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

Germans had looted everything although a banner had been strung right across the road saying: Looting punishable by death. No, no eyes, only the man’s wife, an obese matron who kept her hand tucked in the top of her dress, a face rather like a rabbit’s. No child, no daughter, no sister, no sister-in-law, nothing! Just poky rooms full of kitsch and stale air and the couple’s derisive looks as they watched him searching helplessly, agonizingly.
    That glass cabinet: the Germans had smashed it up. And burned holes in the carpet with their cigarette butts, and slept on the couch with their whores and messed it all up. He spat with contempt. But that had all happened later, not during the battle while Amiens was smoking, much later, after the pilot had crashed in the wheatfield over there where you could see the tail of the aircraft sticking in the earth. The pipe pointed out of the window … yes, there it was, sticking in the earth, the tail with the emblem, and on the French steel helmet on the grave right next to it the sun was glinting; it was all real, as real as the smell from the kitchen of the roast in the oven, and the smashed glass cabinet and, down there in the valley, the cathedral in Amiens. “A fine example of French Gothic architecture.…”
    No eyes. Nothing, nothing at all.…
    “Maybe,” said the man, “maybe it was a whore.” But the man pitied him, it was a miracle that this bourgeois little man could feel pity, pity for a German soldier who belonged to the same army as the ones who had stolen his knives and forks and his clocks, and had slept on his couch with their whores, messing it all up, ruining it.
    The pain was so overpowering that he just stood there in the doorway, looking at the spot on the road where he had passed out, the pain was so great that he didn’t feel it. The man shook his head, perhaps he had never seen such unhappy eyes as those of this soldier leaning heavily on his cane.
    “Peut-être,” he said before Andreas left, “peut-être une folle, a madwoman from the asylum over there.” He gestured toward the wall, where red-roofed buildings showed among fine tall trees. “A mental asylum. During the battle they all ran away, you see, and they all had to be rounded up again, a tough job.…”
    “Thanks … thanks.” On up the hill toward the asylum. The wall began close by, but there was no gate. It was a long, long walk up the hot hill until he reached a gate, and he knew in advance, he knew there would be no one left. A sentry in a steel helmet stood at the gate, and there were no more lunatics, only some sick and wounded and a V.D. treatment center.
    “A big V.D. center,” said the sentry, “did you pick up something too, bud?”
    Andreas looked across to the big field where the aircraft’s tail with the emblem was sticking in the earth and the steel helmet was glinting in the sun.
    “It’s so cheap here, that’s the trouble,” said the sentry, who was bored. “You can have it for fifty pfennigs,” he laughed, “fifty pfennigs!”
    “That’s right,” said Andreas … forty million, he thought, France has forty million inhabitants, that’s too many. Youcan’t search among all those, I must wait … I must look into every pair of eyes I meet. He didn’t feel like walking on another three minutes and having a look at the field where he had been wounded. For it wasn’t the same field, everything was different. It wasn’t the same road, or the same wall, they had all forgotten; the road had forgotten too, just as people forget, and the wall had forgotten that once it had collapsed with fear and he with it. And the tail of the aircraft over there was a dream, a dream with a French emblem. Why go and look at the field? Why walk those extra three minutes and recall with hate and pain the patriotic poem that he had remembered against his will? Why torment his tired legs any further?
    “Now,” said the soldier who needed a shave, “now we’re