s brief commands at the riverbank and the young woman’s haunting song from downstairs …

  Then they returned from the riverbank, and he could hear them singing. It was sad to hear those four men singing, a pathetic, ragged, very thin quartet singing “Gray Columns on the March.” He could also hear Mück’s “left, right—left, right”; Mück seemed to be desperately battling the loneliness, but it was no use. The silence was stronger than his commands, stronger than the singing.

  As they halted outside the house, he heard the first truck arriving from the hamlet they had left the day before yesterday. He quickly trained his glasses on the road: a cloud of dust was rapidly approaching, he could make out the cab and something large and bulky showing above the roof.

  “What’s up?” they called to him from the street.

  “A truck,” he said, keeping the lenses on the approaching vehicle, and at that moment he heard the young woman come out of the house. She spoke to the soldiers and called something up to him. He could not make out what she was saying, but he called down, “The driver’s a civilian; there’s a Brownshirt sitting next to him, seems to be someone from the Party; on the back of the truck there’s a cement mixer!”

  “A cement mixer?” they called up.

  “Yes!” he said.

  Now those down below could also make out the cab of the truck; and the man in brown, and the cement mixer, and they could see another truck approaching from the village, a smaller cloud of dust, then another and another, a whole column heading from the village toward the remains of the bridge. By the time the first truck halted just before the approach to the bridge, the second truck was already so close that they could make out the cab and the load of that one too: hut prefabs. But now they all ran up to the first truck, including Maria, all except the lieutenant, as the truck door opened and a man in brown jumped out. The man was bareheaded, suntanned, with a frank, attractive face. “Heil Hitler, boys,” he shouted. “Is this Berczaba?”

  “Yes,” said the soldiers. They took their hands uncertainly out of their pockets. The man had a major’s shoulder loops on his brown tunic. They did not know how to address him.

  He called into the cab, “We’re here, switch off the motor!” Looking beyond the soldiers at the lieutenant, he paused for a moment, advanced a few steps. The lieutenant also advanced a few steps; then the man stopped and waited, and Lieutenant Mück walked the rest of the way quite fast until he stood facing the man in brown. First Mück’s hand went to his cap, then his arm went up for the Heil Hitler salute, and he said, “Mück!” and the man in brown also raised his arm, then held his hand out to Mück, shook hands, and said, “I’m Deussen—in charge of construction—we’re going to rebuild the bridge here.”

  The lieutenant looked at the soldiers, the soldiers looked at Maria, Maria ran into the house, and Deussen bounced jauntily away to direct the approaching vehicles.

  Deussen went about everything with great determination, great vigor, but with something obliging and friendly in his manner. He asked the widow Suchan to show him the kitchen, smiled, pursed his lips, said nothing, went across to the abandoned house, inspected it very thoroughly, and when he emerged he was smiling, and within minutes two trucks loaded with prefabs were on their way back to Tesarzy. He set up his own quarters at the Temanns’, appeared shortly thereafter leaning on the windowsill smoking and watching the unloading of the trucks. There was another young man in brown with the trucks, wearing a sergeant’s shoulder patches. Now and again Deussen would call something out to him from the window. Meanwhile all the trucks had arrived, ten of them, and the place was a hive of workmen, iron girders, beams, sacks of cement, and an hour later a little motorboat came down the river from Szarny. A third man in brown got out of the boat, and two pretty, suntanned Slovak women who were greeted gaily by the workmen.

  Feinhals watched it all very closely. First the big kitchen stove was carried into the dilapidated house, then the following were unloaded: complete iron railings, rivets, screws, creosoted beams, survey instruments, and kitchen supplies. By eleven the Slovak women were already peeling potatoes, and by noon all the stuff had been unloaded, even a shed for the cement had been assembled, and three more trucks arrived from the village to strew gravel on the approach to the bridge. When he went downstairs for lunch, Gress having relieved him, he saw that a sign had been nailed over the bar entrance saying CANTEEN.

  For the next few days he continued to watch the building activities very closely and was astonished at the precision with which everything had been planned: nothing was done needlessly, no material lay farther away than necessary from the point at which it was to be used. Feinhals had been on many construction sites in his time, and in charge of several construction jobs, but he was astonished to see how neatly and deftly this one was carried out. After only three days the bridge piers had been carefully filled with concrete, and while they were still pouring the last pier the erection of the heavy iron girders was already under way on the first one. By the fourth day a catwalk across the bridge had already been completed, and after a week he saw trucks driving up on the other side of the river carrying bridge sections, heavy vehicles that Deussen used simultaneously as ramp and base for erecting the final girder sections. Now that the catwalk was finished, everything went much faster, and Feinhals spent less time looking up to the mountains or into the forest. He observed the building of the bridge very closely, and even when he had to drill with the other men he usually watched the workmen: he loved this work.

  In the evenings, when dusk was falling and the attic observation post was not manned, he would sit in the garden listening to a young Russian called Stalin—Stalin Gadlenko—playing the balalaika. Indoors there was singing, drinking, even dancing, although dancing was prohibited, but Deussen seemed to close his eyes to all that. He was in very good spirits: he had been given two weeks to build the bridge, and if the work continued at this rate, he would be through in twelve days. He saved a lot of gas because he could buy all the cooking supplies from Temann and the widow Suchan without sending a truck out all over the countryside, and he saw to it that the workmen were issued cigarettes, were well fed, and felt at ease; he knew this was better than exerting authority which, although it induced fear, actually inhibited the work. He had already built a number of bridges, most of which had meanwhile been blown up again; but for a time at least they had served their purpose, and he had never had any trouble meeting his deadlines.

  The widow Suchan was pleased: the bridge would be there again, it would still be there even when the war was over, and if it was there the soldiers would probably stay and people from the villages would start coming back too. The workmen also seemed content. Every third day a snappy little light-brown car would drive down from Tesarzy and screech to a halt outside the tavern, and from the car would emerge a man in brown who looked old and tired and wore a captain’s shoulder loops, and the workmen were rounded up and paid; they were paid plenty, enough to be able to buy socks from the soldiers, and shirts, and to spend the evening drinking and dancing with the pretty Slovak women who worked in the kitchen.

  On the tenth day Feinhals saw that the bridge was finished: the railing was in place, the framework for the roadway completed, and he watched cement and girders being loaded and driven away, as well as the shed that had housed the cement. Half the workmen went back too, and one of the kitchen women, and Berczaba quieted down somewhat. All that was left now were fifteen workmen, Deussen and the young man in brown with the sergeant’s shoulder patches, and one woman in the
kitchen, at whom Feinhals looked very often. She spent the whole morning sitting by the window peeling potatoes, singing to herself, and she would pound the meat and clean the vegetables and was very pretty. When she smiled, he felt a pang, and through the field glasses he could plainly see her mouth on the other side of the street, and her fine dark eyebrows and white teeth. She always sang softly to herself—and that evening he went into the bar and danced with her. He danced a lot with her, and he saw her dark eyes close up, felt her firm white arms under his hands, and was rather disappointed to find that she smelled of cooking—it was close and smoky in the bar. She was the only woman, except for Maria, who sat at the counter and didn’t dance. That night he dreamed about this Slovak woman whose name he didn’t know; he had a very vivid dream about her, although after getting into bed he had again thought for a long time and very hard about Ilona.

  Next day he didn’t look across at her through his field glasses, although he could hear her singing, softly humming; he looked up to the mountains and was pleased to be able to pick out a herd of goats again, now they were to the right of the church spire, white specks moving jerkily against a gray, soft-green background.

  Suddenly he put down the field glasses: he had heard a shot, the echo of a distant explosion coming down from the mountains. There it was again, very distinct, not loud, very far away. The workmen on the bridge paused, the Slovak woman broke off her singing, and Lieutenant Mück came running up to the attic in a state of agitation, wrenched the field glasses out of his hands, and looked up to the mountains. He looked up to the mountains for a very long time, but there were no more explosions, and Mück handed the glasses back to him, murmuring, “Keep watching now—keep watching,” and ran back into the yard where he was supervising the men cleaning their weapons.

  That afternoon seemed quieter than previous ones, although the sounds remained the same: the workmen on the bridge sawing creosoted beams, joining and screwing them together; the voice of the old woman scolding her daughter downstairs in the kitchen and getting no reply; and the gentle humming of the Slovak woman sitting by the open window as she prepared supper for the workmen—big yellow potatoes were frying in the pan, and an earthenware bowl of tomatoes shone in the dusk. Feinhals trained his glasses on the mountains, on the forest, scanned the riverbank; all was quiet on the other side, nothing moved. The two sentries had disappeared into the forest, and he aimed the glasses at the workmen on the bridge. They were already halfway through their work, the black, solid beams of the roadway were gradually meeting, and when he swung the glasses around, he could look down on the road at all the remaining material being loaded: tools and girders, beds, chairs, and the kitchen stove, and soon after that the truck with eight workmen aboard drove off toward Tesarzy. The Slovak woman leaned on the windowsill and waved them good-bye, the place seemed quieter, even the motorboat went off up the river in the late afternoon, and in the roadway over the bridge there was only one bit missing—three or four beams. There was a gap of about six feet when the men knocked off work. Feinhals saw them leave their tools lying on the bridge. The truck returned from Tesarzy, stopped outside the kitchen, and unloaded a small basket of fruit and a few bottles, and shortly before Feinhals was relieved, there came again the echo of muffled explosions from above: it resounded from the mountains like stage thunder, artificially multiplied, reverberating, dying away, three times—four times—then there was silence. And again Lieutenant Mück came running upstairs and looked through the field glasses, his face twitching. Swinging them from left to right he scanned the rocks, the ridges, put down the glasses with a shake of his head, wrote a message on a piece of paper, and within a few minutes Gress was pedaling off to Tesarzy on Deussen’s bicycle.