Billiards at Half-Past Nine

by Heinrich Böll

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Monday or Tuesday you’ll be in Rotterdam. Now what is it? What’s the matter?’

  Nothing. Nothing. The all-points bulletin was still out: red scar on bridge of nose. The father, the mother, Edith—I felt no desire to calculate the differential of their kindnesses, to count off the rosary of my pain. The river was bright and cheerful, with white excursion boats flying gaily colored pennants, freight carriers painted red, green and blue, carrying coal and wood back and forth, from here to there. On the other side of the river ran the green boulevard, the terrace outside the Cafe Bellevue was snow-white. Beyond, the tower of St. Severin’s, the sharp red light running up the corner of the Prince Heinrich Hotel, and my parents’ house only a hundred steps more. They would be sitting down to dinner now, a full-dress meal with my father presiding over it like a patriarch. Saturday, celebrated with sabbatical formality. Was the red wine too cool? The white cool enough?

  ‘More milk, young man?’

  ‘No thanks, Frau Trischler, really.…’

  … The men on motorcycles went racing through the city from billboard to billboard with their red-bordered bulletins: ‘Execution! The Student, Robert Faehmel.…’ Father would be saying a prayer at the supper table: He who has been scourged for us. Mother’s hand would describe a pattern of humility at her breast, before saying: ‘It’s a wicked world, not many are pure in heart.’ And Otto’s resonant heels would be beating out brother, brother, on the floor of our house, on the flagstones outside, on down the street to the Modest Gate.…

  That hooting outside was the Stilte, the clear notes cutting into the evening sky, white lightning furrows in dark blue. Now I was stretched out on a tarpaulin, like someone being prepared for burial at sea. Alois lifted up one side of the canvas to wrap me in, and, woven white on gray, I could clearly read: ‘Morrien. Ijmuiden.’ Frau Trischler bent over me, weeping, and kissed me, and Alois slowly rolled me in as if I were a particularly valuable corpse, and took me up in his arms.

  ‘Boy!’ the old man called after me, ‘don’t forget us, boy!’

  Evening breeze, the Stilte giving another hoot of friendly warning. The sheep were bleating in their pen, the ice cream man was shouting ‘Ice cream, ice cream!’ then stopped, which no doubt meant he was filling crumbly cones with vanilla ice cream. The plank swayed when Alois carried me aboard. A low voice asked, ‘Is that him?’ and Alois answered, in the same low way, ‘It’s him.’ Leaving, he murmured to me, ‘Remember, by Tuesday night you’ll be in the harbor of Rotterdam.’ Other arms carried me below decks down a companionway. It smelled below first of oil, then of coal, and finally of wood, the hooting now seemed far away, the Stilte shuddered, a deep rumbling sound grew stronger. I could feel we were moving, on down the Rhine, always farther away from St. Severin’s.”

  St. Severin’s shadow had drawn nearer. Already it filled the left-hand billiard room window, and was closing in on the one to the right. Pushed forward by the sun, time drew closer like a threat, filling up the great clock which would soon spew it out in terrible chimes. The billiard balls rolled on, white-green, red-green. Years were cut into pieces, seconds, seconds drawn out into eternities by the clock’s calm voice. If only he wouldn’t have to fetch more cognac, anticipate calendar and clock, put up with the sheep-lady and a thing like that should never have been born. Better just to hear the Feed my lambs saying again, hear about the woman who had lain in the grass in the summer rain, about the boats coming to anchor, the women walking up gangways, the ball that Robert hit, Robert who had never taken the Host of the Beast, who played on wordlessly, always making new patterns with cue and ball on two square meters of green table.

  “How about you, Hugo?” he quietly said. “Aren’t you going to tell me any stories today?”

  “I don’t know how long it went on, but it seemed forever to me. Every day, after school, they beat me up. Sometimes I stayed put until I was sure they’d all gone home to eat, until the cleaning woman arrived, down in the hallway where I was waiting, and asked me, ‘Why are you still hanging around, boy? Your mother must be looking for you.’

  But I was afraid, I even used to wait until the cleaning woman had gone, and get myself locked in the school. I didn’t always get away with it; most of the time the cleaning woman threw me out before she locked up. But when I managed to get locked in, I was glad. Then I scrounged food in the desks and garbage pails which the cleaning woman had put out in the hall for the collector, plenty of sandwiches, apples and leftover cake. That way I was all alone in the school and they couldn’t do anything to me. I hid in the teachers’ clothes closet behind the cellar stairwell, because I was afraid they might look in through the window and find me. But it was a long time before they found out how I used to hide out in the school. I squatted there often for hours, waiting until it was nighttime and I could open a window and get out. Lots of times I would just stare and stare at the empty schoolyard. Can anything be emptier than a schoolyard, late in the afternoon? It was fun, until they discovered how I was getting myself locked in the school. I scrunched up there in the teachers’ closet or underneath the window ledge and waited to see if I could feel something I only knew by name—hatred. I wanted to hate them real bad, Doctor, but I couldn’t. I was just plain afraid. Some days I waited only till three or four o’clock, thinking they’d be all gone by then and I might run across the street quick, past Meid’s stable, round the churchyard and then home, where I could lock myself in. But they took turns going home to eat—that was one thing they couldn’t do, go without food—and when they jumped me I could smell what they’d been eating, even before they got real close, potatoes and gravy, roast meat, ham and cabbage. And while they were working me over I used to think, why did Christ die, anyway? What good did it ever do me? What do I care if they pray every morning, take Communion every Sunday and hang a big crucifix in the kitchen, over the tables where they eat their potatoes and gravy, roast meat, ham and cabbage? Nothing, that’s how much I care. What’s it all amount to, if they lie in wait every day and beat me up? It’s been going on like this for five or six hundred years. Yet they’re always shooting off about how old their church is, and they’ve been burying their ancestors in the churchyard for a thousand years, for a thousand years they’ve been praying and then eating potatoes and gravy, and ham and cabbage with the Crucifix on the wall. So what? You know what they used to holler at me when they were beating me up? God’s little lamb. That was my nickname.”

  Red-green, white-green, from the billiard balls new figurations emerged like so many signals. Then were swiftly scattered. Leaving naught behind. Music with no melody, painting without likeness, quadrilaterals, rectangles, rhombs, endlessly multiplied. Clicking billiard balls caroming from green cushions.

  “And later I tried another way. I locked the door at home, piled furniture in front of it, whatever I could find, boxes, mattresses, odds and ends. Until they told the police, who came to get the boy who was playing hookey. They surrounded the house and hollered, ‘Come out of there, you devil.’ But I wouldn’t come out and so they broke the door down, shoved the furniture to one side and then they had me. They took me off to school, to be thrashed again, pushed into the gutter again and again made fun of with that God’s little lamb. Feed my lambs—but I was one lamb they didn’t feed, if I ever was His to begin with. No use, Doctor. The wind blows, the snow falls, the trees turn green, the leaves fall—they go right on eating potatoes and gravy, ham and cabbage.

  Then, of course, sometimes my mother was at home, drunk and dirty, smelling of death, giving off the stink of decay, screaming, ‘whywhywhy!’ She yelled it more times than all the Lord have mercy on us’es in all the priest’s prayers put together. Used to drive me crazy when she hollered ‘whywhywhy’ like that for hours at a time. I ran away in the rain, a God’s little lamb soaked to the skin, hungry, mud sticking to my shoes, all over me. I got plastered with wet mud from head to toe, hiding down there in the beetfields. But I’d
rather be down in the mucky beet rows, letting the rain pour on me, than listen to that awful whywhywhy. Then, sooner or later, someone or other would take pity on me and bring me back home, or back to school, back to that hole called Denklingen. So then they walloped me again and called me God’s little lamb, and my mother kept on with her whywhywhy rosary, so I ran away again, and again someone took pity on me, and this time they took me to a child-welfare center. No one knew me there, none of the kids and none of the grown-ups, but I hadn’t been two days in the center before they were calling me God’s little lamb the same as before, and I was afraid, even though they didn’t beat me. They laughed at me, because there were so many words I didn’t know. The word ‘breakfast,’ for instance. All I knew was ‘eat’—whenever anything was there, whenever I found anything. But when I looked at the bulletin board and saw ‘Breakfast: butter, 30 grams; bread, 200 grams; marmalade, 50 grams; coffee and milk,’ I asked someone ‘What’s breakfast?’ They all surrounded me, the grown-ups, too, laughing and saying, ‘Don’t you know what breakfast is? You’ve never had breakfast?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘How about the Bible,’ one of the grown-ups said, ‘haven’t you ever read the word breakfast there?’ And then the other grown-up said to him, ‘Are you sure the word breakfast’s in the Bible?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘but somewhere, in some reading or other, or at home, he must have heard the word breakfast at least once. After all, pretty soon he’ll be thirteen, and savages aren’t that bad, it just goes to show how poorly people speak today.’ I didn’t know, either, there’d been a war a little while before, and they asked me if I’d ever been in a cemetery where it said ‘Fallen’ on the gravestones, the way we Germans say it when we mean ‘Killed in Battle.’ I told them, yes, I’d seen ‘Fallen.’ Then what did I think ‘Fallen’ meant? I said I imagined that the people buried there had died from falling down. That made them laugh louder than they had at ‘breakfast.’ Then they gave us history lessons, from the earliest times on down, but soon I was fourteen, Doctor, and the hotel manager came to the center and we—all of the fourteen-year-olds—had to line up in the hall outside the rector’s office, and the rector came out with the hotel manager. They walked past us, looking us over, and then both said, as if they had only one mouth between them, ‘We’re looking for some boys to go into hotel service. We need boys who will know how to serve.’ But the only one they picked was me. I had to put my things in a box right away. Then I came up here with the manager, and in the car he said to me, ‘All I hope is you never find out how much your looks are worth. You’re the purest God’s little lamb I ever laid eyes on, that’s for a fact.’ I was afraid, Doctor. I still am. I’m always thinking they’re going to beat me.”

  “Do they beat you?”

  “No, never. But what I’d like to know is what that war was like. I had to leave school before they could tell me about it. Do you know about the war?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you in it?”

  “I was.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I was a demolition expert, Hugo. That mean anything to you?”

  “Demolition?”

  “Blowing things up.”

  “Yes, I’ve seen them blowing up rocks in the quarry behind Denklingen.”

  “That’s exactly what I did, Hugo, only I didn’t blow up rocks, I blew up houses and churches. You’re the first one I ever mentioned it to, except my wife, but she died a long time ago, so no one knows but you, not even my parents or my children. I’m an architect, as you know, and by rights I should be putting houses up. But I’ve never put any up, only blown them down. And the same goes for churches, too, which I used to draw on nice soft drawing paper when I was a boy, always dreaming that some day I’d build real ones like them. But I never did build any. When I went into the army, in my record they found a reference to a doctoral thesis I’d written on a problem in statics. Statics, Hugo, is the study of the equilibrium of forces, of stress and strain in supporting structures. Without statics you can’t even build an African hut. And the opposite of statics is dynamics. Sounds like dynamite, the way it’s used in demolition, and matter of fact it is tied in with dynamite. For the rest of the war I was all dynamite. I know a little something about statics, Hugo, and something about dynamics, too. But about dynamite I know a whole lot. I’ve read every book on it in existence from cover to cover. If you want to smash something, all you need is know where to place the charge and how strong it has to be. I happened to know that, boy, so I demolished. I blew up bridges and apartment blocks, churches and railroad bridges, villas and crossroads. They gave me medals for doing it. I was promoted from second lieutenant to first, from that to captain, and they gave me special leave and citations because I knew how to destroy things so well. By the end of the war I was attached to a general who had only one thought in his head: ‘Field of fire.’ Do you know what a field of fire is? You don’t?”

  Faehmel put the billiard cue to his shoulder like a rifle and aimed out through the window at St. Severin’s tower.

  “Look,” he said. “If I wanted to fire at the bridge, over there behind St. Severin’s, the church would be lying in my field of fire. So, St. Severin’s would have to be demolished, here, now, right off the bat. And, believe me, Hugo, I’d have blown St. Severin’s to smithereens, even though I knew my general was crazy as a two-cent watch, even though I knew that ‘field of fire’ was complete nonsense. Why was it nonsense? If you’re up in the air, you understand, you don’t need a field of fire. And even the simplest general must have realized somewhere along the line that the airplane had been invented. But my general was off his rocker and the only idea in his one-track mind was ‘field of fire.’ Therefore, I gave him a field of fire. I had a good team working with me, physicists and architects, and whatever stood in our way we demolished. Our last job was something really big, something colossal, an entire system of huge and very solid buildings. A church, stables, monks’ cells, an administration block, a whole farmstead. An entire abbey, Hugo. It lay exactly between two armies, one German, the other American. I provided the German army with a field of fire, even though to tell the truth it needed one like a hole in the head. Out there ahead of me the walls went toppling down. The animals bellowed in the stables and the barns, the monks cursed me out. But nothing would stop me. I blew up the whole of St. Anthony’s Abbey in Kissa Valley, just three days before the war ended. Very carefully and correctly. You know me, my boy—always just so!”

  He lowered his cue, which he had been holding all along zeroed in on an imaginary target, returned it to a crooked finger and struck the cue ball. Whitely it rolled over green, and bounced in a wild zigzag from one green cushion to another.

  St. Severin’s muffled bells gave out the time. But when, when did eleven strike?

  “Boy, go and see what all that commotion is at the door.”

  He played another ball. Red-green. Letting the balls come to rest, he put his cue down.

  “The manager would like to know if you’d be so kind as to speak with a Dr. Nettlinger?”

  “How about you? Would you speak with a Dr. Nettlinger?”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “Show me how to get out of here without using that door.”

  “You can go through the dining room, Doctor, then you’ll come out onto Modest Street.”

  “Goodbye, Hugo. See you tomorrow.”

  “Goodbye, Doctor.”

  They were setting the tables for lunch, a ballet of waiters, a ballet of busboys, pushing tea wagons from table to table in a precisely determined order, laying out silver, changing vases of flowers. White carnations in slender vases were replaced by modest violets in round ones, marmalade dishes by wine glasses, round for red wine, slender for white. Only exception was the sheep-lady’s milk, which in the crystal carafe looked gray.

  Faehmel threaded his way among the tables with a light step. Pushing aside the violet curtain, he went down the stairs and presently was standing across the way from the tower o
f St. Severin’s.

  4

  Leonore’s step soothed him. Carefully she went about the studio, opened cupboard doors, lifted lids of chests, untied packages, unrolled drawings. She seldom came to the window where he was to disturb him, only if the document had no date, the plan no name. He had always liked order, but never lived up to it. Leonore, she would take care of that for him. She was laying out piles of plans and papers, letters and old accounts, on the floor of the big studio, according to date. After fifty years the floor, as she worked, still shook from the heavy stamping of the presses below. 1907, ’08, ’09, ’10—the stacks of material were visibly getting bigger with the century’s advance. 1909 was bigger than 1908, 1910 than 1909. Leonore was laying bare the curve of his life’s activities, trained as she was in precision.

  “Yes,” he said, “just ask me whenever you want, child. That one? That’s the hospital in Weidenhammer. Built it in 1924, dedicated in September.” In her neat handwriting she wrote “1924–9” on the margin of the plan.

  The stacks from the 1914–1918 war years were meager: three, four plans; a country house for the general, a hunting lodge for the lord mayor, a St. Sebastian chapel for the Rifle Club. Furlough assignments, costing precious days. To get to see his children he had built castles for the generals free of charge.

  “No, Leonore, that one was in 1935. A Franciscan convent. Modern? Of course I’ve built modern things, too.”

  The view framed by the big studio window had always seemed like a kaleidoscope to him. The sky changed color, the trees in the courtyard went from gray to black to green, the flowers in the roof gardens bloomed and turned sere. Children played on the leaded sheet-metal roofs, grew up, had children themselves, whereupon their parents became grandparents. Only the profile of the roofs remained constant, that and the bridge, the mountains visible on the horizon on clear days. That is, remained constant until the second war altered the line of the roofs, tearing out gaps through which on sunny days the silvery Rhine could be seen, on days of overcast the gray Rhine, and beyond, in the Old Harbor, the drawbridge. But now these gaps had long since been filled in, and again children played on the metaled roofs, and his granddaughter crossed the Kilbs’ roof, schoolbooks in her hand, as fifty years before his wife had done. Or had his wife, Johanna, gone there on sunny afternoons to read Schiller’s Love and Intrigue?