The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll Page 13

  Then came the real shock. I suddenly realized that this sky-splitting fury was in fact a noise: close to my head I heard a strange hiss as of a baleful, swiftly descending hand, felt a moist, hot pain, jumped up with a cry, and reached out toward the sky where just then another searing yellow flash blazed up; with my right hand I held on tight to this flailing yellow snake, letting it spin its angry circle, confident that I would be able to complete the circle, for this was the one and only art I had been born to master. So I held it, guided it, the flailing, raging, jerking, chattering snake, held on to it while my breath came hot and my twitching mouth hurt and the moist pain in my head seemed to increase, and as I brought the points together, drawing the glorious round arc of the circle and gazing at it with pride, the spaces between the dots and dashes closed and an immense, hissing short circuit filled the entire circle with light and fire until the whole sky was burning, and the abrupt momentum of the plunging aircraft rent the world in two. All I could see was light and fire, and the mutilated tail of the machine, a jagged tail like the black stump of a broom fit to carry a witch riding off to her sabbath …

  MY EXPENSIVE LEG

  They’re giving me a chance now. They sent me a postcard telling me to come down to the Department, and I went. They were very nice to me at the Department. They took out my file card and said, “Hm.” I also said, “Hm.”

  “Which leg?” asked the official.

  “The right.”

  “The whole leg?”

  “The whole leg.”

  “Hm,” he went again. He proceeded to shuffle through various papers. I was allowed to sit down.

  Finally the man found what seemed to be the right paper. He said, “I think I have something here for you. Very nice too. A job you can sit down at. Shoeshine stand in a public convenience on Republic Square. How about that?”

  “I can’t shine shoes; that’s one thing people have always noticed about me, my inability to shine shoes.”

  “You can learn,” he said. “One can learn anything. A German can do anything. You can take a free course if you like.”

  “Hm,” I went.

  “You’ll take the job?”

  “No,” I said, “I won’t. I want a higher pension.”

  “You must be out of your mind,” he replied, his tone mild and good-humored.

  “I’m not out of my mind, no one can give me back my leg, I’m not even allowed to sell cigarettes anymore, they’re already making that difficult for me.”

  The man leaned all the way back in his chair and drew a deep breath. “My dear fellow,” he said, launching into a lecture, “your leg’s a damned expensive leg. I see that you’re twenty-nine years of age, your heart is sound, in fact apart from your leg you’re as fit as a fiddle. You’ll live to be seventy. Figure it out for yourself, seventy marks a month, twelve times a year, that’s forty-one times twelve times seventy. Figure it out for yourself, not counting interest, and don’t imagine your leg’s unique. What’s more, you’re not the only one who’ll probably live to a ripe old age. And then you want a higher pension! I’m sorry, but you must be out of your mind.”

  “I think, sir,” I said, also leaning back and drawing a deep breath, “I think that you grossly underestimate my leg. My leg is much more expensive, it is a very expensive leg indeed. It so happens that my head is as sound as my heart. Let me explain.”

  “I’m a very busy man.”

  “I’ll explain!” I said. “You will see that my leg has saved the lives of a great number of people who today are drawing nice fat pensions.

  “What happened was this: I was lying all by myself somewhere up front. My job was to spot them when they came so that the others would have time to clear out. The staffs in the rear were packing up, and while they didn’t want to clear out too soon they also didn’t want to leave it too long. At first there were two of us, but they shot the other fellow, he’s not costing you a cent now. It’s true he was married, but his wife is in good health and able to work, you don’t need to worry. He was a real bargain. He’d only been a soldier for a month, all he cost was a postcard and a few bread rations. There’s a good soldier for you, at least he let himself be killed off. But now there I was, all by myself, scared stiff, and it was cold, and I wanted to clear out too, in fact I was just going to clear out when—”

  “I’m really very busy,” said the man, beginning to search for a pencil.

  “No, listen,” I said, “this is where it gets interesting. Just as I was going to clear out, this business of my leg happened. And because I had to go on lying there anyway, I thought I might as well pass the word, so I passed the word, and they all took off, one after another, in descending order of rank, first the divisional staff, then the regimental, then the battalion, and so on, one after another. The silly part was, you see, they were in such a hurry they forgot to take me along! It was really too silly for words, because if I hadn’t lost my leg they would all be dead, the general, the colonel, the major, and so on down, and you wouldn’t have to pay them any pensions. Now just figure out what my leg is costing you. The general is fifty-two, the colonel forty-eight, and the major fifty, all of them hale and hearty, their heads as well as their hearts, and with the military life they lead they’ll live to be at least eighty, like Hindenburg. Figure it out for yourself: a hundred and sixty times twelve times thirty, we’ll call it an average of thirty, shall we? My leg’s become a damned expensive leg, one of the most expensive legs I can think of, d’you see what I mean?”

  “You really must be out of your mind,” said the man.

  “No,” I replied, “I’m not. Unfortunately my heart is as sound as my head, and it’s a pity I wasn’t killed too, a couple of minutes before that business of my leg happened. We would have saved a lot of money.”

  “Are you going to take that job?” asked the man.

  “No,” I said, and left.

  LOHENGRIN’S DEATH

  Going up the stairs, the men carrying the stretcher slowed down a bit. They were both feeling resentful; they had been on duty for over an hour and so far nobody had given them a cigarette for a tip. Besides, one of them was the ambulance driver, and drivers are not actually required to carry stretchers. But the hospital hadn’t sent anyone down to help, and they couldn’t very well leave the boy lying there in the ambulance; they still had an emergency pneumonia to pick up and a suicide who had been cut down at the last minute. They were feeling resentful, and suddenly they were carrying the stretcher along less slowly again: the corridor was poorly lit, and of course it smelled of hospital.

  “I wonder why they cut him down?” muttered one of the men, referring to the suicide; he was the one behind, and the one in front growled over his shoulder, “Yeah, why would they do that?” But because he had turned round as he spoke, he collided with the doorpost, and the figure lying on the stretcher woke up and emitted shrill, terrible screams; they were the screams of a child.

  “Easy now, easy,” said the doctor, a young intern with fair hair and a tense face. He looked at the time: eight o’clock, his relief should have been here long ago. For over an hour he had been waiting for Dr. Lohmeyer: they might have arrested him, anyone could be arrested any time these days. The young doctor automatically fingered his stethoscope, his eyes fixed on the boy on the stretcher, and now for the first time he noticed the stretcher bearers standing impatiently by the door. “What’s the matter, what are you waiting for?” he asked irritably.

  “The stretcher,” said the driver. “Can’t you move him onto something else? We’ve got work to do.”

  “Oh, of course—over here!” The doctor pointed to the leather couch. At that moment the night nurse appeared, her expression unemotional but serious. She took hold of the boy by the shoulders, and one of the stretcher bearers, not the driver, grabbed him by the legs.

  The boy screamed like one demented, and the doctor said hastily, “Take it easy now, it’s not that bad …”

  The stretcher bearers were still standi
ng there, waiting. The doctor’s look of annoyance evoked a further response from one of them. “The blanket,” he said stonily. The blanket wasn’t his at all, a woman at the scene of the accident had let him have it, saying they couldn’t drive the boy like that to the hospital with those shattered legs of his. But the stretcher bearer figured the hospital would keep it, and the hospital had plenty of blankets, and the blanket certainly wouldn’t be returned to the woman, and it didn’t belong to the boy any more than it did to the hospital, and the hospital had plenty. His wife would clean up the blanket all right, and blankets were worth a lot of money these days.

  The child was still screaming. They had unwrapped the blanket from around his legs and passed it quickly to the driver. Doctor and nurse exchanged glances. The boy was an appalling sight: the whole lower part of his body was bathed in blood, his cotton shorts were mere shreds, and the shreds had coagulated with the blood into a revolting pulp. His feet were bare, and he screamed without pause, screamed with terrible persistence and regularity.

  “Quick,” whispered the doctor, “a hypo. Nurse, hurry, please!” The nurse’s movements were skillful and swift, but the doctor kept whispering, “Hurry, hurry!” His mouth hung slack in his tense face. The boy kept up his incessant screaming, but the nurse was preparing the hypo as fast as she could.

  The doctor felt the boy’s pulse, his pale face twitching with exhaustion. “Be quiet,” he whispered a few times distractedly, “be quiet!” But the child screamed as if he had been born for the sole purpose of screaming. At last the nurse brought the hypo, and the doctor swiftly and skillfully gave the injection.

  With a sigh he drew the needle out of the tough, leathery skin, and just then the door opened and a nun burst into the room, but when she saw the accident case and the doctor she closed her mouth, which she had opened, and approached slowly and quietly. She gave the doctor and the pale lay sister a friendly nod and placed her hand on the child’s forehead. The boy opened his eyes and looked straight up, in surprise, at the black figure standing behind him. It seemed almost as if the pressure of the cool hand on his brow were quieting him down, but the injection was already taking effect. The doctor was still holding the syringe, and he gave another deep sigh, for it was quiet now, blissfully quiet, so quiet that they could all hear their own breathing. They did not speak.

  The boy was evidently out of pain now; he was looking quietly and interestedly around the room.

  “How much?” the doctor asked the night nurse in a low voice.

  “Ten,” she replied, in the same tone.

  The doctor shrugged his shoulders. “Quite a bit. We’ll see what happens. Would you give us a hand, Sister Lioba?”

  “Of course,” the nun replied promptly, seeming to rouse herself from a deep reverie. It was very quiet. The nun held the boy by the head and shoulders, the night nurse took his legs, and together they pulled off the blood-soaked tatters. The blood, as they now saw, was mixed with something black. Everything was black, the boy’s feet were caked with coal dust, his hands too, there was nothing but blood, shreds of cloth, and coal dust, thick oily coal dust.

  “Obviously,” murmured the doctor, “you fell off a moving train while pinching coal, eh?”

  “Yes,” said the boy in a cracked voice, “obviously.”

  His eyes were wide open, and there was a strange happiness in them. The injection must have been gloriously effective. The nun pulled his shirt all the way up, arranging it in a roll on the boy’s chest, under his chin. His chest was scrawny, ludicrously scrawny like the breast of an elderly goose. Alongside the collarbones strangely deep shadows filled the hollows, great cavities where she could have hidden the whole of her broad white hand. Now they could see his legs too, as much of them as was still intact. They were skinny, and seemed to be fine-boned and shapely. The doctor nodded to the women, saying, “Double fracture of both legs, I imagine. We’ll need an X-ray.”

  The night nurse wiped his legs clean with alcohol, and now they didn’t look quite so bad. But the child was so appallingly thin. The doctor shook his head as he applied the bandage. He started worrying again about Lohmeyer: maybe they’d got him after all, and even if he kept his mouth shut it was still very awkward to let him take the rap for that Strophanthin business and get off scot-free himself, while if things had gone well he would have had a share in the profits. Hell, it must be eight-thirty, it was ominously quiet now, not a sound from the street. He had finished his bandaging, and the nun pulled the boy’s shirt down again over his loins. Then she went to the closet, took out a white blanket, and spread it over the boy.

  Her hands on the boy’s forehead again, she said to the doctor as he was washing his hands, “What I really came about was the little Schranz girl, doctor, but I didn’t want to worry you while you were treating this boy.”

  The doctor paused in his drying, made a slight grimace, and the cigarette hanging from his lower lip quivered.

  “Well,” he asked, “what about the Schranz child?” The pallor in his face was almost yellow now.

  “I’m afraid that little heart is giving up, just giving up; it looks like the end.”

  The doctor took the cigarette between his fingers again and hung the towel on the nail beside the wash bowl.

  “Hell,” he cried helplessly, “what am I supposed to do? There’s nothing I can do!”

  The nun kept her hand on the boy’s forehead. The night nurse dropped the blood-soaked rags into the garbage pail; its chrome lid cast flickering lights against the wall.

  The doctor stood there thinking, his eyes lowered. Suddenly he raised his head, gave one more look at the boy, and dashed to the door. “I’ll have a look at her.”

  “Do you need me?” the night nurse called out after him. He put his head in again, saying, “No, you stay here. Get the boy ready for X-rays and see if you can take down his history.”

  The boy was still very quiet, and the night nurse came and stood by the leather couch.

  “Has your mother been told?” asked the nun.

  “She’s dead.”

  The nurse did not dare ask about his father.

  “Whom should we notify?”

  “My older brother, only he’s not home right now. But the kids ought to be told, they’re all alone now.”

  “What kids?”

  “Hans and Adolf. They’re waiting for me to come and make supper.”

  “And where does your older brother work?”

  The boy was silent, and the nun did not pursue the question.

  “Would you mind taking it down, nurse?”

  The night nurse nodded and went over to the little white table which was covered with medicine bottles and test tubes. She pulled the ink toward her, dipped the pen in it, and smoothed out the sheet of white paper with her left hand.

  “What’s your name?” the nun asked the boy.

  “Becker.”

  “Religion?”

  “None. I was never baptized.”

  The nun winced; the night nurse’s expression remained impassive.

  “When were you born?”

  “In 1933 … September 10.”

  “Still going to school, I suppose?”

  “Yes.”

  “And his first name!” the night nurse whispered to the nun.

  “Oh, yes … and your first name?”

  “Grini.”

  “What?” The two women looked at each other and smiled.

  “Grini,” said the boy, slowly and peevishly, as anyone does who has an unusual first name.

  “With an ‘i’?” asked the night nurse.

  “That’s right, with two i’s,” and he repeated once more, “Grini.”

  His real name was Lohengrin. He had been born in 1933, just when the first photographs of Hitler at the Bayreuth Wagner Festival started flooding all the illustrated weeklies. But his mother had always called him Grini.

  The doctor rushed suddenly into the room, his eyes blurred with exhaustion, his wispy fair hair hang
ing down into his young, deeply lined face.

  “Come along, both of you, and be quick about it. I’m going to try a transfusion; hurry up!”

  The nun’s eyes went to the boy.

  “That’s all right,” cried the doctor, “you can leave him alone for a moment.”

  The night nurse was already at the door.

  “Will you lie there quietly like a good boy, Grini?” asked the nun.

  “Yes,” he answered.

  But as soon as they had all left the room he let the tears flow unchecked. It was as if the nun’s hand on his brow had held them back. He was crying not with pain but with happiness. And yet with pain and fear too. It was only when he thought about the kids that he cried with pain, and he tried not to think about them because he wanted to cry with happiness. Never in his life had he had such a wonderful feeling as now, after the injection. It flowed right through him like some wonderful, gently warmed milk, making him feel dizzy and yet awake, and there was a delicious taste on his tongue, more delicious than anything he had ever tasted, but he couldn’t help it, he kept thinking about the kids. Hubert wouldn’t be back before tomorrow morning, and Father, of course, wouldn’t be home for another three weeks, and Mother … and right now the kids were waiting all alone, and he knew very well that they listened for every step, every tiny sound on the stairs, and there were so many, many sounds on the stairs, and the kids were disappointed so many, many times. There wasn’t much hope that Frau Grossmann would bother about them: she never had, why should she today. She never had, and after all she couldn’t know that he … that he had had an accident. Hans might try to comfort Adolf, but Hans was so frail himself and the least thing made him cry. Maybe Adolf would comfort Hans, but Adolf was only five whereas Hans was eight; it was really more likely that Hans would comfort Adolf. But Hans was so terribly frail and Adolf much stronger. Probably they would both cry, for when it got close to seven o’clock they would tire of playing because they were hungry and knew he would be home at seven-thirty to give them something to eat. And they wouldn’t dare take any of the bread; no, they would never dare do that again—he had forbidden them too strictly since those few times when they had eaten it all up, every bit, the whole week’s rations. It wouldn’t matter if they took some of the potatoes, but of course they didn’t know that. If only he had told them it was all right to take some of the potatoes. Hans was already quite good at boiling them; but they wouldn’t dare, he had punished them too severely, in fact he had even had to hit them, for it just wouldn’t do for them to eat up all the bread; it just wouldn’t do. But now he would have been glad if he hadn’t punished them, for then they would take some of the bread and at least they wouldn’t be hungry. So instead they were sitting there waiting, and at every sound on the stairs they were jumping up excitedly and thrusting their pale faces through the crack of the door, the way he had seen them so often, so often, a thousand times maybe. Oh, he always saw their faces first, and they were glad to see him. Yes, even after he had hit them, they were glad to see him; they had understood, he knew that. And now every sound was a disappointment, and they would be scared. Hans trembled at the very sight of a policeman; maybe they’d make such a noise crying that Frau Grossmann would be angry, for she liked peace and quiet of an evening, and then maybe they would go on crying, and Frau Grossmann would come and see what was the matter and take pity on them—she wasn’t so bad, Frau Grossmann. But Hans would never go on his own to Frau Grossmann; he was so dreadfully scared of her, Hans was scared of everything …