Heinrich Böll - The Train Was On Time (The Essential Heinrich Böll)

The Clown

The Safety Net

Billiards at Half-Past Nine

The Train Was on Time

Irish Journal

Group Portrait with Lady

Whats to Become of the Boy? Or:
Something to Do with BooksA Memoir

The Collected Stories of Heinrich Bll

Translators Acknowledgment

I am deeply indebted to my husband, William Vennewitz, for his never-failing advice and assistance in this translation.
Leila Vennewitz

The Train Was On Time
Originally published in German in 1949 as Der Zug war pnklich by Heinrich Bll
1977, 1996, 2003 by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG, Cologne, Germany
Translated by Leila Vennewitz.
Afterword William T. Vollmann, 2010

Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.mhpbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bll, Heinrich, 1917-1985.
[Zug war pnktlich. English]
The train was on time / Heinrich Bll; translated from the German by Leila Vennewitz.
p. cm.
Previously published: London : Secker and Warburg, 1970. With new afterword by William T. Vollmann.
eISBN: 978-1-935554-95-0
1. World War, 1939-1945Fiction. 2. GermanyFiction. I. Vennewitz, Leila. II. Title.
PT2603.O394Z4513 2011
833.914dc22

2011000503

v3.1

I have known many adventures in my time: the creation of postal routes, Sahara rebellions, South America but war is not really an adventure at all, it is only a substitute for adventure. War is a disease. Like typhus.

Antoine de Saint-Exupry,
Pilote de Guerre

As they walked through the dark underpass they could hear the train rumbling up to the platform overhead, and the resounding voice came smoothly over the loudspeaker: The troop-train now arriving from Paris will depart for Przemysl via.

Then they had climbed the steps to the platform and were standing by the leave-train from which beaming soldiers were emerging, weighed down with huge packages. The platform quickly emptied, it was the usual scene. At some of the windows stood girls or women or a very silent, grim-faced father and the resounding voice was telling people to hurry. The train was on time.

Why dont you get on? the chaplain asked the soldier anxiously.

Get on? asked the soldier, amazed. Why, I might want to hurl myself under the wheels, I might want to desert eh? Whats the hurry? I might go crazy, Ive a perfect right to, Ive a perfect right to go crazy. I dont want to die, thats whats so horriblethat I dont want to die. His voice was cold and hard, as if the words were pouring from his lips like ice. Dont say any more! Ill get on all right, theres always a spot somewhere yes yes, dont mind me, pray for me! He grasped his pack, boarded the train through the nearest door, let down the window from inside, and leaned out, while overhead the resounding voice hung like a cloud of mucus: The train is now leaving.

I dont want to die! he shouted. I dont want to die, but the terrible thing is that Im going to die soon! The black figure on that cold gray platform retreated farther and farther into the distance farther and farther, until the station was swallowed up by night.

Now and again what appears to be a casually spoken word will suddenly acquire a cabalistic significance. It becomes charged and strangely swift, races ahead of the speaker, is destined to throw open a chamber in the uncertain confines of the future and to return to him with the deadly accuracy of a boomerang. Out of the smalltalk of unreflecting speech, usually from among those halting, colorless goodbyes exchanged beside trains on their way to death, it falls back on the speaker like a leaden wave, and he becomes aware of the force, both frightening and intoxicating, of the workings of fate. To lovers and soldiers, to men marked for death and to those filled with the cosmic force of life, this power is sometimes given, without warning; a sudden revelation is conferred on them, a bounty and a burden and the word sinks, sinks down inside them.

As Andreas was slowly groping his way back into the center of the car, the word soon entered him like a bullet, painlessly and almost imperceptibly penetrating flesh, tissue, cells, nerves, until at some point it caught, like a barbed hook, exploded, and ripped open a savage wound, making blood pour out life, pain.

Soon, he thought, and felt himself turning pale. At the same time he did all the usual things, almost unconsciously. He struck a match, lighting up the heaps of sitting, stretched out, sleeping soldiers who lay around, across, under, and on top of their luggage. The smell of stale tobacco smoke was mixed with the smell of stale sweat and that strangely gritty dirt which clings to all soldiers in the mass. The flame of the dying matchstick flared up with a final hiss, and in that last glow he saw, over by the narrowing corridor, a small empty space. He carefully picked his way toward it, his bundle tucked under one arm, his cap in his hand.

Soon, he thought, and the shock of fear lay deep, deep. Fear and absolute certainty. Never again, he thought, never again will I see this station, never again the face of my friend, the man I abused right up to the last moment never again. Soon! He reached the empty space, set his pack carefully on the floor in order not to wake the sleeping men around him, and sat down on it so he could lean back against a compartment door. Then he tried to arrange his legs as comfortably as possible; he stretched the left one carefully past the face of one sleeping soldier, and placed the right one across a piece of luggage that was shielding the back of another. In the compartment behind him a match flared up, and someone began to smoke silently in the dark. By turning slightly to one side he could see the glowing tip of the cigarette, and sometimes, when the unknown man drew on it, the reflection spread over an unfamiliar soldiers face, gray and tired, with bitter creases in it, starkly and terribly sober.