The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (88 page)

Immediately above his head the door to the little balcony suddenly opened. A lurid light flooded the garden, and the next moment he recognized the conceited voice of the captain; at the same time, someone was pissing from the balcony down onto the steps. He jumped aside in alarm.

Then it was as if the light were being sucked back out of the garden, swallowed up, while the shadows of the two door panels widened; and, just before the last of the light was shut in, he heard that conceited voice saying: “Let’s call it a day, gentlemen, it’s two o’clock …”

The smell from the puddle on the steps drove him into the garden. With heavy legs, his hands clasped behind him, he plodded as far as the corner of the building.

Then the strident voice of the drunken lieutenant shouted in the corridor “Vive la France!” and burst into peals of laughter over his own wit. In the dimly luminous night the sentry saw the lieutenant staggering down the steps. He remained quite still while with the frantic assurance of the drunk the figure stumbled through the garden parallel to the building, then took the bend too sharply and pitched forward towards the corner.

“What the devil are you doing here?” came the lieutenant’s shaky voice.

The sentry’s silence hung menacingly in the air. Like a hunter, as he leaned calmly against the wall, he watched the swaying figure as it thrust its corrupted child’s face with its torrid breath close to his.

“Can’t you hear me? Aren’t you at least going to challenge me?”

“Yessir,” the sentry replied stoutly.

“And I’m telling you, shoot down anyone who doesn’t know the password—anyone, without mercy.”

And as if obsessed with that idea, he repeated stubbornly: “Shoot to kill! Shoot to kill!” Without waiting for the sentry’s reply, he staggered towards the gate, out into the avenue and, just before turning left into the silent village street, shouted once again: “Vive la France!” His hysterical laughter bounced off the walls of the houses into the park.

With short, quick steps the sentry walked as far as the gate and looked out into the village street; there stood the houses black and silent, and above the outline of their roofs the darkness softened to a watery ink. He could hear the lieutenant’s footsteps, hear him kick a stone on the road, follow him in his mind’s eye as he turned right into the church square, and could hear muffled knocking on a door. The sentry nodded as if in confirmation when the lieutenant’s hoarse, childish voice called out reproachfully, “Yvette! Yvette!”

The church square, opening out to the right beyond the corner, formed an oblique angle with the village street, so that with his last thirty paces the lieutenant had come closer to the sentry again and was standing half-turned towards him. His voice now reached the sentry over the low, dark houses. There was something eerie in the way it seemed to float over the one-storey buildings, always repeating the same words, first reproachfully, “Yvette, Yvette!”, then impatiently, in a childish whine, “Open up!” And again reproachfully, “Yvette, damn you!” Next came a strange silence, and the sentry, listening with bated breath, could visualize the door opening soundlessly and white arms pulling the lieutenant inside. But breaking the paralyzing silence the lieutenant suddenly cried out in a shrill voice, “Yvette, you bitch!” Then apparently the door really did open, there was the sound of throaty laughter, and the sentry, standing there in the cold night with eyes closed, his face screwed up with pain, saw quite clearly: the soothing smile on the white face of the girl.

Although he loved neither Yvette nor the lieutenant, he was seized, as he stood shivering beside the gatepost, by an agonizing jealousy, a fierce sense of total desolation, overshadowing even his hatred.

While he tensed to catch every sound, his fatigue had almost evaporated; he turned right and walked down the village street. Since he could never see more than a few paces ahead, the night seemed to be forever retreating. Each step seemed to bring him closer to the dark, black wall that blocked his view; a cruel game, it seemed to him, because even so the distance never diminished. And as a result of this game, the village, that wretched little place of twenty-three houses, a factory, and two run-down châteaux, became boundless, and it seemed an age before he reached the iron fence surrounding the school playground. From the kitchen the smell of stale, watery soup penetrated all the way to the street. Leaning over the low wall that supported the fence he called in a clear, subdued voice, “Hullo there, Willi!”

He heard footsteps coming from the direction of the kitchen; then a dark figure loomed into view. “Here,” the sentry called, “I’m over here!” Looking half-asleep, Willi approached the fence, walked along beside it, and stepped through the gate into the street.

“What time is it?”

Willi clumsily rolled up his tunic, fumbled for his watch, pulled it out, and held it close to his face: “Ten past two.”

“That’s impossible—your watch must have stopped—no, no, that can’t be right!”

His voice was trembling dangerously; the sentry waited breathlessly while Willi held the watch to his ear, shook it, then looked at its face again.

“It’s going all right, I knew it was, my watch has never stopped yet.”

His voice showed no emotion. The sentry stood there without a word; his face was screwed up and withdrawn, hard and tormented.

“Oh, shut up,” said Willi, although the sentry hadn’t said anything. “Why must you always be so childish? Two hours are two hours, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

The sentry stood there like a pillar of salt. Ten minutes! he kept thinking, and this single thought pounded away in his brain. Ten minutes, twelve times ten minutes, a hundred and twenty times one minute!

“Look,” Willi went on in a complacent tone, “I always think of home, that passes the time for me. One day the war will be over, then we’ll go back, take off our tunics, kiss our wives, and go off to work. We’ve done our duty, see? And we …”

“Shut up!”

The two men looked at each other with hostility, although all they could see of each other was a pale, blurred disc under the black shadow of the steel helmet. Yet each saw the other’s face quite plainly, forming it from the sound of the voice and the tension in the air. Willi saw a thin, dark, bitter face with lacklustre eyes, shadowed by grief: the sentry’s face. He in turn saw that good-natured, rather cunning, smug face, a bit surprised yet watchful; Willi’s face.

“Give me a cigarette,” the sentry croaked.

“Hey, listen, you already owe me three. Tell you what, let’s make that deal with the watch. For God’s sake, a broken watch, what good is it to you! I’ll give you twenty-five for it, ten now, that makes thirteen, and the rest the day after tomorrow when the canteen opens—I needn’t tell you …”

“Shut up, just hand them over!”

Willi hesitated for a moment, then put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a packet of cigarettes.

“Here—but where …”

The sentry snatched the packet from Willi, opened it, and instantly struck a match. Suddenly the two faces were harshly lit up and looked frighteningly similar: pale, unspeakably weary, slack-mouthed.

“Are you crazy, man?” exclaimed Willi, “and then …”

“Oh, shut up.” The sentry’s voice now sounded more conciliatory. “They can lick my …”

At that he turned on his heel but swung round again and asked: “What time is it now?”

Again Willi carefully rolled up his tunic, groped for his watch in the little pocket in his waistband, and held it up to his eyes: “Eighteen minutes past—don’t forget the watch!”

The sentry strolled down the street as far as the second house and leaned against the door of Madame Sevry’s café. He drew deeply and voluptuously on his cigarette, and an extraordinary happiness filled his entire being. The poison radiated a gentle, pleasant vertigo. He closed his eyes. Ten cigarettes, he thought. Now he actually began to feel time slipping between his fingers; that heavy, black, inert, remorseless lump was melting away. It was as if a floodgate had opened and the current was bearing him away.

On either side the road led off into the abyss of darkness; now the silence was released, it too was flowing. For eighteen endless minutes the silence had been like a brake holding back time. Now the silence ran parallel with time, so close to it that the two seemed to be one.

Knowing just where the château was on the right and the school on the left, he imagined he could see them. But the avenue leading from the road to the château—that he really could see. It was like a high, perforated wall, darker than the night and studded with the dim clarity of the sky.

When he carefully tucked away the stub of his cigarette in his pocket, he knew that no more than seven minutes had passed. So it must be twenty-five past two. He decided to take a walk through the factory, that would take care of twelve minutes, and after that to smoke a cigarette. If he then returned slowly to Madame Sevry’s door, smoked another cigarette, and walked to the school, it would have to be three o’clock.

Moving away from the door he walked down the gentle slope to the château gates, then slowly on almost to the corner of the church square—sixty-seven paces—where he turned left towards the abandoned gatehouse. From the archway he glanced into the little house from which all the timberwork had been stolen. As he hurried on he suddenly realized he was scared. Yes, without rhyme or reason, he was scared. Who could possibly be looking for anything in this completely looted factory at two thirty in the morning? But he was scared. His footsteps resounded hollowly on the concrete floor, and through the damaged roof he could see scraps of blue-black sky. It seemed to him as if the bare, black room were soaking up the threats of silence through the holes in the roof. The factory had been so radically gutted that it was no longer possible to make out what it had been used for: a big, bare hall where the concrete bases of the machines seemed glued stubbornly to the floor; meaningless iron structures, dirt, torn paper: indescribably cold and dreary.

Rigid with fear, the sentry walked slowly to the end of the great hall where an open doorway led outside. In the blackness of the wall, the open doorway looked like a rectangular piece of dark grey-blue cloth. He headed straight for it, walking softly, for the sound of his footsteps frightened him. Suddenly he stumbled over the rails leading outside, caught himself as he staggered against the wall, and stood with a pounding heart in the doorway. Although here, too, he could see
scarcely twenty paces ahead, he believed he must be looking at the wide, open field, for he knew it was there and he could smell it: the sharp sweetness of spring nights above the meadows and fields.

Suddenly his fear flared up and landed right in the middle of his heart. Trembling, he turned round and walked with hesitant steps into the soundless menace, and the farther he went the more he realized that it—his fear—was empty, hollow, and he began to feel almost lighthearted. He even smiled a little as he stepped through the narrow doorway in the black wall into the grounds of the château.

It was like a dream! This round he had made seemed to have taken so long, an entire lifetime, as he mounted the stone stairs again, stepped across the captain’s puddle, and stationed himself in the entrance. It was an eerie feeling: time seemed to have passed with ghostly speed yet insane sluggishness, time was disembodied, intangible, contradictory. How terrible to be at its mercy—it was a dream!

The only realities were the puddle, the cold, and the damp. He decided against walking round the château and proceeded to light a cigarette. His calculations became confused, he had merely a dim notion: one cigarette here and one in Madame Sevry’s doorway, then off to Willi, and it would have to be three o’clock. So one hour would have passed. He knew he was deceiving himself, yet, while aware of that, he believed in the deception.

How am I going to tell Willi that I don’t even have the watch any more, he thought in desperation, that two evenings ago I drank it away at Madame Sevry’s! I have to hold him off till the day after tomorrow and then return the cigarettes to him out of my canteen rations. Franz will have to get twelve, Willi thirteen, so all I’ll have left will be seven cigarettes and the tobacco.

And the money he had borrowed! Credit is the worst of all traps for a poor man, he thought bitterly. It was always the same: whenever Marianne’s parcels arrived with the money she sent, he would blow it all, it would run through his fingers; after that he would drag himself along over the perilous, seductive bridge of credit, swaying between the abysses of despair and stupor.

And the war stood still! That monster was marking time. Horror without end. Day and night the uniform, and the futility of routine duty, the arrogant, strident bad temper of the officers and the yelling of the
NCOs. They had been driven into the war like a hopeless, vast, grey herd of desperate men. Sometimes the memory of the front, where the monster really had been bare-fanged and bloody, seemed to him easier to endure than the perpetual waiting in this country that vacillated between spiteful muteness and a kindly, gentle irony. Again and again, on the monotonous carousel of the so-called deployment plan, they were shoved for a short time into the dug-outs and then back into this lousy dump, where they knew every single child, every chair and every bar. And the wine was getting worse and worse, the schnapps ever more dubious, cigarettes and rations ever scarcer; it was a cruel game. He tucked the second butt into his little watch pocket, stepped unconcernedly into the captain’s puddle, and walked rapidly down the avenue, towards the street, straight to the school.

Good as his word, Willi was standing by the entrance to the building, apparently gently dozing.

“What time is it?” asked the sentry in a hectoring tone. He waited impatiently while Willi completed his fumbling manoeuvre with the watch.

“Quarter to,” Willi answered. “Did you bring it along?”

“Bring what along?”

“The watch. You could’ve just gone to your room to pick it up, couldn’t you? I want to send home a parcel tomorrow morning, you see, and …”