The Train Was On Time Read Online Free PDF Page B

Just for her. What I need now is a drink … where can a fellow get some booze now, I’ve been racking my brains; these people are daft here, they don’t have any black market here.…”
    “I’ve got some schnapps,” said Andreas, “d’you want some?”
    “Schnapps … God, man, schnapps!”
    Andreas smiled. “I’ll let you have the schnapps in exchange for the map, okay?” His companion hugged him. His face was almost happy. Andreas bent over his pack and dug out a bottle of schnapps. For a moment he thought: I’ll ration him, I won’t give him the second bottle till he needs it or till he wakes up from the stupor he’s going to drink himself into. But then he rummaged in the pack again and brought out the second bottle.
    “There you are,” he said, “you drink it, I don’t want any!”
    Soon I’m going to die, he was thinking … soon, soon, and this Soon was no longer quite so blurred, he had already groped his way up to this Soon, circled it and sniffed it, and already he knew that he was going to die during the night of Saturday to Sunday, between Lvov and Cernauti … in Galicia.Down there was Eastern Galicia, where he would be quite close to Bucovina and Volhynia. Those names were like unfamiliar drinks. Bucovina—that sounded like a sturdy plum schnapps, and Volhynia—that sounded like a very thick, swampy beer, like the beer he had once drunk in Budapest, a real soupy beer.
    He glanced back once more through the glass pane and saw the unshaven soldier lifting the bottle to his mouth, and the blond fellow shake his head when the other man offered it to him. Then he looked out again but saw nothing … only that Polish horizon, away in the distance beyond an endless plain, that intoxicating, wide horizon that he would see when the hour came.…
    It’s a good thing I’m not alone, he thought. Nobody could go through this alone, and he was glad he had agreed to join in the game and had met these two fellows. That one who needed a shave—he had liked him from the start, and the blond fellow, well, he didn’t seem as effete as he looked. Or maybe he really was effete, but he was a human being. It is not good for man to be alone. It would be terribly difficult to be alone with the others now filling up the corridor again, those fellows nattering about nothing but leave and heroism, promotions and decorations, food and tobacco and women, women, all those women who had been madly in love with every man jack of them.… No girl will cry over me, he thought, how strange. How sad. If only somewhere a girl would think of me! Even if she were unhappy. God is with those who are unhappy. Unhappiness is life, pain is life. It would be nice if somewhere a girl were thinking of me and crying over me … I would pull her after me … I would drag her along behind me by her tears, she shouldn’t wait for me for ever and ever. There’s no such girl. A strange thought. No girl I’ve kissed. It’s just possible, though not probable, that there is one girl who still thinks of me; but she can’t be thinking of me. For a tenth of a second our eyes held each other’s, maybe even less than a tenth of asecond, and I can’t forget her eyes. For three and a half years I’ve had to think about them and haven’t been able to forget them. Only a tenth of a second or less, and I don’t know her name, I don’t know a thing about her, her eyes are all I know, very gentle, almost pale, sad eyes the color of sand dark with rain; unhappy eyes, much that was animal in them and all that was human, and never, never forgotten, not for a single day in three and a half years, and I don’t know her name, I don’t know where she lives. Three and a half years! I don’t know whether she was tall or short, I didn’t even see her hands. If I had at least seen her hands! Only her face, and not even that clearly; dark hair, maybe black, maybe brown, a slender, long face, not pretty, not smooth, but the eyes, almost