The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (41 page)

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 C
ANTEEN
.

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.

After Gress had left, Feinhals distinctly heard sounds of a machine-gun duel from the mountains. The hard, hollow rasp of a Russian machine gun contrasting with the high-pitched, nervous barking of a German one that grated like a frenzied hornet—the shots came so fast they seemed to skid. The skirmish was brief; only a few rounds were
exchanged; then hand grenades burst, three or four, and again the noise was multiplied. Over and over again, until they died away, they sent their echo down into the plain. Somehow it seemed ridiculous to Feinhals: the war, wherever it showed up, was associated with completely unnecessary noise. This time Mück didn’t come upstairs, he stood on the bridge and stared at the mountains; one more isolated shot came from above, from a rifle apparently, the echo sounding as thin as the noise of a rolling stone; then all was quiet until dusk fell. Feinhals replaced the sheet of metal on the roof and slowly went downstairs.

Gress was not back yet, and down in the bar Mück was anxiously holding forth about increased alertness for the night. There he stood, his face deadly serious, his fingers fumbling nervously with his two decorations; he had hung his loaded machine pistol around his neck and his steel helmet from his belt.

Before Gress got back, a gray car arrived from Tesarzy and out of it got a stout, red-faced captain and a spare, stern-looking first lieutenant, both of whom walked across the bridge with Mück. Feinhals stood in front of the house and watched them. It looked as though the three figures had disappeared for good, but they soon came back; the car turned. Across the street Deussen was looking out of the window, and on the ground floor of the workmen’s quarters the men were sitting in the semidarkness around a rough table, tomatoes and potatoes on their plates. In the corner of the room stood the Slovak woman, one hand on hip, in the other a cigarette—the flourish of her arm as she brought the cigarette to her lips seemed to Feinhals a shade too elaborate. Then, as the motor of the gray car started up, she came closer, leaned on the windowsill smoking her cigarette, and smiled at Feinhals. He looked intently at her face, forgetting to salute the two departing officers: the woman was wearing a dark bodice, and the white of her breast shone heartshaped below her brown face. Mück walked past Feinhals on his way into the house and said, “Bring the machine gun over here.” Feinhals now saw that where the officers’ car had been parked, a black, slender machine gun was lying on the road beside some ammunition cases. He slowly crossed the road and brought back the machine gun, then crossed over a second time and brought back the ammunition cases. The Slovak woman was still leaning on the windowsill; she flicked off the glowing end of her cigarette and stuck the rest into her apron
pocket. She was still looking at Feinhals but no longer smiling—she looked sad, her mouth was a poignant pale red. Then all at once she pursed her lips a little, turned, and began to clear the table. The workmen came out of the house and walked toward the bridge.