The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll

by Heinrich Böll

  He could already sense it: the thing he wanted to confess was starting to become a memory, to acquire luster; imperceptibly it was emerging from the level of the sordid daily grind, and it seemed to him that one day, soon—he would somehow rise above it and look down: a beautiful, sinful adventure, while in reality—and this he knew too—he had simply followed the rules of the game out of a sort of politeness, rules so depressingly casual and so grimly serious that he had been appalled. Even before it happened, he had been seized with disgust, but he had joined in the game, persuading himself that after all it was nothing but a mechanical act, dictated by nature, while in his heart he knew that the arrow, already quivering in the bow, was going to be released, and would strike him unerringly in that invisible something for which he could find no other name than soul.

  He sighed, and began to feel impatient; in his mind’s eye the images—those which were gradually acquiring a golden patina, and the real ones—were hovering beside, above, below one another, occasionally merging for an instant, and his gaze traveled in agonizing suspense past the headless saints against their columns to that velvet rope beside the bell.

  It occurred to him that possibly the bell was not even working, or that the priest whose name he had not bothered to read was not there. He was not familiar with this form of confession; in the old days they used to make jokes about it. He was just about to get up and go over to the bell-pushes again when he saw in the motionless background of the empty church a dark figure which emerged from the sacristy, genuflected before the altar, and crossed over to the confessionals on the right-hand side. His tense gaze followed the monk; he was tall and slight, and the circle of hair left by the tonsure was thick and black.

  Fink quickly tried once more to summon a sense of remorse and contrition, he silently intoned the formulas he had known by heart for twenty years, and stood up. As he stepped into the aisle he stumbled; somewhere in the red and white tiles with their pattern of lilies there must be a damaged place; he steadied himself against a prayer stool and heard the priest switch off the tiny light and pull the curtain aside. As he knelt down in the airless, dark and very uncomfortable little space and made out the pale ear behind the grille, he felt his heart pounding in his throat; he was too agitated to speak.

  “Praise be to Jesus Christ,” said a colorless, detached voice.

  He forced out a “For ever and ever Amen” and was silent. The sweat was pouring down his back, making his shirt cling to his skin, closely and relentlessly, as if it had been soaked in water; there seemed to be no room left to breathe. The priest cleared his throat.

  “I have committed adultery,” stammered Fink, and he knew that with that he had said about all he was capable of saying.

  “Are you married?”

  “No.”

  “But the woman is?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many times?” The question brought him instantly to his senses. Everything that had been swimming in front of his vision, this large white ear, which looked enormous to him, and the grille—of a strange, crisp brown like the latticework on an apple pie—all this he now saw quite clearly, in all its reality, and he looked into the drooping sleeve of the priest’s propped-up arm, a dark cavity between the monk’s habit and the pale skin covered with light hairs.

  “Once,” and a deep involuntary sigh escaped him.

  “When?” The questions came tersely, rapidly, impersonally, like a doctor’s during an examination.

  “Today,” he said. Actually it had already receded far into the past for him, but the word brought it back again before his eyes, like a camera zooming toward its object to fix it for ever. One was compelled to look closely at something one did not want to look at closely.

  “Avoid seeing this woman.”

  Now for the first time Fink realized he would be seeing her again; a pretty little housewife with a firm neck and wearing a red housecoat, with eyes which were both boring and sad, and he pictured her with such intensity that he almost missed the priest’s question.

  “Do you love her?”

  He could not say no; to say yes seemed even more monstrous. He thought about it, while the sweat accumulated hot and burning above his eyebrows. “No,” he said quickly, adding: “It will be very difficult to avoid seeing her.”

  The priest was silent, and for a moment Fink saw the lowered lids jerk up, a pair of very quiet gray eyes.

  “I am a salesman for a firm that makes prefabricated houses,” he said, “and the—the lady has ordered a house from us.”

  “And you have that territory?”

  “Yes.” He thought of how he would have to negotiate with her, present plans, discuss estimates, advise on details—countless details which, if one wanted to, could be dragged out for months.

  “You must see that you are transferred.”

  Fink was silent.

  The voice became more forceful. “You must do all you can not to see her again. Habit is strong, very strong. You have the sincere desire and resolve not to see the woman again?”

  “Yes,” said Fink at once, and he knew that for the first time he was really speaking the truth.

  “Try; do everything in your power. Think of the Bible message: If thy left hand offend thee, cut it off. Accept the possibility of material loss.” He was silent for a moment. “I know it is not easy, but Hell doesn’t make things easy for us.”

  His voice had lost its personal quality again when he said: “Anything else?”

  Fink was startled. He was not familiar with this kind of confession, although by this time he realized it was serious, extremely serious, more serious than that regular mechanical hygiene he underwent at home every three months with the chaplain.

  “Anything else?” asked the voice impatiently. “When did you last confess?”

  “Eight weeks ago.”

  “And go to Mass?”

  “Four.”

  In a monotonous voice the priest began to intone the Commandments, the way he did with the penitents he was accustomed to, people who scarcely knew the Creed, whose religious vocabulary consisted of Our Father and Hail Mary. Fink was feeling uncomfortable, he wanted to leave.

  “No,” he said each time quietly, as far as the fifth Commandment. The priest left out the sixth.

  “Stealing,” said the priest without emotion, “and lying, the seventh and eighth Commandments.”

  Fink felt his color rising, it surged hot into his ears. For God’s sake, he wasn’t a thief.

  “Have you told a lie?”

  Fink said nothing. Never before had anyone asked him whether he had told a lie. In any case it seemed to him he had never confessed before. These crude formulas struck him like hammer blows, and while he was thinking he had never confessed before, he muttered: “Oh well, the houses, our houses are not quite the way they look in the catalogue—I mean, they—people are often disappointed when they actually see them.…”

  The priest could not suppress an “Aha.” He said: “We must be honest about that too, although …” he groped for words, “although it seems impossible. But it is a lie to sell something of whose value one is not convinced.” He cleared his throat again, and Fink saw the propped-up arm disappear as the priest began to whisper: “Now we will take it all together and fervently beseech Our Lord Jesus Christ to obtain our forgiveness. He died on the Cross to free us from our sins, and each one of our sins nails Him once more to the Cross. Summon remorse and contrition within yourself again, and as a penance recite one decade of the Sorrowful Mystery.”

  The priest sat up straight in the center of the confessional, murmuring with closed eyes, then he suddenly turned his face toward Fink again, pronounced the Absolvo te in a clear voice, and made the sign of the Cross over him.

  “Praise be to Jesus Christ—”

  “For ever and ever Amen!” said Fink.

  He was stiff all over, and he felt as if hours had gone by. He sat down in a pew and pulled out his handkerchief, and as he began to dry the
sweat off he noticed the priest disappearing again into the sacristy.

  Fink was tired. He tried to pray, but the words tumbled back inside him like a heavy fall of rock, and while he fought against sleep he saw through half-closed lids that in the dark corner next to the side door candles were now burning in front of the altar of the Mother of God: the cheap paraffin tapers flickered restlessly, consuming themselves in feverish haste, and their shimmer swung the silhouette of a small, old woman onto the wall of the center nave, in gigantic and outlandish detail: single hairs protruding from her forehead stood out hard and black on the wall, a childlike nose and the tired slackness of her lips moving silently: a fleeting memorial, towering above the truncated plaster figures and seeming to grow out beyond the edge of the roof.

  MURKE’S COLLECTED SILENCES

  Every morning, after entering Broadcasting House, Murke performed an existential exercise. Here in this building the elevator was the kind known as a paternoster—open cages carried on a conveyor belt, like beads on a rosary, moving slowly and continuously from bottom to top, across the top of the elevator shaft, down to the bottom again, so that passengers could step on and off at any floor. Murke would jump onto the paternoster but, instead of getting off at the second floor, where his office was, he would let himself be carried on up, past the third, fourth, fifth floors; he was seized with panic every time the cage rose above the level of the fifth floor and ground its way up into the empty space where oily chains, greasy rods, and groaning machinery pulled and pushed the elevator from an upward into a downward direction; Murke would stare in terror at the bare brick walls, and sigh with relief as the elevator passed through the lock, dropped into place, and began its slow descent, past the fifth, fourth, third floors. Murke knew his fears were unfounded: obviously nothing would ever happen, nothing could ever happen, and even if it did, it could be nothing worse than finding himself up there at the top when the elevator stopped moving and being shut in for an hour or two at the most. He was never without a book in his pocket, and cigarettes; yet as long as the building had been standing, for three years, the elevator had never once failed. On certain days it was inspected, days when Murke had to forgo those four and a half seconds of panic, and on these days he was irritable and restless, like people who had gone without breakfast. He needed this panic, the way other people need their coffee, their oatmeal, or their fruit juice.

  So when he stepped off the elevator at the second floor, the home of the Cultural Department, he felt lighthearted and relaxed, as lighthearted and relaxed as anyone who loves and understands his work. He would unlock the door to his office, walk slowly over to his armchair, sit down, and light a cigarette. He was always first on the job. He was young, intelligent, and had a pleasant manner, and even his arrogance, which occasionally flashed out for a moment—even that was forgiven him, since it was known he had majored in psychology and graduated cum laude.

  For two days now, Murke had been obliged to go without his panic-breakfast: unusual circumstances had required him to get to Broadcasting House at 8:00 a.m., dash off to a studio, and begin work right away, for he had been told by the director of broadcasting to go over the two talks on “The Nature of Art” which the great Bur-Malottke had taped and to cut them according to Bur-Malottke’s instructions. Bur-Malottke, who had converted to Catholicism during the religious fervor of 1945, had suddenly, “overnight,” as he put it, “felt religious qualms,” he had “suddenly felt he might be blamed for contributing to the religious overtones in radio,” and he had decided to omit God, who occurred frequently in both his half-hour talks on “The Nature of Art,” and replace Him with a formula more in keeping with the mental outlook he had professed before 1945. Bur-Malottke had suggested to the producer that the word “God” be replaced by the formula “that higher Being Whom we revere,” but he had refused to retape the talks, requesting instead that God be cut out of the tapes and replaced by “that higher Being Whom we revere.” Bur-Malottke was a friend of the director, but this friendship was not the reason for the director’s willingness to oblige him: Bur-Malottke was a man one simply did not contradict. He was the author of numerous books of a belletristic-philosophical-religious and art-historical nature, he was on the editorial staff of three periodicals and two newspapers, and closely connected with the largest publishing house. He had agreed to come to Broadcasting House for fifteen minutes on Wednesday and tape the words “that higher Being Whom we revere” as often as “God” was mentioned in his talks: the rest was up to the technical experts.

  It had not been easy for the director to find someone whom he could ask to do the job; he thought of Murke, but the suddenness with which he thought of Murke made him suspicious—he was a dynamic, robust individual—so he spent five minutes going over the problem in his mind, considered Schwendling, Humkoke, Fräulein Broldin, but he ended up with Murke. The director did not like Murke; he had, of course, taken him on as soon as his name had been put forward, the way a zoo director, whose real love is the rabbits and the deer, naturally accepts wild animals too for the simple reason that a zoo must contain wild animals—but what the director really loved was rabbits and deer, and for him Murke was an intellectual wild animal. In the end his dynamic personality triumphed, and he instructed Murke to cut Bur-Malottke’s talks. The talks were to be given on Thursday and Friday, and Bur-Malottke’s misgivings had come to him on Sunday night—one might just as well commit suicide as contradict Bur-Malottke, and the director was much too dynamic to think of suicide.

  So Murke spent Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning listening three times to the two half-hour talks on “The Nature of Art”; he had cut out “God,” and in the short breaks which he took, during which he silently smoked a cigarette with the technician, reflected on the dynamic personality of the director and the inferior Being Whom Bur-Malottke revered. He had never read a line of Bur-Malottke, never heard one of his talks before. Monday night he had dreamed of a staircase as tall and steep as the Eiffel Tower; he had climbed it but soon noticed that the stairs were slippery with soap, and the director stood down below and called out, “Go on, Murke, go on … show us what you can do—go on!” Tuesday night the dream had been similar: he had been at a fairground, strolled casually over to the roller coaster, paid his thirty pfennigs to a man whose face seemed familiar, and as he got on the roller coaster he saw that it was at least ten miles long, he knew there was no going back, and realized that the man who had taken his thirty pfennigs had been the director. Both mornings, after these dreams, he had not needed the harmless panic-breakfast up there in the empty space above the paternoster.

  Now it was Wednesday. He was smiling as he entered the building, got into the paternoster, let himself be carried up as far as the sixth floor—four and a half seconds of panic, the grinding of the chains, the bare brick walls—he rode down as far as the fourth floor, got out, and walked toward the studio where he had an appointment with Bur-Malottke. It was two minutes to ten as he sat down in his green chair, waved to the technician, and lit his cigarette. His breathing was quiet, he took a piece of paper out of his breast pocket and glanced at the clock. Bur-Malottke was always on time, at least he had a reputation for being punctual; and as the second hand completed the sixtieth minute of the tenth hour, the minute hand slipped onto the twelve, the hour hand onto the ten, the door opened and in walked Bur-Malottke. Murke got up, and with a pleasant smile walked over to Bur-Malottke and introduced himself. Bur-Malottke shook hands, smiled, and said, “Well, let’s get started!” Murke picked up the sheet of paper from the table, put his cigarette between his lips, and, reading from the list, said to Bur-Malottke:

  “In the two talks, God occurs precisely twenty-seven times—so I must ask you to repeat twenty-seven times the words we are to splice. We would appreciate it if we might ask you to repeat them thirty-five times, so as to have a certain reserve when it comes to splicing.”

  “Granted,” said Bur-Malottke with a smile, and sat down.

  “Ther
e is one difficulty, however,” said Murke: “where God occurs in the genitive, such as ‘God’s will,’ ‘God’s love,’ ‘God’s purpose,’ He must be replaced by the noun in question followed by the words ‘of that higher Being Whom we revere.’ I must ask you, therefore, to repeat the words ‘the will’ twice, ‘the love’ twice, and ‘the purpose’ three times, followed each time by ‘of that higher Being Whom we revere,’ giving us a total of seven genitives. Then there is one spot where you use the vocative and say ‘O God’—here I suggest you substitute ‘O Thou higher Being Whom we revere.’ Everywhere else only the nominative case applies.”

  It was clear that Bur-Malottke had not thought of these complications; he began to sweat, the grammatical transposition bothered him. Murke went on. “In all,” he said, in his pleasant, friendly manner, “the twenty-seven sentences will require one minute and twenty seconds of radio time, whereas the twenty-seven times ‘God’ occurs require only twenty seconds. In other words, in order to take care of your alterations we shall have to cut half a minute from each talk.”

  Bur-Malottke sweated more heavily than ever; inwardly he cursed his sudden misgivings and asked, “I suppose you’ve already done the cutting, have you?”

  “Yes, I have,” said Murke, pulling a flat metal box out of his pocket; he opened it and held it out to Bur-Malottke. It contained some darkish sound-tape scraps, and Murke said softly, “ ‘God’ twenty-seven times, spoken by you. Would you care to have them?”

  “No, I would not,” said Bur-Malottke, furious. “I’ll speak to the director about the two half minutes. What comes after my talks in the program?”

  “Tomorrow,” said Murke, “your talk is followed by the regular program ‘Neighborly News,’ edited by Grehm.”

  “Damn,” said Bur-Malottke, “it’s no use asking Grehm for a favor.”