The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll

by Heinrich Böll

  At 11:00 a.m. Kandick relieved me again; I had to go to company headquarters before they went off duty. In Pochelet—the hamlet where the orderly room was—I was handed instructions to go to battalion headquarters, where I was to be interrogated by a judicial officer about an incident that had taken place while I was still in Paris. I gulped down my meal in order to reach Crutelles punctually by twelve-thirty. Fortunately the sun wasn’t shining. While pedaling at top speed past that lonely tavern, I cast a desperate glance into the empty garden.

  The interrogation took place in a small room at battalion headquarters, conducted by a bilious second lieutenant who was a law graduate and due to be promoted to lieutenant in our regiment.

  I had to watch my step very closely. I was supposed to give evidence about a comrade at my Paris headquarters who, as transpired during the liquidation of the unit, had for years been trading in blank forms for French identity documents. How much money had he spent, how many women had he had, and what purchases had he made; had anything aroused my suspicions? In answering all these questions with a quaking conscience, I tried to spare the accused as much as possible, feigning ignorance. Actually I was in extreme danger myself. I too had forged documents in order to acquire cigarettes; I had placed horse-racing bets and won, and in dingy bars I had exchanged German money for French.

  For almost an hour he squeezed me from every angle, but each time I sidestepped skillfully into the inviolable naïveté of a simple mind, with the result that he got nothing out of me. He had to let me go.

  “Damn it,” he muttered through his teeth, “it’s like wading through mud; you just don’t get anywhere.”

  I rode back very slowly; by this time it was almost two o’clock. Three days earlier I had come past that tavern at almost the same hour. I dismounted, threw the bike against the house wall, and tried the door. It was locked.

  I was aghast. Hadn’t she said “I’m always here”?

  But, then, what does “always” mean? What do all those words mean that we utter so thoughtlessly? I rattled the doorknob, shouted—no response. I walked around the house, climbed over a small locked gate into the yard, rattled all the doorknobs, walked into the stable, stared into the calm eyes of the cows. I called and called—there was no one about. I climbed back over the gate, walked around the entire property, but there was nothing to be seen except for those sweltering meadows with their reed-choked rivulets … a few sleepy cows … not a living soul …

  When would I have another chance to get out of the mousetrap? When would circumstances ever be so favorable again? Already I was making plans to sneak off at night or to invent stories that would justify another trip to battalion headquarters. My God, I simply had to see her!

  In a fit of jealousy, I hated every stone of that bumpy courtyard where, within half an hour, her feet might be treading again; full of jealousy I hated the doorknobs she would touch with her hands that smelled of milk. I hated the whole house, and that fierce hatred was almost identical with the hope of seeing her again. The hope of the flesh is despair.

  While I desperately pedaled off on my bicycle, I concocted an infallible plan for seeing her again. Our plans are always infallible. I would report sick; then I would have to go to battalion headquarters, and once I was in Crutelles, there would be nothing to stop me from seeing her again.

  But there was something else in store for me.

  V

  I began by deciding to get drunk at Cadette’s.

  Just as the ultima ratio of the Christian is prayer, so my last resort was drink.

  Any kind of narcotic holds an irresistible attraction for me. Maybe I should have become a chemist, providing mankind with new drugs of oblivion, though I know I’d never have had the will power to study the subject in depth and face possible failures in my experiments; I am not only weak, I am also impatient. Everything has to happen immediately: I couldn’t wait to see that girl and put my arms around her …

  Every soldier demands the solace of instant forgetfulness. Let this be your explanation for the apparently inexplicable and, for civilians, shockingly direct link between soldiers and prostitutes. The prostitute supplies instant gratification.

  Every soldier permanently faces death, swaying on a gently teetering or perilously bouncing springboard that is ready to hurl him off.

  While I was cycling back, the certainty that I would never see her again filled me with true despair. Never again to see that pale face, never again those compelling eyes and that darkly gleaming auburn hair above the pale-olive skin …

  I decided to get drunk at Cadette’s.

  A soldier’s goodbye is always, as it were, a goodbye forever. Think of that massive, insane load of pain hauled across Europe by those leave trains! Oh, if only those filthy corridors could speak, those grimy windowpanes scream! If only those railroad stations, those ghastly railroad stations—if only they would at last cry out with the pain and despair they have seen! There would be no more war. But with twenty pails of whitewash one of those terrible railroad halls has been restored to a forum for cheerful idiots: six brushes and a few raptly whistling painters on scaffolding, and life goes on. Life goes on. People go on living because of their weak memory. They walk through the same barrier through which they once passed full of the fear of death; but today, only a few years later, they are laughing, on their way to help in the erection of some Potemkin façade.

  Oh, if only the fallen could speak, those who were hauled away in some train or other to their death, their faces gray and sad, their pockets full of jam sandwiches. If the dead could speak, there would be no more war. But look at me: the only survivors are the glib ones, those who weaseled their way through, who were smart; there wasn’t a trap in Europe that could catch them.

  Oh, if only there were nothing but infantrymen, all that shouting about war or no war would be superfluous. There would be no more war. All those surviving heroes, those specialists for whom war was a game, a game that had the attraction of being a little bit risky: all those glib ones praise war and, in the boredom of their bourgeois monotony, long for the “good old days.” … Oh, if only there were nothing but infantrymen! There used to be no need to spell out that war was despicable. Everyone knew it was gruesome, a pestilence, a horror. Just take a look today at those sentimental idiots stretching out their fancy little boots under the desks in their boring offices.

  Oh, to get drunk, drunk …

  I finished two bottles before that terrible mollusk face behind the bar ceased to disgust me. Only then did my loosened tongue give me the courage to tell her straight out that even her sweetest of sweet smiles would not seduce me. She confined herself to bringing me more bottles, carefully sorting out my butts, and sometimes throwing in a good-natured word of comfort that I couldn’t take amiss.

  I daresay you don’t know that strange feeling of sitting on a bar stool and realizing one’s consciousness is gradually growing confused. There one sits, without moving, staring into space, yet filled with adventurous life. This vibrating immobility of the drunk can only be compared to the contained confidence of a tightrope walker, swinging high up between two towers in infinity. If one were to see that man only as far down as his feet, one would think, What a cautious fellow, how slowly and cautiously he is walking! Yet in reality the man on the tightrope is being quite un-cautious.

  The secret of blissful drunkenness is a balanced imbalance.

  Take this paradox any way you like. One pours wine into one’s mouth, feels it pass the critical gateway of the palate, and at first everything flows into a silent underground reservoir that must be filled—until suddenly a kind of barometer starts to rise. Invisibly and quite involuntarily, something takes shape that resembles a U-shaped tube connecting the mind to the body; happiness and well-being increase as the levels of both sides of the tube approach each other. Body and mind are brought into balance—it is a constant interplay—like tightrope walking … an exquisite test of one’s own equilibrium. Incredibly clear insight
s transfix one but leave nothing behind. How sad! But no doubt their lack of substance corresponds to their indeterminate origin.

  I was also perfectly aware that Cadette was cheating me (all publicans live off drunks). Several times, after wiping away the figure indicating the bottles I had consumed, she wrote down a higher one. I said nothing. Part of that condition is a sublime sense of total indifference to material things. There is no doubt that love and drunkenness, even under the most sordid circumstances, have something sublime about them even in their final stages. So I let Cadette do as she pleased, partly because of that indifference but also from inertia. I couldn’t be bothered to open my mouth merely to start a conversation, let alone an argument, with that repulsive mask. She watched me tensely, like a spider lying in wait for the fly’s last drop of blood …

  Later one never remembers how one got home. Yet, with that deadly accuracy known only to the drunk, one has taken the safest and most direct route back.

  Naturally the body has its revenge by allowing the barometer of well-being to drop far below zero. Four hours of sleep would have been enough for me, but Kandick was nothing if not petty. I had telephone duty, and I had to sit it out, even though he spent the next two hours slumped beside me. There he sat, laboriously scrawling a letter to his wife, now and then giving me a gloating poke in the ribs. Those fellows see to it that regulations are complied with!

  Your brother had gone off to a staff meeting. He did not return, as I later found out, until almost eight o’clock, by which time I was asleep and Kandick had gone to bed. Your brother then sat beside me from eight until nearly midnight. I slept like a dead man; not even the shrill ringing of the phone right beside my ear wakened me. Sleep after wine is almost as delicious as the wine itself: that sinking into a blue well, into bottomless depths, with a wistful fear in one’s heart, until one has sunk all the way down into a sediment of dark semiconsciousness. The man drunk on wine unconsciously performs strange embryonic gestures in his sleep; it is like a thrusting against the womb, and the awakening is like a birth: pain coupled with bliss … I seemed to be clinging firmly to something, something that I wanted to pull toward me, but now it was pulling me. When I awoke, I found myself looking into your brother’s smiling face and holding one of his tunic buttons in my hand.

  Well, of course it was embarrassing; I didn’t know where to look. But he caught my eye and asked, “Is your head reasonably clear?”

  “Completely,” I said, and it really was.

  He stood up and looked over to the bunk where Kandick was sleeping, gently snoring. Sitting down again, he began in a low voice, “Listen, I implore you: don’t drink! If you start drinking, you’ll be done for. If after only three days you need this phony, short-lived consolation, you’ll be finished in a month. Find your consolation in staying sober, I beg you.” He fell silent. Because of the blackout, the window had to be kept closed, the door too; the air smelled stale. An uncanny silence hung heavily over the room. I stood up, turned off the light without asking, and opened door and window: a breath of mild, cool air came in, free and fresh.

  “Hell,” he continued, “I hate lecturing anyone. It reeks of moralism, and, no matter what, there’s always that holier-than-thou echo: I’m different—me, I’m not like that—look at me! I implore you, come to your senses.” Then he suddenly asked, his tone vehement and brusque, “What are you looking for in booze?” Startled, I had to search for words, and the only thing I could think of was the threadbare platitude, “Oblivion and happiness.”

  “Happiness?” he repeated. “Happiness? We weren’t born to be happy. We were born to suffer, and to know why we suffer. Our suffering is the only thing we will have to show for our lives. Good deeds can be performed only by a few saints, not by us … and as for prayer … perhaps you don’t understand that—or perhaps better than I … do you?” I was silent. Something prevented me from telling him about the girl; besides, this was my first experience of such melodramatic statements, and I was taken aback. I could only long for dawn never to come again.

  “And if you can’t understand that we weren’t born to be happy, you will at least understand that we weren’t born to forget. Oblivion and happiness! We were born to remember. Not to forget but to remember—that’s what we’re here for.”

  He spoke in a very low voice, but rarely have words had such an unforgettable impact on me. Kandick was asleep; outside in the dark the tide was rolling back, down the barely perceptible slope of the beach.

  I couldn’t think of any reply.

  “You won’t drop off again now, will you?” he finally asked quietly.

  “I won’t,” I said.

  “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  He stood up, cautiously opened the door to his room, and I was alone. Quietly and steadily the tide rolled back, quietly and imperturbably Kandick went on snoring.

  My first thought, after your brother had closed the door behind him, was: I will see her again! I can’t forget that …

  Every awakening was terrible, sir. Any consolation one imagined to have been gained the previous night had dissolved in the light of day, and none of the ocean’s beauty, no freshness of wind or quiet gurgling of water, was of any help.

  Several days passed in a strange, uneasy calm. I performed my duties methodically, and time went on like an unchanging ribbon drawn across a turbulent background. Whenever I was on telephone duty in the evening, your brother would sit beside me. Kandick had started operating a canteen in the cellar of a dynamited house behind the dunes.

  In our conversations we never mentioned a name, never identified by name or title an institution or person of that foundering Reich. We played games with the language, we were like two kids playing ball, bouncing it—depending on energy or mood—fourteen times or seven times against the wall and, the moment we felt our strength giving out, quickly returning the ball to our playmate.

  “Any person,” your brother might say, “who is incapable of recognizing his own inadequacy is a nincompoop and essentially stupid. A vain genius is no longer a genius. Anyone who isn’t aware that he is part of an unknown plan is stupid. There is no such thing as a stupid genius—ergo, he’s no longer a genius. Which only leaves the inglorious possibility of being a genius of stupidity—or of crime. Do you follow me?”

  “I do,” I said, “and think of a blockhead who considers himself a genius, and every day he is confirmed in this by the hoarse roaring of the crowds—say, eighty million—confirming that he is a genius, and a universal genius at that—artist, statesman, strategist—all to an unprecedented degree. Every day they roar that at him. He is perfection personified. Anyone attempting to claim, for instance, ‘I am like X,’ would be avenged more drastically than if he were to say, ‘I am like God.’ Don’t you agree?”

  “Of course. To demand that such a person come to his senses is almost impossible. But how to render him harmless?”

  “There’s only one way,” I said. “He must be assassinated.”

  “Okay. Assassinated. But then come the problems. How to get at him, what route to choose? You see …”

  For several days that was how we discussed all the institutions of that damnable regime, reducing them to zero, blowing them up like soap bubbles, letting them collapse again, then gathering up all that was left to have a good look at whatever remained of substance.

  In this way a few days passed quickly enough. One evening about five I had, as usual, ridden off to company headquarters. It was always a relief to get out of the mousetrap. I cycled slowly along that wonderful avenue leading from the beach, between the mined houses, past Cadette’s tavern and onto the highway. I was always glad to see people—women, civilians. My God, the pleasure the sight of a woman can give a soldier when he spends all his time with men, with men only, their smell, their garrulousness, their dirt, all their dry gruffness. I always looked forward to those trips. And how lucky I was compared to all those others who, if they were lucky, were allowed to leave
the base once a month. Of course, escapes were dreamed up with a recklessness explicable only by a desperate longing for the world—secret paths through the minefields, sudden desertion of one’s post, but for most of them that world existed only in Cadette’s dubious consolations.

  So I always took my time, maybe stopping for a beer or a glass of wine on the way, picking up mail and passwords in the orderly room, and pedaling back just as leisurely.

  By now it was September; the heat hadn’t abated very much. In the evenings it lay like sultry clouds on the sandy patches among the pine groves. A hot, stifling monotony pervaded the huts, most of them wooden barracks that soaked up the heat.

  That day the company commander was in a good mood. Normally he would keep pestering me about petty details: the shine on my boots or belt, the cleanliness of my bicycle. That he was in a good mood was something I noticed as soon as I came in. His eyes were shining. I was soon to learn the cause. Beautifully shaven, tanned, he was wearing a light summer tunic and carelessly flapping his cap at the flies drumming on the windowpanes of the orderly room. The topkick seemed ill at ease; the orderly was wearing his expression of Olympian indifference. That fellow Schmidt could express everything by way of indifference: contempt, friendship, pleasure, hatred.

  “I leave it to you, Fischer my friend, to see how you manage it. In any event, it’s time something was done to improve the company’s food supplies. The ground has been laid, the practical details are up to you. Heil Hitler! I’m looking forward to that roast!”

  As he walked past me, I flung open the door and stood at attention. Before leaving the room, he paused and said to me, “I’m very satisfied with you—a pleasant surprise, I must say!” I almost bowed before that handsome schoolmaster. He stalked out: a fine figure of a man, endowed with everything—good looks, a splendid physique, and all the decorations appropriate to evening wear neatly displayed on his chest.

  “Goddamn it,” exclaimed the topkick, throwing down his pen. “When he smells food there’s no holding him.”