The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (48 page)

In the background Egelhecht’s voice said, “The first German bread—and he of all people is the one to get it.”

He sounded as if he was almost sobbing. I wasn’t far off it myself either, but they would never understand that it wasn’t just because of
the bread, or because by now we had crossed the German border, it was mainly because, for the first time in eight months, I had for one moment felt a woman’s hand on my arm.

“No doubt,” said Egelhecht in a low voice, “you will even deny the bread the quality of being German.”

“Yes, indeed,” I said, “I shall employ a typical intellectual’s trick and ask myself whether the flour this bread is made of doesn’t perhaps come from Holland, England, or America. Here you are,” I said. “Divide it up if you like.”

Most of them I hated, many I didn’t care about one way or the other, and Tom Thumb, who was now the last to join the ranks of the sewers-on, was beginning to be a nuisance; yet I felt it was the right thing to do, to share this loaf with them, I was sure it hadn’t been meant only for me.

Egelhecht made his way slowly toward me: he was tall and thin, like me, and he was twenty-six, like me; for three months he had tried to make me see that a nationalist wasn’t a Nazi, that the words “honor,” “loyalty,” “fatherland,” “decency,” could never lose their value—and I had always countered his impressive array of words with just five: Wilhelm II, Papen, Hindenburg, Blomberg, Keitel. It had infuriated him that I never mentioned Hitler, not even that May I when the sentry ran through the camp blaring through a megaphone, “Hitler’s dead, Hitler’s dead!”

“Go ahead,” I said, “divide up the bread.”

“Number off,” said Egelhecht. I handed him the loaf, he took off his coat, laid it on the floor of the boxcar with the lining uppermost, smoothed the lining, and placed the bread on it, while the others numbered off around us. “Thirty-two,” said Tom Thumb, then there was a silence. “Thirty-two,” said Egelhecht, looking at me, for it was up to me to say thirty-three; but I didn’t say it. I turned away and looked out at the highway with the old trees: Napoleon’s poplars, Napoleon’s elms, like the ones I had rested under with my brother when we rode from Weeze to the Dutch border on our bikes to buy chocolate and cigarettes cheap.

I could sense that those behind me were terribly offended; I saw the yellow road signs: “To Kalkar,” “To Xanten,” “To Geldern,” heard behind me the sounds of Egelhecht’s tin knife, felt the offendedness swelling like a thick cloud. They were always being offended for some reason or other. They were offended if an English guard offered them
a cigarette, and they were offended if he did not; they were offended when I cursed Hitler, and Egelhecht was mortally offended when I did not curse Hitler; Tom Thumb had secretly read Benjamin and Brecht, Proust, Tucholsky, and Karl Kraus, and when we crossed the German border he was sewing on his ensign’s piping. I took the cigarette out of my pocket I had got in exchange for my staff Pfc chevron, turned around, and sat down beside Tom Thumb. I watched Egelhecht dividing up the loaf: first he cut it in half, then the halves in quarters, then each quarter again in eight parts. This way there would be a nice fat chunk for each man, a dark cube of bread which I figured would weigh about two to three ounces.

Egelhecht was just quartering the last eighth, and each man, every one of them, knew that the ones who got the center pieces would get at least a quarter to a half ounce extra, because the loaf bulged in the middle and Egelhecht had cut the slices all the same thickness. But then he cut off the bulge of the two center slices and said, “Thirty-three—the youngest starts.” Tom Thumb glanced at me, blushed, bent down, took a piece of bread, and put it directly into his mouth. Everything went smoothly till Bouvier, who had almost driven me crazy with his planes he was always talking about, had taken his piece of bread; now it should have been my turn, followed by Egelhecht, but I didn’t move. I would have liked to light my cigarette, but I had no matches and nobody offered me one. Those who already had their bread were scared and stopped chewing; the ones who hadn’t got their bread yet had no idea what was happening, but they understood: I didn’t want to share the loaf with them. They were offended, while the others (who already had their bread) were merely embarrassed. I tried to look outside: at Napoleon’s poplars, Napoleon’s elms, at the tree-lined road with its gaps, with Dutch sky caught in the gaps, but my attempt to look unconcerned was not successful. I was scared of the fight that was bound to start now; I wasn’t much good in a fight, and even if I had been it wouldn’t have helped, they would have beaten me up the way they did in the camp near Brussels when I had said I would rather be a dead Jew than a live German. I took the cigarette out of my mouth, partly because it felt ridiculous, partly because I wanted to get it through the fight intact, and I looked at Tom Thumb, who, his face scarlet, was squatting on his heels beside me. Then Gugeler, whose turn it would
have been after Egelhecht, took his piece of bread, put it directly into his mouth, and the others took theirs. There were three pieces left when the man came toward me whom I scarcely knew—he had not joined our tent till we were in the camp near Brussels. He was already old, nearly fifty, short, with a dark, scarred face, and whenever we began to quarrel he wouldn’t say a word, he used to leave the tent and run along beside the barbed-wire fence like someone to whom this kind of trotting up and down is familiar. I didn’t even know his first name; he wore some sort of faded tropical uniform, and civilian shoes. He came from the far end of the boxcar straight toward me, stopped in front of me, and said in a surprisingly gentle voice, “Take the bread”—and when I didn’t, he shook his head and said, “You fellows have one hell of a talent for turning everything into a symbolic event. It’s just bread, that’s all, and the woman gave it to you, the woman—here you are.” He picked up a piece of bread, pressed it into my right hand, which was hanging down helplessly, and squeezed my hand around it. His eyes were quite dark, not black, and his face wore the look of many prisons. I nodded, got my hand muscles moving so as to hold on to the bread; a deep sigh went through the car; Egelhecht took his bread, then the old man in the tropical uniform. “Damn it all,” said the old fellow, “I’ve been away from Germany for twelve years. You’re a crazy bunch, but I’m just beginning to understand you.” Before I could put the bread into my mouth the train stopped, and we got out.

Open country, turnip fields, no trees; a few Belgian guards with the lion of Flanders on their caps and collars ran along beside the train calling, “All out, everybody out!”

Tom Thumb remained beside me; he polished his glasses, looked at the station sign, and said, “Weeze—does this also convey something to you?”

“Yes,” I said, “it lies north of Kevelaer and west of Xanten.”

“Oh yes,” he said, “Kevelaer—Heinrich Heine.”

“And Xanten—Siegfried, in case you’ve forgotten.”

Aunt Helen, I thought. Weeze. Why hadn’t we gone straight through to Cologne? There wasn’t much left of Weeze other than a spattering of red bricks showing through the treetops. Aunt Helen had owned a
fairsized shop in Weeze, a regular village store, and every morning she used to slip some money into our pockets so we could go boating on the river Niers or ride over to Kevelaer on our bikes; the sermons on Sunday in church, roundly berating the smugglers and adulterers.

“Let’s go,” said the Belgian guard. “Get a move on, or don’t you want to get home?”

I went into the camp. First we had to file past an English officer who gave us a twenty-mark bill, for which we had to sign a receipt. Next we had to go to the doctor; he was a German, young, and grinned at us; he waited till twelve or fifteen of us were in the room, then said, “Anyone who is so sick that he can’t go home today need only raise his hand.” A few of us laughed at this terribly witty remark; then we filed past his table one by one, had our release papers stamped, and went out by the other door. I waited for a few moments by the open door and heard him say, “Anyone who is so sick that—,” then moved on, heard the laughter when I was already at the far end of the corridor, and went to the next check point. This was an English corporal, standing out in the open next to an uncovered latrine. The corporal said, “Show me your paybooks and any papers you still have.” He said this in German, and when they pulled out their paybooks, he pointed to the latrine and told them to throw the books into it, adding, “Down the hatch!” and then most of them laughed at this witticism. It had struck me anyway that Germans suddenly seemed to have a sense of humor, so long as it was foreign humor: in camp even Egelhecht had laughed at the American captain who had pointed to the barbed-wire entanglement and said, “Don’t take it so hard, boys, now you’re free at last.”

The English corporal asked me too about my papers, but all I had was my release; I had sold my paybook to an American for two cigarettes. So I said, “No papers”—and that made him as angry as the American corporal had been when I had answered his question, “Hitler Youth, SA, or Party?” with “No.” He had yelled at me and put me on KP, he had sworn at me and accused my grandmother of various sexual offenses the nature of which, due to my insufficient knowledge of the American language, I was unable to ascertain. It made them furious when something didn’t fit into their stereotyped categories. The English corporal went purple with rage, stood up, and began to frisk me, and he didn’t have to search long before he had found my diary. It was thick,
cut from paper bags, stapled together, and in it I had written down everything that had happened to me from the middle of April till the end of September: from being taken prisoner by the American sergeant Stevenson to the final entry I had made in the train as we went through dismal Antwerp and I read on walls
“Vive le Roi!”
There were more than a hundred paper-bag pages, closely written, and the furious corporal took it from me, threw it into the latrine, and said, “Didn’t I ask you for your papers?” Then I was allowed to go.

We stood crowded around the camp gate waiting for the Belgian trucks which were supposed to take us to Bonn. Bonn? Why Bonn, of all places? Someone said Cologne was closed off because it was contaminated by corpses, and someone else said we would have to clear away rubble for thirty or forty years, rubble, ruins, “and they aren’t even going to give us trucks, we’ll have to carry away the rubble in baskets.” Luckily there was no one near me who I had shared a tent or sat in the boxcar with. The drivel coming from mouths I did not know was a shade less disgusting than if it had come from mouths I knew. Someone ahead of me said, “But then he didn’t mind taking the loaf of bread from the Jew,” and another voice said, “Yes, they’re the kind of people who are going to set the tone.” Someone nudged me from behind and asked, “Four ounces of bread for a cigarette, how about it, eh?” and from behind he thrust his hand in front of my face, and I saw it was one of the pieces of bread Egelhecht had divided up in the train. I shook my head. Someone else said, “The Belgians are selling cigarettes at ten marks apiece.” To me that seemed very cheap: in camp the Germans had sold cigarettes for a hundred and twenty marks apiece. “Cigarettes, anyone?” “Yes,” I said, and put my twenty-mark bill into an anonymous hand.

Everyone was trading with everyone else. It was the only thing that seriously interested them. For two thousand marks and a threadbare uniform someone got a civilian suit, the deal was concluded, and clothes were changed somewhere in the waiting crowd, and suddenly I heard someone call out, “But of
course
the underpants go with the suit—and the tie too.” Someone sold his wristwatch for three thousand marks. The chief article of trade was soap. Those who had been in American camps had a lot of soap—twenty cakes, some of them—for
they had been given soap every week but never any water to wash in, and the ones who had been in the English camps had no soap at all. The green and pink cakes of soap went back and forth. Some of the men had discovered their artistic aspirations and shaped the soap into little dogs, cats, and gnomes, and now it turned out that the artistic aspirations had lowered the exchange value. Unsculptured soap rated higher than sculptured, a loss of weight being suspected in the latter.

The anonymous hand into which I had placed the twenty-mark bill actually reappeared and pressed two cigarettes into my left hand, and I was almost touched by so much honesty (but I was almost touched only till I found out that the Belgians were selling cigarettes for five marks; a hundred-percent profit was evidently regarded as a fair markup, especially among “comrades”). We stood there for about two hours, jammed together, and all I remember is hands: trading hands, passing soap from right to left, from left to right, money from left to right and again from right to left; it was as if I had fallen into a snakepit; hands from all sides moved every which way, passing goods and money over my shoulders and over my head in every direction.

Tom Thumb had managed to get close to me again. He sat beside me on the floor of the Belgian truck driving to Kevelaer, through Kevelaer, to Krefeld, around Krefeld to Neuss; there was silence over the fields, in the towns, we saw hardly a soul and only a few animals, and the dark autumn sky hung low. On my left sat Tom Thumb, on my right the Belgian guard, and we looked out over the tailboard at the road I knew so well: my brother and I had often ridden our bicycles along it. Tom Thumb kept trying to justify himself, but I cut him off every time, and he kept trying to be clever; there was no stopping him. “But Neuss,” he said, “that can’t remind you of anything. What on earth could Neuss remind anybody of?”

“Novesia Chocolate,” I said, “sauerkraut, and Quirinus, but I don’t suppose you ever heard of the Thebaic Legion.”

“No, I haven’t,” he said, and blushed again.

I asked the Belgian guard if it was true that Cologne was closed off, contaminated by corpses, and he said, “No—but it’s a mess all right; is that where you’re from?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Be prepared for the worst … do you have any soap left?”

“Yes,” I have,” I said.