The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (6 page)

I could feel one of them fumbling in my pocket, a match hissed, and the lighted cigarette was stuck between my lips. I took a long pull. “Thanks,” I said.

All this, I thought, doesn’t prove a thing. Logically speaking, every high school has an art room, corridors with bent old clotheshooks let into green- and yellow-painted walls; logically speaking, the fact that
Medea
hangs between VI
A
and VI
B
and Nietzsche’s mustache between Ia and Ib is no proof that I’m in my old school. No doubt there’s some regulation requiring it to hang there. Rule for Prussian High Schools:
Medea
between VI
A
and VI
B
,
Boy with a Thorn
on that wall, Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, and Cicero in the corridor, and Nietzsche upstairs where they’re already taking philosophy. Parthenon frieze, colored print of Togoland.
Boy with a Thorn
and Parthenon frieze are, after all, good old stand-bys, traditional school props, and no doubt I wasn’t the only boy who had been moved to write on a banana “Long live Togoland.” And the jokes, too, that boys tell each other in school are always the same. Besides, maybe I’m feverish, maybe I’m dreaming.

The pain had gone now. In the truck it had still been pretty bad; I had yelled every time they drove through the small potholes, the shell craters had been better: the truck rose and sank like a ship in a wave trough. But now the injection they had stuck in my arm somewhere in the dark seemed to be working: I had felt the needle boring through the skin and my leg lower down getting all hot.

It can’t be true, I thought, the truck couldn’t have driven that far: nearly twenty miles. Besides, I feel nothing. Apart from my eyes, nothing tells me I’m in my school, in my old school that I left only three months ago. Eight years in the same school is a pretty long time—is it possible that after eight years only your eyes recognize the place?

Behind my closed lids I saw it all again, reeling off like a film: downstairs corridor, painted green, up the stairs, painted yellow, war
memorial, corridor, up more stairs, Caesar, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius … Hermes, Nietzsche’s mustache, Togoland, Zeus’ ugly mug …

I spat out my cigarette and yelled. It always felt good to yell; but you had to yell loud, it was a glorious feeling, I yelled like mad. When someone bent over me, I still didn’t open my eyes; I smelled someone’s breath, hot and fetid with tobacco and onions, and a quiet voice asked, “What’s the matter?”

“I want a drink,” I said, “and another cigarette, top pocket.”

Once more someone fumbled in my pocket, once more a match hissed, and someone stuck a burning cigarette between my lips.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“In Bendorf.”

“Thanks,” I said, and drew on my cigarette.

So at least I really was in Bendorf, in my hometown, that is, and unless I had an exceptionally high fever there seemed to be no doubt that I was in a high school with a classics department; it was certainly a school. Hadn’t that voice downstairs shouted, “The others into the art room”? I was one of the others, I was alive; the living were evidently the others. The art room was there, then, and if I could hear properly why shouldn’t I be able to see properly, so that it was probably true that I had recognized Caesar, Cicero, and Marcus Aurelius, and that could only happen in a classics high school. I didn’t think they stood those fellows up against the wall in any other kind of school.

At last he brought me some water: again I smelled the tobacco-and-onion breath and, without wanting to, I opened my eyes. They saw a weary, elderly, unshaven face above a fireman’s uniform, and an old man’s voice whispered, “Drink, lad!”

I drank; it was water, but water is glorious. I could taste the tin mug against my lips, and it was wonderful to feel how much water was still waiting to be drunk, but the fireman whisked the mug from my lips and took off. I yelled, but he didn’t turn round, just gave a weary shrug of the shoulders and walked on. A man lying next to me said quietly, “No use yelling, they haven’t any more water. The town’s burning, you can see for yourself.”

I could see it through the blackout curtains: there were flares and booms behind the black material, red behind black like in a stove when you throw on fresh coal. I could see it all right: the town was burning.

“What town is it?” I asked the man lying next to me.

“Bendorf,” he said.

“Thanks.”

I looked straight ahead at the row of windows, and sometimes at the ceiling. The ceiling was still in perfect condition, white and smooth, with a narrow antique stucco border; but all schools have antique stucco borders on their art-room ceilings, at least the good old traditional classics high schools. No doubt about that.

I had to accept the fact that I was in the art room of a classics high school in Bendorf. Bendorf has three of these schools: the Frederick the Great School, the Albertus School, and—perhaps I need hardly add—the last, the third, was the Adolf Hitler School. Hadn’t old Frederick’s picture on the staircase wall at the Frederick the Great School been the biggest, the most colorful and resplendent of all? I had gone to that school for eight years, but why couldn’t the same picture hang in exactly the same place in other schools, so clear and noticeable that it couldn’t fail to catch your eye whenever you went up the first flight of stairs?

Outside, I could hear the heavy artillery firing now. There was hardly any other sound; just occasionally you could hear flames consuming a house and somewhere in the dark a roof would cave in. The artillery was firing quietly and regularly, and I thought: Good old artillery! I know that’s a terrible thing to think, but I thought it. God, how reassuring the artillery was, how soothing: dark and rugged, a gentle, almost refined organ sound, aristocratic somehow. To me there is something aristocratic about artillery, even when it’s firing. It sounds so dignified, just like war in picture books … Then I thought of how many names there would be on the war memorial when they reconsecrated it and put an even bigger gilded Iron Cross on the top and an even bigger stone laurel wreath, and suddenly I realized that if I really was in my old school, my name would be on it too, engraved in stone, and in the school yearbook my name would be followed by “Went to the front straight from school and fell for …”

But I didn’t know what for, and I didn’t know yet whether I was in my old school. I felt I absolutely had to make sure. There had been nothing special about the war memorial, nothing unusual, it was like all the rest, a ready-made war memorial—in fact they got them from some central supply house …

I looked round the art room, but they had removed the pictures, and what can you tell from a few benches stacked up in a corner, and from the high, narrow windows, all close together to let in a lot of light because it was a studio? My heart told me nothing. Wouldn’t it have told me something if I had been in this place before, where for eight solid years I had drawn vases and practiced lettering, slender, delicate, beautiful reproductions of Roman vases that the art teacher set on a pedestal up front, and all kinds of lettering, Round, Antique, Roman, Italic? I had loathed these lessons more than anything else in school; for hours on end I had suffered unutterable boredom, and I had never been any good at drawing vases or lettering. But where were my curses, where was my loathing, in the face of these dun-colored, monotonous walls? No voice spoke within me, and I mutely shook my head.

Over and over again I had erased, sharpened my pencil, erased … nothing …

I didn’t know exactly how I had been wounded. I only knew I couldn’t move my arms or my right leg, just the left one a little; I figured they had bandaged my arms so tightly to my body that I couldn’t move them.

I spat the second cigarette into the aisle between the straw pallets and tried to move my arms, but it was so painful I had to yell; I kept on yelling; each time I tried it, it felt wonderful to yell. Besides, I was mad at not being able to move my arms.

Suddenly the doctor was standing in front of me. He had taken off his glasses and was peering at me. He said nothing; behind him stood the fireman who had brought me the water. He whispered something into the doctor’s ear, and the doctor put on his glasses: I could distinctly see his large gray eyes with the faintly quivering pupils behind the thick lenses. He looked at me for a long time, so long that I had to look away, and he said softly, “Hold on, it’ll be your turn in a minute …”

Then they picked up the man lying next to me and carried him behind the blackboard. My eyes followed them: they had taken the blackboard apart and set it up crossways and hung a sheet over the gap between wall and blackboard; a lamp was glaring behind it …

There was not a sound until the sheet was pushed aside and the man who had lain next to me was carried out; with tired, impassive faces the stretcher bearers carted him to the door.

I closed my eyes again and thought, I must find out how I’ve been wounded and whether I’m in my old school.

It all seemed so cold and remote, as if they had carried me through the museum of a city of the dead, through a world as irrelevant as it was unfamiliar, although my eyes, but only my eyes, recognized it; surely it couldn’t be true that only three months ago I had sat in this room, drawn vases and practiced lettering, gone downstairs during breaks with my jam sandwich, past Nietzsche, Hermes, Togoland, Caesar, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, taking my time as I walked to the lower corridor where
Medea
hung, then to the janitor, to Birgeler, for a glass of milk, milk in that dingy little room where you could risk a smoke although it was against the rules. They must be carrying the man who had lain next to me downstairs now, to where the dead were lying, maybe the dead were lying in Birgeler’s gray little room that smelled of warm milk, dust, and Birgeler’s cheap tobacco …

At last the stretcher bearers came back, and now they lifted me and carried me behind the blackboard. I was floating again, passing the door now, and as I floated past I could see that was right too: in the old days, when the school had been called St. Thomas’s, a cross had hung over the door, and then they had removed the cross, but a fresh deep-yellow spot in the shape of a cross had stayed behind on the wall, hard and clear, more noticeable in a way than the fragile little old cross itself, the one they had removed; the outline of the cross remained distinct and beautiful on the faded wall. At the time they were so mad they repainted the whole wall, but it hadn’t made any difference. The painter hadn’t got quite the right color: the cross stayed, deep yellow and clear, although the whole wall was pink. They had been furious, but it was no good: the cross stayed, deep yellow and clear on the pink wall; they must have used up their budget for paint so there wasn’t a thing they could do about it. The cross was still there, and if you looked closely you could even make out a slanting line over the right arm of the cross where for years the boxwood sprig had been, the one Birgeler the janitor had stuck behind it, in the days when it was still permitted to hang crosses in schools …

All this flashed through my mind during the brief second it took for me to be carried past the door to the place behind the blackboard where the glaring lamp shone.

I lay on the operating table and saw myself quite distinctly, but very small, dwarfed, up there in the clear glass of the lightbulb, tiny and white, a narrow, gauze-colored little bundle looking like an unusually diminutive embryo: so that was me up there.

The doctor turned away and stood beside a table sorting his instruments; the fireman, stocky and elderly, stood in front of the blackboard and smiled at me. His smile was tired and sad, and his unshaven, dirty face was the face of someone asleep. Beyond his shoulder, on the smudged reverse side of the blackboard, I saw something that, for the first time since being in this house of the dead, made me aware of my heart—somewhere in a secret chamber of my heart I experienced a profound and terrible shock, and my heart began to pound: the handwriting on the blackboard was mine. Up at the top, on the very top line. I know my handwriting: it is worse than catching sight of oneself in a mirror, much clearer, and there was not the slightest possibility of doubting the identity of my handwriting. All the rest hadn’t proved a thing, neither
Medea
nor Nietzsche, neither the Alpine profile nor the banana from Togoland, not even the outline of the cross over the door: all that was the same in every school, but I don’t believe they write on blackboards in other schools in my handwriting. It was still there, the Thermopylae inscription we had had to write, in that life of despair I had known only three months ago: “Stranger, bear word to the Spartans we …”

Oh, I know, the board had been too short, and the art teacher had bawled me out for not spacing properly, for starting off with letters that were too big, and shaking his head he had written underneath, in letters the same size, “Stranger, bear word to the Spartans we …”

Seven times I had had to write it: in Antique, Gothic, Cursive, Roman, Italic, Script, and Round. Seven times, plain for all to see: “Stranger, bear word to the Spartans we …”

The fireman, responding to a whispered summons from the doctor, had stepped aside, so now I saw the whole quotation, only slightly truncated because I had started off too big, had used up too many dots.

A prick in my left thigh made me jerk up, I tried to prop myself on my elbows, but couldn’t. I looked down at my body, and then I saw: they had undone my bandages and I had no arms, no right leg, and I fell back instantly because I had no elbows to lean on. I screamed; the doctor and fireman looked at me in alarm, but the doctor merely shrugged his shoulders, keeping his thumb on the plunger of his hypo as he pressed it slowly and gently down. I tried to look at the blackboard again, but the fireman was standing right beside me now, obscuring it. He was holding down my shoulders, and I was conscious only of the scorched, grimy smell of his stained uniform, saw only his tired, sad face, and then I recognized him: it was Birgeler.