The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll

by Heinrich Böll

  “So you,” he said quietly, “are going fishing; you’ll go sailing and swimming, and stroll up the little streams, in wading boots, and catch fish with your hands.”

  “That’s right,” said Griff sleepily, “my uncle catches fish with his hands, even salmon, yes …” He sank back onto the bed with a sigh. His uncle in Lübeck had never caught a fish, not even with a rod or a net, and he, Griff, doubted whether there were any salmon at all up there on the Baltic and in the little streams. Uncle was just the owner of a small cannery; in old sheds in the backyard the fish were slit open, cleaned, salted or pickled; preserved in oil or tomato sauce; they were pressed into cans by an ancient machine which threw itself with a grunt like a tired anvil onto the tiny cans and shut the fish up in tin-plate. Lumps of damp salt lay around in the yard, fish bones and skin, scales and entrails; seagulls screamed, and light-red blood splashed onto the white arms of the women workers and ran down their arms in watery trickles.

  “Salmon,” said Griff, “are smooth, silvery and pink, they’re strong, much too beautiful to eat; when you hold them in your hand, you can feel their strong muscles.”

  Paul shuddered: they had once had some canned salmon for Christmas, a putty-colored mass swimming in pink fluid, full of bits of fish bone.

  “And you can catch them in the air when they jump,” said Griff; he sat up, knelt on the bed, threw up his hands, fingers spread wide, brought them together till they looked as if they were about to strangle something; the rigid hands, the motionless face of the boy, it all seemed to belong to someone who worshiped a stern god. The soft yellow light bathed the rigid boyish hands, lent the flushed face a dark, brownish tinge—“Like that,” Griff whispered, snatched with his hands at the fish that wasn’t there, and suddenly dropped his hands, letting them hang limp, inert, by his sides. “Come on,” he said, jumped off the bed, picked up the box with the pistol from the bookshelf, opened it before Paul could turn away, and held out the open bottom half of the box containing the pistol. “Look at it now,” he said, “just have a look at it.” The pistol looked rather pathetic: only the firmness of the material distinguished it from a toy pistol; it was even flatter, but the solidity of the nickel gave it some glamour and a degree of seriousness. Griffduhne threw the open box containing the pistol into Paul’s lap, took the closed glass jar from the bookshelf, unscrewed the lid, separated the perished rubber ring from the edge, lifted the pistol out of the box, dropped it slowly into the jam; the boys watched while the level of the jam rose slightly, scarcely beyond the narrowing of the neck. Griff put the rubber ring back around the edge, screwed on the lid, and replaced the jar on the bookshelf.

  “Come on,” he said, and his face was stern and dark again. “Come on, we’ll go and get your dad’s pistol.”

  “You can’t come with me,” said Paul. “I have to climb in through a window because they didn’t give me a key—I have to get in at the back. They would notice; they didn’t give me a key because they thought I was going to the regatta.”

  “Rowing,” said Griff, “water sports, that’s all they ever think about.” He was silent, and they both listened for sounds from the river: they could hear the cries of the ice-cream vendors, music, fanfares, a steamer hooting.

  “Intermission,” said Griff. “Plenty of time still. All right, go by yourself, but promise me you’ll come back with the pistol. Will you promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “Shake.”

  They shook hands: they were warm and dry, and each wished the other’s hand had been firmer.

  “How long will you be?”

  “Twenty minutes,” said Paul. “I’ve thought it out so many times but never done it—with the screwdriver. It’ll take me twenty minutes.”

  “Right,” said Griff; he reached across the bed and took his watch from the bedside table drawer. “It’s ten to six; you’ll be back at quarter past.”

  “Quarter past,” said Paul. He paused in the doorway, looked at the great splashes on the wall: yellow and purplish. Swarms of flies were sticking to the splashes, but neither of the boys moved a finger to drive them away. Laughter drifted up from the riverbank: the water clowns had begun to add zest to the intermission. An “Ah” rose up like a great soft sigh; the boys looked up at the sheet over the window as if they expected it to billow out, but it hung limp, yellowish, the dirt spots were darker now, the sun had moved farther westward.

  “Water skiing,” said Griff, “the women from the face-cream factory.” An “Oh” came up from the river, a sigh, and again the sheet did not billow out.

  “The only one,” said Griff quietly, “the only one who looks like a woman is the Mirzov girl.” Paul did not move. “My mother,” Griff said, “found the piece of paper with those things about the Mirzov girl on it—and her picture.”

  “Good God,” said Paul, “d’you mean to say you had one too?”

  “Yes,” said Griff, “I spent all my pocket money on it—I—I don’t know why I did it. I didn’t even read what was on the paper, I stuck it in my report envelope, and my mother found it. D’you know what was on it?”

  “No,” said Paul, “I don’t, I bet it’s all lies, and I don’t want to know about it. Everything Kuffang does is a lie. I’m off now—”

  “Right,” said Griff firmly, “hurry up and get the pistol, and come back. You promised. Go on, go.”

  “Okay,” said Paul, “I’m going.” He waited a moment, listening to the sounds from the river: he could hear laughter, fanfare. “Funny I never thought of the Mirzov girl …” And he said again, “Okay,” and went.

  II

  Cutouts might be like that, she thought, miniatures or colored medallions: the images were sharply punched, round and clear, a whole series of them. She was looking at it from a distance of twelve hundred yards, magnified twelve times through binoculars. The church with the savings bank and pharmacy, in the center of the gray square an ice-cream cart: the first picture, detached and unreal. A section of the riverbank, above it, in a semicircle of horizon, green water with boats on it, colored pennants: the second picture, the second miniature. The series could be added to at will: hills with woods and a monument; over there—what were their names?—Rhenania and Germania, torch-bearing, stalwart female figures with stern faces, on bronze pedestals, facing each other; vineyards, with green vines—hatred welled up in her, salty, bitter and satisfying. She hated wine; they were always talking about wine, and everything they did, sang, or believed was associated ritually with wine: puffy faces, mouths emitting sour breath, hoarse gaiety, belching, shrill women, the bloated stupidity of the men who thought they resembled this—what was he called?—Bacchus. She hung on to this picture for a long time: I’ll certainly stick this little picture in my album of memories, a round picture of a green vineyard with vines. Perhaps, she thought, I might be able to believe in You, their God, if it were not wine which turns into Your blood for them, is wasted for them, poured out for those useless idiots. My memory will be a clear one, as acid as the grapes taste at this time of year when you pick one the size of a pea. All the pictures were small, distinct, and ready to be stuck in; vignettes of sky blue, grass green, river green, banner red, blending with the sounds which formed the background to the pictures, as in a movie, spoken words, dubbed-in music: chanting, hurrahs, shouts of victory, fanfare, laughter, and the little white boats, as tiny as the feathers of young birds, as light too, and as quickly blown away, the white feathers scudding airily across the green water. When they reached the rim of the binoculars the noise swelled slightly. That’s how I shall remember it all: just a little album of miniatures. A tiny twist of the binoculars, and already everything was blurred, red with green, blue with gray; another twist of the screw, and all that was left was a round patch of mist in which noise sounded like cries for help from a group of lost mountain climbers, like the shouts of the search party.

  She swung the binoculars up and down, trailed them slowly across the sky, punching out circles of blue; just
as her mother did when she was baking, punching the uniform yellow dough with the cookie cutters, that was how she punched out the uniform blue sky: round sky-cookies, blue, a great quantity of them. But where I am going there will be blue sky too, so why stick these miniatures into the album? That’ll do. Slowly she let the binoculars sweep downward. Careful, she thought, I’m falling, and she felt slightly giddy as she flew from the blue of the sky onto the trees in the avenue, covering more than a mile in less than a second; past the trees, over the gray tiles of the next house. She looked into a room: a powder compact, a Madonna, a mirror, a single black shoe, a man’s, on the polished floor; she flew on to the living room: a samovar, a Madonna, a large family photo, the brass strip along the carpet and the russet, warm gleam of mahogany. She stopped, but her giddiness persisted in subsiding waves. Then she saw the open box with the snow-white tennis balls in the hall—how ugly those balls are, she thought, the way women’s breasts sometimes look on statues I don’t like; the terrace: a garden umbrella, a table with a cloth and dirty cups and saucers, an empty wine bottle still with its white foil cap. Oh, Father, she thought, how wonderful to be going to you, and how wonderful that you don’t drink wine, only schnapps.

  Melting tar was dripping from the garage roof in a few places. Then she jumped as Paul’s face—eighty feet away, such a long way off, but in the binoculars only six feet—came directly toward her. His pale face looked as if he were on the verge of doing something desperate: he was blinking into the sun, his arms, fists clenched, were hanging down limply as if he were holding something, but he wasn’t holding anything; his fists were empty, squeezed tight. He turned the corner of the garage, sweating, his breath labored, jumped up onto the terrace. The cups and saucers clinked on the table; he rattled at the door, took two steps to the left, swung himself up onto the window sill, and jumped into the room. The samovar gave off a silvery chime as Paul bumped into the buffet: inside, the rims of the glasses passed on the vibration to each other; they were still faintly twittering as the boy ran on, across the brass strip in the doorway. When he came to the tennis balls, he paused, bent down, but did not touch them; he stood there for a long time, stretched out his hands again, almost as if in benediction or tenderness, suddenly pulled a little book out of his pocket, threw it on the floor, picked it up, kissed it, and placed it on the shelf under the hall mirror. Then all she could see was his legs as he ran upstairs, and in the center of this miniature was the carton with the tennis balls.

  She sighed, lowered the binoculars, letting her eyes linger on the pattern of the carpet; it was rust red, with a black pattern of innumerable squares all joined together in labyrinths; toward the middle of each labyrinth the red got thinner and thinner, the black wider and wider, almost dazzling in its purity.

  His bedroom was in the front of the house, facing the street. She remembered it from the days when he had still been allowed to play with her—it must be a year or two ago now; she had been allowed to play with him till he had begun to stare at her breasts with such a strange persistence that it interfered with their game, and she had asked: What are you looking at, do you want to see it? And he had nodded as if in a dream; she had undone her blouse, and she did not realize it was wrong till it was already too late. She saw it was wrong, not from his eyes but from the eyes of his mother, who had been in the room all the time, who came over now and screamed, while the darkness in her eyes turned to stone. That scream, that’s also something I have to preserve on one of the phonograph records of my memory; that’s what the screams must have sounded like at the witch burnings the man used to describe, the one who came to have discussions with Mother; he looked like a monk who no longer believes in God. And her mother looked like a nun who no longer believed in her God: home again in this place called Zischbrunn, after years of bitter disillusionment, salty error, preserved in the faith she had had and lost in something called Communism, floating in the brine of the memory of the man who was called Mirzov, drank schnapps, and had never possessed the faith which she had lost; her mother’s words were as salty as her heart.

  Scream across the carpet pattern, broken game on the floor: models of houses his father had been the sales agent for twenty years ago, little houses such as had not been built for twenty years; old pneumatic mail tubes from the bank, samples of rope which the other boy—that’s right, Griff was his name—had contributed; corks of various sizes, various shapes; Griff had not been there that afternoon. All broken by that scream, which was to hang over her in future like a curse: she was the girl who had done what one must never do.

  As she sighed, her glance lingered on the rust-red carpet, watching the sparkling threshold for his brown shoes to reappear.

  Languidly she swung the binoculars back to the table: under the garden umbrella on the terrace, a basket of fruit, dark brown wicker-work full of orange peel, the wine bottle with the label “Zischbrunner Mönchsgarten”; one still life after another, with an undercurrent of noise from the regatta; dirty plates with remains of ice cream; the folded evening paper on which she could make out the second word in the headline, “Khrushchev,” and in the second line, “open grave”; some cigarettes with brown filter tips, others white, stubbed out in the ashtray, a brochure from a refrigerator firm—but they had had one for ages!—a box of matches; russet mahogany, like fire in old paintings; the samovar gleaming on the buffet, silver and bright, unused for years, shining like some strange trophy. Teawagon with salt cellar and mustard pot, the big family photograph: the children sitting at table with their parents at a restaurant out in the country, in the background the pond with swans, then the waitress bringing the tray with two mugs of beer and three bottles of lemonade; in the foreground, the family seated at the table: on the right, in profile, their father, holding a fork level with his chest, a piece of meat skewered on it, noodles festooned round the meat; on the left their mother, a crumpled serviette in her left hand, a spoon in her right; in the middle the children, their heads below the edge of the waitress’s tray: ice-cream dishes reached to their chins, patches of light, filtered through the leaves, lay on their cheeks; in the middle, framed by the curly heads of his sisters, the one who had stood for such a long time by the tennis balls and had then run upstairs: his brown shoes had still not returned across the brass strip.

  The tennis balls again, on their right the clothes closet, straw hats, an umbrella, a linen bag with the handle of a shoebrush sticking out of it; in the mirror the large picture that hung in the hall on the left, of a woman picking grapes, with eyes like grapes, a mouth like a grape.

  Tired of looking, she put down the binoculars. Her eyes plunged across the lost distance, smarted; she closed them. Red and black circles danced behind her closed lids, she opened them again, was startled to see Paul coming through the door. He was carrying something which sparkled in the sun, and this time he did not pause when he came to the tennis balls. Now that she saw his face without the binoculars—detached from her collection of miniatures—now she was certain he was going to do something desperate. Once more the samovar chimed, once more the glasses inside the buffet passed along the vibration, twittering like women exchanging secrets; Paul knelt down on the carpet in the corner by the window. All she could see of him was his right elbow, moving back and forth like a piston, regularly disappearing in a forward drilling movement—she ransacked her memory for a clue as to where she had seen this movement, she imitated the drilling pumping movement and then she knew: he was holding a screwdriver. The red-and-yellow-checked shirt came, went, was still—Paul jerked back a little; she saw his profile, raised the binoculars to her eyes, was startled at the sudden nearness, and looked into the open drawer. It contained bundles of blue checkbooks, neatly tied with white string, and some ledger sheets, bound through the holes with blue string. Paul hastily stacked up the bundles beside him on the carpet, clutched something to his chest, something wrapped in a blue cloth, put it down on the floor, replaced the checkbooks and ledger sheets in the drawer, and again al
l she could see, while the bundle in the blue cloth lay beside him, was the pumping, drilling movement of his elbow.

  She cried out when he unwrapped the cloth: black, smooth, glistening with oil, the pistol lay in the hand that was much too small for it. It was as if the girl had shot her cry through the binoculars at him; he turned, she lowered the binoculars, screwed up her smarting eyes, and called out, “Paul! Paul!”

  He held the pistol close to his chest as he climbed slowly out of the window onto the terrace.

  “Paul,” she called, “come over here, through the garden.”

  He put the pistol in his pocket, shaded his eyes with his hand, walked slowly down the steps, across the lawn, scuffed across the gravel by the fountain, dropped his hand when he suddenly found himself in the shadow of the summerhouse.

  “Oh,” he said, “it’s you.”

  “Didn’t you recognize my voice?”

  “No—what d’you want?”

  “I’m going away,” she said.

  “I’m going away too,” he said. “So what? Everyone’s going away, almost. I’m leaving tomorrow for Zalligkofen.”

  “No,” she said, “I’m leaving for good, I’m going to my father’s in Vienna …” and she thought: Vienna, that has something to do with wine too, in songs anyway.

  “Vienna,” he said, “down there … and you’re staying there?”

  “Yes.”

  The look in his eyes, raised almost vertically to her, motionless, trancelike, frightened her: I am not your Jerusalem, she thought, no, I’m not, and yet your eyes have the look the eyes of pilgrims must have when they see the towers of their Holy City.

  “I—” she said softly. “I saw everything.”

  He smiled. “Come on down,” he said, “come on.”

  “I can’t,” she said, “my mother’s locked me in. I’m not allowed out till the train leaves, but …” She suddenly stopped, her breathing was labored, shallow, excitement was choking her, and she said what she had not meant to say, “But why don’t you come up here?”