The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll Read Online Free PDF Page B

flowers, and this time it was she who said to me, with a smile on her face: “Rise, my love, rise …” but I had already risen and was walking toward her.…

THAT TIME WE WERE IN ODESSA
    That time we were in Odessa it was very cold. Every morning we drove in great rattling trucks along cobbled streets to the airfield, where we waited, shivering, for the great gray birds that came lumbering across the tarmac; but the first two days, just as we were boarding, an order came through canceling the flight due to bad weather—the fog over the Black Sea was too thick or the clouds were too low—and we climbed onto the great rattling trucks again and drove along cobbled streets back to barracks.
    The barracks were huge, dirty, and louse-ridden; we sat about on the floor or sprawled over the stained tables playing cards, or sang and waited for a chance to sneak into town. There were a lot of soldiers waiting there, and the city was off limits. The first two days we tried to slip out, but they caught us, and we were given KP duty and had to carry the heavy scalding coffee urns and unload the bread, while a paymaster, wearing a magnificent fur coat intended for the front lines, stood by counting to see that no one pinched a loaf, and to us it looked as though the paymaster was concerned less with paying than with counting. The sky was still cloudy and dark over Odessa, and the sentries sauntered up and down in front of the black, grimy barrack walls.
    The third day we waited till it was quite dark and then simply walked to the gates; when the sentry stopped us we said “Seltchini Commando,” and he let us through. There were three of us, Kurt, Erich, and myself, and we walked along very slowly. It was only four o’clock and already quite dark. All we had really wanted was to get outside those great, black, grimy walls, and now that we were outside we would almost rather have been inside again. We hadn’t been in the army more than eight weeks and were very scared, but we also knew that if we had been inside again we would most certainly have wanted to get out, and then it would have been impossible, and it was only four o’clock, and we couldn’t sleep because of the lice and the singing,and also because we dreaded and at the same time hoped that the next morning might bring good flying weather, and they would fly us out to the Crimea, where we were supposed to die. We didn’t want to die, and we didn’t want to go to the Crimea, but neither did we want to spend the whole day cooped up in those grimy, black barracks that smelled of ersatz coffee and where they were forever unloading bread for the front and where paymasters in coats intended for the front lines stood around and counted to see that no one pinched a loaf.
    I don’t know what we wanted. We walked very slowly along that dark, uneven road on the outskirts of the city. Between unlighted, low houses, the night was contained by a few rotting fence posts, and somewhere beyond lay what seemed to be a wasteland, wasteland just like at home, where people believe a road is going to be built, where they dig sewers and fiddle around with surveying instruments, and nothing ever comes of it, and they toss out rubbish, cinders, and garbage, and grass grows again, coarse, wild grass, and rank weeds, and the sign saying “No Dumping” is hidden by all the rubbish they have dumped around it.…
    We walked along very slowly because it was still so early. In the darkness we met soldiers heading for the barracks, and there were others coming from the barracks who overtook us. We were scared of the patrols and would have liked to turn back, but we knew that once we were back in barracks we would really be desperate, and it was better to be scared than merely desperate inside those black, grimy barrack walls, where they were forever carrying coffee around and unloading bread for the front, forever unloading bread for the front, and where the paymasters got themselves up in fur