The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (136 page)

Two men from Schneider’s team screwed down the last of the rivets a few minutes before four, while the lieutenant was already busy placing the explosives, which were linked by fuses. The lieutenant himself walked to the middle of the bridge at one minute to four, where I was watching the last of the planks being fastened onto the frame. He asked me not to screw down the final plank, since it was a perfect location for a charge of explosives, but I insisted on it, since I had received explicit orders from the chief to stick to our principles. The lieutenant shrugged and walked off. I glanced again at the bridge, then returned to the construction hut with Schnur, Schneider, and the last of the workers to register the completion of the bridge at Berkovo precisely on schedule.

But now something horrifying happened. On the other side, in the breathless silence, fleeing soldiers appeared from the woods, a few carrying wounded men, others racing along singly, in spite of the total
exhaustion that could be read in their faces at this short distance; vehicles too emerged from the woods, all in fearful, wild flight. The crowd thickened, streaming from the forest, racing for the bridge, which must have appeared like hope incarnate, since I had ordered a swastika flag attached to its highest point to celebrate its completion.

The lieutenant now rushed from the bridge with his men, shrugged, and showed me his watch, which indicated five seconds to four, pointing with his other hand toward a few Russian tanks firing at the fleeing men and drawing dangerously near to the bridge.

The moment I saw the burning fuse, I too ran to my office and tried to call Southeast Construction Headquarters as quickly as possible. But before my call had gone through, another phone rang. I lifted the receiver and heard the chief’s voice: Stop work on the bridge at once. And since he was about to hang up, I cried, “Hold it!” and gave my report according to regulations: construction of the bridge completed on schedule, to the minute, as ordered. But he was no longer listening … and I was almost deafened by the savage blast with which the bridge now exploded into the air. Then I went to my car and ordered everyone to move out. But I can’t tell you what the bridge at Berkovo looked like after the explosion, because I didn’t look back, although the shells of the Russian tanks were already landing among the houses of Berkovo. Yet sometimes I think I see those exhausted, fleeing men who fought to the last, protecting us too, as duty demanded, and although I did not actually see them, I see them cursing, the fear of death upon their faces, the fear of capture, and hate for us as well, although we too did nothing but act as duty demanded.

The lieutenant told us to take a break and we did. We were at the edge of a forest, the sun was shining, it was springtime, everything was quiet, and we knew the war would soon be coming to an end. Those with tobacco lit up and the rest of us tried to get some sleep. We were tired, having eaten little and carried out several counterattacks over the past three days. It was marvelously peaceful, somewhere birds were singing, and the air was filled with a soft, moist tenderness.

Suddenly the lieutenant starting shouting. He cried out: “Hey!” Then he grew angry and bellowed: “Hey, you!” Finally, becoming furious, his voice broke: “You! You there! You!”

Then we saw who he was yelling at. Someone was sitting on the other side of the woodland road, asleep. It was an ordinary soldier, dressed in gray, leaning back against a tree, asleep. The soldier had a pleasant smile on his freckled face, and we thought the lieutenant would go nuts. We thought the soldier was nuts too, because the lieutenant kept on shouting and the sleeping man kept right on smiling.

The men who had started to smoke stopped, the ones trying to sleep were now wide awake, and some of us were smiling, too. The spring air was fresh and gentle, and we knew that the war would soon be over.

Suddenly the lieutenant stopped shouting and jumped up. He crossed the road in two long strides and struck the sleeping man in the face.

We saw now that the sleeping man was dead. He fell over without a word, no longer smiling. His face was affixed with a terrible grin, and we didn’t feel at all sorry for the lieutenant, who came back pale faced, for the sun no longer gave us pleasure. We found no joy in the soft moisture of the mild spring air, and it made little difference to us now whether the war was coming to an end or not. Suddenly we felt we were all dead—the lieutenant too, for he was grinning now, and no longer wore a uniform.

I found Hubert lying in his bed, which he had shoved closer to the stove. He had kindled a pathetic fire from a few old picture frames. Of course it couldn’t heat the huge room. A tiny island of a somewhat humane temperature surrounded the stove, but elsewhere the room, with all its paintings, easel, and cupboards, lay cold and poignantly desolate. Hubert was holding a sketch on his knees that he’d just begun, but he was no longer working on it, gazing meditatively instead at some vague spot on the brown bedspread. He greeted me with a smile, laid the drawing aside, and in his sad, large gray eyes, I read for the moment only hunger and scant hope. But I didn’t leave him stretched on the rack for long; instead I pulled out some fresh, sweet-smelling, white bread. His eyes gleamed.

“Either you’re crazy,” he said, “or I am. Or you’ve stolen this, or I’m dreaming, or …” He made a dismissive gesture and rubbed his eyes. “It’s simply not true.”

“Look,” I said, holding it under his nose, pressing it into his hands, making the crisp crust crackle. “Now you’ve touched it, experienced it with all your senses. Think you’re crazy for all I care, but I certainly didn’t steal it. Cut it in two, would you?”

Hubert finally seemed to trust his senses, seized the bread firmly, as if he feared he were reaching into the void, realized that it was real, then pulled the knife from the cupboard with a strange groan. Meanwhile I had pulled the tobacco from my pocket and was cutting the plug into smaller pieces, which I crumbled and placed on the warm stove plate. They call it roasting, I believe. Hubert gazed at me with shining eyes, sniffed greedily, and said: “You’ve turned into a regular criminal.”

We ended up stretched out beside each other on the bed, each of us enjoying our portion of bread, pinching small pieces from the loaf and stuffing them in our mouths, sweet-smelling bread, fresh and still warm, white and delicious. Bread is the best thing there is. Woe unto the man who no longer eats bread because he is full. Woe!

I was happy that Hubert had apparently forgotten the question of where the bread came from. My God, if he’d insisted on knowing. He’s so strict about things, a true artist! But he ate silently, happily; ah, happy the man who still has a bit of bread.

“Do you know what I was thinking when you came in?”

I had to admit I didn’t. I’m not a psychologist, for God’s sake.

“I was wondering, if American universities ran some experiments, I was wondering how many calories they’d find in a genius, in Rembrandt for instance. After all, modern science can tell us anything. What do you think?”

“Maybe they’d discover that a genius lives beyond the norm. That he eats a tremendous amount or starves himself, that his accomplishments are independent of—let’s say—his so-called caloric intake.”

“But even a genius has a starvation limit. He might starve and freeze all week in a cellar for all I care, and still write a wonderful sonnet. But if you spend your whole life in a cold cellar, it’s all over with the sonnet writing, over because you simply no longer have the strength to write sonnets with a pencil stub on some dirty piece of paper.”

“But I would claim he might have many, many beautiful unwritten sonnets in his mind, sonnets the world will never see, although they’re there, sonnets which might be
immortal
were they known.”

Our bread was finished. I reached from the bed and gathered the roasted tobacco from the stove, filled our pipes, and Hubert held out a piece of his drawing as a spill. I lit it at the stove and now we smoked as dusk fell in the large room, creeping in like fog, enveloping everything.

“I’ll write to America,” said Hubert, “and see if they’ll try to figure out Rembrandt’s daily calorie intake.” He looked at me uneasily. “I have an inferiority complex because I can’t work as long as I used to. And I read recently in the newspapers that they’ve run tests in America showing that at our caloric level a person can’t do creative work—at least not two years’ worth. This major scientific discovery has depressed me so much I can’t paint anymore.”

Suddenly he sprang out of bed like a wild man, right past me, raced to the easel, stretched a sheet of paper on the board, and began working like crazy. He dashed off a lively sketch, grabbed the box of watercolors, and was off, with strong, bold strokes, stepping back from time to time to judge the effect. He finished a small painting I couldn’t
see clearly because it was getting darker and darker in the room. But all at once he turned around and asked me energetically: “Where did you get the bread, you bastard?”

I had to show my colors at last. “I traded my pen for it,” I said shyly, “to an American soldier. Here.” I pulled the two white cylinders from my pocket. “There’s a cigarette for each of us too.”

We laid aside our smelly pipes at once and inhaled the marvelous tobacco with deep enjoyment—American cigarettes! Hubert worked boldly on; he had turned on the light.

“The best thing about America, the very best thing of all, are the cigarettes,” he said with a laugh.

The former paths were scarcely visible in the tangled shrubbery, in part no longer even recognizable. The broken gaps of the fence admitted one and all, the luxuriant greenery had been trampled flat, wilted, rotted, replaced by new growth, until at last a sort of gauzy jungle had rendered the untended paths impassable. New ones had been ruthlessly flattened, no longer following any plan, but simply the dictates of convenience, and now led to the house from all different directions. Even the old main road, which had bordered the park in a half circle, was scarcely passable. Seams of grass had spread from the sides toward the middle, meeting to form sparse new grassy areas in which stripling elders, box trees, and elder bushes were growing merrily, the decayed banks covered with foliage. The fountain at the upper curve of the path was covered with moss and filled with dirt and tin cans, so that in spite of the wet spring weather, it held scarcely a drop of water. Its iron water spout had been bent by a well-aimed rock, and I discovered signs of children at play, who, digging through the decayed vegetation, had produced a hole at the base of which a thick, greenish fluid was visible. Next I saw that the large, graveled square had been dug up and planted, and that the rocks and gravel had been swept together and dumped into the fountain. A poorly patched fence surrounded a few miserable cabbages, which had been given ample time to rot over the course of the winter. Wilted bean stalks clung to water pipes, and from a few inevitable tin buckets rose the stench of a greenish liquid similar to that which evidently lay hidden beneath the fountain.

At last I came upon a person. Behind some sort of shed, which probably held gardening tools, sat an old man on a crate, a spade propped between his knees, a pipe in his mouth. But even though the gentle, veiled afternoon of my homecoming left me longing for a human face, I was still taken aback when I saw one. I retreated a few steps so that the shed again hid him from view, and only then did I look around.

The former layout of the park could be clearly discerned from this vantage point. The handsome large semicircle, once covered with white gravel, was now traversed by pathetic fences constructed out of narrow strips of stamped tin, warped by rust and ready to break, gas pipes, and box-tree branches. Yet the square still retained the soft, fertile beauty of perfection, even though its once smooth and carefully tended shrub border was now tangled, cut, burned, and trampled. Archaeologists say nothing is more indestructible or more easily found, even centuries later, than a hole, something dug into the earth, and this beautifully designed park was still wholly present in form.

Higher up, at the top of the curve of the clear half circle, lay the round, soiled, but still perfect circle of the fountain, from which the main road led straight to the entrance gate. And in the bearded, greenish, curling undergrowth of the shrubbery the small paths that could scarcely be seen up close were now clearly apparent, indelibly preserved like smooth weals in the foundering, arched backs of the shrubbery, while to the left and right of the main road ran the other two, simple and clear, in the shape of musical clefs.

And now at last I dared to look at the house. I saw it clearly through the gaps in the row of poplars, with their gleaming, thick, fresh-green foliage. I counted the trees; seven of twelve remained, while the willows at either end were still undamaged. The façade of the house, with its gray and intentionally somewhat rough surface, was practically unaltered. A few large patches of plaster had fallen here and there, and large, grayish white water spots appeared in a few places, like the cover of an old, damp-stained book. Only a few of the windows still contained unbroken glass; most were covered instead with mill-board or nailed shut with plywood, while others were partially bricked up and inset with windows too small for the grand casements.

For the moment I was only registering visual impressions. The memories were too numerous, the feelings too powerful, for me to allow them to rise. Although everything—past, memory, youth, and life—bound me to this house and park, I could only stand like a stranger visiting some outlying area of fine homes, who, overcome by simple curiosity, bypasses a gate now rusted shut and steps into the garden through a gap in the fence, to view the traces of destruction.

Painfully we recognize the inner transformations that mark the threshold of maturity. With ineffable sorrow we leave behind the toys and playgrounds of childhood, plunging with fear, sorrow, and desire into that tumult the grown-ups have always called life; more sadly yet do we leave the house of youth, the place of dreams, sensing darkly that our memories are but memories of dreams, already tasting the unspeakable pain we will feel when we are no longer simply adults, but old, and for the first time we glimpse ahead the only moment of which we can be sure, the one in which we cross the threshold of death to enter into another life.