The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll Read online

  But I didn’t know what for, and I didn’t know yet whether I was in my old school. I felt I absolutely had to make sure. There had been nothing special about the war memorial, nothing unusual, it was like all the rest, a ready-made war memorial—in fact they got them from some central supply house …

  I looked round the art room, but they had removed the pictures, and what can you tell from a few benches stacked up in a corner, and from the high, narrow windows, all close together to let in a lot of light because it was a studio? My heart told me nothing. Wouldn’t it have told me something if I had been in this place before, where for eight solid years I had drawn vases and practiced lettering, slender, delicate, beautiful reproductions of Roman vases that the art teacher set on a pedestal up front, and all kinds of lettering, Round, Antique, Roman, Italic? I had loathed these lessons more than anything else in school; for hours on end I had suffered unutterable boredom, and I had never been any good at drawing vases or lettering. But where were my curses, where was my loathing, in the face of these dun-colored, monotonous walls? No voice spoke within me, and I mutely shook my head.

  Over and over again I had erased, sharpened my pencil, erased … nothing …

  I didn’t know exactly how I had been wounded. I only knew I couldn’t move my arms or my right leg, just the left one a little; I figured they had bandaged my arms so tightly to my body that I couldn’t move them.

  I spat the second cigarette into the aisle between the straw pallets and tried to move my arms, but it was so painful I had to yell; I kept on yelling; each time I tried it, it felt wonderful to yell. Besides, I was mad at not being able to move my arms.

  Suddenly the doctor was standing in front of me. He had taken off his glasses and was peering at me. He said nothing; behind him stood the fireman who had brought me the water. He whispered something into the doctor’s ear, and the doctor put on his glasses: I could distinctly see his large gray eyes with the faintly quivering pupils behind the thick lenses. He looked at me for a long time, so long that I had to look away, and he said softly, “Hold on, it’ll be your turn in a minute …”

  Then they picked up the man lying next to me and carried him behind the blackboard. My eyes followed them: they had taken the blackboard apart and set it up crossways and hung a sheet over the gap between wall and blackboard; a lamp was glaring behind it …

  There was not a sound until the sheet was pushed aside and the man who had lain next to me was carried out; with tired, impassive faces the stretcher bearers carted him to the door.

  I closed my eyes again and thought, I must find out how I’ve been wounded and whether I’m in my old school.

  It all seemed so cold and remote, as if they had carried me through the museum of a city of the dead, through a world as irrelevant as it was unfamiliar, although my eyes, but only my eyes, recognized it; surely it couldn’t be true that only three months ago I had sat in this room, drawn vases and practiced lettering, gone downstairs during breaks with my jam sandwich, past Nietzsche, Hermes, Togoland, Caesar, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, taking my time as I walked to the lower corridor where Medea hung, then to the janitor, to Birgeler, for a glass of milk, milk in that dingy little room where you could risk a smoke although it was against the rules. They must be carrying the man who had lain next to me downstairs now, to where the dead were lying, maybe the dead were lying in Birgeler’s gray little room that smelled of warm milk, dust, and Birgeler’s cheap tobacco …

  At last the stretcher bearers came back, and now they lifted me and carried me behind the blackboard. I was floating again, passing the door now, and as I floated past I could see that was right too: in the old days, when the school had been called St. Thomas’s, a cross had hung over the door, and then they had removed the cross, but a fresh deep-yellow spot in the shape of a cross had stayed behind on the wall, hard and clear, more noticeable in a way than the fragile little old cross itself, the one they had removed; the outline of the cross remained distinct and beautiful on the faded wall. At the time they were so mad they repainted the whole wall, but it hadn’t made any difference. The painter hadn’t got quite the right color: the cross stayed, deep yellow and clear, although the whole wall was pink. They had been furious, but it was no good: the cross stayed, deep yellow and clear on the pink wall; they must have used up their budget for paint so there wasn’t a thing they could do about it. The cross was still there, and if you looked closely you could even make out a slanting line over the right arm of the cross where for years the boxwood sprig had been, the one Birgeler the janitor had stuck behind it, in the days when it was still permitted to hang crosses in schools …

  All this flashed through my mind during the brief second it took for me to be carried past the door to the place behind the blackboard where the glaring lamp shone.

  I lay on the operating table and saw myself quite distinctly, but very small, dwarfed, up there in the clear glass of the lightbulb, tiny and white, a narrow, gauze-colored little bundle looking like an unusually diminutive embryo: so that was me up there.

  The doctor turned away and stood beside a table sorting his instruments; the fireman, stocky and elderly, stood in front of the blackboard and smiled at me. His smile was tired and sad, and his unshaven, dirty face was the face of someone asleep. Beyond his shoulder, on the smudged reverse side of the blackboard, I saw something that, for the first time since being in this house of the dead, made me aware of my heart—somewhere in a secret chamber of my heart I experienced a profound and terrible shock, and my heart began to pound: the handwriting on the blackboard was mine. Up at the top, on the very top line. I know my handwriting: it is worse than catching sight of oneself in a mirror, much clearer, and there was not the slightest possibility of doubting the identity of my handwriting. All the rest hadn’t proved a thing, neither Medea nor Nietzsche, neither the Alpine profile nor the banana from Togoland, not even the outline of the cross over the door: all that was the same in every school, but I don’t believe they write on blackboards in other schools in my handwriting. It was still there, the Thermopylae inscription we had had to write, in that life of despair I had known only three months ago: “Stranger, bear word to the Spartans we …”

  Oh, I know, the board had been too short, and the art teacher had bawled me out for not spacing properly, for starting off with letters that were too big, and shaking his head he had written underneath, in letters the same size, “Stranger, bear word to the Spartans we …”

  Seven times I had had to write it: in Antique, Gothic, Cursive, Roman, Italic, Script, and Round. Seven times, plain for all to see: “Stranger, bear word to the Spartans we …”

  The fireman, responding to a whispered summons from the doctor, had stepped aside, so now I saw the whole quotation, only slightly truncated because I had started off too big, had used up too many dots.

  A prick in my left thigh made me jerk up, I tried to prop myself on my elbows, but couldn’t. I looked down at my body, and then I saw: they had undone my bandages and I had no arms, no right leg, and I fell back instantly because I had no elbows to lean on. I screamed; the doctor and fireman looked at me in alarm, but the doctor merely shrugged his shoulders, keeping his thumb on the plunger of his hypo as he pressed it slowly and gently down. I tried to look at the blackboard again, but the fireman was standing right beside me now, obscuring it. He was holding down my shoulders, and I was conscious only of the scorched, grimy smell of his stained uniform, saw only his tired, sad face, and then I recognized him: it was Birgeler.

  “Milk,” I whispered …

  DRINKING IN PETÖCKI

  The soldier felt he was getting drunk at last. At the same moment it crossed his mind again, very clearly, that he hadn’t a single pfennig in his pocket to pay the bill. His thoughts were as crystal-clear as his perception, he saw everything with the utmost clarity: the fat, shortsighted woman sitting in the shadows behind the bar, intent on her crocheting as she chatted quietly to a man with an unmistakably Magyar mustache—a true opere
tta face, straight from the puszta, while the woman looked stolid and rather German, somewhat too respectable and sedate for the soldier’s image of a Hungarian woman. The language they were chatting in was as unintelligible as it was throaty, as passionate as it was strange and beautiful. The room was filled with a dense green twilight from the many close-planted chestnut trees along the avenue leading to the station: a wonderful dense twilight that reminded him of absinthe and made the room exquisitely intimate and cozy. The man with the fabulous mustache, half perched on a chair, looked relaxed and comfortable as he sprawled across the counter.

  The soldier observed all this in great detail, at the same time aware that he would not have been able to walk to the counter without falling down. It’ll have to settle a bit, he thought, then with a loud laugh shouted “Hey there!,” raised his glass toward the woman, and said in German, “Bitte schön!” The woman slowly got up from her chair, put aside her crochet work equally slowly, and, carrying the carafe, came over to him with a smile, while the Hungarian also turned round and eyed the medals on the soldier’s chest. The woman waddling toward him was as broad as she was tall, her face was kind, and she looked as if she had heart trouble; clumsy pince-nez, attached to a worn black string, balanced on her nose. Her feet seemed to hurt too; while she filled his glass she took the weight off one foot and leaned with one hand on the table. She said something in her dark-toned Hungarian that was doubtless the equivalent of “Prost” or “Your very good health,” or perhaps even of some affectionate, motherly remark such as old women commonly bestow on soldiers.

  The soldier lit a cigarette and drank deeply from his glass. Gradually the room began to revolve before his eyes; the fat proprietress hung somewhere at an angle in the air, the rusty old counter now stood on end, and the Hungarian, who was drinking sparingly, was cavorting about somewhere up near the ceiling like an acrobatic monkey. The next instant everything tilted the other way, the soldier gave a loud laugh, shouted “Prost!”, took another drink, then another, and lit a fresh cigarette.

  The door opened and in came another Hungarian, fat and short, with a roguish onion face and a few dark hairs on his upper lip. He let out a gusty sigh, tossed his cap onto a table, and hoisted himself onto a chair by the counter. The woman poured him some beer …

  The gentle chatter of the three at the counter was wonderful, like a quiet humming at the edge of another world. The soldier took another gulp of wine, put down his empty glass, and everything resumed its proper place.

  The soldier felt almost happy as he raised his glass again, repeating with a laugh, “Bitte schön!”

  The woman refilled his glass.

  I’ve had almost ten glasses of wine, the soldier thought. I’ll stop now, I’m so gloriously drunk that I feel almost happy. The green twilight thickened, the farther corners of the bar were already filled with impenetrable deep-blue shadows. What a crime, thought the soldier, that there are no lovers here. It would be a perfect spot for lovers, in this wonderful green-and-blue twilight. What a crime, he thought, as he pictured all those lovers somewhere out there in the world who had to sit around or chase around in the bright light, while here in the bar there was a place where they could talk, drink wine, and kiss …

  Christ, thought the soldier, there ought to be music here now, and all these wonderful dark-green and dark-blue corners ought to be full of lovers—and I would sing a song. You bet I’d sing a song. I feel very happy, and I would sing those lovers a song, then I’d really quit thinking about the war; now I’m always thinking a little bit about this damn war. Then I’d quit thinking about it altogether.

  He looked closely at his watch: seven-thirty. He still had twenty minutes. He drank long and deep of the dry, cool wine, and it was almost as if someone had given him stronger spectacles: now everything looked closer and clearer and very solid, and he felt himself becoming gloriously, beautifully, almost totally drunk. Now he saw that the two men at the counter were poor, either laborers or shepherds, in threadbare trousers, and that their faces were tired and terribly submissive in spite of the dashing mustache and the wily onion look …

  Christ, thought the soldier, how horrible it was back there when I had to leave, so cold, and everything bright and full of snow, and we still had a few minutes left and nowhere was there a corner, a wonderful, dark, human corner where we could have kissed and embraced. Everything had been bright and cold …

  “Bitte schön!” he shouted to the woman; then, as she approached, he looked at his watch: he still had ten minutes. When the woman started to fill his half-empty glass, he held his hand over it, shook his head with a smile, and rubbed thumb and forefinger together. “Pay,” he said, “how many pengös?”

  He very slowly took off his jacket, slipped off the handsome gray turtleneck sweater, and laid it beside him on the table in front of the watch. The men at the counter had stopped talking and were looking at him, the woman also seemed startled. Very carefully she wrote a “14” on the tabletop. The soldier placed his hand on her fat, warm forearm, held up the sweater with the other, and asked with a laugh, “How much?” Rubbing thumb and forefinger together again, he added, “Pengös.”

  The woman looked at him and shook her head, but he went on shrugging his shoulders and indicating that he had no money until she hesitantly picked up the sweater, turned it over, and carefully examined it, even sniffed it. She wrinkled her nose a little, then smiled and with a pencil quickly wrote a “30” next to the “14.” The soldier let go of her warm arm, nodded, raised his glass, and took another drink.

  As the woman went back to the counter and eagerly began talking to the men in her throaty voice, the soldier simply opened his mouth and sang. He sang “When the Drum Roll Sounds for Me,” and suddenly realized he was singing well—singing well for the first time in his life; at the same time he realized he was drunker again, that everything was gently swaying. He took another look at his watch and saw he had three minutes in which to sing and be happy, and he started another song, “Innsbruck, I Must Leave You.” Then with a smile he took the money the woman had placed in front of him and put it in his pocket …

  It was quite silent now in the bar. The two men with the threadbare trousers and the tired faces had turned toward him, and the woman had stopped on her way back to the counter and was listening quietly and solemnly, like a child.

  The soldier finished his wine, lit another cigarette, and knew he would walk unsteadily. But before he left he put some money on the counter and, with a “Bitte schön,” pointed to the two men. All three stared after him as he at last opened the door and went out into the avenue of chestnut trees leading to the station, the avenue that was full of exquisite dark-green, dark-blue shadows where a fellow could have put his arms around his girl and kissed her good-bye …

  DEAR OLD RENÉE

  Whenever you turned up at her place around ten or eleven in the morning, she looked a real fat slattern. Her round massive shoulders bulged beneath the shapeless flowered smock, battered curlers were stuck in her lifeless hair like lead sinkers caught in muddy weeds; her face was bloated, and breadcrumbs still clung to the neckline of her smock. She made no attempt to conceal her unlovely morning appearance, for she was at home to only a few select customers—usually only me—whom she knew to be concerned less with her feminine charms than with her excellent drinks. And her drinks were excellent at that, and high-priced too; in those days she still had a very fine cognac. Besides, she gave credit. In the evening she was a real charmer: well-corseted, her shoulders and breasts high and firm, some sexy stuff sprayed on her hair and her eyes made up, scarcely a man could resist her, and perhaps I was one of the few she was willing to receive in the mornings just because she knew I was always able to withstand her charms in the evenings.

  In the morning, around ten or eleven, she was a mess. Her disposition was bad then too, she was given to moralizing and to delivering herself of sententious utterances. When I knocked or rang (she preferred me to knock, “It sounds so int
imate,” she used to say), I would hear her shuffling footsteps, the curtain behind the frosted-glass door would be pushed aside, and I could see her shadow. She would peer through the pattern of flowers on the glass pane, muttering: “Oh, it’s you,” and push back the bolt.

  She was truly a repulsive sight, but it was the only decent tavern in the place, with its thirty-seven grimy houses and two run-down châteaux, and her drinks were first-rate; besides, she gave credit, and in addition to all this she was really very pleasant to talk to. And so the leaden morning hours would pass in no time. As a rule I stayed only until we could hear the distant voices of the company singing on its way back from drill, and it always gave you a funny feeling to hear the same old song, coming closer and closer, in the same old sluggish silence of that godforsaken hole.

  “There it comes again,” was her invariable comment, “that crappy war.”

  And together we would watch the company, the first lieutenant, the sergeants, the corporals, the privates, all marching past the frosted-glass windowpane looking tired and dispirited; we would stand watching the company through the pattern of flowers. Between the roses and tulips were whole strips of clear glass, and you could see the lot of them, row after row, face after face, all sullen and hungry and apathetic.…