The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll

  Before he had a chance to ask, the woman jumped up and screamed: “They’ve taken him away, my Piotr, Piotr Stepanovich … oh sir, sir!”

  “But he’s not …” the lieutenant shouted back.

  “No, sir, he’s not a Jew, no. Oh sir, sir!”

  The tears gushed from between the fingers that she was pressing against her face as if to staunch a bleeding wound …

  Driven by some overpowering inner force, the lieutenant turned on his heel and, calling out something to the woman, dashed out into the street.

  The streets were completely deserted. An eerie tension hung in the air: what hovered over the little town was not only the terror of those crouching in their hiding-places, not only the whip of death. The silence, which filled the streets like pale, grey dust, held a kind of mockery as if one devil were grinning at another.

  The lieutenant raced along, sweat dripping from every pore, the terrible sweat that was no release but more like a death sweat poisoned by a bestiality that had been saturated with the killers’ vicious lust. A strange burning cold flowed over him from the dead façades of the houses. And yet he was filled with something like joy—no, it actually was joy—what a glorious feeling to run for the life of a human being! In those minutes, racing through the streets at breakneck speed, almost beside himself, his subconscious came to understand many things; a thousand things were revealed to him from out of that nebulous haze he had called his ideology, rising like stars to pierce him with their brilliance and then die away like comets, but their reflection remained within him, as an accumulated source of subdued light.

  Panting, covered with dust, he reached the outskirts of the town where the doomed had been herded together at the edge of the steppe. They formed a square surrounded by vehicles mounted with machine guns; in the vehicles, guards lounged behind the slim barrels, smoking their cigarettes.

  At first Hegemüller ignored the sentry who tried to stop him, did not react when the man grabbed him by the sleeve. For a second he stared into the man’s face, amazed at how close and clear it was. In fact, the faces of the sentry cordon seemed all equally dull-witted and brutish whereas the faces of those inside the cordon seemed in some exquisite manner to have been lifted high above the mass and placed on the pinnacle of humanity. A sombre silence hung over the crowd, something strangely vibrating, fluttering, like the flapping of heavy banners, something solemn, and—Hegemüller felt, as his heart missed a beat—inexplicably comforting, joyful; he felt this joy surge through him, and at that instant he envied the doomed people and was shocked to realize that he was wearing the same uniform as the murderers. Blushing with shame he turned towards the sentry and croaked: “The man whose house I’m billeted in is here. He’s not a Jew …” and since the sentry stood there in apathetic silence he added: “Grimschenko, Piotr …”

  An officer approached the group and raised his eyebrows at the sight of the dusty, sweat-soaked lieutenant, who was wearing neither belt nor cap. Hegemüller now realized that the executioners and their minions were all drunk. With their bloodshot eyes they looked like bulls, and their breath was like steam from a manure heap. Once again Hegemüller stammered out the name of his host, and the lieutenant in command of the minions scratched his head in a display of gruesome good nature and asked lamely: “Innocent, you mean?”

  “Innocent, that too,” Hegemüller replied curtly.

  The lieutenant seemed taken aback as this little word fell into the pool of his heart. But the word had sunk without trace, without raising ripples, as the lieutenant stepped in front of the doomed figures and shouted: “Grimschenko, Piotr, step forward!” Since nobody moved, and that strangely fluttering silence persisted, he called out the name again, adding: “Can go home!” And when there was still no response he stepped back and said awkwardly: “Gone, maybe already done for, maybe still over there—come with me!”

  Hegemüller’s eyes followed the finger pointing towards the place of execution.

  What he saw was the edge of an enormous quarry that sloped towards the assembly point, and a row of close-ranked soldiers armed with machine pistols. From the assembly point, a procession of the doomed led up to the rim of the quarry, where it flattened out: from this rim the regular, whiplike cracking of the machine pistols sounded through the afternoon air.

  And once again, as he followed the drunken lieutenant, it seemed to Hegemüller that the crowd, the doomed crowd, had dissolved into a procession of noble personalities, while the few murderers seemed like brutish clods. Each one of those faces he so anxiously scanned in search of Grimschenko seemed to him calmer, revealing an inexpressibly human gravity. The women with babies in their arms, old people and children, men, girls smeared with faeces who had apparently been pulled out of latrines for the purpose of being murdered; rich and poor, ragged and well-dressed, all were endowed with a sublimity that left Hegemüller speechless. The lieutenant tried to make conversation by throwing out oddly apologetic fragments, not as an excuse for the killings but to gloss over his drunken condition while on duty: “Tough job, this, you know. Couldn’t stand it without booze … hope you understand …”

  But Hegemüller, in whom horror had aroused a strange and sober calm, was nagged by a single question: What do they do with the babies, the tiny ones who can’t stand or walk—how is it technically possible? Meanwhile his eyes never left the procession of the doomed, never rose to the rim of the quarry where the pallid afternoon was punctured by the thwacking and spitting of the machine pistols. But on reaching the point where the slope flattened out and he was forced to lift his gaze, he saw the answer to that nagging question. He saw a black boot kicking the bloodied corpse of an infant into the abyss and, averting his eyes in horror and looking along the rim of the quarry, he suddenly saw Grimschenko at the head of the line, saw him collapse under a bullet. With a wild and terrible cry he shouted “Stop, stop!” so loud that the executioners held their fire in alarm. He seized the lieutenant by the arm and dragged him over to where Grimschenko, drenched in blood, was hanging half over the edge. He had not tipped forward into the quarry but, facing away from his killer, had fallen over backwards.

  Hegemüller grabbed him and lifted him up, and just then an official voice shouted from somewhere: “Everyone get back—blasting!” Hegemüller did not see the killers running back fifty yards in their panic, or the astonished, bewildered face of the lieutenant in charge of his drunken minions. Hegemüller had grasped Grimschenko’s body and hoisted him onto his shoulders; he could feel the flowing blood congealing between his fingers. Behind him the detonation exploded in a cloud of leaden sound into the sky; scarcely a foot or two behind Hegemüller, the rim of the quarry collapsed, and the earth buried both the dead and the half-dead, the infants and the old men who for ninety-four years had borne the burden of life …

  It was no surprise to Hegemüller that the row of killers, waiting with smoking barrels and dull eyes for the next batch, made way for him without resistance. He felt he had the power to force them all onto their knees with a single glance, a single word, those butchers of men in their brand-new uniforms, for in the midst of the red fog of confusion, fear and noise, of stench and anguish, he had felt something that filled him with happiness: Grimschenko’s gentle breath that brushed his shoulder like a caress from another world, that tiny breath of the gravely wounded, whose blood had caked his fingers.

  Unhindered he passed through the row of murderers, hearing behind him the upsurge of renewed firing. He found a waiting vehicle and shouted at the dozing driver: “Get going—the nearest field hospital!” as he jerked open the door, let Grimschenko slide from his shoulders, and laid him on the back seat.

  Suddenly he was dreaming: he was running, running, with a number of others in a mad, gruelling race to a lake in whose waters they wanted to cool off. The heat burned over them, and all round them. The whole world was one pitiless furnace, and they ran and ran, while the sweat flowed from their pores like streams of sour blood. It was an indescribable tort
ure, this race along a dusty road to the lake which they knew lay beyond a curve in the road, yet it was a sensual pleasure, this sweating, a kind of swimming in torture, a dreadful yet in some mysterious way pleasurable torture, while the sweat flowed, flowed, flowed. And then came that curve in the road beyond which must be the lake; with a wild cry he raced round the curve, saw the glittering silver surface of the water, plunged into it with a jubilant shout, knelt down and joyfully dipped his face in the water. Then, just as he was marvelling at how miraculously cool the water was despite the scorching heat, he woke up and opened his eyes.

  He was looking into the impassive face of an orderly who was holding an empty jug, and he instantly grasped that he had fainted and been revived with a dash of cold water. He could smell some kind of disinfectant, could hear a typewriter tapping. “Grish, Grimschenko?” he whispered, but the orderly, instead of replying, turned away. “So the Russian’s name is Grimschenko—now you can complete the medical report, Sister.”

  The orderly stepped aside, and Hegemüller felt the cool professional hand of a doctor on his forehead and heard a complacent voice say: “Been overdoing it a bit, eh?” Then the hand slid down his sleeve to his pulse and, while Hegemüller was feeling his own pulse beating irregularly against the doctor’s gentle fingers, the complacent voice spoke again: “All right, Sister—got it? Then write down: Cause of death—let’s say, hooked nose,” and then the complacent voice laughed while the hands belonging to that complacent voice were feeling Hegemüller’s pulse almost tenderly. But Hegemüller sat up, took in the white room with a strangely detached expression, then laughed too, and his laughter was as strange as his expression. His eyeballs rolled back as his laughter grew louder and louder; they dimmed and seemed to turn ever further inward, like the closing shutters of a searchlight, taking the whole world inside with them and leaving nothing but a clouded emptiness; Hegemüller laughed, and from then on the only words he ever spoke were: “Cause of death: hooked nose.”

  VIVE LA FRANCE!

  The sentry groped his way across the dark room to the door, opened it and stepped out into the corridor; for half a second he hesitated in the doorway, reluctant to leave the warmth of the room behind him and go out into the cold night. He slowly closed the door and merged with the darkness of the corridor. He could see nothing, he was merely aware that the front door was open, and subconsciously he was surprised to find that the cold which had greeted him in the corridor seemed to be intensified outside: damp, icy, remorseless, it advanced upon him through the open doorway. Then, standing in the entrance, completely enveloped by that damp cold, he was able to distinguish, more or less from memory, the vague outlines of the trees in the park, the furrow of the avenue, on the right the ruined factory whose sinister black wall seemed to rise like a barrier between two underworlds …

  A weary, almost desperate voice called out: “Is that you?”

  “Yes,” he replied, surprised to find he had the strength to utter that one syllable. A deathly fatigue flowed like lead through his limbs, as if dragging him down; his eyelids drooped, and leaning against the front door he fell into a sleep that lasted perhaps for a second, a voluptuous, heavy stupor. To sleep, ah, to sleep.

  The sentry he was relieving bumped into him; with a sense of searing pain he was awake again. “It’s all yours,” said the voice, a voice that contained something like pity.

  He couldn’t even summon the strength to ask for a cigarette, to open his mouth at all. He was paralyzed by the hopeless deathly fatigue which was suffocating him. His eyes burned like hot coals in their sockets, from his empty stomach rose a sourish, nauseating fluid; his arms and legs were like lumps, numb, leaden. Without knowing it, he uttered muffled, brutish sounds as he collapsed onto stone slabs. But he couldn’t sleep: it wasn’t the cold that prevented him—he had slept under more difficult conditions and in worse cold—no, he was overstimulated by fatigue. So there he remained, squatting on his heels, wrapped in cold and night, at the top of the wide flight of stone steps—a bundle of misery, with two hours ahead of him, a mountain of agonizing eternity.

  Suddenly he realized from the sounds coming from the upper floor of the château that the festivities were not yet over. Laughter, subdued voices, reached him, partly through the corridor, partly through the thickly curtained window. And now something awoke in him, tiny at first yet strong, a raging, minute inner chill, a crystalline chill mounting inside him like a surging spring that froze instantly but continued to grow, a column of ice, rising layer upon layer, and by which he pulled himself up: HATRED. Lost in thought he straightened up, leaned against the wall, and smoked. His fatigue was still there, as well as that nauseating, sour malaise; but now hatred had reared up like a column to support him.

  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, yo
u 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.