The Forgotten Soldier

EPILOGUE Return

In the train, rolling through the sunny French countryside, my head knocked against the wooden back of the seat. Other people, who seemed to belong to a different world, were laughing. I couldn’t laugh and couldn’t forget.

I had looked everywhere for Hals, but hadn’t been able to find him. He filled my thoughts, and only my acquired ability to hide my feelings kept me from weeping. He was attached to me by all the terrible memories of the war, which still rang in my ears. He was my only friend in this hostile world, the man who had so often carried my load when my strength was failing. I would never be able to forget him, or the experiences we had shared, or our fellow soldiers, whose lives would always be linked to mine.

The train rolled on, carrying me minute by minute farther away from all that. If it had gone on like that for days, and carried me to the other side of the earth, it would still have made no difference. My memories would have remained at my side.

Then there was a station. My worn boots, which had tramped across Russia, scraped against the cement platform, and my disillusioned eyes took in the details of a place I knew well. Nothing had changed. The place seemed to be sleeping, although the unexpectedness of my arrival might very well have awakened it. Everything looked as it had; only I had changed, and I knew very well that I would not be able to fit myself in.

I stood for a while, staring at all the details, which seemed to me so small, walking slowly and hesitantly. Then I noticed that two station employees were glaring at me, clearly wishing me gone so they could go about their own business. I was the last person left on the platform. Everyone else had hurried away.

“Let’s get going,” one of them said. I went over to him with my papers.

“You’ll have to show those to the stationmaster. This way.”

The stationmaster looked rapidly through my sheaf of documents, and clearly unable to make them out, rubber-stamped the lot.

“Mannheim,” he said. “That’s in Bochie, isn’t it?”

“No sir,” I said. “It’s in Germany.”

He caught my atrocious accent, and looked at me doubtfully.

“For me, they’re the same thing.”

I was still five miles from my house and from the end of my journey, and the place where it had all begun. It was a beautiful day, and I should have been impelled by joy to run the whole way, toward the incredible fact that drew closer with each step. However, my throat was knotted with anguish, and I could scarcely breathe. I felt my reason faltering, assailed by the incomprehensible emotion of seeing, touching and tasting the reality which surrounded me: the station I had just inspected with a fresh eye and my village, about to become visible in that damp, green hollow, and the imminent prospect of meeting my parents, which was so overwhelming I couldn’t begin to think about it.

This reality suddenly seemed so huge that I felt afraid: the front of the house, edged by a vine, and cut by a door, which I had left three years earlier, and in the shadowy doorway an old man and an old woman. With my mind’s eye, I composed features on those shadowy faces, corresponding to the features of my mother and father. Then, like forbidden pleasures suddenly exposed, the furtive image grew dim. I saw that my little brother was there too, and was amazed by how much he had grown.

A cold sweat suddenly began to pour down my emaciated body. The despair which had settled over me in the East was suddenly violated by a reality I had almost forgotten, which was about to impose itself on me once more, as if nothing had happened. The transition was too great, too brutal. I needed some sort of sieve, or filter. Hals and all the others, the war, and everything for which I had been obliged to live; all the names of all the men beside whom, my eyes huge with terror, I had watched death approach; and death itself, which could have overcome us at any moment; the names and faces of all the men without whom I would never have made these observations all of these things were incompatible with what happened afterward. I could neither forget nor deny them, and my position became untenable.

My head was spinning like a boat with a broken rudder, as I walked slowly toward the encounter which I had so much longed for, and which I suddenly feared.

A plane flew over very low across the sunny countryside. Unable to stop myself, I plunged into the ditch on the other side of the road. The plane throbbed overhead for a moment, and then vanished, as suddenly as it had come. I pulled myself up by the trunk of an apple tree, without understanding what had just happened. I felt stunned. My blurred eyes watched the grass, which had been crushed by my weight, slowly straightening up again. It looked like badly combed hair. It was still yellow from the winter frosts and, like myself, was struggling to revive. This grass was not so tall, but otherwise reminded me of the grass on the steppe. It seemed familiar, and I let myself fall down again. The brilliance of the day rose over the points of the blades, forcing me to shut my eyes. The touch of the ground, silent witness of my emotion, reassured me. I managed to calm down, and fell asleep.

Only death is final. The hopes that Memel had been unable to destroy could not be destroyed by peace, either. When I woke, I set out again, to complete my journey. My sleep must have lasted for several hours; the sun was setting behind the hill, and I arrived at twilight — which was preferable to the glare of full day. I felt anxious enough about meeting my own family; I didn’t want to meet anyone I used to know, who might not have forgotten me. So I arrived at the end of the day I had longed for so much, and started down the street as if I had just left it the day before. I tried to walk slowly, but each step seemed to resound like a parade step at Chemnitz. I passed two young men, who paid no attention to me. As I turned the corner, to the left, I saw my house. My heart was pounding so hard that my chest ached.

Someone appeared at the corner: a small old woman, whose shoulders were covered by a worn cloak. Even the cloak was familiar to me. My mother was carrying a small milk can. She was walking toward a neighboring farm, which I knew well. She was also walking toward me. I thought I was going to fall. She was coming down the middle of the road, about two yards from the grassy verge along which I had been forcing my steps with the last of my strength.

Although my eyes were blurred by almost inconceivable emotion, I recognized her face.

My heart contracted so hard I thought I would faint.

My mother walked past me. I leaned against a wall to keep my balance. A bitter taste filled my mouth, as if it had filled with blood. I knew that within a few minutes she would come back the same way.

I felt like running, but at the same time, couldn’t move, and stood paralyzed, letting the minutes trickle by.

After a few moments, as I had foreseen, she reappeared, going the other way, grayer and more shadowy in the deepening darkness. She came closer and closer. I was afraid to move, afraid of frightening her. And then it was unbearable. I summoned up my courage and spoke.

“Maman.”

She stopped. I took several steps toward her, and then I saw that she was about to faint. The milk can fell to the ground, and I caught her in my trembling arms. She gave a long-drawn-out groan, and I was afraid someone would come.

Carrying my fainting mother, I hurried toward the doorway, in which a young man had just appeared. This young man was my brother. Suddenly alarmed, he called out. “Papa! Someone’s bringing Maman home! She’s sick!”

Hours went by. I remained motionless and mute, surrounded by my family, who gazed at me as if they had forgotten that the earth was round. Over the fireplace I noticed a photograph of myself as a young man. Beside it stood a small vase which held a few faded flowers.

Time passed, leaving behind it a monumental silence. The tale was drawing to an end. It would take all of us — those who had waited, and I, who had hoped — a long measure of time to accept the evidence of our senses.

I also understood that my return could create complications for everyone, and that they too had needed courage to give up the habit of hope. The neighborhood must not learn too quickly of my return, and for the time being our happiness would have to be kept secret. For the next few days, while I collapsed into an anesthetizing exhaustion, I could use the room of a sister, who had married during my absence.

In due course, I would enter the victorious French Army, which would make room in its ranks for a particle from the ranks of the vanquished. It was to prove an unexpected transfer for my unease, the filter I had been hoping for. Of course, I would be a damned Boche to whom a great kindness was being done. I would even be able to enjoy experiences which the others found tiresome. The discipline I was used to made it easy for me to be first, and I had to watch myself, so I didn’t annoy the others. I would meet people who hated me, and others with generous hearts, who accepted the totality of my experience and offered me a glass of beer to help me forget.

My parents imposed an absolute silence; I would never be able to tell them the things which would have relieved me.

I listened attentively to the tales of the heroes on the other side heroes to whose ranks I would never be admitted.

People who hated me would pursue me with vindictiveness, seeing in my past only cupidity and culpable error. Others might someday understand that men can love the same virtues on both sides of a conflict, and that pain is international.

The French Army, which I had entered for a three-year tour, finally kept me for only ten months. Despite my sense of well-being, I fell seriously ill and in the end was sent home.

However, before that, I took part in a huge parade in Paris, in ’46. There was also a long silence of remembrance for the dead, to which I added these names:

Ernst Neubach, Lensen, Wiener, Wesreidau, Prinz, Solma, Hoth, Olensheim, Sperlovski, Smellens, Dunde, Kellerman, Freivitch, Ballers, Frösch, Woortenbeck, Siemenleis…

I refuse to add Paula to that list, and I shall never forget the names of Hals, or Lindberg, or Pferham, or Wollers. Their memory lives within me.

There is another man, whom I must forget. He was called Guy Sajer.