The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll

by Heinrich Böll

  “Good night,” he said, and his aunt turned out the light and went into the bedroom.

  His uncle stayed behind and tried to pretend he was looking for something; his hands groped across the boy’s face toward the window sill, and the hands, which smelled of wood stain and shellac, groped back across his face; his uncle’s shyness hung like lead in the air, and without saying what he wanted to say, he disappeared into the bedroom.

  I’ll make it all right, thought the boy when he was alone, and in his mind’s eye he saw his mother, who at this moment was sitting at home by the fire knitting, from time to time letting her hands fall into her lap and sending up a prayer to one of her favorite saints: Judas Thaddeus—or was Don Bosco the proper saint for him, the farm boy who had come to town to try to get into high school?

  “There are some things which simply shouldn’t be allowed to happen,” said the woman beside him, and as she seemed to be waiting for a reply, he wearily said “Yes,” and noticed to his despair that it was already getting light; day was coming and bringing him the hardest of all his duties: that of putting on his face.

  No, he thought, enough things happen which shouldn’t be allowed to happen. All those years ago, in the darkness on the kitchen bench, he had been so confident: he thought of the math problem, of the essay, and he was sure everything would be all right. The essay theme would almost certainly be “A Strange Experience,” and he knew exactly what he was going to describe: the visit to the institution where Uncle Thomas was confined. Green-and-white-striped chairs in the consulting room, and Uncle Thomas who—no matter what anyone said to him—always replied in the same words, “If only there were justice in this world.”

  “I’ve knitted you a lovely red pullover,” said his mother, “you were always so fond of red.”

  “If only there were justice in this world.”

  They talked about the weather, about the cows and a little about politics, and Thomas always said the same thing, “If only there were justice in this world.”

  And later, when they walked back along the green-painted corridor, he saw at the window a thin man with narrow drooping shoulders gazing mutely out into the garden.

  Just before they went out through the gate, a pleasant-looking man with a kindly smile came up to them and said, “Madame, please do not forget to address me as Your Majesty,” and his mother said softly to the man, “Your Majesty.” And when they were standing at the streetcar stop, he had looked across once more to the green house lying hidden among the trees, and seen the man with the drooping shoulders standing at the window, and a laugh rang out through the garden that sounded like tin being cut with blunt scissors.

  “Your coffee’s getting cold,” said the woman who was his wife, “and do try and eat something at least.”

  He raised the coffee cup to his lips and ate something.

  “I know,” said the woman, laying her hand on his shoulder, “I know you’re worrying about that justice of yours again, but can you call it unjust to lend a helping hand to a child? You’re fond of Uli, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said, and this yes was sincere: he was fond of Uli. The boy was sensitive, friendly, and in his way intelligent, but it would be torture for him to go to high school: with a lot of extra coaching, spurred on by an ambitious mother, by dint of great effort and much intercession, he would never be more than a mediocre student. He would always have to carry the burden of a life, of demands, with which he could not cope.

  “Promise me you’ll do something for Uli, won’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I’ll do something for him,” and he kissed his wife’s beautiful face and left the house. He walked slowly along, put a cigarette between his lips, dropped his put-on face, and enjoyed the relaxation of feeling his own face on his skin. He looked at it in the window of a fur shop; between a gray sealskin and a leopard skin, he saw his face on the black velvet draping the display: the pale, rather puffy face of a man in his mid-forties—the face of a skeptic, a cynic perhaps, the cigarette smoke wreathed in white coils around the pale puffy face. His friend Alfred, who had died the year before, used to say, “You have never got over certain feelings of hostility—and everything you do is influenced much too much by your emotions.”

  Alfred had meant well; in fact what he had had in mind was right, but you can’t define a person with words, and for him the word “hostility” was one of the most facile, one of the most convenient.

  Thirty years ago, on the bench in his aunt’s kitchen, he had thought: No one will write an essay like that; no one can have had such a strange experience, and before he fell asleep he thought about other things: he was going to sleep on this bench for nine years, do his homework at this table for nine years, and throughout this eternity his mother would sit at home by the fire knitting and sending up prayers to heaven. In the next room he could hear his uncle and aunt talking, and the only word he could make out from the murmuring was his name: Daniel. So they were talking about him, and although he could not make out the words, he knew they were speaking kindly about him. They were fond of him, they had no children themselves. Then all of a sudden fear shot through him: In two years, he thought in panic, this bench will already be too short for me—where will I sleep then? For a few minutes this idea really scared him, but then he thought: Two years, what an eternity that is, such a lot of darkness, day after day it would turn into light; and quite suddenly he slipped into that little portion of darkness which lay ahead of him—the night before the exam—and in his dreams he was pursued by the picture hanging on the wall between the buffet and the window: grim-faced men standing in front of a factory gate, one holding a tattered red flag in his hand, and in his dream the boy could clearly read the words which in the semidarkness he had been barely able to make out: ON STRIKE.

  He took leave of his face as it hung there pale and intense between the sealskin and the leopard skin in the shop window, as if drawn with a silver pencil on black cloth; he took leave reluctantly, for he saw the child he had once been, behind this face.

  “ ‘On Strike,’” the school superintendent had said to him thirteen years later, “ ‘On Strike’—do you consider that a suitable essay theme to give seventeen-year-olds?” He had not given it, and by that time, in 1934, the picture had long since disappeared from his uncle’s kitchen wall. It was still possible to visit Uncle Thomas in the institution, to sit on one of the green-striped chairs, smoke cigarettes, and listen to Thomas, who seemed to be replying to a litany which only he could hear. Thomas sat there listening—but he was not listening to what the visitors were saying to him, he was listening to the dirge of an invisible choir as it stood hidden in the wings of the world’s stage chanting a litany to which there was but one response, Thomas’s response, “If only there were justice in this world.”

  The man who always stood at the window looking out into the garden had one day been able—so thin had he become—to squeeze through the bars and fall headlong into the garden: his metallic laugh came crashing down with him. But His Majesty was still alive, and Heemke never failed to go up to him and whisper with a smile, “Your Majesty.” “Types like that go on forever,” the keeper said to him. “It’ll take a lot to finish him off.”

  But seven years later His Majesty was no longer alive, and Thomas was dead too: they had been murdered, and the choir standing hidden in the wings of the world’s stage chanting its litany waited in vain for the response which only Thomas could give.

  Heemke turned into the street where the school was, and he was startled to see all the candidates. They were standing around with mothers, with fathers, and over them all lay that spurious, hectic cheerfulness which descends like a sickness on people before an examination: desperate cheerfulness lay like makeup on the faces of the mothers, desperate indifference on those of the fathers.

  His eye, however, was caught by a boy sitting alone and apart from the rest on the doorstep of a bombed house. Heemke stopped and felt fear rising in him like moisture in
a sponge: I must watch out, he thought, if I’m not careful, I’ll end up sitting in Uncle Thomas’s place, and maybe I’ll be saying the same words. The child sitting on the doorstep reminded him of himself thirty years ago, so intensely that he felt the thirty years falling away from him like dust being blown off a statue.

  Noise, laughter—the sun shone on damp roofs from which the snow had melted, and only in the shadows of the ruins was the snow still lying.

  His uncle had brought him here much too early, all those years ago; they had taken the streetcar over the bridge, had not exchanged a single word, and while he was looking at the boy’s black stockings he thought: Shyness is a disease that deserves to be cured the way whooping cough is cured. His uncle’s shyness, coupled with his own, had caught him by the throat. Mute, his red scarf round his neck, the Thermos flask in his right coat pocket, his uncle had stood beside him in the empty street, had suddenly muttered something about “go to work,” and was gone. He had sat down on a doorstep. Vegetable carts rumbled over the cobbles, a baker’s boy walked past with his basket of rolls, and a girl carrying a milk jug went from house to house, leaving a little blue-white spot of milk behind on every doorstep. He had been very impressed by the houses, houses in which no one seemed to be living, and today he could still see traces among the ruins of the yellow paint that had so impressed him at the time.

  “Good morning, Principal,” said someone walking by; he nodded briefly, and he knew that inside his colleague would say, “The old man’s off his head again.”

  I have three alternatives, he thought. I can turn into that child sitting over there on the doorstep, I can go on being the man with the pale, puffy face, or I can become Uncle Thomas. The alternative with the least appeal was to go on being himself: the heavy burden of carrying his put-on face. There was also not much to be said for turning into the child: books he had loved, had hated, gobbled up, devoured at the kitchen table, and every week the battle for paper, for exercise books which he filled with notes, problems, draft essays; every week thirty pfennigs which he had to fight for, till it occurred to his teacher to let him tear the blank pages out of old exercise books stored in the school basement. But he also tore out the pages where only one side had been written on, and at home he sewed them with black cotton into thick notebooks—and now he sent flowers every year for the teacher’s grave in the village.

  No one, he thought, ever knew what it cost me, not a living soul, except perhaps Alfred, but Alfred always fell back on one very silly word, “hostility.” It is useless to talk about it, to explain it to anyone—the last person to understand would be the one with the beautiful face who lies beside me in bed.

  He hesitated a few moments longer, while the past lay upon him: what appealed to him most was to take over Uncle Thomas’s role and spend his days reciting the one solitary response to the litany which the choir was chanting in the wings.

  No, he didn’t want to be that child again, it was too hard—what boy wears black stockings these days? The middle alternative was the one, to go on being the man with the pale, puffy face, and he had always chosen the middle alternative. He walked over to the boy and as his shadow fell across him, the child raised his eyes and gave him a startled look. “What’s your name?” asked Heemke.

  The boy got hastily to his feet and from his blushing face came the answer, “Wierzok.”

  “Spell it for me, please,” said Heemke, reaching in his pocket for his notebook, and the child slowly spelled “W-i-e-r-z-o-k.”

  “And where do you come from?”

  “From Wollersheim,” said the child.

  Thank God, thought Heemke, he’s not from my village and doesn’t bear my name—he’s not a child of one of my many cousins.

  “And where are you going to live here in town?”

  “At my aunt’s,” said Wierzok.

  “That’s fine,” said Heemke. “It’s going to be all right with the exam. I expect you’ve always had good marks and a good report from your teacher, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, I’ve always had good marks.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Heemke, “it’ll be all right, you will …” He stopped, because what Alfred would have called emotion and hostility were strangling him. “Mind you don’t catch a chill on those cold stones,” he said in a low voice, turned on his heel and entered the school through the janitor’s premises, so as to avoid Uli and Uli’s mother. Concealed behind the curtain of the hall window, he looked out once more at the children and their parents waiting outside and, as happened every year on this day, he was swept by a feeling of despondency: it seemed to him that in the faces of those ten-year-old boys he could read a bleak future. They were pressing at the school gates like cattle at the stable door. Among these seventy youngsters, two or three would be better than mediocre, and all the rest would simply form a background. Alfred’s cynicism has penetrated me deeply, he thought, and he looked despairingly over to the Wierzok boy, who had sat down again and, his head bowed, seemed to be brooding.

  When I did that I got a bad cold, thought Heemke. This boy will get through, and if I, if I—if I what?

  Hostility and emotion, Alfred my friend, these are not the words to express what I feel.

  He entered the common room, greeted the other teachers who had been waiting for him, and said to the janitor who helped him off with his coat, “Have the children come in now.”

  He could tell from the faces of the other teachers how strange his behavior had been. Perhaps, he thought, I was standing out there on the street for half an hour watching the Wierzok boy, and he glanced nervously at his watch: but it was only four minutes past eight.

  “Gentlemen,” he said aloud, “bear in mind that for many of these children, the test they are about to undergo is more crucial and decisive than university finals will be for some of them twelve years from now.” They waited for more, and those who knew him were waiting for the word he was so fond of using whenever he could, the word “justice.” But he said no more, merely turned to one of the teachers and quietly asked, “What is the essay theme for the candidates?”

  “ ‘A Strange Experience.’”

  Heemke stayed behind as the room emptied.

  Those childish fears of his, that in two years the kitchen bench would be too short for him, had been superfluous, for he had not passed the exam, although the essay theme had been “A Strange Experience.” Right up to the moment when they had been let into the school he had clung to his confidence, but as soon as he entered the school, his confidence had melted away.

  When he came to write the essay, he tried in vain to grasp hold of Uncle Thomas. Thomas was suddenly very close, too close for him to be able to write an essay about him; he wrote down the title, “A Strange Experience,” and underneath he wrote, “If only there were justice in this world,” but as he wrote “justice” what he really meant was “vengeance.”

  It had taken him more than ten years not to think of vengeance whenever he thought of justice.

  The worst of those ten years had been the year after he failed his entrance exam: the people he had left behind when he embarked on what merely seemed to promise a better life could be just as unsympathetic as those who were completely unaware, completely ignorant, and whom a phone call from his father saved from becoming involved in months of pain and effort. A smile from his mother, a clasp of the hand on Sunday after Mass, and a hasty word or two: that was the justice of this world—and the other, the thing he had always wanted but had never achieved, was what Uncle Thomas had so desperately longed for. The desire to achieve that had earned him the nickname “Daniel the Just.” He was roused by the door opening, and the janitor ushered in Uli’s mother.

  “Marie,” he said, “what—why …”

  “Daniel,” she said, “I,” but he interrupted her, “I’ve got no time now, no, not even a second,” he said fiercely, and he left his room and went up to the second floor: up here the sounds of the waiting mothers were muted. He went to the window ov
erlooking the playground, put a cigarette between his lips but forgot to light it. It has taken me thirty years to get over it and arrive at a knowledge of what it is I want. I have eliminated vengeance from my idea of justice; I make a good living, I put on my grim face, and most people believe this means I have reached my goal; but I have not reached my goal. I have only just begun—but now I can take off my grim face, as you put away a hat you no longer need. I shall wear a different face, perhaps my own …

  He would spare Wierzok this year; he did not want to make any child go through what he had gone through, any child at all, least of all this one—whom he had met as if it were himself.

  THE POSTCARD

  None of my friends can understand the care with which I preserve a scrap of paper that has no value whatever. It merely keeps alive the memory of a certain day in my life, and to it I owe a reputation for sentimentality which is considered unworthy of my social position: I am the assistant manager of a textile firm. But I protest the accusation of sentimentality and am continually trying to invest this scrap of paper with some documentary value. It is a tiny, rectangular piece of ordinary paper, the size, but not the shape, of a stamp—it is narrower and longer than a stamp—and although it originated in the post office it has not the slightest collector’s value. It has a bright red border and is divided by another red line into two rectangles of different sizes; in the smaller of these rectangles there is a big black R, in the larger one, in black print, DÜSSELDORF and a number—the number 634. That is all, and the bit of paper is yellow and thin with age, and now that I have described it minutely I have decided to throw it away: an ordinary registration sticker, such as every post office slaps on every day by the dozen.

  And yet this scrap of paper reminds me of a day in my life which is truly unforgettable, although many attempts have been made to erase it from my memory. But my memory functions too well.