“Sure, I’ve got all my vacation money already. Do you want some?”
“Yes, let me have some. I’ll send it back to you, later on.”
Paul opened his wallet, counted out the coins, opened the flap for the bills. “All my money for Zalligkofen. I can let you have eighteen marks. D’you want it?”
“Yes,” said Griff; he took the bill, the coins, stuck it all in his trouser pocket. “I’ll wait here,” he said, “till I can hear and see that you’ve shot down the Rapier Beer sign; fire quickly and empty the whole magazine. When I can hear it, and see it, I’ll go over to Dreschenbrunn and get on the next train. But don’t tell anyone you know where I’ve gone.”
“I won’t,” said Paul. He ran off, kicking stones aside as he ran, letting out a shrill cry so as to hear the wild echo of his voice as he ran through the underpass; he did not slow down until he was passing the railway yard and approaching Drönsch’s house; he gradually slackened speed, turned round but could not see the churchyard gates yet, only the big black cross in the middle of the churchyard and the white gravestones above the cross. The closer he came to the station, the more rows of graves he could see below the cross: two rows, three, five, then the gates, and Griff was still sitting there. Paul crossed the station square, slowly; his heart was thumping, but he knew it was not fear, it was more like joy, and he would have liked to fire off the whole magazine into the air and shout “Jerusalem”; he felt almost sorry for the big round Rapier Beer sign, on which two crossed swords seemed to protect a mug overflowing with foaming beer.
I must hit it, he thought before taking the pistol out of his pocket, I must. He walked past the houses, stepped back into the doorway of a butcher’s shop, and nearly trod on the hands of a woman who was washing the tiled entrance. “Watch it, can’t you?” she said out of the semidarkness. “Beat it!”
“Excuse me,” he said, and took up a position outside the entrance. The soapsuds ran between his feet across the asphalt into the gutter. This is the best place, he thought, it’s hanging directly in front of me, round, like a big moon, and I’m bound to hit it. He took the pistol out of his pocket, released the safety catch, and smiled before he raised it and took aim. He no longer felt something had to be destroyed, and yet he had to shoot: there were some things that had to be done, and if he didn’t shoot, Griff wouldn’t go to Lübeck, wouldn’t see the white arms of the cute girls, and would never go with one of them to the movies. He thought: God, I hope I’m not too far away—I must hit it, I must; but he had already hit it: the crash of the falling glass was almost louder than the noise of the shots. First a round piece broke out of the sign—the beer mug; then the swords fell, he saw the plaster of the house wall jump out in little clouds of dust, saw the metal ring that had held the glass sign, splinters of glass were clinging to the edge like a fringe.
Drowning out everything else were the screams of the woman; she had rushed out of the passageway and then ran back and went on screaming inside in the dark. Men were shouting too, a few people came out of the station; a great many rushed out of the tavern. A window was opened, and for a moment Drönsch’s face appeared up above. But no one came near him because he was still holding the pistol. He looked up toward the churchyard: Griff had gone.
An eternity passed before someone came and took the pistol from him. He had time to think of many things: Now, he thought, Father has been yelling all over the house for the past ten minutes, putting the blame on Mother—Mother, who found out ages ago that I climbed up to Katharina’s room; everyone knows about it, and nobody will understand why I did it and why I did this, shot at the lighted sign. Maybe it would have been better if I had shot into Drönsch’s window. And he thought: Maybe I ought to go and confess, but they won’t let me; it was eight o’clock, and after eight you couldn’t confess. The Lamb has not drunk my blood, he thought, O Lamb.
There are only a few pieces of broken glass, and I have seen Katharina’s breasts. She’ll come back. And for once Father has good reason to clean his pistol.
He even had time to think of Griff, now on his way to Dreschen-brunn, over the slopes, past the vineyards, and he thought of the tennis balls and the jar of jam, which he already imagined completely overgrown.
A lot of people were standing around him at some distance. Drönsch was leaning out of the window on his arms, his pipe in his mouth. Never will I look like that, he thought, never. Drönsch was always talking about Admiral Tirpitz. “Tirpitz was the victim of injustice. One day history will see that justice is done to Tirpitz. Objective scholars are at work to find out the truth about Tirpitz.” Tirpitz? Oh well.
From behind, he thought, I might have known they would come from behind. Just before the policeman grabbed hold of him, he smelled his uniform: its first smell was of cleaning fluid, its second, furnace fumes, its third …
“Where do you live, you young punk?” asked the policeman.
“Where do I live?” He looked at the policeman. He knew him, and the policeman must know him too: he always brought round the renewal for Father’s gun license, a friendly soul, always refused a cigar three times before he accepted it. Even now he was not unfriendly, and his grasp was not tight.
“That’s right, where do you live?”
“I live in the Valley of the Thundering Hoofs,” said Paul.
“That’s not true,” shouted the woman who had been scrubbing the passageway, “I know him, he’s the son—”
“All right, all right,” said the policeman, “I know. Come along,” he said, “I’ll take you home.”
“I live in Jerusalem,” said Paul.
“Now stop that,” said the policeman. “Come along with me.”
“All right,” said Paul, “I’ll stop.”
The people were silent as he walked down the dark street just ahead of the policeman. He looked like a blind man: his eyes fixed on a certain point, and yet he seemed to be looking past everything. He saw only one thing: the policeman’s folded evening paper. And in the first line he could read “Khrushchev” and in the second “open grave.”
“Hell,” he said to the policeman, “you know where I live.”
“Of course I do,” said the policeman. “Come along!”
THE SEVENTH TRUNK
For thirty-two years I have been trying to finish writing a story, the beginning of which I read in the Bockelmunden Parish News but the promised continuation of which I never got to see, since, for unknown reasons (probably political—it was in 1933) this modest publication ceased to appear. The name of the author of this story is engraved on my memory: he was called Jacob Maria Hermes, and for thirty-two years I have tried in vain to find other writings by him; no encyclopedia, no authors’ society index, not even the Bockelmunden parish register, still extant, lists his name, and it looks as though I must finally accept the fact that the name of Jacob Maria Hermes was a pseudonym. The last editor of the Bockelmunden Parish News was Vice-Principal Ferdinand Schmitz (retired), but by the time I had finally tracked him down I was unduly delayed by prewar, wartime, and postwar events, and when at last in 1947 I trod my native soil again, I found that Ferdinand Schmitz had just died at the age of eighty-eight.
I freely admit that I invited myself to his funeral, not only to do final honor to a man under whose editorship at least half of the most masterly short story I had ever read had been published; and not only because I hoped to find out more about Jacob Maria Hermes from his relatives—but also because in 1947 attendance at a country funeral meant the promise of a decent meal. Bockelmunden is a pretty village: old trees, shady slopes, half-timbered farmhouses. On this summer’s day, tables had been set up in the yard of one of the farms, there was home-slaughtered meat from the Schmitz family storerooms, there was beer, cabbage, fruit, later on cakes and coffee—all served by two pretty waitresses from Nellessen’s inn; the church choir sang the hymn that is de rigueur on the occasion of schoolteachers’ funerals, “With wisdom and honor hast thou mastered the school.” Trumpets sounded,
club banners were unfurled (illegally, for this was still prohibited at that time); when the jokes grew broader, the atmosphere—as it is so nicely put—became more relaxed, I sat down beside each person there and asked them all in turn if they knew anything about the editorial estate of the deceased. The answers were unanimous and shattering: in five, six, or seven cartons (the information varied only as to quantity), the entire archives, the entire correspondence of the Bockelmunden Parish News had been burned during the final days of the war “as a result of enemy action.”
Having eaten my fill and drunk a little too much, yet without obtaining any precise information on Jacob Maria Hermes, I returned home with that sense of disappointment familiar to anyone who has ever tried to catch two butterflies with one net but has only managed to catch the vastly inferior butterfly while the other, the gorgeous shimmering one, flew away.
Nothing daunted, I tried for the next eighteen years to do what I had been trying to do for the previous fourteen years: finish writing the best short story I had ever read—and all attempts were in vain for the simple reason: I couldn’t get the seventh trunk open!
I regret having to expatiate a little here; not thirty-two but thirty-five years ago I fished out of the bargain barrel in a secondhand bookstore in the Old Town of Cologne a pamphlet entitled “The Secret of the Seventh Trunk, or, How to Write Short Prose.” This remarkable publication consisted of only a few pages; the author was called Heinrich Knecht and described himself as “temporarily conscripted into service with the Deutz Cuirassiers.” The pamphlet had been published in 1913 by “Ulrich Nellessen, Publisher and Printer, corner of Teutoburg and Maternus Street.” Underneath, in small print, was the remark: “The author may also be reached at this address in his (very limited) free time.”
I could, of course, hardly suppose that in 1939 anyone would still be serving in the Cuirassiers as he had been in 1913, for, although I did not (and still do not) know what a Cuirassier is, I did know that that part of the Republic in which I was living had been spared the presence of the Army (not forever, unfortunately, as it turned out five years later for the first time, and twenty-five years later for the second)—but there was a slight chance that the printer and publisher were still to be found at this corner, and somehow I am quite touched at the thought of that thirteen-year-old boy immediately mounting his bicycle and racing from a westerly part of the city to that southerly one to discover that the two streets do not form a corner at all. To this day I admire the persistence with which I rode from the northern entrance of Römer Park, where at that time the built-up right-hand side of Maternus Street came to an end, to the Teutoburg Street, which had (and still has) the impudence to end shortly before the western entrance to Römer Park—from there to the office of the Tourist Association where with a pencil I furtively extended the right side of Maternus Street and the left side of Teutoburg Street on the city map hanging there, to discover that, if these two streets formed a corner, they would do so in the middle of the Rhine. So Heinrich Knecht, the old so-and-so, provided he was halfway honest, must have lived roughly fifty yards north of Marker 686 in a caisson at the bottom of the Rhine and have swum every morning a mile and a half down-river to report for duty at his Cuirassiers’ barracks. Today I am no longer so certain that he really did not live there, perhaps still does: a deserter from the Cuirassiers, the color of the river, with a green beard, consoled by naiads—little knowing that for deserters times are still bad. At the time I was simply so shattered by all this hocus-pocus that I bought the first three cigarettes in my life with my last nickel; I enjoyed the first cigarette, and since then I have been a fairly heavy smoker. Needless to say, there was no trace either of the Nellessen printing shop. I did not even attempt to find Knecht—perhaps I ought to have got hold of a boat, dived in fifty yards north of Marker 686, and taken hold of Heinrich Knecht by his green beard. The thought never occurred to me at the time—today it is too late: I have smoked too many cigarettes since then to risk a dive, and Knecht is to blame for that.
I need hardly mention that I soon knew Knecht’s treatise by heart; I carried it with me, on my person, in war and peace; during the war I lost it, it was in a haversack that also contained (I beg forgiveness of all militant atheists!) a New Testament, a volume of poems by Trakl, the half-story by Hermes, four blank furlough certificates, two spare paybooks, a company stamp, some bread, some ersatz spread, a package of fine-cut, and some cigarette paper. Cause of loss: enemy action.
Today, enriched, saturated almost, by literary insight and hindsight, and a little more perspicacious too, I have, of course, no difficulty in realizing that Knecht and Hermes must have known about each other, that both names were perhaps pseudonyms for Ferdinand Schmitz—that the name Nellessen linking the two should have put me on the track.
These are unpleasant, embarrassing assumptions, terrible consequences of an education that was forced upon me, betrayal of that earnest, flushed boy riding his bicycle right across Cologne that summer’s day to find a street corner that did not exist. It was not until much later, actually only now that I am writing it down, that I realized that names, all names, are but sounding brass: Knecht, Hermes, Nellessen, Schmitz—and the only thing that matters is: someone actually wrote this half of a short story, actually wrote “The Seventh Trunk,” so when I am asked to acknowledge who encouraged me to write, who influenced me, here are the names: Jacob Maria Hermes and Heinrich Knecht. Unfortunately I cannot reproduce the Hermes short story word for word, so I will merely relate what happened in it. The central character was a nine-year-old girl who, in a school playground surrounded by maple trees, was persuaded, duped, perhaps even forced, by a nun who in a nice way was not quite right in the head to join a brotherhood whose members undertook to attend Holy Mass on Sundays, “reverently,” not once but twice. There was only one weak sentence in the story, and I can recall it—the weaknesses of one’s fellow writers are always what one remembers best—word for word. The sentence goes: “Sister Adelheid suddenly became aware of her senselessness.” First of all I am firmly convinced that there was a typographical error here, that instead of senselessness it should have been sensualness (in my own case it has happened three times that printers, typesetters, and proofreaders have made senselessness out of sensualness); secondly: an outright psychological statement of this kind was utterly out of keeping with Hermes’ prose style, which was as dry as immortelles. In the preceding sentence a spot of cocoa on the little girl’s blue blouse had been mentioned. He must have meant sensualness. I swear with even greater emphasis: a man of the stature of a Jacob Maria Hermes does not regard nuns as senseless, and nuns who become aware of their senselessness simply do not belong in his repertoire, especially as three paragraphs further on, in a prose as arid as the steppes, he let the little girl become fourteen years old without having her suffer complexes, conflicts, or convulsions, although usually she went only once to church, on many Sundays not at all, and only on a single occasion twice. Nowadays one does not have to even get wind of ecclesiastical wrath, one has only to be an ardent TV-viewer, to know that both terms, senselessness and sensualness, as applied to a nun, will find their way directly into the Church Council chamber and out again. For some Council fathers would immediately attack the term senselessness as applied by a nun in an internal monologue to her own existence; others would defend it; and needless to say it would not be the attackers but the defenders who would cause an author considerable trouble, for he would have to point to a printer’s error, send them a notarized copy of his manuscript, and still they would interpret his allusion to a typographical error as cowardice and maintain that he was “attacking progress from the rear.”
It stands to reason that it was not Hermes’ intention to attack anything or anyone from the rear, or to turn his back on anyone or anything. I am so indebted to him that, in his place, I bare my breast to reactionaries and avant-gardists alike, because I know very well: a short story which speaks of a brotherhood whose members undertake
to attend Mass not once but twice on Sundays—prose of this kind is highly suspect to both parties.
For thirty-two years now I have been carrying the end of this story around with me, and what rejoices me as a contemporary but inhibits me as an author is the fact that I know (no: I sense) that this woman is still alive, and perhaps this is why the seventh trunk will not spring open.
This is precisely the place where I must finally explain about Knecht’s seventh trunk. Before doing so I must quickly, in a few sentences, deal with the numerous works of which none ranks equally with Knecht’s but of which many are worthy of considerable note. It seems to me there are so many handbooks on how to write a short story that I am often surprised that not more good ones are written. For instance: the directions given in every creative writing course, teaching every beginner, clearly and to the point, with a minimum of fuss, how to make a story so attractive and so convenient that it poses not the slightest difficulty for the Sunday supplement copy editor—i.e., has a maximum length of one hundred column-length lines, in other words roughly the size (comparatively speaking, of course) of the smallest transistor in the world. And there are many more directions than those I have mentioned: one has only to read them and then just simply (these four expansion words contain the entire secret of short-story writing), and then just simply write it down, except—except that Knecht’s very last injunction states: “And from the final trunk, the seventh one, the finished short prose, lively as a mouse, must jump out the moment the trunk springs open.” This last sentence has always reminded me of a superstition that one of my great-grandmothers—she must have been called Nellessen, which would make her the third in the conspiracy—used to tell us about. All one had to do, according to my great-grandmother, was take a few stale crusts of bread, and some rags, and tie them securely inside a cardboard or wooden box, open the box after at most six weeks, and live mice would come jumping out.
The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll Page 57