The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (25 page)

Someone jerked him upright and gave him a shove, and he saw the company lined up, headed by the first lieutenant, who was shouting, “Let’s go, let’s go!” and he swung his rifle over his shoulder and slipped into the space up front indicated by a wave of the sergeant major’s hand.

Off they marched, into the darkness, and he moved without wanting to: what he really wanted was to drop, but he marched on, without wanting to, the weight of his body forcing him to straighten his knees, and when he straightened his knees his sore feet propelled themselves forward, carrying along great slabs of pain that were much too big for his feet; his feet were too small for this pain; and when he propelled his feet forward the whole bulk of his backside, shoulders, arms, and head started moving again, forcing him to straighten his knees, and when he straightened his knees his sore feet propelled themselves forward …

Three hours later he was lying exhausted somewhere on sparse steppe grass, his eyes following a vague shape that was crawling away in the gray darkness; the shape had brought him two greasy pieces of paper, some bread, a roll of lemon drops, and six cigarettes, and it had said, “D’you know the password?”

“No.”

“Victory. That’s the password: victory.”

And he repeated softly, “Victory. That’s the password: victory,” and the word tasted like tepid water on his tongue.

He peeled the paper off the roll and stuck a lemon drop in his mouth; when he felt the thin, acid, synthetic flavor in his mouth, the saliva came pouring out of his glands, and he washed down the first wave of this sweet-tasting bitterness—and at that moment he heard the shells: they had been rumbling around for hours over some distant line, and now they were flying across it, sputtering, hissing, rattling like badly nailed crates, and bursting behind them. The second lot landed not far ahead of them: fountains of sand showed up like disintegrating mushrooms against the bright darkness of the eastern sky, and he noticed that it was dark now behind him and a bit lighter in front. The third lot he never heard: right in amongst them, sledgehammers seemed to be smashing up plywood sheets, crashing, splintering, close, dangerous.
Dust and powder fumes were drifting along near the ground, and when he had thrown himself over and lay pressed against the earth, his head thrust into a hollow in the mound he had heaped up, he heard the command being passed along, “Get set to advance!” Coming from the right, the whisper hissed past them like a burning fuse, quiet and dangerous, and as he was about to adjust his battle pack, to tighten it, there was a crash right next to him, and it felt as if someone had knocked away his hand and was tugging violently at his upper arm. His whole left arm was bathed in moist warmth, and he raised his face from the ground and shouted, “I’ve been hit!” but didn’t even hear himself shouting, all he heard was a quiet voice saying, “Horse Droppings.”

Far, far away, as if separated from him by thick panes of glass, very close and yet far away, “Horse Droppings,” said the voice; quiet, well-bred, far away, subdued, “Horse Droppings, Captain Bauer speaking, yessir.” Not a sound, then came the voice, “I can hear you, Colonel.” Pause, not a sound, only a kind of bubbling in the distance, a gentle hissing and sputtering as if something were boiling over. Then he realized he had closed his eyes, so he opened them: he saw the captain’s head, and now he could also hear the voice more distinctly; the head was framed in a dark, dirty window opening, and the captain’s face was tired, unshaven and ill-tempered, his eyes were screwed tight, and he said three times in succession, with barely a pause between each: “Yes, Colonel”—“Yes, Colonel”—“Yes, Colonel.”

Then the captain put on his steel helmet, and his broad, good-natured face and dark head looked quite ridiculous now as he said to someone beside him, “Hell—there’s a breakthrough at Horse Droppings 3, Sharp-shooter 4, I’ll have to go forward.” Another voice shouted into the building, “Dispatch rider, report to the captain,” and it carried on like an echo, reverberating around inside the building and getting fainter and fainter, “Dispatch rider, report to the captain—dispatch rider, report to the captain!”

Next he heard the rattle of a motor and followed the dry rasping sound as it came closer; he saw the motorcycle slowly turn a corner, slackening speed until it stopped in front of him, throbbing, covered with dust, and the driver, his face tired and apathetic, remained seated on the pulsing machine and shouted toward the window, “Motorcycle for the captain reporting!” And the captain came out, walking slowly,
legs wide apart, a cigar in his mouth, the steel helmet giving him the look of a sinister squat mushroom. He climbed without enthusiasm into the sidecar, said “Let’s go,” and the machine bounced and rattled off, at high speed, veiled in dust, in the direction of the seething confusion up front.

Feinhals wondered if he had ever been so happy in his life. He felt almost no pain; his left arm, lying beside him like a tight bundle, stiff and bloody, damp and unfamiliar, felt faintly uncomfortable, that was all. Everything else was all right; he could raise each leg separately, wriggle his feet in his boots, lift his head, and he could smoke as he lay there, facing him was the sun as it hung a hand’s breadth above the gray cloud of dust in the east. All noise was somehow remote and subdued, his head felt as if wrapped in a layer of cotton, and it occurred to him that he had had nothing to eat for almost twenty-four hours except an acid, synthetic lemon drop, and nothing to drink except a little water, rusty and tepid and tasting of sand.

When he felt himself being lifted up and carried away, he closed his eyes again, but he could see it all, it was so familiar, it had all happened to him somewhere else: they carried him past the exhaust fumes of a throbbing vehicle into the hot, gasoline-reeking interior, the stretcher scraped against the metal rails, and then the engine started up and the noise outside retreated farther and farther, almost imperceptibly, just as the evening before it had come imperceptibly closer. A few isolated shells burst in the suburbs, regularly, quietly, and just as he felt himself dropping off to sleep he thought: How nice, it was all over so quickly this time, so quickly … All it had meant was a little thirst, sore feet, and a little fear.

When the ambulance stopped with a jerk, he awoke from his half-sleep. Doors were flung open, once again the stretchers scraped against the metal rails, and he was carried into a cool white corridor where it was very quiet. The stretchers stood in rows like lounge chairs on a narrow deck, and next to him he saw a head of thick black hair, lying quietly, and on the stretcher beyond that a bald head, moving restlessly from side to side, and up at the end, on the first stretcher, a white head, heavily bandaged, completely covered, ugly and much too narrow, and from this bundle of gauze came a voice, piercing, shrill, clear, harsh as it rose to the ceiling, helpless yet insolent, the voice of the colonel, and the voice cried, “Champagne!”

“Piss,” said the bald head calmly, “drink your own piss.” Someone behind laughed, quietly and cautiously.

“Champagne,” cried the voice in fury, “chilled champagne!”

“Shut up,” said the bald head calmly, “why don’t you shut up?”

“Champagne,” whimpered the voice, “I want some champagne”; and the white head sank back, it was lying flat now, and from between thick layers of gauze rose a thin pointed nose, and the voice became even shriller and shouted: “A girl—get me a girl …”

“Do it to yourself,” retorted the bald head.

At last the white head was carried through a door, and there was silence.

In the silence they could hear only the isolated shells bursting in distant parts of the city, muffled far-off explosions thrumming softly away at the edge of the war. And when the white head of the colonel, now lying silently on one side, was carried out and the bald head was carried in, the sound of a car could be heard approaching outside: the muted sound of a whining engine came closer, quickly and almost threateningly, and now it was so close it seemed about to ram the cool white building. Then suddenly silence fell, outside a voice shouted something, and when they turned their heads, startled out of their peaceful, dozing weariness, they saw the general walking slowly past the stretchers and wordlessly placing packs of cigarettes on the men’s laps. The silence became more and more oppressive the nearer the little man’s footsteps approached from behind, and at last Feinhals saw the general’s face quite close: yellow, large and sad, with snow-white eyebrows, dark traces of dust around the thin mouth, and written in this face was the message that this battle, too, had been lost.

He heard a voice saying “Bressen—Bressen, look at me,” and he knew this was the voice of Kleewitz, the divisional medical officer, who must have been sent here to find out when he would be going back. But he wouldn’t be going back, he never wanted to be reminded again of that regiment—and he didn’t look at Kleewitz. He looked fixedly at the picture hanging way over to the right, almost in the dark corner: a flock of
sheep, painted gray and green, and in the middle of them a shepherd in a blue cloak playing a flute.

He thought about things no one else on earth would have dreamed of, things he liked thinking about, repulsive though they were. He wasn’t sure whether he heard Kleewitz’s voice; he did hear it, of course, but he didn’t want to admit it, and he looked at the shepherd playing his flute instead of turning his head and saying, “Kleewitz, how nice of you to come.”

Next he heard the shuffle of papers, and he assumed they were studying his medical history. He looked at the back of the shepherd’s neck and recalled how for a time he had been a nodder at a hotel, in a very high-class restaurant. At noon, when the local businessmen came for lunch, he would walk through the restaurant, very erect, and bow, and it was funny how quickly and accurately he had grasped the required nuances: whether he gave a short bow or a deep one, whether he merely nodded and, if so, how he nodded, and sometimes he would just move his head very briefly, more of an opening and closing of his eyes really, that gave the impression he was moving his head. He found status differences so easy to recognize—like army ranks, that hierarchy of braided and flat, starred and unstarred, shoulder loops, all the way down to the great mass of people with their more or less undecorated shoulders.

In this restaurant the scale of bowing was relatively simple: it was all a matter of bankroll, of the size of the bill. He wasn’t even especially obliging, he almost never smiled, and his face—despite his efforts to look as impassive as possible—his face never lost that expression of severity and vigilance. A feeling crept over everyone he looked at, not so much of being honored as of being guilty; all felt themselves observed, inspected, and he soon discovered that there were certain people who became confused, so confused that they unthinkingly applied their knives to their potatoes the moment his glance rested on them and who nervously fingered their wallets as soon as he had passed. The only thing that surprised him was that they kept coming back, even this kind. Back they came and submitted to being nodded at, to that uncomfortable scrutiny that goes with a high-class restaurant. His thin, aristocratic face and a knack of wearing clothes well brought him in quite a decent income; besides, he ate there for nothing. But while he tried to assume a certain air of haughtiness, he was in fact often quite
nervous. There were days when he could feel the sweat gathering and breaking out all over his body so that he could hardly breathe. And the owner was a coarse fellow, good-natured, vain about his success but awkward in manner; late at night, when the place was gradually emptying and he could think about going home, the owner would sometimes dig his stubby fingers into the cigar box and, despite his protests, stuff three or four cigars into the top pocket of Bressen’s jacket. “Go on,” the owner would mumble with his diffident smile, “take them—they’re good cigars.” And he would take them. He smoked them in the evening with Velten, with whom he shared a small furnished apartment, and Velten never failed to be surprised at the quality of the cigars. “Bressen,” Velten would say, “I must say, Bressen, you smoke an excellent weed.” He would make no comment and no pretense at refusing when Velten brought home an especially good bottle. Velten traveled for a wine merchant, and when business was good he would take home a bottle of champagne.

“Champagne,” he said out loud to himself, “chilled champagne.”

“That’s all he ever says,” said the ward medical officer standing beside him.

“Are you referring to the colonel?” asked Kleewitz coldly.

“That’s right, Colonel Bressen. The only thing the colonel ever says: Champagne—chilled champagne. And sometimes he talks about women—girls.”

He had loathed having to take his meals at the restaurant. In a grubby back room off a worn tablecloth, served by the ungracious cook who paid absolutely no attention to his fondness for desserts—and in his nose, throat, and mouth that sickening stale reek of cooking, greasy and disgusting—and that constant coming and going of the owner, the way he would plump himself down beside him for a few seconds, cigar in mouth, pour himself a schnapps, and sit there silently knocking back the stuff.

Later on he had given lessons in social etiquette. The town he lived in was very suitable for this kind of instruction, containing as it did a great many rich people who didn’t even know that fish was eaten differently from meat, who had literally eaten with their fingers all their lives, and who now had cars, villas, and women—people who could no longer bear to be the kind of people they really were. He taught them how to perform adequately on the slippery ice of social obligations; he
went to their homes, discussed menus, taught them how to handle servants, and stayed for dinner—he had to teach them every gesture, watch them like a hawk, correct them, and he tried to show them how to open a bottle of champagne without assistance.

“Champagne,” he said out loud to himself, “chilled champagne.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” cried Kleewitz, “Bressen, look at me!” But he had no intention of looking at Kleewitz; he never wanted to be reminded of it again, the regiment that had disintegrated in his hands like dry tinder; Horse Droppings, Sharpshooter, Sugarloaf—under the command of his staff known as Hunting Lodge—all finished! And shortly after that he heard Kleewitz leave.