The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll Read online

  As a result I was the first to be ushered into the room where the questionnaires were spread out on attractive tables. The walls were done in a shade of green that would have summoned the word “delightful” to the lips of interior decoration enthusiasts. The room appeared to be empty, and yet I was so sure of being observed that I behaved as someone pregnant with action behaves when he believes himself unobserved: I ripped my pen impatiently from my pocket, unscrewed the top, sat down at the nearest table and pulled the questionnaire toward me, the way irritable customers snatch at the bill in a restaurant.

  Question No. 1: Do you consider it right for a human being to possess only two arms, two legs, eyes, and ears?

  Here for the first time I reaped the harvest of my pensive nature and wrote without hesitation: “Even four arms, legs and ears would not be adequate for my driving energy. Human beings are very poorly equipped.”

  Question No. 2: How many telephones can you handle at one time?

  Here again the answer was as easy as simple arithmetic: “When there are only seven telephones,” I wrote, “I get impatient; there have to be nine before I feel I am working to capacity.”

  Question No. 3: How do you spend your free time?

  My answer: “I no longer acknowledge the term free time—on my fifteenth birthday I eliminated it from my vocabulary, for in the beginning was the act.”

  I got the job. Even with nine telephones I really didn’t feel I was working to capacity. I shouted into the mouthpieces: “Take immediate action!” or: “Do something!—We must have some action—Action will be taken—Action has been taken—Action should be taken.” But as a rule—for I felt this was in keeping with the tone of the place—I used the imperative.

  Of considerable interest were the noon-hour breaks, when we consumed nutritious foods in an atmosphere of silent good cheer. Wunsiedel’s factory was swarming with people who were obsessed with telling you the story of their lives, as indeed vigorous personalities are fond of doing. The story of their lives is more important to them than their lives, you have only to press a button, and immediately it is covered with spewed-out exploits.

  Wunsiedel had a right-hand man called Broschek, who had in turn made a name for himself by supporting seven children and a paralyzed wife by working night-shifts in his student days, and successfully carrying on four business agencies, besides which he had passed two examinations with honors in two years. When asked by reporters: “When do you sleep, Mr. Broscheck?” he had replied: “It’s a crime to sleep!”

  Wunsiedel’s secretary had supported a paralyzed husband and four children by knitting, at the same time graduating in psychology and German history as well as breeding shepherd dogs, and she had become famous as a night-club singer where she was known as Vamp Number Seven.

  Wunsiedel himself was one of those people who every morning, as they open their eyes, make up their minds to act. “I must act,” they think as they briskly tie their bathrobe belts around them. “I must act,” they think as they shave, triumphantly watching their beard hairs being washed away with the lather: these hirsute vestiges are the first daily sacrifices to their driving energy. The more intimate functions also give these people a sense of satisfaction: water swishes, paper is used. Action has been taken. Bread gets eaten, eggs are decapitated.

  With Wunsiedel, the most trivial activity looked like action: the way he put on his hat, the way—quivering with energy—he buttoned up his overcoat, the kiss he gave his wife, everything was action.

  When he arrived at his office he greeted his secretary with a cry of “Let’s have some action!” And in ringing tones she would call back: “Action will be taken!” Wunsiedel then went from department to department, calling out his cheerful: “Let’s have some action!” Everyone would answer: “Action will be taken!” And I would call back to him too, with a radiant smile, when he looked into my office: “Action will be taken!”

  Within a week I had increased the number of telephones on my desk to eleven, within two weeks to thirteen, and every morning on the streetcar I enjoyed thinking up new imperatives, or chasing the words take action through various tenses and modulations: for two whole days I kept saying the same sentence over and over again because I thought it sounded so marvelous: “Action ought to have been taken;” for another two days it was: “Such action ought not to have been taken.”

  So I was really beginning to feel I was working to capacity when there actually was some action. One Tuesday morning—I had hardly settled down at my desk—Wunsiedel rushed into my office crying his “Let’s have some action!” But an inexplicable something in his face made me hesitate to reply, in a cheerful gay voice as the rules dictated: “Action will be taken!” I must have paused too long, for Wunsiedel, who seldom raised his voice, shouted at me: “Answer! Answer, you know the rules!” And I answered, under my breath, reluctantly, like a child who is forced to say: I am a naughty child. It was only by a great effort that I managed to bring out the sentence: “Action will be taken,” and hardly had I uttered it when there really was some action: Wunsiedel dropped to the floor. As he fell he rolled over onto his side and lay right across the open doorway. I knew at once, and I confirmed it when I went slowly around my desk and approached the body on the floor: he was dead.

  Shaking my head I stepped over Wunsiedel, walked slowly along the corridor to Broschek’s office, and entered without knocking. Broschek was sitting at his desk, a telephone receiver in each hand, between his teeth a ballpoint pen with which he was making notes on a writing pad, while with his bare feet he was operating a knitting machine under the desk. In this way he helps to clothe his family. “We’ve had some action,” I said in a low voice.

  Broschek spat out the ballpoint pen, put down the two receivers, reluctantly detached his toes from the knitting machine.

  “What action?” he asked.

  “Wunsiedel is dead,” I said.

  “No,” said Broschek.

  “Yes,” I said, “come and have a look!”

  “No,” said Broschek, “that’s impossible,” but he put on his slippers and followed me along the corridor.

  “No,” he said, when we stood beside Wunsiedel’s corpse, “no, no!” I did not contradict him. I carefully turned Wunsiedel over onto his back, closed his eyes, and looked at him pensively.

  I felt something like tenderness for him, and realized for the first time that I had never hated him. On his face was that expression which one sees on children who obstinately refuse to give up their faith in Santa Claus, even though the arguments of their playmates sound so convincing.

  “No,” said Broschek, “no.”

  “We must take action,” I said quietly to Broschek.

  “Yes,” said Broschek, “we must take action.”

  Action was taken: Wunsiedel was buried, and I was delegated to carry a wreath of artificial roses behind his coffin, for I am equipped with not only a penchant for pensiveness and inactivity but also a face and figure that go extremely well with dark suits. Apparently as I walked along behind Wunsiedel’s coffin carrying the wreath of artificial roses I looked superb. I received an offer from a fashionable firm of funeral directors to join their staff as a professional mourner. “You are a born mourner,” said the manager, “your outfit would be provided by the firm. Your face—simply superb!”

  I handed in my notice to Broschek, explaining that I had never really felt I was working to capacity there; that, in spite of the thirteen telephones, some of my talents were going to waste. As soon as my first professional appearance as a mourner was over I knew: This is where I belong, this is what I am cut out for.

  Pensively I stand behind the coffin in the funeral chapel, holding a simple bouquet, while the organ plays Handel’s Largo, a piece that does not receive nearly the respect it deserves. The cemetery café is my regular haunt; there I spend the intervals between my professional engagements, although sometimes I walk behind coffins which I have not been engaged to follow, I pay for flowers out of my own
pocket and join the welfare worker who walks behind the coffin of some homeless person. From time to time I also visit Wunsiedel’s grave, for after all I owe it to him that I discovered my true vocation, a vocation in which pensiveness is essential and inactivity my duty.

  It was not till much later that I realized I had never bothered to find out what was being produced in Wunsiedel’s factory. I expect it was soap.

  THE LAUGHER

  When someone asks me what business I am in, I am seized with embarrassment: I blush and stammer, I who am otherwise known as a man of poise. I envy people who can say: I am a bricklayer. I envy barbers, bookkeepers and writers the simplicity of their avowal, for all these professions speak for themselves and need no lengthy explanation, while I am constrained to reply to such questions: I am a laugher. An admission of this kind demands another, since I have to answer the second question: “Is that how you make your living?” truthfully with “Yes.” I actually do make a living at my laughing, and a good one too, for my laughing is—commercially speaking—much in demand. I am a good laugher, experienced, no one else laughs as well as I do, no one else has such command of the fine points of my art. For a long time, in order to avoid tiresome explanations, I called myself an actor, but my talents in the field of mime and elocution are so meager that I felt this designation to be too far from the truth: I love the truth, and the truth is: I am a laugher. I am neither a clown nor a comedian. I do not make people gay, I portray gaiety: I laugh like a Roman emperor, or like a sensitive schoolboy, I am as much at home in the laughter of the seventeenth century as in that of the nineteenth, and when occasion demands I laugh my way through all the centuries, all classes of society, all categories of age: it is simply a skill which I have acquired, like the skill of being able to repair shoes. In my breast I harbor the laughter of America, the laughter of Africa, white, red, yellow laughter—and for the right fee I let it peal out in accordance with the director’s requirements.

  I have become indispensable; I laugh on records, I laugh on tape, and television directors treat me with respect. I laugh mournfully, moderately, hysterically; I laugh like a streetcar conductor or like a helper in the grocery business; laughter in the morning, laughter in the evening, nocturnal laughter and the laughter of twilight. In short: wherever and however laughter is required—I do it.

  It need hardly be pointed out that a profession of this kind is tiring, especially as I have also—this is my specialty—mastered the art of infectious laughter; this has also made me indispensable to third- and fourth-rate comedians, who are scared—and with good reason—that their audiences will miss their punch lines, so I spend most evenings in night clubs as a kind of discreet claque, my job being to laugh infectiously during the weaker parts of the program. It has to be carefully timed: my hearty, boisterous laughter must not come too soon, but neither must it come too late, it must come just at the right spot: at the pre-arranged moment I burst out laughing, the whole audience roars with me, and the joke is saved.

  But as for me, I drag myself exhausted to the checkroom, put on my overcoat, happy that I can go off duty at last. At home I usually find telegrams waiting for me: “Urgently require your laughter. Recording Tuesday,” and a few hours later I am sitting in an overheated express train bemoaning my fate.

  I need scarcely say that when I am off duty or on vacation I have little inclination to laugh: the cowhand is glad when he can forget the cow, the bricklayer when he can forget the mortar, and carpenters usually have doors at home which don’t work or drawers which are hard to open. Confectioners like sour pickles, butchers like marzipan, and the baker prefers sausage to bread; bullfighters raise pigeons for a hobby, boxers turn pale when their children have nose-bleeds: I find all this quite natural, for I never laugh off duty. I am a very solemn person, and people consider me—perhaps rightly so—a pessimist.

  During the first years of our married life, my wife would often say to me: “Do laugh!” but since then she has come to realize that I cannot grant her this wish. I am happy when I am free to relax my tense face muscles, my frayed spirit, in profound solemnity. Indeed, even other people’s laughter gets on my nerves, since it reminds me too much of my profession. So our marriage is a quiet, peaceful one, because my wife has also forgotten how to laugh: now and again I catch her smiling, and I smile too. We converse in low tones, for I detest the noise of the night clubs, the noise that sometimes fills the recording studios. People who do not know me think I am taciturn. Perhaps I am, because I have to open my mouth so often to laugh.

  I go through life with an impassive expression, from time to time permitting myself a gentle smile, and I often wonder whether I have ever laughed. I think not. My brothers and sisters have always known me for a serious boy.

  So I laugh in many different ways, but my own laughter I have never heard.

  IN THE VALLEY OF THE THUNDERING HOOFS

  I

  The boy had not noticed that it was his turn. He was staring at the tiles on the floor dividing the side nave from the center nave: they were red and white, shaped like honeycomb cells, the red ones were speckled with white, the white with red; he could no longer distinguish the white from the red, the tiles ran together, and the dark lines of the cement joins became blurred, the floor swam before his eyes like a gravel path of red and white chips; the red dazzled, the white dazzled, the joins lay indistinctly over them like a soiled net.

  “It’s your turn,” whispered a young woman next to him; he shook his head, made a vague gesture with his thumb toward the confessional, and the woman went ahead of him; for a moment the smell of lavender became stronger; then he heard murmuring, the scuffing sound of her shoes on the wooden step as she knelt down.

  Sins, he thought, death, sins; and the intensity with which he suddenly desired the woman was torture. He had not even seen her face; a faint smell of lavender, a young voice, the sound of her high heels, light yet crisp, as she walked the four steps to the confessional; this rhythm of the heels, crisp yet light, was but a fragment of the eternal refrain that seethed in his ears for days and nights on end. In the evening he would lie awake, beside the open window, and hear them walking along outside on the cobblestones, on the asphalt sidewalk: shoes, heels, crisp, light, unsuspecting; he could hear voices, whispering, laughter under the chestnut trees. There were too many of them, and they were too beautiful. Some of them opened their handbags; in the streetcar, at the movie box office, on the store counter, they would leave their handbags lying open in cars, and he could see inside: lipsticks, handkerchiefs, loose change, crumpled bus tickets, packs of cigarettes, compacts. His eyes were still moving in torment back and forth over the tiles: this was a thorny path, and never-ending.

  “It’s your turn, you know,” said a voice beside him, and he looked up. A little girl, red-cheeked and with black hair. He smiled at the child and waved her on too with his thumb. Her flat child’s shoes had no rhythm. Whispering over there to the right. What had he confessed, when he was her age? I stole some cookies. I told lies. Disobedient. Didn’t do my homework. I stole from the sugar jar, cake crumbs, wineglasses with the dregs from grown-ups’ parties. Cigarette butts. I stole some cookies.

  “It’s your turn.” This time he waved mechanically. Men’s shoes. Whispering and the obtrusiveness of that faint no-smell smell.

  Once again his glance fell on the red and white chips of the aisle. His naked eyes hurt as acutely as his naked feet would have hurt on a rough gravel path. The feet of my eyes, he thought, wander round their mouths as if round red lakes. The hands of my eyes wander over their skin.

  Sins, death, and the insolent unobtrusiveness of that no-smell smell. If only there were someone who smelled of onions, of stew, laundry soap, or engines, of pipe tobacco, lime blossom, or road dust, of the fierce sweat of summer toil, but they all smelled unobtrusive; they smelled of nothing.

  He raised his eyes and looked across the aisle, letting his glance rest where those who had received absolution were kneeling and saying
their prayers of penance. Over there it smelled of Saturday, of peace, bathwater, poppyseed rolls, of new tennis balls, like the ones his sisters bought on Saturdays with their pocket money; it smelled of the clear, pure oil Father cleaned his pistol with on Saturdays. It was black, his pistol, shining, unused for ten years, an immaculate souvenir of the war, discreet, useless; it merely served Father’s memory, summoned a glow to his face when he took it apart and cleaned it; the glow of an erstwhile mastery over death, which a light touch on a spring could move out of the pale, gleaming magazine into the barrel. Once a week on Saturday, before he went to the club, this ritual of taking apart, caressing, oiling the black sections, which lay spread out on the blue cloth like those of a dissected animal: the rump, the great metal tongue of the trigger, the smaller innards, joints, and screws. He was permitted to look on, he would stand there spellbound, speechless before his father’s enraptured face; he was witnessing the celebration of the cult of an instrument that so frankly and terrifyingly resembled his sex; the seed of death was thrust out of the magazine. Father checked that too, to see whether the magazine springs were still working. They were still working, and the safety catch held back the seed of death in the barrel; with the thumb, with a tiny delicate movement, it could be released, but Father never released it; delicately his fingers fitted the separate parts together again before hiding the pistol under some old checkbooks and ledger sheets.

  “It’s your turn.” He gestured again. Whispers. Whispered replies. The obtrusive smell of nothing.

  Here on this side of the aisle it smelled of damnation, sins, the sticky banality of the other days of the week, the worst of which was Sunday: boredom, while the coffee percolator hummed on the terrace. Boredom in church, in the outdoor restaurant, in the boathouse, movie, or café, boredom up at the vineyards where the progress of the Zischbrunner Mönchsgarten vines was inspected, slender fingers smoothly and expertly feeling the grapes; boredom which seemed to offer no escape except sin. It was visible everywhere: green, red, brown leather of handbags. Over there in the center nave he saw the rust-colored coat of the woman he had allowed to go ahead of him. He saw her profile, the delicate nose, the light-brown skin, the dark mouth, saw her wedding ring, the high heels, those fragile instruments which harbored the deadly refrain; he listened to them going away, a long, long walk on hard asphalt, then on rough cobblestones, the crisp yet firm staccato of sin. Death, he thought, mortal sin.