Эрих Ремарк - All Quiet on the Western Front / На Западном фронте без перемен. Книга для чтения на английском языке

I cross the bridge, and look to the left and to the right; the water is still full of algae, and it still arches over the weir in bright spurts. In the tower itself, the laundry-women are still standing as they always did, with bare arms over the white washing, and the heat from their irons streams out through the open windows. Dogs trot along the narrow street, people are standing by their front doors, and they look at me as I go past, dirty and weighed down with my pack.

In that cafe we ate ice-creams and smoked our first cigarettes. I recognize every building in this street as I put them behind me – the grocer’s, the chemist’s, the baker’s. And then I am standing in front of the brown door with the worn-down handle, and my hand feels heavy. I open the door; the amazing coolness greets me, and my eyes can’t see clearly any more.

The stairs creak under my boots. Above me a door clicks open, someone looks over the banisters. It was the kitchen door that opened, they are in the middle of cooking potato pancakes, and you can smell them all through the house – of course, it’s Saturday evening, and that must be my sister bending over the stair-well. For a moment I feel ashamed and hang my head; then I take off my helmet and look up. Yes, it is my eldest sister.

‘Paul —’ she shouts, ‘Paul —’

I nod, my pack bangs against the banisters, my rifle is so heavy.

She throws the door open and shouts, ‘Mother, Mother, it’s Paul —’

I can’t go on. Mother, Mother, it’s Paul.

I lean against the wall and grip my helmet and my rifle. I grip them as hard as I can, but I can’t move another step, the staircase blurs before my eyes, I thump my rifle-butt against my foot and grit my teeth in anger, but I am powerless against that one word that my sister has just spoken, nothing has any power against it. I try with all my might to force myself to laugh and to speak, but I can’t manage a single word, and so I stand there on the stairs, wretched and helpless, horribly paralysed and I can’t help it, and tears and more tears are running down my face.

My sister comes back and asks, ‘What’s the matter?’

This makes me pull myself together, and I stumble up to our landing. I lean my rifle in a corner, put my pack down against the wall and prop my steel helmet on top of it. The webbing and the bits and pieces [189] bits and pieces – всякие причиндалы have to go, too. Then I say furiously, ‘Well give me a handkerchief then, can’t you?’

She gets one from the cupboard for me and I wipe my face. On the wall above me hangs the glass case with the butterflies I used to collect.

Now I hear my mother’s voice coming from the bedroom.

‘Isn’t she up?’ I ask my sister.

‘She’s ill —’ she answers.

I go in to see her, give her my hand and say as calmly as I can, ‘Here I am, Mother.’

She is lying still in the semi-darkness. Then she asks me anxiously – and I can feel how her eyes are searching over me – ‘Have you been wounded?’

‘No, I’m on leave.’

My mother is very pale. I don’t dare put on the light. ‘And there I am lying here crying,’ she says, ‘instead of being pleased.’

‘Are you ill, Mother?’ I ask.

‘I shall get up for a little while today,’ she says, and turns to my sister, who is constantly ready to pop into the kitchen so that the food doesn’t burn. ‘Open the jar of cranberry sauce – you like that, don’t you?’ she asks me.

‘Yes, Mother. I haven’t had that for a long time.’

‘It’s as if we guessed you would be coming,’ laughs my sister, ‘just when it’s your favourite food, potato pancakes, and now we’ll even have cranberries with them.’

‘Well, it is Saturday,’ I answer.

‘Sit down by me,’ says my mother.

She looks at me. Her hands are white and sickly looking, and thin, compared to mine. We speak little, and I am grateful that she doesn’t enquire about anything. What would I be able to say, anyway? That everything that could happen has happened? I am out of it [190] out of it – сам не свой , I’m in one piece [191] in one piece – цел и невредим and I’m sitting beside her. And in the kitchen my sister is getting supper ready and singing while she does so.

‘My dear son,’ says my mother softly.

We have never been a very demonstrative family – poor people who have to work hard and cope with problems very rarely are. They can’t really understand that sort of thing either, and they don’t like constantly going on about things that are perfectly obvious. If my mother says ‘my dear son’ to me, that is just as valid as somebody else making heaven knows what kind of flowery speech. I know for sure that the jar of cranberries is the only one they have been able to find for months, and that they have kept it specially for me, just like the slightly stale biscuits that she gives me now. I’m sure that she will have got hold of them by chance at some time, and put them aside for me straightaway.

I sit beside her bed and through the window the chestnut trees in the garden of the inn opposite flash gold and brown. I breathe slowly in and out and say to myself, ‘You are home, you are home.’ But there is an awkwardness that will not leave me, I can’t get used to everything yet. There is my mother, there is my sister, there is the glass case with my butterflies, there is the mahogany piano – but I am not quite there myself yet. There is a veil and a few steps between me and them.

And so I go out and fetch my pack, bring it to the bed and get out the things I have brought back for them: a whole Edam cheese that Kat conjured up for me, two army-issue loaves, three-quarters of a pound of butter, two cans of liver sausage, a pound of lard and a bag of rice.

‘I’m sure you can do with these —’

They nod.

‘Things are pretty bad here?’ I ask.

‘Yes, there isn’t much to be had. Do you get enough out there?’

I smile and point to the things I’ve brought. ‘It isn’t always as much as that, but we still manage.’

Erna takes the food away. Suddenly my mother grips my hand and asks hesitantly, ‘Was it very bad out there, Paul?’

Mother, what kind of an answer can I give you? You won’t understand and never will. And I don’t want you to. Was it bad, you ask – you, Mother. I shake my head and say, ‘No, Mother, not really. After all, there are lots of us together, and that means that it isn’t so bad.’

‘Yes, but a little while ago Heinrich Bredemeyer was here, and he told us stories of how terrible it is out there now, with the gas and all the rest of it.’

It is my mother saying these things. She says ‘with the gas and all the rest of it’. She doesn’t know what she is saying, she is just afraid for me. Should I tell her how we once found three enemy trenches, where everyone was fixed and rigid as they stood, as if they’d been struck like it? On the parapets, in the dugouts, wherever they happened to be, they were standing or lying with their faces blue, dead.

‘Oh, Mother, they say all sorts of things,’ I reply, ‘Bredemeyer was just spinning a yarn [192] spinning a yarn – рассказывать невероятные истории . You can see, I’m in one piece and I’ve put on weight.’

Faced with my mother’s anxious concern for me, I manage to get a grip on my own emotions. I’m able to walk about again, and talk, and answer questions without being afraid of suddenly having to support myself against the wall because the whole world has turned as soft as rubber and my veins as fragile as tinder.

My mother wants to get up, so while she does so I go out into the kitchen to talk to my sister. ‘What’s wrong with her?’