The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (26 page)

He was glad to be able to detach his gaze at last from the flock of sheep and the stupid shepherd; it was hanging a bit too far over to the right and he was getting a crick in his neck. The second picture hung almost directly opposite him, and he was compelled to look at it, although that one didn’t appeal to him either: it showed Crown Prince Michael talking to a Rumanian peasant, flanked by Marshal Antonescu and the queen. The stance of the Rumanian peasant was alarming. He was standing with his feet too close and too firmly together, and he seemed about to tip forward and throw the gift in his hands at the young king’s feet. Bressen couldn’t quite make out what the gift was—salt or bread or a hunk of goat cheese—but the young king was smiling at the peasant. Bressen had long ceased to see these things; he was thankful to have found a spot to stare at without worrying about getting a crick in his neck.

What had amazed him so during those etiquette lessons—what he hadn’t known and had long tried to ignore—was that such things could actually be learned, this little performance: how to handle a knife and fork correctly. It often shocked him to see these fellows and their womenfolk treating him after three months with formal courtesy, as if he were a competent instructor of limited scope, and smile as they handed him a check. There were some, of course, who never made it—their fingers were too clumsy, they were incapable of cutting the rind off a piece of cheese without picking up the whole slice, or of holding a wineglass properly by the stem—and then there was a third category who never learned but who couldn’t have cared less—as well as those he never met but heard about, who considered it a waste of time to consult him.

His sole consolation during this period was the opportunity for an occasional affair with their wives—there was no risk attached to these little adventures, which didn’t disappoint him although they seemed to put the women off him. He had many affairs during this time—with all kinds of women—but not a single one had ever come to him or gone out with him a second time, although he usually ordered champagne.

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

He said it when he was alone too—it felt better that way—and for a moment he thought about the war, this war, just for an instant, until he heard two more people entering the room. He went on staring at that indefinable hunk that the Rumanian peasant was holding out to young King Michael—and for a moment he caught a glimpse, between himself and the picture, of the pink hand of the senior medical officer as the latter leaned over and took the chart down from its hook.

“Champagne,” said Bressen in a loud voice, “champagne and a girl.”

“Colonel Bressen,” said the senior medical officer, urgently but softly. “Colonel Bressen!” There was a brief silence, and the senior medical officer said to the person beside him, “Mark his tag H
OME
H
OSPITALIZATION
, and transfer him to Vienna—needless to say the division will be very sorry to have to get along without Colonel Bressen, but …”

“Right, sir,” said the ward medical officer. Bressen heard nothing more, although they must be standing beside him because he had not heard the door. Then came the rustling of those damned papers again, they must be rereading his medical history. Not a word was said.

Later on certain people had recalled that there were things he really could teach and which there was some point in teaching: the new army regulations, already familiar to him because he received the new issues regularly. He was put in charge of training the Stahlhelm and Youth Groups in his area, and he clearly remembered this honor having coincided with that period in his life when he had discovered an inordinate craving for sweet things and a decline in his interest in affairs with women. His notion of keeping a horse had proved a good one, although it meant scrimping a bit, for now on maneuver days he could ride out onto the heath early in the morning, hold discussions with subordinates, go through the drill plan—and best of all he could get to know the men in a way that was hardly possible while they were on duty: veterans and strangely clear-headed yet naïve young men who now
and again had gone so far as to risk openly contradicting him. What saddened him was a certain amount of official secrecy that prevented him from riding back to town at the head of the troops—but while on duty it was almost like the old days: he was thoroughly familiar with combat duty at battalion level, and he had no cause to find fault with the new regulations, which had made good use of wartime experience without aiming at anything in the way of an actual revolution in methods. The things he had always encouraged and considered of prime importance were: route marches, standing at attention, about-turns executed with maximum precision—and those were red-letter days when he felt sufficiently strong and confident to risk something that even in peacetime and with well-disciplined troops had been risky: battalion maneuvers.

But the secrecy was soon dropped, before long there were daily maneuvers, and it didn’t feel very different when one day he was made a real major again, in command of a real battalion.

For a moment he was not sure whether he was actually turning or whether this turning was already one of those things beyond the edge of his consciousness, but turning he was, and he was aware that he was turning, and it was depressing to find that so far nothing had occurred beyond the edge of his consciousness: he was being turned. They had lifted him up and swung him carefully out of his bed onto a stretcher. At first his head fell back, for a moment he was staring at the ceiling, but then a pillow was pushed under his head and his gaze fell precisely on the third picture hanging in his room. This was a picture he had never seen, it hung near the door, and at first he was glad to be able to look at it, since otherwise he would have had to look straight at the two doctors, between whom the picture was now hanging. The senior medical officer seemed to have left the room. The ward medical officer was talking to another, younger medical officer he had never seen before; he saw the short, plump ward MO read some passages from his medical history to his colleague in a low voice and explain something to him. Bressen couldn’t understand what they were saying, not because he couldn’t hear—it bothered him very much that so far he had not been able to close his ears—no, it was just that they were too far away and whispering. From the corridor he could hear everything: people calling out, cries of the wounded, and the throbbing hum of motors outside.
He saw the back of the stretcher bearer standing in front of him, and now the one standing behind him said, “Let’s go.”

“The bags,” said the front stretcher bearer. “Major,” he called across to the ward MO, “someone’ll have to carry out those bags.”

“Get hold of a few fellows.”

The two stretcher bearers went out into the corridor.

Without moving his head, Bressen carefully studied the third picture between the two doctors’ heads: this picture was incredible, he couldn’t understand how it had ever got here. He didn’t know whether they were in a school or a convent, but as for there being Catholics in Rumania, he had never heard of such a thing. In Germany there were some, he had heard about those—but in Rumania! And now here was a picture of the Virgin Mary. It annoyed him to be forced to look at this picture, but he had no option, he was forced to stare at her, that woman in the sky-blue cloak whose face he found disconcertingly grave; she stood poised on a globe, looking up to Heaven, which consisted of snow-white clouds, and around her hands was twisted a string of brown wooden beads. He gently shook his head and thought: What a repulsive picture, and suddenly he noticed the two doctors watching him. They looked at him, then at the picture, followed his gaze, and slowly returned to him. It wasn’t easy to stare between those two heads—those four eyes that were looking into his—at the picture which he found so repulsive. He couldn’t think of anything to take his mind off it; he tried to let his thoughts slip back to those years which a moment ago had been so easy to recall, years when he felt that the things which had once been his world were slowly becoming a world again: the association with staff officers, barracks gossip, adjutants, orderlies. He found himself unable to think about them. He was hemmed in by those eight inches left free by the two heads, and in those eight inches hung the picture—but it was a relief to see this space become larger because now they were approaching him, separating, and standing one on either side of him.

Now he couldn’t see them at all, just their white smocks at the periphery of his vision. He heard exactly what they were saying.

“So you don’t think it has anything to do with this injury?”

“Definitely not,” said the ward MO; he opened the medical history again, papers rustled. “Definitely not. It’s only a trifling scalp wound—very minor. Healed in five days. Nothing—not a trace of the
usual symptoms of concussion, not a thing. I can only assume it was shock—or …” He broke off.

“What were you going to say?”

“I’m not going to stick my neck out.”

“Go on—tell me.”

It was annoying that both the doctors should remain silent, they seemed to be exchanging some kind of signals—then the younger one burst out laughing. Bressen hadn’t heard a word spoken. Then both doctors laughed. He was glad when the two soldiers came in accompanied by a third with his arm in a sling.

“Feinhals,” the ward medical officer told him, “take the briefcase out to the ambulance. The heavy bags will be sent on later,” he called to the stretcher bearers.

“Are you serious?” asked the other doctor.

“Absolutely.”

Bressen felt himself being lifted up and carried off; the picture of the Virgin slipped away to his left, the wall came closer, then the window frame outside in the corridor, again he was swung—he looked into the long corridor, one more swing, and he closed his eyes: outside the sun was dazzlingly bright. He was relieved when the ambulance door closed behind him.

There were a great many sergeants in the German army—with enough stars to decorate the sky of some thick-witted underworld—and a great many sergeants called Schneider, and of these quite a number who had been christened Alois, but at this particular time only one of these sergeants called Alois Schneider was stationed in the Hungarian village of Szokarhely; Szokarhely was a compact little place, half village, half resort. It was summer.

Schneider’s office was a narrow room papered in yellow; on the door outside hung a pink cardboard sign on which was printed in black India ink: D
ISCHARGES
, S
GT
. S
CHNEIDER
.

The desk was so placed that Schneider sat with his back to the window, and when he had nothing to do he would get up, turn around,
and look out onto the narrow dusty road leading on the left to the village, and on the right, between cornfields and apricot orchards, out into the
puszta
.

Schneider had almost nothing to do. Only a few seriously wounded men still remained in the hospital; all those fit to be moved had been loaded into ambulances and taken away—and the rest, the walking wounded, had been discharged, loaded onto trucks, and taken to the redeployment center at the front. Schneider could look out of the window for hours on end: outside, the air was close, muggy, and the best remedy for this climate was pale-yellow apricot schnapps mixed with soda water. The schnapps was mildly tart, as well as cheap, pure, and good, and it was very pleasant to sit by the window, look out at the sky or onto the road, and get drunk. Intoxication was a long time coming, Schneider had to fight hard for it; it was necessary—even in the morning—to consume a considerable quantity of schnapps in order to reach a state in which boredom and futility became bearable. Schneider had a system: in the first glass he took only a dash of schnapps, in the second a bit more, the third was 50:50, the fourth he drank neat, the fifth 50:50 again, the sixth was as strong as the second, and the seventh as weak as the first. He drank only seven glasses—by about ten-thirty he was through with this ritual and had reached a state he called raging soberness, a cold fire consumed him, and he was armed to cope with the boredom and futility of the day. The first discharge cases usually turned up shortly before eleven, most of them around eleven-fifteen, and that still gave him almost an hour to look out onto the road, where from time to time a cart, drawn by lean horses and churning up a lot of dust, would race past on its way to the village; or he could catch flies, conduct ingenious dialogues with imaginary superiors—sarcastic, terse—or maybe sort out the rubber stamps on his desk, straighten the papers.

About this time—around ten-thirty—Schmitz was standing in the room containing the two patients on whom he had operated that morning: on the left, Lieutenant Moll, aged twenty-one, looking like an old woman, his peaked face seemed to be grinning under the anesthetic. Clouds of flies swarmed over the bandages on his hands, squatted drowsily on the blood-soaked gauze around his head. Schmitz fanned them away—it
was hopeless, he shook his head and drew the white sheet as far as he could over the sleeping man’s head. He began pulling on the clean white smock he wore on his rounds, buttoned it slowly, and looked at the other patient, Captain Bauer, who seemed to be gradually coming out of the anesthetic, mumbling indistinctly, his eyes closed; he tried to move but couldn’t, he was strapped down, even his head had been firmly tied to the bars at the head of the bed—only his lips moved, and now and again it looked for a moment as if he were about to open his eyelids—and he would start mumbling again. Schmitz dug his hands into the pockets of his smock and waited—the room was shadowy, the air fetid, there was a slight smell of cow dung, and even with closed doors and windows there were swarms of flies; at one time cattle had been kept in the basement beneath.

The captain’s sporadic, inarticulate mumbling appeared to be taking shape; now he was opening his mouth at regular intervals and seemed to be uttering one single word, which Schmitz could not understand—an oddly fascinating mixture of
E
and
O
and throaty sounds—then all of a sudden the captain opened his eyes. “Bauer,” cried Schmitz, but he knew it was no use. He stepped closer and waved his hands in front of the captain’s eyes—there was no reflex. Schmitz held his hand close to the captain’s eyes, so close that he could feel the man’s eyebrows on his palm: nothing—the captain merely went on repeating his incomprehensible word at regular intervals. He was looking inside himself, and no one knew what was inside. Suddenly he uttered the word very distinctly, sharply articulated as if he had learned it by heart—then again. Schmitz held his ear close to the captain’s mouth. “Byelyogorshe,” said the captain. Schmitz listened intently, he had never heard the word and had no idea what it meant, but he liked the sound of it, it was beautiful, he thought—mysterious and beautiful. Outside all was quiet—he could hear the captain’s breathing, he looked into his eyes and with bated breath waited each time for the word: “Byelyogorshe.” Schmitz looked at his watch, following the second hand—how slowly that tiny finger seemed to crawl across the watch face—fifty seconds: “Byelyogorshe.” It seemed to take forever for the next fifty seconds to pass. Outside, trucks were driving into the courtyard. Someone called out in the corridor. Schmitz remembered that the senior MO had sent a message asking him to do his rounds for him, another truck drove into the
yard. “Byelyogorshe,” said the captain; Schmitz waited once more—the door opened, a sergeant appeared, Schmitz signaled impatiently to him to keep quiet, stared at the little second hand, and sighed as it touched the thirty. “Byelyogorshe,” said the captain.