The Train Was On Time by Heinrich Böll Page B

at the spot where her gaze, very close and tender, true and deep, rested in my soul for a quarter of a second? But these thoughts were as leaden as his legs. It felt great to stretch your legs, your legs got longer and longer, and he felt as though he could stretch them all the way to Przemysl.
    They lay there smoking, sluggish and weary as only men can be who have been sleeping and sitting in a cramped railway car.
    The sun had made a wide arc by the time Andreas awoke. The bearded soldier still was not back. The blond fellow was awake and smoking.
    The train for Germany had left, but already there was another train for Germany standing there, and from the large delousing hut on the other side emerged gray figures with their parcels and knapsacks, rifles slung around their necks, bound for Germany. One of them started running, then three ran, then ten, then they were all running, bumping into one another, knocking parcels out of hands … and the whole gray weary wretched column of men was running because one of them had begun to panic.…
    “Where did you put the map?” asked the blond fellow. These were the first words spoken by either of them in a long while.
    Andreas pulled the map out of his tunic pocket, unfolded it, and sat up, spreading it out on his knees. His eyes went to where Galicia was, but the blond fellow’s finger was lying much farther to the south and east, it was a long, shapely finger, with fine hair on it, a finger that not even the dirt had deprived of any of its good breeding.
    “There,” he said, “that’s where I’m heading. With any luck it’ll take me another ten days.” His finger with its flat, still glossy, blue-sheened nail filled the whole bay between Odessa and the Crimea. The edge of the nail lay beside Nikolayev.
    “Nikolayev?” Andreas asked.
    “No,” the blond fellow winced, and his nail slid lower down, and Andreas noticed that he was staring at the map but seeing nothing and thinking of something else. “No,” said the blond fellow. “Ochakov. I’m with the antiaircraft; before that we were in Anapa, in the Kuban, you know, but we got out of there. And now it’s Ochakov.
    Suddenly the two men looked at one another. For the first time in the forty-eight hours they had been cooped up together, they looked at one another. They had played cards together by the hour, drunk and eaten and slept leaning against each other, but now for the first time they looked at one another. A strangely repellent, whitish-gray, slimy film coated the blond fellow’s eyes. To Andreas it looked as though the man’s gaze were piercing the faint first scab that closes over a festering wound. Now all at once he realized what that repulsive aura was which emanated from this man who at one time, when his eyes were still clear, must have been handsome, fair and slender with well-bred hands. So that’s it, thought Andreas.
    “Yes,” said the blond fellow very quietly, “that’s it,” as if he realized what Andreas was thinking. He went on speaking, his voice quiet, uncannily quiet. “That’s it. He seduced me, that sergeant major. I’m totally corrupted now, rotten to the core, life holds no more pleasure for me, not even eating,it just looked as if I enjoyed that, I eat automatically, I drink automatically, I sleep automatically. It’s not my fault, they corrupted me!” he cried, then his voice subsided again.
    “For six weeks we lay in a gun emplacement, way up along the Sivash River … not a house in sight … not even a broken wall. Marshes, water … willow shrubs … and the Russians flew over it when they wanted to attack our planes flying from Odessa to the Crimea. For six weeks we lay there. Words can’t describe it. We were just one cannon with six men and the sergeant major. Not a living soul for miles. Our food supplies were trucked in as far as the edge of the marsh, and we had to pick them up from there and carry them across log-walks to our emplacement; the