He turned red with humiliation, red with fear, red with remorse. I really did deny the existence of human happiness, and life was beautiful. I’ve had an unhappy life … a wasted life as they say, I’ve suffered every instant from this ghastly uniform, and they’ve nattered my ears off, and they made me shed blood on their battlefields, real blood it was, three times I was wounded on the field of so-called honor, outside Amiens, and down at Tiraspol, and then in Nikopol, and I’ve seen nothing but dirt and blood and shit and smelled nothing but filth … and misery … heard nothing but obscenities, and for a mere tenth of a second I was allowed to know true human love, the love of man and woman, which surely must be beautiful, for a mere tenth of a second, and twelve hours or eleven hours before my death I have to find out that life was beautiful. I drank Sauternes … on a terrace above Le Treport by the sea, and in Cayeux, in Cayeux I also drank Sauternes, also on a summer evening, and my beloved waswith me … and in Paris I used to spend hours at those sidewalk cafes soaking up some other glorious golden wine. I know for sure my beloved was with me, and I didn’t need to comb through forty million people to find happiness. I thought I had forgotten nothing, I had forgotten everything … everything … and this meal was wonderful.… And the pork heart and the cheese, and the wine that gave me the power to remember that life is beautiful … twelve hours, or eleven hours, to go.…
Last of all he thought once more about the Jews of Cernauti, then he remembered the Jews of Lvov, and the Jews of Stanislav and Kolomyya, the cannon down there in the Sivash marshes. And the man who had said: Those are precisely the advantages of the 37 antitank weapon.… And that poor ugly shivering whore in Paris whom he had pushed away in the night.…
“Come on, mate, have another drink!” said Willi roughly, and Andreas raised his head and drank. There was still some wine left, the bottle was standing in the ice bucket; he emptied his glass and Willi refilled it.
All this is happening in Lvov, everything I’m doing here, he thought, in a mansion of the old Hapsburg Empire, in an old dilapidated Imperial mansion, in one of the great rooms of this house where they used to entertain on a grand scale, give glamorous balls where they danced the waltz, at least—he counted under his breath—at least twenty-eight years ago, no, twenty-nine, twenty-nine years ago there was no war yet. Twenty-nine years ago all this was still Austria … then it was Poland … then it was Russia … and now, now it’s all Greater Germany. They used to have balls … they danced the waltz, wonderful waltzes, and they would smile at one another and dance … and outdoors, in the big garden that must be behind the house, in that big garden they would kiss, the lieutenants and the girls … and maybe the majors and the wives, and the host, he must have been a colonel or a general and he pretended not to see whatwas going on … or maybe he was a very senior civil servant or some such thing … maybe.…
“Come on, mate, have another drink!” Yes, he’d like some more wine … time is running out, he thought, I wonder what time it is. It was eleven, or eleven-fifteen, when we left the station, by now it must be two or three o’clock … twelve more hours, no, more than that. The train doesn’t leave till five, and then I’ve got till … soon. That Soon was all blurred again now. Forty miles beyond Lvov, it won’t be more than that. Forty miles, that’ll be an hour and a half by train, that would make it six-thirty, it’ll be light by then. All of a sudden, just as he was raising his glass to his lips, he knew it would never be light again. Thirty miles … an hour or three quarters of an hour before the first hint of dawn. No, it’ll still be dark, there’ll be no dawn! That’s it! That’s it
Last of all he thought once more about the Jews of Cernauti, then he remembered the Jews of Lvov, and the Jews of Stanislav and Kolomyya, the cannon down there in the Sivash marshes. And the man who had said: Those are precisely the advantages of the 37 antitank weapon.… And that poor ugly shivering whore in Paris whom he had pushed away in the night.…
“Come on, mate, have another drink!” said Willi roughly, and Andreas raised his head and drank. There was still some wine left, the bottle was standing in the ice bucket; he emptied his glass and Willi refilled it.
All this is happening in Lvov, everything I’m doing here, he thought, in a mansion of the old Hapsburg Empire, in an old dilapidated Imperial mansion, in one of the great rooms of this house where they used to entertain on a grand scale, give glamorous balls where they danced the waltz, at least—he counted under his breath—at least twenty-eight years ago, no, twenty-nine, twenty-nine years ago there was no war yet. Twenty-nine years ago all this was still Austria … then it was Poland … then it was Russia … and now, now it’s all Greater Germany. They used to have balls … they danced the waltz, wonderful waltzes, and they would smile at one another and dance … and outdoors, in the big garden that must be behind the house, in that big garden they would kiss, the lieutenants and the girls … and maybe the majors and the wives, and the host, he must have been a colonel or a general and he pretended not to see whatwas going on … or maybe he was a very senior civil servant or some such thing … maybe.…
“Come on, mate, have another drink!” Yes, he’d like some more wine … time is running out, he thought, I wonder what time it is. It was eleven, or eleven-fifteen, when we left the station, by now it must be two or three o’clock … twelve more hours, no, more than that. The train doesn’t leave till five, and then I’ve got till … soon. That Soon was all blurred again now. Forty miles beyond Lvov, it won’t be more than that. Forty miles, that’ll be an hour and a half by train, that would make it six-thirty, it’ll be light by then. All of a sudden, just as he was raising his glass to his lips, he knew it would never be light again. Thirty miles … an hour or three quarters of an hour before the first hint of dawn. No, it’ll still be dark, there’ll be no dawn! That’s it! That’s it
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