Outside, torn to a thousand pieces by the speed of the train, everything he owned passed by: the little house on the hill with his pictures, his table and chair and bed, his wife, the dog, many days of happiness. And the wide landscape at which he had often gazed, his eyes shining, was gone as if hurled away, like his freedom and his whole life. He seemed to feel his life’s blood streaming out of all his veins; he was nothing now but the white call-up order crackling in his pocket, and he was driven on with it by the ill will of Fate.

In dull bewilderment, he merely registered events as they happened. The conductor asked for his ticket; he had none, but in the voice of a sleepwalker named the town on the border as his destination, and passively changed to another train. The mechanism inside him did everything, and it had stopped hurting. At the Swiss customs office they asked to see his papers. He showed them what he had: only that one sheet of paper. Now and then some lost remnant of himself made a slight effort to think, murmuring as if in a dream, “Turn back! You’re still free! You don’t have to go.” But the mechanism in his blood that did not speak, and yet made his nerves and limbs move by force, thrust him implacably on with its invisible command, “You must.”

 

He was standing on the platform of the transit station where he had to change trains again for his native land. Over there, clearly visible in the dull light, a bridge crossed the river which was the border. His weary mind tried to understand the meaning of the word; on this side of the border you could still live, breathe, and speak freely, act as you liked, do work that mattered. Eight hundred paces further on, once over that bridge, your will would be removed from your body like an animal’s entrails being gutted, you would have to obey strangers and stab other strangers to death. And the little bridge there, a structure of just ten dozen wooden posts and two crossbeams meant all those things. That was why two men, each in a different, colourful and pointless uniform, stood one at each end with guns to guard the bridge. A sombre sensation tormented him, he knew he couldn’t think clearly any more, but his thoughts rolled on. What exactly were they guarding in the form of that wooden structure? They were preventing anyone passing from one country to the other, making sure no one got out of the country where men’s wills were gutted, and went to the country on the other side of the border. And was he himself going to cross the bridge? Yes, but the other way, out of freedom into …

He stood still, musing, hypnotized by the idea of the border. Now that he saw its intrinsic nature, a physical object guarded by two bored citizens in military uniforms, there was something in himself that he could no longer entirely understand. He tried to stand back and think: there was a war going on. But only in the country over there—the war was going on a kilometre away, or rather a kilometre minus two hundred metres away. Or perhaps, it occurred to him, it was ten metres closer than that, say a kilometre minus eight hundred metres minus ten metres away. He felt some kind of odd urge to find out whether there was still a war in progress on those last ten metres or not. The comical aspect of the idea amused him. There ought to be a line drawn somewhere, the dividing line. Suppose when you reached the border you had one foot on the bridge and one on the ground, what were you then—were you still free, or already a soldier? You’d have to be wearing a civilian boot on one foot and a military boot on the other. His confused thoughts became more and more childish. Suppose you were standing on the bridge, you were already over it, and then you ran back, were you a deserter? And the water under the bridge—was it warlike or peaceful? And was there a line drawn somewhere in the national colours? What about the fish, were they allowed to swim across into the war zone? What about the animals? He thought of his dog. If the dog had come along too, they’d probably have called him up as well, he’d have had to fire machine guns or go tracking down wounded men under a hail of bullets. Thank God the dog had stayed at home.

Thank God! The thought gave him a shock, and he shook himself. He sensed that since he had seen the border in physical form, a bridge between life and death, something in him that was not the mechanism was beginning to work, understanding and resistance were coming back to life in him. The train that had brought him in still stood on the opposite track, except that the locomotive had been moved and its gigantic glass eyes were now looking the other way, ready to pull the carriages back into Switzerland.