“Balek von Bilgan, if you please,” said Gertrud.
“All right, Frau Balek von Bilgan,” but Gertrud only laughed at him, and he walked back to the village in the dark, took the Cechs, the Weidlers, and the Vohlas their coffee, and said he had to go and see the priest.
Instead he went out into the dark night with his five pebbles in his kerchief. He had to walk a long way before he found someone who had scales, who was permitted to have them; no one in the villages of Blaugau and Bernau had any, he knew that, and he went straight through them till, after two hours’ walking, he reached the little town of Dielheim, where Honig the apothecary lived. From Honig’s house came the smell of fresh pancakes, and Honig’s breath, when he opened the door to the half-frozen boy, already smelled of punch, there was a moist cigar between his narrow lips, and he clasped the boy’s cold hands firmly for a moment, saying, “What’s the matter, has your father’s lung got worse?”
“No, I haven’t come for medicine, I wanted …” My grandfather undid his kerchief, took out the five pebbles, held them out to Honig, and said, “I wanted to have these weighed.” He glanced anxiously into Honig’s face, but when Honig said nothing and did not get angry, or even ask him anything, my grandfather said, “It is the amount that is short of justice,” and now, as he went into the warm room, my grandfather realized how wet his feet were. The snow had soaked through his cheap shoes, and in the forest the branches had showered him with snow which was now melting, and he was tired and hungry and suddenly began to cry because he thought of the quantities of mushrooms, the herbs, the flowers, which had been weighed on the scales that were short five pebbles’ worth of justice. And when Honig, shaking his head and holding the five pebbles, called his wife, my grandfather thought of the generations of his parents, his grandparents, who had all had to have their mushrooms, their flowers, weighed on the scales, and he was overwhelmed by a great wave of injustice, and began to sob louder than ever, and, without waiting to be asked, he sat down on a chair, ignoring the pancakes, the cup of hot coffee which nice plump Frau Honig put in front of him, and did not stop crying till Honig himself came out from the shop at the back and, rattling the pebbles in his hand, said in a low voice to his wife, “Two ounces, exactly.”
My grandfather walked the two hours home through the forest, got a beating at home, said nothing, not a single word, when he was asked about the coffee, spent the whole evening doing sums on the piece of paper on which he had written down everything he had sold to Frau Balek, and when midnight struck, and the cannon could be heard from the château, and the whole village rang with shouting and laughter and the noise of rattles, when the family kissed and embraced all round, he said into the New Year silence, “The Baleks owe me eighteen marks and thirty-two pfennigs.” And again he thought of all the children there were in the village, of his brother Fritz, who had gathered so many mushrooms, of his sister Ludmilla; he thought of the many hundreds of children who had all gathered mushrooms for the Baleks, and herbs and flowers, and this time he did not cry but told his parents and brothers and sisters of his discovery.
When the Baleks von Bilgan went to High Mass on New Year’s Day, their new coat-of-arms—a giant crouching under a fir tree—already emblazoned in blue and gold on their carriage, they saw the hard, pale faces of the people all staring at them. They had expected garlands in the village, a song in their honor, cheers and hurrahs, but the village was completely deserted as they drove through it, and in church the pale faces of the people were turned toward them, mute and hostile, and when the priest mounted the pulpit to deliver his New Year’s sermon, he sensed the chill in those otherwise quiet and peaceful faces, and he stumbled painfully through his sermon and went back to the altar drenched in sweat. And as the Baleks von Bilgan left the church after Mass, they walked through a lane of mute, pale faces. But young Frau Balek von Bilgan stopped in front of the children’s pews, sought out my grandfather’s face, pale little Franz Brücher, and asked him, right there in the church, “Why didn’t you take the coffee for your mother?” And my grandfather stood up and said, “Because you owe me as much money as five pounds of coffee would cost.” And he pulled the five pebbles from his pocket, held them out to the young woman, and said, “This much, two ounces, is short in every pound of your justice”; and before the woman could say anything the men and women in the church lifted up their voices and sang: “The justice of this earth, O Lord, hath put Thee to death …”
While the Baleks were at church, Wilhelm Vohla, the poacher, had broken into the little room, stolen the scales and the big fat leather-bound book in which had been entered every pound of mushrooms, every pound of hayflowers, everything bought by the Baleks in the village, and all afternoon of that New Year’s Day the men of the village sat in my great-grandparents’ front room and calculated, calculated one-eighth of everything that had been bought—but when they had calculated many thousands of talers and had still not come to an end, the reeve’s gendarmes arrived, made their way into my great-grandfather’s front room, shooting and stabbing as they came, and removed the scales and the book by force. My grandfather’s little sister Ludmilla lost her life, a few men were wounded, and one of the gendarmes was stabbed to death by Wilhelm Vohla the poacher.
Our village was not the only one to rebel: Blaugau and Bernau did too, and for almost a week no work was done in the flax sheds. But a great many gendarmes appeared, and the men and women were threatened with prison, and the Baleks forced the priest to display the scales publicly in the school and demonstrate that the finger of justice swung to and fro accurately. And the men and women went back to the flax sheds—but no one went to the school to watch the priest: he stood there all alone, helpless and forlorn with his weights, scales, and packages of coffee.
And the children went back to gathering mushrooms, to gathering thyme, flowers, and foxglove; but every Sunday, as soon as the Baleks entered the church, the hymn was struck up: “The justice of this earth, O Lord, hath put Thee to death,” until the reeve ordered it proclaimed in every village that the singing of this hymn was forbidden.
My grandfather’s parents had to leave the village, and the new grave of their little daughter; they became basket weavers, but did not stay long anywhere because it pained them to see how everywhere the finger of justice swung falsely. They walked along behind their cart, which crept slowly over the country roads, taking their thin goat with them, and passers-by could sometimes hear a voice from the cart singing, “The justice of this earth, O Lord, hath put Thee to death.” And those who wanted to listen could hear the tale of the Baleks von Bilgan, whose justice lacked an eighth part. But there were few who listened.
MY UNCLE FRED
My Uncle Fred is the only person who makes my memories of the years after 1945 bearable. He came home from the war one summer afternoon, in nondescript clothes, wearing his sole possession, a tin can, on a string around his neck, and supporting the trifling weight of a few cigarette butts which he had carefully saved in a little box. He embraced my mother, kissed my sister and me, mumbled something about “Bread, sleep, tobacco,” and curled himself up on our family sofa, so that I remember him as being a man who was considerably longer than our sofa, a fact which obliged him either to keep his legs drawn up or to let them simply hang over the end. Both alternatives moved him to rail bitterly against our grandparents’ generation, to which we owed the acquisition of this valuable piece of furniture. He called these worthy people stuffy, constipated owls, despised their taste for the bilious pink of the upholstery, but let none of this stop him from indulging in frequent and prolonged sleep.
I for my part was performing a thankless task in our blameless family: I was fourteen at the time, and the sole contact with that memorable institution which we called the black market. My father had been killed in the war, my mother received a tiny pension, with the result that I had the almost daily job of peddling scraps of salvaged belongings or swapping them for bread, coal, and tobacco. In those days coal was th
e cause of considerable violation of property rights, which today we would have to bluntly call stealing. So most days saw me going out to steal or peddle, and my mother, though she realized the need for these disreputable doings, always had tears in her eyes as she watched me go off about my complicated affairs. It was my responsibility, for instance, to turn a pillow into bread, a Dresden cup into a semolina, or three volumes of Gustav Freytag into two ounces of coffee, tasks to which I devoted myself with a certain amount of sporting enthusiasm but not entirely without a sense of humiliation and fear. For values—which is what grown-ups called them at the time—had shifted substantially, and now and then I was exposed to the unfounded suspicion of dishonesty because the value of a peddled article did not correspond in the least to the one my mother thought appropriate. It was, I must say, no pleasant task to act as broker between two different worlds of values, worlds which since then seem to have converged.
Uncle Fred’s arrival led us all to expect some stalwart masculine aid. But he began by disappointing us. From the very first day I was seriously worried about his appetite, and when I made no bones about telling my mother this, she suggested I let him “find his feet.” It took almost eight weeks for him to find his feet. Despite his abuse of the unsatisfactory sofa, he slept there without much trouble and spent the day dozing or describing to us in a martyred voice what position he preferred to sleep in.
I think his favorite position was that of a sprinter just before the start. He loved to lie on his back after lunch, his legs drawn up, voluptuously crumbling a large piece of bread into his mouth, and then roll himself a cigarette and sleep away the day till suppertime. He was a very tall, pale man, and there was a circular scar on his chin which gave his face somewhat the look of a damaged marble statue. Although his appetite for food and sleep continued to worry me, I liked him very much. He was the only one with whom I could at least theorize about the black market without getting into an argument. He obviously knew all about the conflict between the two worlds of values.
Although we urged him to talk to us about the war, he never did; he said it wasn’t worth discussing. The only thing he would do sometimes was tell us about his induction, which seemed to have consisted chiefly of a person in uniform ordering Uncle Fred in a loud voice to urinate into a test tube, an order with which Uncle Fred was not immediately able to comply, the result being that his military career was doomed from the start. He maintained that the German Reich’s keen interest in his urine had filled him with considerable distrust, a distrust which he found ominously confirmed during six years of war.
He had been a bookkeeper before the war, and when the first four weeks on our sofa had gone by, my mother suggested in her gentle sisterly way that he make inquiries about his old firm. He warily passed this suggestion on to me, but all I could discover was a pile of rubble about twenty feet high, which I located in a ruined part of the city after an hour’s laborious pilgrimage. Uncle Fred was much reassured by my news.
He leaned back in his chair, rolled himself a cigarette, nodded triumphantly toward my mother, and asked her to get out his old things. In one corner of our bedroom there was a carefully nailed-down crate, which we opened with hammer and pliers amid much speculation. Out of it came: twenty novels of medium size and mediocre quality, a gold pocket watch, dusty but undamaged, two pairs of suspenders, some notebooks, his Chamber of Commerce diploma, and a savings book showing a balance of twelve hundred marks. The savings book was given to me to collect the money, as well as the rest of the stuff to be peddled, including the Chamber of Commerce diploma—although this found no takers, Uncle Fred’s name being inscribed on it in black India ink.
This meant that for the next four weeks we were free from worry about bread, tobacco, and coal, which was a great relief to me, especially as all the schools opened wide their doors again and I was required to complete my education.
To this day, long after my education has been completed, I have fond memories of the soups we used to get, mainly because we obtained these supplementary meals almost without a struggle, and they therefore lent a happy and contemporary note to the whole educational system.
But the outstanding event during this period was the fact that Uncle Fred finally took the initiative a good eight weeks after his safe return.
One morning in late summer he rose from his sofa, shaved so meticulously that we became apprehensive, asked for some clean underwear, borrowed my bicycle, and disappeared.
His return late that night was accompanied by a great deal of noise and a penetrating smell of wine; the smell of wine emanated from my uncle’s mouth, the noise was traceable to half a dozen galvanized buckets which he had tied together with some stout rope. Our confusion did not subside till we discovered he had decided to revive the flower trade in our ravaged town. My mother, full of suspicion toward the new world of values, scorned the idea, claiming that no one would want to buy flowers. But she was wrong.
It was a memorable morning when we helped Uncle Fred take the freshly filled buckets to the streetcar stop where he set himself up in business. And I still vividly remember the sight of those red and yellow tulips, the moist carnations; nor shall I ever forget how impressive he looked as he stood there in the midst of the gray figures and piles of rubble and started calling out, “Flowers, fresh flowers—no coupons required!” I don’t have to describe how his business flourished: it was a meteoric success. In a matter of four weeks he owned three dozen galvanized buckets, was the proprietor of two branches, and a month later he was paying taxes. The whole town wore a different air to me: flower stalls appeared at one street corner after another, it was impossible to keep pace with the demand; more and more buckets were procured, booths were set up, and handcarts hastily thrown together.
At any rate, we were kept supplied not only with fresh flowers but with bread and coal, and I was able to retire from the brokerage business, a fact which helped greatly to improve my moral standards. For many years now, Uncle Fred has been a man of substance: his branches are still thriving, he owns a car, he looks on me as his heir, and I have been told to study commerce so I can look after the tax end of the business even before I enter on my inheritance.
When I look at him today, a solid figure behind the wheel of his red automobile, I find it strange to recall that there was really a time in my life when his appetite caused me sleepless nights.
DANIEL THE JUST
As long as it was dark, the woman lying beside him could not see his face, and this made everything easier to bear. She had been talking away at him for an hour, and it did not take much effort to keep on saying “Yes,” or “Yes, of course,” or “Yes, that’s right.” The woman lying beside him was his wife, but when he thought of her he always thought: the woman. She was actually quite beautiful, and there were people who envied him his wife, and he might have had cause to be jealous—but he was not jealous. He was glad the darkness hid the sight of her face from him and allowed him to relax his own face; there was nothing more exhausting than to put on a face and wear it all day, as long as daylight lasted, and the face he showed in the daytime was a put-on face.
“If Uli doesn’t make it,” she said, “I can’t bear to think what will happen. It would finish Marie, you know what she’s gone through, don’t you?”
“Yes, of course,” he said, “I know.”
“She’s had to eat dry bread, she—really, I don’t know how she could stand it—she’s slept for weeks in beds without sheets, and when Uli was born, Erich was still listed as missing. If the boy doesn’t get through his entrance exam—I just don’t know what will happen. Don’t you agree?”
“Yes, I agree,” he said.
“Make sure you see the boy before he goes into the classroom where the exam’s being given—say something to encourage him. You’ll do what you can, won’t you?”
“Yes, I will,” he said.
One day in spring, thirty years ago, he too had come to town to take the entrance exam: that evening the red l
ight of the sun had fallen over the street where his aunt lived, and to the eleven-year-old boy it seemed as if someone were spilling liquid fire over the roofs, and hundreds of windows caught this red light like molten metal.
Later, while they were sitting at supper, the windows were filled with greenish darkness for that half hour when women hesitate before turning on the light. His aunt hesitated too, and when she touched the switch she seemed to be giving the signal to hundreds and hundreds of women: suddenly yellow light from all the windows pierced the green darkness; the lights hung in the night like brittle fruits with long yellow spikes.
“Do you think you’ll make it?” asked his aunt, and his uncle, who was sitting by the window holding the newspaper, shook his head as if the question were an insult.
His aunt proceeded to make up a bed for him on the bench in the kitchen, using a quilt for a mattress; his uncle let him have his blanket and his aunt one of their pillows. “You’ll soon have your own bedding here,” said his aunt, “and now sleep well. Good night.”
The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll Page 42