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

was groping for the right word—“all I can say is, you feel like a new man. You’ve still got time, our train doesn’t leave for two hours. We’ll be in Lvov this evening. From Lvov we take the civilian express, the courier train, the one that goes direct from Warsaw to Bucharest. It’s a terrific train, I always take it, all you need is to get your pass stamped, and we’ll see to that,” he guffawed, “we’ll see to that, but I’m not letting on how!”
    But surely we won’t need twenty-four hours to get from Lvov to that place where it’s going to happen, thought Andreas. Something’s wrong there. We won’t be leaving Lvov as early as five tomorrow morning. The sandwiches tasted marvelous. He spread the butter thickly on the bread and ate it with chunks of the juicy sausage. That’s really strange, he thought, this is Sunday’s butter and maybe even part of Monday’s, I’m eating butter I’m no longer entitled to. I’m not even entitled to Sunday’s butter. Rations are calculated from noon to noon, and starting Sunday noon I’m not entitled to any more butter. Perhaps they’ll court-martial me … they’ll lay my body on a desk before a tribunal and say: He ate Sunday’s butter and even part of Monday’s, he robbed the great-and-glorious German Wehrmacht. He knew he was going to die, but thatdidn’t stop him from eating the butter and bread and sausage and candy and from smoking the cigarettes. We can’t enter that anywhere, there’s no place to enter rations for the dead. We’re not heathens, after all, who place food in graves for their dead. We are positive Christians, and he has robbed the positive-Christian, glorious Greater German Wehrmacht. We must find him guilty.…
    “In Lvov,” Willi laughed, “that’s where I’ll get that rubber stamp, in Lvov. You can get anything in Lvov, I know my way around there.”
    Andreas had only to say one word, only to ask, and he would have found out how and where one obtained the rubber stamp in Lvov. Willi was just itching to tell him. But Andreas didn’t care about finding out. It was fine with him if they got the stamp. The civilian express was fine with him. It was wonderful to travel by civilian train. They weren’t for soldiers only, for men only. It was terrible to be always among men, men were so womanish. But in that train there would be women … Polish women … Rumanian women … German women … women spies … diplomats’ wives. It was nice to ride on a train with women … as far as … as … where he was going to die. What would happen? Partisans? There were partisans all over the place, but why would partisans attack a train carrying civilians? There were plenty of leave-trains carrying whole regiments of soldiers with weapons, luggage, food, clothing, money, and ammunition.
    Willi was disappointed that Andreas did not ask where he could get hold of the stamp in Lvov. He wanted so badly to talk about Lvov. “Lvov,” he cried with a laugh. And since Andreas still did not ask, he launched out anyway: “In Lvov, you know, we always flogged the cars.”
    “Always?” Andreas was listening now. “You always flogged them?”
    “I mean, when we had one to flog. We’re a repair depot, see, and often there’s a wreck left over, often it’s a wreck that’s not really a wreck at all. You just have to say it’s scrap, that’s all. And the superintendent has to close both eyes because he’s been going to bed all the time with that Jewish girl from Cernauti. But it isn’t scrap at all, that car, see? You can take two or three and make a terrific car out of them, the Russians are terrific at that. And in Lvov they’ll give you forty thousand marks for it. Divided by four. Me and three men from my column. It’s damn dangerous, of course, you’re taking a hell of a risk.” He sighed heavily. “You sweat blood, I can tell you. You never know whether the fellow you’re dealing with mightn’t be from the