The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (86 page)

But now my eyes saw nothing but blood, darker than the night, and the face of a crazy prostitute who had given herself for nothing and had even added a little something …

“The old man’s crazy,” I said in a low voice.

“More likely pissed, he’s always pissed when he orders an attack. Take it from me, that’s how it is.” I said nothing, and Heini’s voice continued: “He tanks up till he’s deaf and blind, and then: Let’s go! At ’em! To hell with that kind of courage … are you asleep?” His hand groped towards me, and he tugged at my belt.

“Stop it,” I said, slightly annoyed, “I’m awake. But what I’d like to know is how to get out of this. I don’t relish the idea of a hero’s death—I can’t really say why. And last time, I needn’t tell you, we left fifteen men behind; we had to beat it, and the old man was hoarse with rage because he still had a sore throat …”

“Not a chance—ahead of us the Russians and behind us the Prussians, and us in the middle, on a very narrow black strip; all we can do is try and stay alive.”

Somewhere up front a flare shot into the sky, and a kind of pale shimmer flooded the bare, hilly ground …

“I’ll be damned!” Heini suddenly cried, “they’re showing a light, those idiots—the shooting’ll start any moment, you’ll see.”

Behind us, where the command posts were located at the top of the slope, someone had apparently pulled away the blanket from a dug-out entrance, a bowed silhouette showed for a moment, then all was dark again; the flare had gone out too … as if its light had been swallowed up by the infinite darkness …

“That was the old man’s hole, I hope they drop a load right in front of it, or right inside, then there’ll be no attack tomorrow …”

We quickly ducked, for from somewhere ahead came the sound of a gentle crack, then there was a shattering explosion, and behind us on the hilltop a few low, blackish-red flames shot up from the earth. Then all was quiet again, and we listened intently for any noise or shouting to start up behind us. But the silence persisted …

“Seems they were lucky,” Heini muttered angrily. “But it’s the truth, isn’t it—a nice direct hit on the old man’s quarters, and tomorrow we’ll have saved the lives of twenty men …”

We turned back to face the coal-black wall of the night.

“There he sits, the bastard, boozing away and mulling over his plan …”

“More likely asleep,” I said wearily.

“But he had a light!”

“He always has a light, even when he’s asleep—I’ve been there a few times with dispatches. There were two candles burning, and he was asleep. His mouth open, snoring, probably pissed …”

“I see,” Heini said slowly, and something in that “I see” made me take notice. I looked over to where he must be standing and listened to his breathing. “I see,” he repeated, and I would have given a lot to be able to see his face: all I could make out, blacker than the black night, were the rough outlines of his figure, and suddenly I heard him start to clamber out of the hole. Small clods of earth trickled from the parapet, and I could hear his hands scrabbling for a grip at the top …

“What are you up to?” I asked nervously, scared to be alone in this hole.

“I’ve got to go, and in a hurry, I’ve got the shits, it may take a while.” He had reached the top, and soon I heard his footsteps disappearing off to the right before the darkness swallowed up all sound …

Alone now, I groped for the bottle of rot-gut and found it in the darkness right under the cold metal of the machine-gun case. I pulled out the stopper, wiped the lip of the bottle with my hand, and drank deeply. The first taste as it touched the roof of my mouth was horrible, but soon a comfortable warmth spread slowly through me. I drank again, and again; then once again, then huddled down onto the bottom of the hole, threw the blanket over me and lit my pipe. All fear had left me. I propped myself on one elbow, covered my face with my hands, leaving just enough room for my pipe, and dozed off …

I was woken by the weird clatter of the night plane, which concealed cunning and deadly accuracy behind its seeming decrepitude. We had every reason to fear it. I wondered where Heini was and turned round. I was met with an incredible sight: to the rear, along the top of the range of hills where the command posts were, I saw a large, bright
spot in the night, an open dug-out entrance, and in the middle of that bright, wavering spot a candle flickering. Agitated voices of scurrying men came alive, the blanket was hastily pulled across, but it was too late: at that very moment the noise of the night plane’s engine stopped for a fraction of a second, and just where the light had been a flame shot up that was instantly suffocated by the night. In the absolute silence one could sense everybody ducking, trembling as they flattened themselves on the ground. But the plane flew slowly on. Now from the slope came renewed shouts and the sounds of men digging: picks hacking into the stony soil, and beams were being dragged out …

At last Heini returned from over on the right; clambering back into the hole he cursed: “Goddammit, have I got the shits, I could’ve gone on for hours! Pass me the bottle, will you?”

His voice was quite calm, but when I passed him the bottle, waiting in the dark for his hand to touch mine so I would know he had hold of the bottle, I could feel him trembling violently. He drank long and deep, and I could hear him panting, and it seemed to me that the night had become even darker and more silent …

“By the way,” said Heini a little later, “d’you know the old man is dead? Those were his quarters. Direct hit. I don’t imagine he’ll have felt a thing—after all, he was pissed …”

I drew an ace, gleefully placed my bet, drew a nine and said “Pass.”

Fips turned up his card, a ten; then he smiled at me, for there were a hundred and twenty
pengö
in the kitty. Slowly he took the second card, a queen, then he drew a king and smiled again. And when he picked up the fourth card, I laughed … but he hadn’t even looked at it when we suddenly flung ourselves to the ground: a strange, soft whirring sound was in the air. Our faces were deathly pale. Then from our right came an appalling crash, and immediately afterwards we heard a terrible scream, followed by nothing. There was total silence. Fips was still holding the fourth card face down as he looked at me: “That was Alfred,” he said quietly, “go and see what’s happened to him.” There was still total silence, then we were startled again, this time by the shrill sound of the phone in the next dug-out. Fips jumped across me, threw the rest of the cards down onto the kitty, and flung aside the blanket. I could hear him answering the phone and saying “Yes,” and again “Yes,” and again, after a brief pause, a third time, “Yes …”

He emerged, still holding the card. He looked stunned and absent-mindedly tucked the card under his corporal’s shoulder strap. “What was it?” I asked calmly.

“Christ!” he shouted at me. “Aren’t you going to go and find Alfred?” His eyes held a terrible fear, I forgave him for shouting at me, and I didn’t dare ask him who it had been on the phone.

He walked the few steps to the edge of the forest with me and showed me the cable I had to follow to reach Alfred.

Alfred had gone off half an hour earlier to look for a break in the line. I glanced back into the trench and saw Fips standing there with that altogether strange, new fear in his face, saw him lean against the parapet and gaze out over the churned-up terrain. Then I picked up the cable and marched off into the unfamiliar undergrowth. I followed the trail that Alfred’s feet had ploughed through the ferns; in some alarm I
noticed that the path to the right was moving farther and farther out of sight and that the cable was leading me into totally unknown territory. It was so silent in the forest that my footsteps startled me, that soft, fluttery sound as I brushed against the fern fronds, the grazing of tendrils against my greatcoat, the soft swish of bobbing brambles …

Suddenly I felt the cable in my hands tightening; I pulled at it, but it didn’t yield. Somewhere on the ground it must have been caught by a rock, a branch, or some heavy object. I pulled more vigorously and now discovered, just a few paces ahead of me, where it was pinned to the ground. Nervously I went closer, and then I saw him lying there, Alfred’s grey figure, his face turned towards me. At the same moment I threw myself to the ground, for I suddenly saw that I was standing in a clearing that opened like a funnel into a hollow. I crawled slowly closer and first looked out across the dead man’s body into that unfamiliar, shallow valley that was filled with an oppressive silence. Down there among the meadows flowed a little stream, and beyond it was a steep slope with a bare ridge.

Only then did I look at Alfred. His fixed eyes stared upwards, and involuntarily I followed his gaze into the mute green roof of beech leaves; at that moment I understood why he was smiling and lying there so calmly. His right hand still clasped the receiver of the testing set, and his head was still tilted to the right in a listening pose. I carefully closed his eyelids and released his hand from the set; then, putting my arms round the dead man, I dragged him with me as I crawled slowly back into the forest …

It was as silent as it can only be in war. Those gentle, chirping sounds of a forest in summertime hummed around me; from somewhere up ahead I could hear the good-natured booming of a cannon, but the silence was stronger. I bent down, took Alfred’s paybook from his breast pocket and, as I carefully leaned with my left hand on his chest, I heard a strange sound, almost like a sponge being squeezed. Alarmed, I pulled him up and discovered in his back a hole the size of a fist, its edges fringed with shreds of cloth. His whole back was sticky with blood. I lowered him again, removed the steel helmet from his head, and gazed silently at that childish forehead, at that childish mouth which only half an hour ago had laughingly placed his bet. Involuntarily and unknowingly, I called out in a loud, strained voice,
“Alfred, Alfred!” and it seemed to me that he must surely move, but my absorption was penetrated once again by the soft, cruel, menacing sound as of smouldering cotton wool … I threw myself down beside Alfred and this time heard the crash to my left, at the very spot where Fips must have stayed behind. Then all was silent again. I wrenched the testing set from Alfred’s shoulder, connected it to the cable, and dialled. “Cherry stone, switchboard,” a bored voice responded …

“Cherry stone three, please,” I said, and he repeated: “Cherry stone three.” I heard him plug in and crank the handle; there followed that typical telephone exchange silence with only a few soft clicks audible. Again I heard him crank, then the voice said: “Cherry stone doesn’t answer.”

“Is there something wrong with the line?” I asked anxiously.

“No, the connection’s all right, there seems to be nobody there.”

I hurriedly stuffed Alfred’s paybook in my pocket, yanked the set free again and, following my own trail, ran back. After jumping into the trench I first listened for a moment but could hear nothing; then, crouching low, I ran along the trench until I saw Fips lying there …

There wasn’t much left of him to recognize, his chest was ripped apart, and blood and bone splinters had swamped his face; only his shoulders were uninjured, and the card was still tucked under his left shoulder strap. I pulled it out: it was a king …

“Twenty-one,” I said softly, “you win.” I walked back the few paces to where our kitty lay, picked up the notes, tore them into tiny pieces, and scattered the coloured scraps over him like flower petals.

At that moment the phone rang. I stepped across Fips’s body into the dug-out, picked up the receiver, and answered. But there was nothing to be heard except for that typical telephone exchange silence and, obeying an obscure urge, I said “Yes!” Now I understood the fear in Fips’s eyes. Still no one responded, and again I said, in a loud, mocking voice: “Yes!” And, following the rule of three, I repeated, now obedient and subdued: “Yes.” Then I hung up, and I, too, went outside, leaned against the parapet, and waited …

When Lieutenant Hegemüller returned to his billet, his thin face was trembling with a nervous pallor; his eyes seemed to have gone dead, his face under the flaxen hair was a blank, quivering surface. All day long he had been sitting in the communications room, relaying radio messages to the incessant accompaniment of the chatter of machine pistols as they spewed out their bullets over at the outskirts of the town into the wan afternoon light: over and over again that cackling screech of a new salvo, and knowing that every single link in that rattling chain of sound meant a destroyed or mutilated human life, a body writhing in the dust and tumbling down a slope! And every half hour, with hellish regularity, the thud of a muffled explosion, and knowing that that sound, fading like a retreating thunderstorm, replaced the work of gravediggers, gravedigging in the interests of sanitation; knowing that yet another section of the quarry was at that very moment collapsing over the harvest of the last half hour and burying the living with the dead …

For the thousandth time the lieutenant wiped his pale, sweat-soaked face; then with a curse he kicked open the door to his quarters and stumbled into his room, where with a groan he sat down on his chair. On and on and on rushed the venomous machinery of death—almost as if that ripping, crackling sound were the screech of a monstrous saw splitting the sky so it would collapse when the day’s work was done. Often it seemed as though the traces of this destruction must be visible and, his face twitching, he would lean for a moment out of the window to see with his own eyes whether the vast grey vault of the sky were not already tilting like the prow of a foundering ship. He thought he could even hear the gurgling of the black water lying in wait to wash over the wreckage of the world and swallow it up in deadly calm.

Quaking in every limb, he smoked with trembling fingers, knowing that he must do something to fight this madness. For he felt that he was not without guilt, that he had been forced into the stony heart
of guilt, a heart that must lie at the centre of this ceaselessly grinding atrocity. Neither the pain he suffered nor the nameless horror and mortal fear could wipe out the consciousness that
he
was shooting and
he
was being shot. Never before had he been so intensely aware of the great cosmic home that embraces all men, the reality of God.