The Train Was On Time by Heinrich Böll Read Free Book Online

He said the same prayers as the evening before, but this time he prayed first for the eyes, so he wouldn’t forget them. The eyes were always with him, but not always with the same clarity. Sometimes they submerged for months and were only there in the sense that his lips were there and his feet, which were always with him and of which he was only occasionally aware, only when they hurt; and sometimes, at irregular intervals, often after months, the eyes would surface like some new burning pain, and on days like that he prayed in the evening for the eyes; today he had to pray for the eyes in the morning. He also prayed again for the Jews of Cernauti, and for the Jews of Stanislav and Kolomyya; there were Jews all over Galicia, Galicia, the word was like a snake with tiny feet and shaped like a knife, a snake with glittering eyes gliding smoothly over the ground and slicing, slicing the ground in two. Galicia … a dark, beautiful word, filled with anguish, and in this country I am going to die.
    There was a lot of blood in that word, blood made to flow by the knife. Bucovina, he thought, that’s a good solid word, I shan’t die there, I shall die in Galicia, in Eastern Galicia. I must have a look, when it gets light, and see where the province of Bucovina begins, I won’t see it any more now; I’m gettingcloser and closer. Cernauti is already in Bucovina, I won’t see that.
    “Kolomyya,” he asked his companion, “is that in Galicia?”
    “Don’t know. Poland, I think.”
    Every border has a terrible finality. There’s a line, and that’s it. And the train goes across it just as it would go across a dead body, or a live body. And hope is dead, the hope of being sent back once more to France and finding the eyes again and the lips belonging to the eyes, and the heart and the breast, a woman’s breast that must belong to those eyes. That hope is quite dead, completely cut off. For ever and ever those eyes will only be eyes, they will never surround themselves again with body and clothes and hair, no hands, no human hands, no woman’s hands that might one day caress you. That hope had always been there, for after all it was a human being, a living human being, to which those eyes belonged, a girl or a woman. But not now. Now there were only eyes, no lips now, never again a mouth, a heart, never again to feel a living heart under a soft skin beating against your hand, never again … never … never. Sunday morning between Lvov and Kolomyya. Cernauti was far away now, as far as Nikopol and Kishinev. That Soon had narrowed down even more, it was very narrow now. Two days, Lvov, Kolomyya. He knew he might get barely as far as Kolomyya, but certainly no farther. No heart, no mouth, only eyes, only the soul, that unhappy lovely soul that had no body; wedged between two elbows like a witch pinned to her stake before they burn her.…
    The border had cut off a lot of things. Paul was finally gone too. Only memory, hope, and dream. “We live on hope,” Paul had once said. As if one were to say: “We live on credit.” We have no security … nothing … only eyes, and don’t know whether three and a half years of prayer have coaxed those eyes over to the place we may hope to reach.…
    Yes, later on he did limp up that hill, from the hospital in Amiens, and nothing was the same. The road was not gray as it ran up the hill, it was just an ordinary road. The hill carried the road on its back, and the wall had no intention of swaying and charging; the wall just stood there. And there was the house, which he hadn’t recognized, only the wall, he had recognized that, a wall made of bricks with gaps in them where bricks had been left out to make a kind of pattern. A Frenchman was standing there, a real lower-middle-class type, his pipe between his teeth, his eyes full of that truly French derision—ponderous, bourgeois—and the man had known nothing. He knew only that they had all gone, fled, and that the