The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll Page 47

  And I cannot understand why anyone regards this work as beneath my dignity …

  AND THERE WAS THE EVENING AND THE MORNING …

  It was not until noon that he thought of leaving his Christmas presents for Anna in the baggage room at the station; he was glad he had thought of it, for it meant he didn’t have to go home immediately. Ever since Anna had stopped speaking to him, he was afraid of going home; her silence bore down on him like a tombstone the minute he entered the apartment. He used to look forward to going home, for two years after his wedding day: he loved having supper with Anna, talking to her, and then going to bed; best of all he loved the hour between going to bed and falling asleep. Anna fell asleep earlier than he did because nowadays she was always tired—and he would lie there in the darkness beside her, he could hear her breathing, and from the far end of the street the headlights of cars now and again threw rays of light onto the ceiling, light that curved down as the cars reached the rise in the street, bands of pale yellow light that made his sleeping wife’s profile leap up for a second against the wall; then darkness would fall once more over the room, and all that remained was delicate whorls: the pattern of the curtains drawn on the ceiling by the gas lamp in the street. This was the hour he loved more than any hour of the day, because he could feel the day falling away from him, and he would slide down into sleep as into a bath.

  Now he strolled hesitatingly past the baggage counter and saw his box still there at the back, between the red suitcase and the demijohn. The open elevator coming down from the platform was empty, white with snow: it descended like a piece of paper into the gray concrete of the baggage room, and the man who had been operating it walked over and said to the clerk, “Now it really feels like Christmas. It’s nice when there’s snow for the kids, eh?” The clerk nodded, silently impaled baggage checks on his spike, counted the money in his drawer and looked suspiciously across to Brenig, who had taken his claim check out of his pocket but folded it up and put it back again. This was the third time he had come, the third time he had taken the claim check out and put it back in his pocket again. The clerk’s suspicious glances made him uncomfortable; he strolled over to the exit and stood looking out onto the empty station square. He loved the snow, loved the cold; as a boy it had intoxicated him to breathe in the cold clear air, and now he threw away his cigarette and held his face against the wind, which was driving light, profuse snowflakes toward the station. Brenig kept his eyes open, for he liked it when the flakes got caught in his eyelashes, new ones constantly replacing the old, which melted and ran down his cheeks in little drops. A girl walked quickly past him, and he saw how her green hat became white with snow while she hurried across the square, but it was only when she was standing at the streetcar stop that he recognized the little red suitcase she was carrying as the one which had stood next to his box in the baggage room.

  It was a mistake to get married, thought Brenig; they congratulate you, send you flowers, have stupid telegrams delivered to your door, and then they leave you alone. They ask whether you have thought of everything: of things for the kitchen, from salt shaker to stove, and finally they make sure you even have plenty of soup seasoning on the shelf. They estimate whether you can support a family, but what it means to be a family is something nobody tells you. They send flowers, twenty bouquets, and it smells like a funeral; then they throw rice and leave you alone.

  A man walked past him, and he could tell the man was drunk, he was singing “Oh Come All Ye Faithful,” but Brenig did not shift the angle of his head, so that it was a moment or two before he noticed that the man was carrying a demijohn in his right hand and he knew the box with his Christmas presents for his wife was now standing all by itself on the top shelf of the baggage room. It contained an umbrella, two books, and a big piano made of mocha chocolate: the white keys were of marzipan, the black ones of dark brittle. The chocolate piano was as big as an encyclopedia, and the girl in the store had said the chocolate would keep for six months.

  Maybe I was too young to get married, he thought, maybe I should have waited until Anna became less serious and I became more serious, but actually he knew he was serious enough and that Anna’s seriousness was just right. That was what he loved about her. For the sake of the hour before falling asleep he had given up movies and dancing, and hadn’t even bothered to meet his friends. At night, when he was lying in bed, he was filled with devoutness, with peace, and he would often repeat the sentence to himself, although he wasn’t quite certain of the exact wording: “And God made the earth and the moon, to rule over the day and over the night, to divide the light from the darkness, and God saw that it was good, and there was the evening and the morning.” He had meant to look it up in Anna’s Bible again to see just how it went, but he always forgot. For God to have created day and night seemed to him every bit as wonderful as the creation of flowers, beasts, and man.

  He loved this hour before falling asleep more than anything else. But now that Anna had stopped speaking to him, her silence lay on him like a weight. If she had only said, “It’s colder today,” or “It’s going to rain,” it would have put an end to his misery—if she had only said, “Yes,” or “No, no,” or something sillier still, he would be happy, and he would no longer dread going home. But for the space of a few seconds her face would turn to stone, and at these moments he suddenly knew what she would look like as an old woman; he was seized with fear, suddenly saw himself thrust thirty years forward into the future as onto a stony plain, saw himself old too, with the kind of face he had seen on some men: deeply lined with bitterness, strained with suppressed suffering, and tinged to the very nostrils with the pale yellow of gall. Masks scattered throughout the everyday world like death’s-heads …

  Sometimes, although he had only known her for three years, he also knew what she had looked like as a child. He could picture her as a ten-year-old girl, dreaming over a book under the lamplight, grave, her eyes dark under her light lashes, her eyelids flickering above the printed page, her lips parted … Often, when he was sitting opposite her at table, her face would change like the pictures that change when you shake them, and he suddenly knew that she had sat there exactly like that as a child, carefully breaking up her potatoes with her fork and slowly dribbling the gravy over them … The snow had almost stuck his eyelashes together, but he could just make out the Number 4 gliding up over the snow as if on sleds.

  Maybe I should phone her, he thought, have her come to the phone at Menders’; she’d have to speak to me then. The Number 4 would be followed immediately by the 7, the last streetcar that evening, but by this time he was bitterly cold and he walked slowly across the square, saw the brightly lit blue 7 in the distance, stood undecided by the phone booth, and looked in a store window where the window dressers were exchanging Santa Clauses and angels for other dummies: ladies in décolletage, their bare shoulders sprinkled with confetti, their wrists festooned with paper streamers. Their escorts, male dummies with graying temples, were being hurriedly placed on bar stools, champagne corks scattered on the floor; one dummy was having its wings and curls taken off, and Brenig was surprised how quickly an angel could be turned into a bartender. Mustache, dark wig, and a sign swiftly nailed to the wall, saying NEW YEAR’S EVE WITHOUT CHAMPAGNE?

  Here Christmas was over before it had begun. Maybe, he thought, Anna is too young, she was only twenty-one, and while he contemplated his reflection in the store window he noticed the snow had covered his hair like a little crown—the way he used to see it on fenceposts—and it struck him that old people were wrong to talk about the gaiety of youth: when you were young, everything was serious and difficult, and nobody helped you, and he was suddenly surprised that he did not hate Anna for her silence, that he didn’t wish he had married someone else. The whole vocabulary that people offered you was meaningless: forgiveness, divorce, a fresh start, time the Great Healer—these words were all useless. You had to work it out for yourself, because you were different from other people, and b
ecause Anna was different from other people’s wives.

  The window dressers were deftly nailing masks onto the walls, stringing crackers on a cord: the last Number 7 had left long ago, and the box with his presents for Anna was standing all by itself up there on the shelf.

  I am twenty-five, he thought, and because of a lie, one little lie, a stupid lie such as millions of men tell every week or every month, I have to endure this punishment; with my eyes staring into the stony future I have to look at Anna crouching like a sphinx on the edge of the stony desert, and at myself, my face yellowed with bitterness, an old man. Oh, yes, there would always be plenty of soup seasoning on the kitchen shelf, the salt shaker would always be in its proper place, and he would have been a department head for years and well able to support his family: a stony clan, and never again would he lie in bed and in the hour before falling asleep rejoice in the creation of evening, and offer thanks to God for having created rest from the labors of the day, and he would send the same stupid telegrams to young people when they got married as he had been sent himself …

  Other women would have laughed over such a stupid lie about his salary, other women knew that all men lie to their wives: maybe it was a kind of instinctive self-defense, against which they invented their own lies, but Anna’s face had turned to stone. There were books about marriage, and he had looked up in these books what you could do when something went wrong with your marriage, but none of the books said anything about a woman who had turned to stone. The books told you how to have children and how not to have children, and they contained a lot of big fine words, but the little words were missing.

  The window dressers had finished their work: streamers were hanging over wires that were fastened out of sight, and he saw one of the men disappearing at the back of the store with two angels under his arm, while the second man emptied a bag of confetti over the dummy’s bare shoulders and gave a final pat to the sign saying NEW YEAR’S EVE WITHOUT CHAMPAGNE?

  Brenig brushed the snow from his hair, walked back across the square to the station, and when he had taken the claim check from his pocket and smoothed it out for the fourth time, ran quickly, as if he hadn’t a second to lose. But the baggage room was closed, and there was a sign hanging in front of the grille: “WILL OPEN TEN MINUTES BEFORE ARRIVAL OR DEPARTURE OF A TRAIN.” Brenig laughed, he laughed for the first time since noon and looked at his box, lying up there on the shelf behind bars as if it were in prison. The departure board was right next to the counter, and he saw the next train would not be arriving for another hour. I can’t wait that long, he thought, and at this time of night I won’t even be able to get flowers or chocolate, not even a little book, and the last Number 7 has gone. For the first time in his life he thought of taking a taxi, and he felt very grown-up and at the same time a bit foolish as he ran across the square to the taxi rank.

  He sat in the back of the cab, clasping his money: ten marks, the last of his cash, which he had set aside to buy something special for Anna. But he hadn’t found anything special, and now he was sitting there clasping his money and watching the meter jump up at short intervals—very short intervals, it seemed to him—ten pfennings at a time, and every time the meter clicked it felt like a stab in the heart, although it only showed 2.80 marks. Here I am coming home, with no flowers, no presents, hungry, tired, and stupid, and it occurred to him that he could almost certainly have got some chocolate in the waiting room at the station.

  The streets were empty, the cab drove almost soundlessly through the snow, and in the lighted windows Brenig could see the Christmas trees glowing in the houses. Christmas, the way he had known it as a child and the way he had felt today, seemed very far away: the important things, the things that mattered, happened independently of the calendar, and in the stony desert Christmas would be like any other day of the year and Easter like a rainy day in November: thirty, forty torn-off calendars, metal holders with shreds of paper, that’s all that would be left if you didn’t watch out.

  He was roused by the driver saying “Here we are …” Then he was relieved to see that the meter had stopped at 3.40 marks. He waited impatiently for his change from five marks, and he felt a surge of relief when he saw a light upstairs in the room where Anna’s bed stood next to his. He made up his mind never to forget this moment of relief, and as he got out his house key and put it in the door, he experienced that silly feeling again that he had had when he got into the taxi: he felt grown-up, yet at the same time a bit foolish.

  In the kitchen the Christmas tree was standing on the table, with presents spread out for him: socks, cigarettes, a new fountain pen, and a gay, colorful calendar which he would be able to hang over his desk in the office. The milk was already in the saucepan on the stove, he had only to light the gas, and there were sandwiches ready for him on the plate—but that was how it had been every evening, even since Anna had stopped speaking to him, and the setting up of the Christmas tree and the laying out of the presents was like the preparing of the sandwiches, a duty; Anna would always do her duty. He didn’t feel like the milk, and the appetizing sandwiches didn’t appeal to him either. He went into the little hall and noticed at once that Anna had turned out the light. But the door to the bedroom was open, and without much hope he called softly into the dark rectangle, “Anna, are you asleep?” He waited, for a long time it seemed, as if his question were falling into a deep well, and the dark silence in the dark rectangle of the bedroom door contained everything that was in store for him in thirty, forty years—and when Anna said “No,” he thought he must have heard wrong, perhaps it was an illusion, and he went on hurriedly in a louder voice, “I’ve done such a stupid thing. I checked my presents for you at the station, and when I wanted to pick them up the baggage room was closed, and I didn’t want to hang around. Are you angry?”

  This time he was sure he had really heard her “No,” but he could also hear that this “No” did not come from the corner of the room where their beds had been. Evidently Anna had moved her bed under the window. “It’s an umbrella,” he said, “two books and a little piano made of chocolate; it’s as big as an encyclopedia, the keys are made of marzipan and brittle.” He stopped, listened for a reply, nothing came from the dark rectangle, but when he asked, “Are you pleased?” the “Yes” came quicker than the two “No’s” had done …

  He turned out the light in the kitchen, undressed in the dark, and got into bed. Through the curtains he could see the Christmas trees in the building across the street, and downstairs there was singing, but he had regained his hour, he had two “No’s” and a “Yes,” and when a car came up the street, the headlights made Anna’s profile leap up out of the darkness for him …

  THE ADVENTURE

  Fink walked over to the side entrance of the church. Right and left of the cracked asphalt were tiny triangular garden plots bordered with black iron railings: sour, gray-black earth and two box shrubs with leaves as tough and desiccated as leather. Leaning his shoulder against the brown padded door, he opened it and found himself in a musty entrance with another padded door ahead. This one he punched open with his fist, and before entering the church he glanced at a notice on a plywood board which read: “Third Order of St. Francis—Announcements.…”

  The church was filled with a greenish half-light, and on a wall painted a nondescript color Fink saw a white placard showing a hand, done in black, pointing straight down. Above the stiff, exaggeratedly long forefinger were the words: Confessional Bell. Underneath, in brown holders, were bell-pushes of dark ivory, and name plates. He did not bother to decipher the names but pressed one of the buttons at random, and it seemed to him that this act represented something irrevocable, final. Then he listened—not a sound.

  He dipped his finger into a pink plaster stoup in the form of a shell; in the dim light it resembled a great artificial palate with a few bits chipped out of it. Slowly he crossed himself and entered the center nave. On either side he saw two dark confessionals, their red curtains drawn shu
t, and he now noticed that bomb damage had caused the stucco roof between the gothic columns to crumble away: the ugly masonry of yellow brick was laid bare, somehow it reminded him of an old-fashioned public bathhouse. What was once the main entrance had been walled up with rough stones, and squashed in among them was a crooked old window frame from which the white paint had flaked off.

  Fink knelt down in the center nave and tried to pray, but over his folded hands he had to keep watching the four confessionals and peering into the dimness so as not to miss the priest who might suddenly appear from somewhere. He would probably come from the sacristy, up front, where in the semi-darkness Fink could make out a brass bell with a red velvet rope next to the perpetual light. Toward the middle the church got lighter, and he now saw that the whole center nave had been repaired: the ruined, jagged walls supported temporary, almost flat rafters boarded up with grimy old planks—some of the planks were dark with floor varnish—and the saints against the columns were all minus their heads, a helpless, pathetic double rank of strange plaster figures with their heads knocked off and their emblems torn from their grasp, somber truncated torsos which seemed to be holding out their mutilated hands to him in supplication.

  Fink tried to summon feelings of remorse and contrition, but without success; he found it hard to concentrate, and from within him there arose a welter of stumbling, spasmodic, imploring prayers, interspersed with memories and the ever-recurring desire to get all this over with quickly and leave, get out and away from this town.