The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll Page 55

  I am not your Jerusalem, she thought. No, no. He did not lower his eyes as he asked, “How can I get up there?”

  “If you climb up onto the roof of the summerhouse, I’ll give you a hand and help you up onto the veranda.”

  “I—there’s someone waiting for me.” But he was already testing the trellis to see if it would hold; it had been recently nailed and painted, dense dark vine leaves were growing up the trellis, which formed a kind of ladder. The pistol swung heavily against his thighs; as he pulled himself up by the weathervane, he remembered Griff, lying in his room back there, flies buzzing round him, with pale chest and red cheeks, and Paul thought of the little flat nickel pistol: I must ask Griff whether nickel oxidizes. If it does, he’ll have to stop them eating out of the jar.

  The girl’s hands were larger and firmer than Griff’s hands, larger and firmer than his own too: he felt this and was ashamed when she helped him climb from the ridge of the summerhouse roof onto the veranda balustrade.

  He brushed the dirt off his hands and said, without looking at the girl, “It’s funny that I’m really up here.”

  “I’m glad you’re here. I’ve been locked in since three.” He looked warily over to her, at her hand, which was holding her coat together over her chest.

  “Why’ve you got your coat on?”

  “You know why.”

  “Because of that?”

  “Yes.”

  He took a step toward her. “I expect you’re glad to be going away?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “There was a boy in school this morning,” he said in a low voice, “selling pieces of paper with things about you written on them, and a picture of you.”

  “I know,” she said, “and he said I get part of the money he gets for the pieces of paper, and that he has seen me the way he drew me. None of it’s true.”

  “I know it isn’t,” he said. “He’s called Kuffang; he’s stupid and tells lies, everyone knows that.”

  “But they believe him when he tells them that.”

  “Yes,” he said, “it’s strange, they do believe that.”

  She pulled her coat tighter around her chest. “That’s why I have to leave so suddenly, quickly, before they all get back from the regatta—for a long time now they’ve given me no peace. You make a show of your body, they say; they say it when I wear a dress with a low neck, and they say it when I wear a dress with a high neck—and a sweater. They go crazy then—but I have to wear something, don’t I?”

  He watched her without emotion as she went on talking. He was thinking: Funny that I never thought of her, not once. Her hair was blond, her eyes seemed blond too, they were the color of freshly planed beechwood—blond and slightly moist.

  “I don’t make a show of my body at all,” she said, “I just have it.”

  He nodded, pushed the pistol up a bit with his right hand, as it was lying heavy against his thigh. “Yes,” he said, and she was afraid: he had that dream face again. You would have thought he was blind, that other time, those empty, dark eyes had seemed to fall upon her and yet past her in an unpredictable refraction, and now again he looked as if he were blind.

  “The man,” she went on hurriedly, “who sometimes comes to have discussions with my mother, the old man with white hair, do you know him?” There was silence, the noise from the river was too far off to disturb this silence—“Do you know him?” she asked impatiently.

  “Of course I know him,” he said; “that’s old Dulges.”

  “Yes, that’s the one—he’s looked at me like that sometimes and said: Three hundred years ago they would have burned you as a witch. A woman’s hair crackling, and the cry from a thousand unfeeling souls unable to tolerate beauty.”

  “Why did you make me come up?” he asked. “To tell me that?”

  “Yes,” she said, “and because I saw what you were doing.”

  He pulled the pistol out of his pocket, held it up, and waited with a smile for her to scream, but she did not scream.

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “I don’t know, shoot at something.”

  “At what?”

  “Maybe at me.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” he said. “Why? Sins, death. Mortal sin. Do you understand that?” Slowly, without touching her, he made his way past her, in through the open kitchen door, and leaned with a sigh against the cupboard; the picture was still there on the wall, the one he had not seen for so long, the one he thought about sometimes: factory chimneys, with red smoke rising up from them, smoke pouring out and joining together in the sky to form a blood-red cloud. The girl was standing in the doorway, turned toward him. There were shadows across her face, and she looked like a woman. “Come inside,” he said, “they might see us; that would be bad for you, you know.”

  “In an hour,” she said, “I shall be sitting in the train. Here—here’s my ticket—it’s not a return.” She held up the buff ticket, he nodded, and she put the ticket back in her coat pocket. “I shall take off my coat and be wearing a sweater, a sweater, d’you understand?”

  He nodded again. “An hour’s a long time. Do you know what sin is? Death. Mortal sin?”

  “Once,” she said, “the pharmacist wanted to—and the teacher too, your history teacher.”

  “Drönsch?”

  “Yes, him. I know what they want, but I don’t know what their words mean. I know what sin is too, but I don’t understand it any more than I understand what the boys sometimes call out after me when I come home alone, in the dark; they call out after me from doorways, from windows, from cars sometimes, they called out things after me which I knew the meaning of but which I didn’t understand. Do you know?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is it?” she said. “Does it bother you terribly?”

  “Yes,” he said, “terribly.”

  “Even now?”

  “Yes,” he said, “doesn’t it bother you?”

  “No,” she said, “it doesn’t bother me. It just makes me unhappy that it’s there and that other people want something—that they call out after me. Please tell me, why are you thinking of shooting yourself? Because of that?”

  “Yes,” he said, “simply because of that. Do you know what it means when it says in the Bible: Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven?”

  “Yes, I know what that means; sometimes I stayed behind in class when they had religion.”

  “Well, then,” he said, “maybe you also know what sin is. Death.”

  “I do,” she said. “Do you really believe all that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Everything?”

  “Everything.”

  “You know I don’t believe it. But I do know that the worst sin of all is to shoot yourself—at least, that’s what I heard,” she said, raising her voice, “with my own ears,” she pulled her ear with her left hand, with her right she was still clutching her coat, “with my own ears I heard the priest say: We must not throw away the gift of life and toss it at God’s feet.”

  “Gift of life,” he said bitterly, “and God has no feet.”

  “Hasn’t He?” she said quietly. “Hasn’t He any feet, didn’t they pierce them?”

  He was silent, then flushed and said in a low voice, “I know.”

  “Yes,” she said, “if you really believe everything, the way you say you do, then you have to believe that too. Do you believe that?”

  “What?”

  “That we mustn’t throw away the gift of life?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, and held the pistol straight up in the air.

  “Come on,” she said softly, “put it away. It looks so silly. Please put it away.”

  He placed the pistol in his right pocket, put his hand into his left pocket, and took out the three cartridge clips. The metal clips lay without luster on the palm of his hand. “That should do,” he said.

  “Shoot at something else,” she said, “for instance, at�
�—she turned round and looked back at his own home, through the open window—“at the tennis balls,” she said.

  A deep flush enveloped him like darkness, his hands went limp, the clips fell from his hand. “How did you know …?” he whispered.

  “Know what?”

  He bent down, picked up the clips from the floor, pushed one cartridge, which had dropped out, carefully back into the clip; he looked through the window at the house standing in full view in the sunshine: the tennis balls were lying back there white and hard in their carton.

  Here, in this kitchen, it smelled of bath water, soap, of peace and fresh bread, of cake; red apples were lying on the table, a newspaper, and half a cucumber, its cut surface pale, green, and watery; closer to the peel the cucumber flesh was darker and firmer.

  “I also know,” said the girl, “what they used to do to fight sin. I’ve heard about it.”

  “Who?”

  “Those saints of yours. The priest told us about it: they whipped themselves, they fasted and prayed, not one killed himself.” She turned toward the boy, afraid again: No, no, I’m not your Jerusalem.

  “They weren’t fourteen,” said the boy, “or fifteen.”

  “Some of them must have been,” she said.

  “No,” he said, “no, it’s not true, most of them weren’t converted till after they’d sinned.” He came closer, pushing himself along the window sill toward her.

  “That’s a lie,” she said, “some of them didn’t sin first at all—I don’t believe any of that—if anything, I believe in the Mother of God.”

  “If anything,” he said scornfully, “but She was the Mother of God.”

  He looked the girl full in the face, turned aside, and said in an undertone: “Forgive me … yes, yes, I have tried. Prayed.”

  “And fasted?”

  “Oh, fasting,” he said. “I don’t care what I eat.”

  “That’s not fasting. And whipping. I would do that, I would whip myself, if I believed.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you really?” he whispered.

  “No,” she said, “it doesn’t bother me, to do something, to see something, to say something—but it does bother you, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “What a pity,” she said, “that you’re so Catholic.”

  “Why a pity?”

  “Otherwise I’d show you my breasts. I would like so much to show them to you—to you. Everyone talks about them, the boys call out things after me, but no one has ever seen them yet.”

  “No one?”

  “No,” she said, “no one.”

  “Show it to me,” he said.

  “It won’t be the same as it was last time, you know when I mean.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “Was it terrible for you?”

  “Only because Mother was so terrible. She was absolutely furious and told everyone about it. It wasn’t so terrible for me. I would have forgotten all about it. Come here,” he said.

  Her hair felt smooth and hard; that surprised him, he had thought it would be soft, but it was the way he imagined spun glass.

  “Not here,” she said. She pushed him along in front of her, slowly, for he did not let go of her head, he kept his eyes on her face while they moved, as if in some strange dance step invented by themselves, away from the open veranda door across the kitchen; he seemed to be standing on her feet, she seemed to be lifting him with every step.

  She opened the kitchen door, pushed him slowly across the hall, opened the door to her room.

  “Here,” she said, “in my room, not out there.”

  “Mirzova,” he whispered.

  “Why do you call me that? My name is Mirzov, and Katharina.”

  “Everyone calls you that, and I can’t think of you any other way. Show it to me now.” He blushed, because again he had said “it” and not “them.”

  “It makes me sad,” she said, “that for you it’s a sin.”

  “I want to see it,” he said.

  “Not a soul—” she said. “You’re not to talk to a soul about it.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise—but there’s one person I must tell.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Think for a moment,” he said softly, “think for a minute, you should know all about that.” She bit her lip, still clutching her coat tightly around her chest, looked thoughtfully at him, and said, “Of course, you can tell him, but no one else.”

  “All right,” he said, “now show it to me.”

  If she laughs or giggles, he thought, I’ll shoot; but she did not laugh: she was so serious she was trembling, her hands fluttered as she tried to undo the buttons, her fingers were ice-cold and stiff.

  “Come here,” he said gently, “I’ll do it.” His hands were calm, his fear lay deeper than hers; down in his ankles was where he felt it, they were like rubber and he thought he was going to fall over. He undid the buttons with his right hand, passed his left hand over the girl’s hair, as if to comfort her.

  Her tears came quite suddenly, silently, without warning, without fuss. They simply ran down her cheeks.

  “Why are you crying?”

  “I’m scared,” she said, “aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am,” he said. “I’m scared too.” He was so nervous he almost tore off the last button, and he took a deep breath when he saw Mirzova’s breasts; he had been scared because he was afraid of being disgusted, afraid of the moment when politeness would force him to pretend, so as to hide this disgust, but he was not disgusted and there was no need to hide anything. He sighed again. As suddenly as they had begun, the girl’s tears stopped flowing. She held her breath as she looked at him: the least movement of his face, the expression in his eyes, she took in every detail, and she already knew that in years to come she would be grateful to him, because he had been the one to undo the buttons.

  He looked at them closely, did not touch her, just shook his head, and laughter rose up in him.

  “What is it?” she asked, “may I laugh too?”

  “Go ahead, laugh,” he said, and she laughed.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said, and again he was ashamed because he had said “it” instead of “they,” but he could not bring himself to say “they.”

  “Do it up again,” she said.

  “No,” he said, “you do it up, but leave it for a moment.” It was very quiet, the sun pierced the yellow curtains, which had dark-green stripes. Dark stripes also lay across the faces of the children. You can’t have a woman, thought the boy, at fourteen.

  “Let me do it up,” said the girl.

  “All right,” he said, “do it up.” But he held her hands back for a moment, and the girl looked at him and laughed aloud.

  “Why are you laughing now?”

  “I’m so happy, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am,” he said, “I’m happy because it’s so beautiful.”

  He let go her hands, stepped back, and turned aside as she buttoned up her blouse.

  He walked round the table, looked at the open suitcase lying on the bed; sweaters lay piled one on top of the other, underwear had been sorted into little heaps, the bed had already been stripped, the suitcase was lying on the blue mattress ticking.

  “So you’re really leaving?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He moved on, looked into the open clothes closet: nothing but empty coat hangers, a red hair ribbon dangling from one of them. He shut the closet doors, glanced over to the bookshelf above her bed: empty except for some used blotting paper, and a brochure standing at an angle against the wall: “All About Winegrowing.”

  When he looked around, her coat was lying on the floor. He picked it up, threw it on the table, and ran out.

  She was standing in the kitchen doorway, holding the binoculars. She winced when he laid his hand on her shoulder, lowered her binoculars, and gave him a frightened look.

  “Please go,
” she said. “You must go now.”

  “Let me see it just once more.”

  “No, the regatta will be over soon, my mother’s coming to take me to the train. You know what’ll happen if anyone sees you here.”

  He said nothing, leaving his hand on her shoulder. She ran away quickly, round to the other side of the table, took a knife out of the drawer, cut off a piece of the cucumber, took a bite, put down the knife. “Please,” she said, “if you stare at me like that much longer, you’ll look like the pharmacist or that fellow Drönsch.”

  “Shut up,” he said. She looked at him in astonishment as he suddenly came over to her, grasped her by the shoulder; she brought her hand up over his arm and put the piece of cucumber in her mouth, and smiled. “Don’t you understand,” she said. “I was so happy.”

  He looked at the floor, let go her shoulder, went to the veranda, jumped onto the balustrade, and called out, “Give me a hand.” She laughed, ran over to him, put down the piece of cucumber, and held on to him with both hands, bracing herself against the wall while she slowly lowered him onto the roof of the summerhouse.

  “I bet someone has seen us,” he said.

  “Probably,” she said. “Can I let go?”

  “Not yet. When are you coming back from Vienna?”

  “Soon,” she said. “D’you want me to come soon?” He already had both feet on the roof and said, “You can let go now.” But she did not let go, she laughed. “I’ll come back. When d’you want me to come?”

  “When I can look at it again.”

  “That might be a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, looking at him thoughtfully. “First you looked as if you were dreaming, then all of a sudden you looked almost like the pharmacist; I don’t want you to look like that and commit mortal sins and be bound.”

  “Let go now,” he said, “or pull me up again.”

  She laughed, let go his hands, picked up the piece of cucumber from the balustrade, and bit into it.

  “I’ve got to shoot at something,” he said.