Billiards at Half-Past Nine

by Heinrich Böll

  “Why so shocked, child? They’re mine, and I can do what I want with them. Too late, and yet maybe not entirely. Let’s hope it’ll rain soon and the dirt will be washed down off the roof. A belated salute to my father’s memory. Down with the honor of our fathers and our grandfathers and our great-grandfathers.”

  I felt strong enough for the task, though I was not. I read the algebra of the future in my formulas, which resolved themselves into forms. Abbots and archbishops, generals and waiters, all belonged to my cast, my team, all played on my side. I alone was the featured player, even when, Friday evenings with the choir at the Germania Glee Club, I was singing: ‘What glitters there in forest sun?’ I sang it well, I had learned it from Father. But suppressed laughter lurked in my baritone phrasings. The conductor, as he beat time with his baton, never suspected he was obeying my baton. Meanwhile I was invited to social functions of an obligatory nature, offered assignments, laughingly slapped on the back. ‘Sociability, young fellow, it’s the spice of life.’ Gray-haired members of the club sourly inquired about my background and my prospects. But all I did was sing, from seven-thirty to ten, and not a minute longer. The legend had to be ready before the scandal broke. Cauliflower cannot be had.

  I roamed in thought up the Kissa Valley with my wife and children, and imagined how the youngsters would try to catch trout. We would stroll through vineyards and fields of wheat, through beetfields and patches of wooded land, drink beer and lemonade at Denklingen station. Yet in fact I knew I had handed in my design and received the receipt only an hour before. Loneliness still held me round like a giant lifebelt. I was still swimming in a sea of time, sinking with the swell into troughs, crossing oceans of past and present, pressing on, aways saved from going down by my solitude. Into the future’s icy cold I went, taking my laughter with me for iron rations, subsistence which I partook of only sparingly. Coming out of this reverie, I rubbed my eyes, drank a glass of water, ate a slice of bread and walked to the window, with my cigar. And there she was, strolling in the roof garden, visible every so often through a gap in the pergola as she looked down over the ledge to the street, where she saw what I was seeing, too: apprentices, trucks, nuns, life in the thoroughfare. She was twenty, her name was Johanna and she was reading Love and Intrigue. I knew her father, the Glee Club’s booming bass. His voice to me did not seem to go with his office air of dignity, it lacked the ring of discretion which was drummed into the apprentices. It was a voice that had in it the timbre of secret sins, the kind that give you the creeps. Was he already aware that I wanted to marry his only daughter? That we were exchanging a smile now and then on quiet afternoons? That I was already thinking ardent thoughts about her, as if we were legitimately engaged? She was pale, her hair was dark. I would have her wear dresses of willow green. Green would suit her well. I’d already picked out frocks and hats for her in Hermine Horuschka’s shop window during my afternoon walks, when, come rain, wind or sun, I passed the place at twenty to five. I would set her free from conventionality, the properness that was lacking in her father’s voice. I’d buy her marvelous hats, large as cartwheels, made of rough green straw. I had no desire to be her lord and master. I wanted to love her and I would not wait much longer. Some Sunday morning, armed with flowers, I would drive up in a carriage around half-past eleven, when they had finished eating breakfast after High Mass and were drinking brandy in the smoking room. I’ve come to ask for your daughter’s hand. Every afternoon, I let her see me, here at the studio window. I bowed, we exchanged a smile and I moved back again into shadow. And then moved forward again a little, to let her know she was still being watched. I couldn’t bring myself to lurk up here like a spider in his net. I couldn’t bear to see her without her seeing me; there were some things you just didn’t do.

  The next morning she would know who I was. Scandal. She would laugh, and a year later she’d be brushing dried mortar from my pants legs. She would still be doing it when I was forty, fifty, sixty. She would be a charming old lady at my side. I finally made my decision on September 30, 1907, at three-thirty in the afternoon.

  “Yes, Leonore, pay it for me. Take the money out of the cash box over there, and give the girl two marks for herself, yes, two marks. A pullover and skirt from Hermine Horuschka for my granddaughter Ruth, expecting her back today. Green suits her well. What a pity girls today don’t wear hats, I’ve always got such a kick out of buying hats. You’ve called for the taxi? Thank you, Leonore. Aren’t you ready to quit yet? Well, whenever you want. Of course it’s curiosity, too, a little, isn’t it? Don’t blush. Yes, I’d like another coffee. I should have found out when the holidays ended. But is Ruth back, do you think? My son hasn’t said anything? He won’t have forgotten the invitation to my birthday party, will he? I’ve left orders for the doorman downstairs to take flowers and telegrams, presents and cards, tip all the messengers two marks apiece and say I’ve left town. Pick out the prettiest bunch or two for yourself and take them home with you. And if you’d like, you’re welcome to spend the afternoon here.”

  This time the freshly filled cup of coffee did not tremble. Apparently they had stopped printing edification or election posters on white paper. In the kaleidoscope the scene was as always. Kilb’s roof garden across the way was deserted. The nasturtiums on the pergola were drooping. Outline of rooftops, with mountains in the background and, above, a brilliant sky. In this same kaleidoscope I saw my wife, later my children, and my parents-in-law, when, now and then, I went up to the studio, to peer over the shoulders of my hard-working young architectural assistants, to check their calculations, set their deadlines. Actual work meant no more to me than art. Others could do it just as well as I could, and I paid them well for it. I could never understand the fanatics who sacrificed themselves to what they called “art.” I did what I could for them, gave them work, but as for understanding them, I never could. Though I passed for an artist, and was admired as such, craftsmanship was all I knew. That villa I built for Gralduke, was it not daring, modern? It was, all right. Even my artistic colleagues admired and praised it. Yet I’d designed and built it without being conscious of art at all. Maybe they took it all too seriously because they knew so much about it. Yes they built horrible boxes which I knew, the minute I laid eyes on them, would be eyesores ten years later. Then every once in a while I’d roll up my sleeves and stand here in front of my drawing board and design an administration building for some public welfare society or other and make it so welfarish and public that I astonished the fools who took me for a money-grubbing, success-crazy hayseed. Why, even today I’m not ashamed of that administration building. Is that art? Perhaps I created the thing without knowing just what I was doing. Anyway, I never could take the word “art” seriously, any more than I did my three celebrated competitors, when they got so angry with me. Good God, why not make a little game of it? Do the Goliaths of the world always have to be so humorless? Well, they believed in art, and I didn’t, and they felt their honor had been smirched by an upstart. As far as that goes, we all have to make a start somewhere, don’t we? I just laughed in their faces. I’d jockeyed them into a position where I’d win even if I lost, and if I won, my victory would be a triumph.

  I almost felt sorry for them as we climbed the museum steps. I made sure I walked in the ceremonial way to which these touchy gentlemen had been so long accustomed. It was the way you walked when you went up cathedral steps behind queens and bishops, the pace at which monuments are unveiled, a measured intensity, not too slow, not too fast, fraught with a self-conscious dignity that just naturally wasn’t in me. If I’d had my way, I’d have raced up the stone steps like a puppy, past the statues of Roman legionaries, with their broken fasces, their swords and lances that might have been so many torches, past the statues of Caesars and the facsimiles of Roman children’s graves, to the first floor and the committee room, between the Low Countries and the Nazarene exhibits. All bourgeois gravity. There should have been a ruffle of drums somewhere in the background. Alta
r steps and scaffold steps were climbed that way, and tribunal steps, when you’re about to have a medal hung around your neck, or your death sentence pronounced. An amateur theatrical idea of ceremonial solemnity. But the gentlemen walking with me were no amateurs, not Brehmockel, Grumpeter and Wollersein.

  Museum attendants in full-dress uniform were standing self-consciously in front of the Rembrandts, the Van Dycks and Overbecks. And at the marble balustrade, in the darkness of the hallway before the committee room, there stood Meeser, holding the silver tray with glasses of cognac ready to pour us a drink before we were told the jury’s verdict. Meeser grinned at me. We hadn’t agreed on any sign, but mightn’t he do a little something along this line for me now? A nod, a shake of the head? Yes or no? But nothing was forthcoming. Brehmockel was whispering to Wollersein and Grumpeter had got to talking with Meeser. Now he pressed a silver coin into Meeser’s thick hand, a hand which I’d hated even as a child. I’d served early Mass with him for a year. With him I’d listened to the mutterings of old peasant women in the background, stubbornly praying over their rosaries in response to the liturgy. Smell of hay, milk and stable warmth, while Meeser and I bowed our heads in unison, allowing the guilt of unspoken sins to beat at our breasts during the mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. And when the priest mounted the altar steps, Meeser’s hand, the same hand now tightly clutching Wollersein’s silver coin, would make an obscene gesture. And into this same hand were now entrusted the keys to the city museum, to Holbein and Hals, Lochner and Leibl.

  None of them said a word to me. They left me leaning on the balustrade, left me to the cold marble. I looked down into the inner courtyard where a bronze burgomaster, inflexibly self-important, held out his belly to the centuries, where a marble Maecenas held eyelids lowered over froggy eyes, in a vain attempt to appear profound. Empty the statues’ eyes like the eyes of marble-cold Roman women whose voyeurist parties reflected the passions of a dying culture. Meeser shuffled over to his friends, Brehmockel, Grumpeter and Wollersein, the three standing together in a huddle. The December sky was clear and cold above the courtyard. Outside, early evening drunks were bawling at each other, cabs were rolling toward the theaters, behind mignonette-green veils, gentle-faced women were looking forward to La Traviata. I stood there like a leper whose touch spells death, between Meeser and the three offended gentlemen, longing for my strict daily routine, where I alone was puppeteer, and alone decided what should exist, what should not, and the while propagated my legend. Here I was no longer running the show. Now all was becoming scandal, rumor. An abbot in my studio. Building contractors sending me hampers of food, gold watches in red velvet cases. One writing to me: ‘… and rest assured I would not refuse you my daughter’s hand.’ Their right hand is full of bribes.

  I would accept none of these things, not as much as a single brick. I like the Abbot very much. Had I really, just for a fleeting instant, thought of using Domgreve’s trick on him? I went red with shame at the very thought, for toying with the idea even for a second. I loved Kilb’s daughter, Johanna, and I loved the Abbot. By rights I should have taken a cab to Johanna’s house, got there about eleven-thirty, presented my bouquet of flowers and said, ‘I’ve come to ask for your daughter’s hand.’ In which case Johanna would have come out and joined us, her eyes twinkling, and not merely breathing her yes of consent, but saying it right out. I was still taking my walk from five till six, still singing Fridays at the Glee Club, still playing billiards in the Reserve Officers Club, though the twinkle in Johanna’s eyes (as I imagined it) encouraged me to draw more recklessly on my stores of laughter.

  Slowly I slid along the cold marble balustrade toward the three offended ones, and put my empty cognac glass back on the tray. Would they retreat from the leper? They did not give way before me. Were they expecting some sort of humble gambit on my part? ‘May I introduce myself? I’m Faehmel.’ Good God, didn’t everyone have to make a start somewhere? Hadn’t Grumpeter, as a young Swiss, milked cows for the Count of Telm and spread cow manure over the fragrant earth, before he discovered his architectural vocation? Leprosy, too, was curable, curable on the shores of Lago Maggiore, in the Monusio Gardens. Even the leprosy of respectable building contractors, was it not curable? Contractors who bought up Romanesque churches to tear down for salvage, together with their respective contents, their pews and ancient madonnas, and who then, with these same respective contents, decorated the salons of the newly rich and the landed gentry; who sold confessional boxes in which humble peasants had whispered their sins for three hundred years for use in a whore’s parlor. In hunting lodges, in Bad Ems, leprosy was indeed curable.

  The deadly earnest faces of the offended ones stiffened as the committee-room door opened. An indistinct dark form took on shape and color. Members of the jury were stepping into the hall. Hubrich, professor of the history of art at the Theological Faculty. Only over my dead body. In this light, and in his black robe, he looked like a city councillor in a Rembrandt painting. Hubrich went to the tray, took a glass of cognac. I heard him heave a heavy sigh. Sweeping past the three offended gentlemen, who tried to crowd up to him, he moved away toward the end of the hall. The severity of his priestly garb was tempered by a white scarf. The blond locks falling like a child’s over his collar heightened the impression which Hubrich deliberately tried to create. That is, of looking like an artist. He could be imagined with his wood-carver’s burin bent over a block of wood, or with a delicate paintbrush dipped in gilt, humbly at work painting the hair of a madonna, or prophets’ beards, or adding a droll twist to the tail of Tobias’ little doggy. Softly Hubrich’s feet glided over the linoleum. Wearily he nodded to the three offended ones, and then proceeded through the gloom of the hall toward Rembrandt and Van Dyck. On these narrow shoulders rested the responsibility for churches, hospitals and homes in which for many centuries to come nuns and widows, orphans and charity patients, fallen women and the mentally defective would all have to suffer the kitchen stink of generations long gone. Gloomy halls and cheerless facades which heavy mosaics made even more cheerless than the architect’s design had contemplated. There he went, the preceptor and arbiter architecturae ecclesiasticae, a man who, with pathetic zeal and the conceit of blind conviction, had been pleading the cause of Neo-Gothic for forty years. When still a schoolboy, trotting home through the desolate suburbs of his industrial home town, taking with him his schoolboy honors, and en route observing the smoking chimney stacks and the blackened house fronts, he must have made up his mind then and there to make people happy, and leave a mark behind on this earth. This he would do, a reddish mark, of brick façades growing ever sadder with the passage of the years, in their niches morose saints staring at the future with implacable dejection.

  Meeser was dutifully holding out the tray now to the second member of the jury, cognac for Krohl. Jovial, claret-colored face. A cigar-smoker. Meat-gorger who’d stayed slim. Irreplaceable master builder of St. Severin’s. Pigeon droppings, engine steam, chemically poisoned clouds from the eastern suburbs, biting wet winds from the western suburbs, southern sun, northern cold, all natural and industrial atmospheric forces guaranteed him and his successors a lifetime in office. Being forty-five years old, he still had twenty more years for the things he really loved: eating, drinking, cigars, horses and women, the special kind you run into near stables, or on fox hunts—hard-limbed Amazons with a mannish smell. I had studied my adversary. Krohl hid his absolute indifference toward architectural problems behind an exquisite, almost Chinese politeness, an air of piety picked up from bishops. Krohl’s movements brought to mind memorial dedications. He also knew a couple of very good jokes, which he gave different inflections, always in a certain order of succession. And since he had learned Handke’s Handbook of Architecture by heart as a twenty-two-year-old, and at that time decided to make the most of this effort the rest of his life, when he needed a few architectural references he always cited ‘the immortal Handke.’ At plan-judging sessions he pleaded shamelessl
y for the project whose author had given him the biggest bribe, but switched to the favorite as soon as he saw his man had no chance. For he preferred saying ‘Ja’ to ‘Nein,’ on the grounds that a Ja has only two letters whereas a Nein has four, and beyond this the terrific disadvantage of not being pronounceable with tongue and palate alone, but of requiring a displacement backward almost to the roots of the nose. Moreover, a Nein had to be uttered with an expression of firmness, whereas a Ja required no such effort. So then, Krohl sighed, too, and likewise shook his head, avoided the three aggrieved ones, and went to the corner of the corridor where the Nazarenes were.

  For a second only the table with the green felt top was visible in the rectangle of light made by the frame of the door, and on it a carafe, ash trays and clouds of blue smoke from Krohl’s cigar above. Stillness within, not even a whisper audible. Death sentences hung in the air. For Hubrich it was a question of honor or shame, and the latter he had vowed as a dogged fifth-former never to have come on his head. A question of the dreadful humiliation of having to admit to the Archbishop that he had failed. ‘Well, how about the corpse, Hubrich?’ that humorous prince of the church would say. ‘Where shall we bury you?’ As for Krohl, for him it was a matter of a villa on Lake Como promised to him by Brehmockel.

  A murmur arose among the rows of attendants and Meeser hissed for silence. Schwebringer came out the door, a small man, as slightly built as myself, and not only supposed to be incorruptible, but actually so. He had on threadbare breeches, darned stockings. His close-cropped head was darkish, a smile in his Corinthian eyes. Schwebringer represented Money; he controlled the funds which had built the Nation. He stood for the industrialists and the king, also for the shopkeeper’s assistant who had contributed a ten-pfennig piece and the little old lady who had given thirty pfennigs. Schwebringer would make credit available, check over the bills, with a sour look on his face okay advances. He was a convert and the baroque was his secret architectural passion. He loved hovering angels, gilded choir stalls, curved prayer stools, whitely lacquered pulpits, incense and the singing of boy choirs. Schwebringer was power. Bank syndicates belonged to him as surely as the railroad crossing gate to its tender. He regulated rates of exchange, ran steel mills. With his hard, dark Corinthian eyes he looked as if he had tried all the laxatives on the market without finding one that worked, as if he were waiting for someone to come along and invent a true and really helpful means of jarring his bowels loose. He took the cognac without leaving a tip on the tray. There he stood, only a couple of steps away, for all the world like a professional cyclist down on his luck, with his breeches, his darned stockings. Then suddenly he glanced my way, smiled, put down his empty cognac glass, and went to the Dutch corner, whither Hubrich had also vanished. Nor did he, Schwebringer, deign to say a word to the three aggrieved ones.