The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll

by Heinrich Böll

  “Come on down,” I said quietly. “Not so much noise, for God’s sake!” He was making a stupid racket with the stuff hanging from his belt, his spade and gas mask; he stepped clumsily into the hole and almost knocked over my mess-tin. “Idiot,” I muttered as I made room for him. I heard rather than saw how he proceeded to unbuckle his belt, place the spade to one side, his gas mask beside it, and his rifle up onto the parapet, pointing at the enemy, and then buckle on his belt again, all strictly according to regulations.

  The bean soup was cold by this time, and it was just as well that in the dark I couldn’t see all the grubs that must have been boiled out of the beans. There was plenty of meat in the soup, delicious crisp brown bits. Next I ate up the tinned meat from the wax paper and stuffed the bread into the empty mess-tin. He stood perfectly silent beside me, always facing the enemy, and in the blackness of the night I could see a snub-nosed profile. When he turned aside, I could tell from his narrow cheeks that he was still young; his steel helmet looked almost like the shell of a tortoise. These boys had a special something about their cheeks that recalled playing soldiers on a suburban common. “My Redskin brother,” they always seemed to be saying, and their lips trembled with fear, and their hearts were stiff with courage. Those poor kids …

  “You might as well sit down,” I said in that painstakingly acquired voice that is easily intelligible but scarcely audible a yard away. “Here,” I added, pulling at the hem of his greatcoat and almost forcing him down into the hollowed-out seat. “You can’t possibly stand all the time.”

  “But on sentry duty …” came a feeble voice that cracked like that of a sentimental tenor.

  “Shut up!” I hissed at him.

  “But on sentry duty,” he whispered, “we’re not permitted to sit!”

  “Nothing’s permitted, not even starting a war.”

  Although I could see him only in outline, I knew that he was now sitting like a pupil in class, hands on knees, bolt upright and ready to jump up any second. I bent forward, drew my greatcoat right over the back of my head, and lit my pipe.

  “Want a smoke?”

  “No.” I was surprised how quickly he had learned to whisper.

  “Well, anyway,” I said, “have a drink instead.”

  “No,” he repeated, but I grabbed his head and held the neck of the flask to his mouth; as patient as a calf with its first bottle, he swallowed a few times, then made such a violent gesture of disgust that I took away the flask.

  “Don’t you like it?”

  “I do,” he stammered, “but I choked.”

  “Then drink it yourself.”

  He took the flask out of my hand and swallowed a good gulp.

  “Thanks,” he murmured. I had a drink, too.

  “Feeling better now?”

  “Yes—much.”

  “Not quite so scared, eh?”

  He was ashamed to admit that he was scared at all, but they were all like that.

  “I’m scared, too,” I said, “all the time, that’s why I find courage in a bottle.”

  I felt him jerk towards me, and I leaned over to see his face. All I could see was the bright glint of his eyes, eyes that looked dangerous, and shadowy dark outlines, but I could smell him. He smelled of army stores, of sweat, storeroom, and leftover soup, and slightly of the schnapps. There was no sound at all; behind us they seemed to have finished doling out the rations. He turned back towards the enemy.

  “Is this your first time out?”

  Again he was ashamed, I could tell, but he answered: “Yes.”

  “How long have you been a soldier?”

  “Eight weeks.”

  “And where are you from?”

  “From St Avold.”

  “Where?”

  “St Avold. Lorraine, you know …”

  “A long trip?”

  “Two weeks.”

  We fell silent, and I tried to peer through the impenetrable darkness ahead. Oh, if only daylight would come, I thought, if one could at least see something, daybreak at least, some fog maybe—see something, see anything, a scrap of light … but when daylight came I would be wishing that it was dark. If only dusk would fall, or fog would roll in suddenly. It was always the same …

  Up front there was nothing. Off in the distance, the gentle throbbing of engines. The Russians were being fed, too. Then came the sound of a twittering Russian voice that was abruptly suppressed, as if a hand had been clapped over a mouth. It was nothing …

  “Do you know what our job is?” I asked him. How good it felt not to be alone any more! How wonderful to feel the breath of a human being, to be aware of his stale smell—a human being who was not about to finish one off the very next second!

  “Yes,” he said, “listening post.” Again I was surprised how well he could whisper, almost better than I could. It seemed so effortless. For me it was always an effort, I always wanted to shout, yell, call out, so that the night would collapse like black foam; for me it was a terrible effort, that whispering.

  “Fine,” I said, “listening post. So we have to be on the look-out for when the Russians come, when they attack. Then we send up a red flare, bang away with our rifles for a bit, and scram, to the rear—got it? But when only a few come, a recce patrol, then we have to keep quiet, let them through, and one of us has to go back and tell the others, tell the lieutenant—you’ve been in his dug-out, haven’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said, his voice trembling.

  “Okay. And if the patrol attacks us both, then we have to finish them off, dead as doornails, right? We mustn’t clear out just for a patrol. Got it? Okay?”

  “Yes,” he said, his voice still trembling, and then I heard a dreadful sound: his teeth were chattering.

  “Here,” I said, handing him the flask.

  I had another drink, too.

  “But suppose … suppose …” he stammered, “suppose we can’t even see them coming …”

  “Then we’re done for. But don’t worry—we’re bound to see them or hear them. And if we suspect something we’re allowed to send up a flare, then we’ll see everything.” He was silent again; it was terrible the way he was never the first to speak.

  “But they won’t come,” I rattled on, “they never come at night. If they come at all, it’ll be in the morning, two minutes before dawn …”

  “Two minutes before dawn?” he broke in.

  “Two minutes before dawn is when they start, then they’ll be here by first light …”

  “But then surely it’s too late.”

  “Well, then we have to quickly send up a red flare and clear out—don’t worry, you’ll find you can run like a hare. And don’t forget we’ll hear it first. What’s your name, anyway?” It was a nuisance, every time I wanted to speak to him I had to nudge him, take my hands out of my warm pockets and stuff them back in and wait till they got warm again …

  “My name,” he said, “my name’s Jak.”

  “English?”

  “No,” he said, “it’s from Jakob … Jak a-k, not Jack—Jak, just Jak.”

  “Jak,” I went on, “what did you do for a living?”

  “Me? My last job was as a tout.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A tout.”

  “What did you tout then?”

  He jerked his face towards me, and I could tell he was very surprised.

  “What did I tout—what did I tout? Well, I was just a tout!”

  “What d’you mean? What did you tout?”

  He was silent for a while, looking straight ahead again; then in the darkness his head turned back towards me.

  “Well,” he said, “I was touting,” and he sighed deeply. “I stood at the railway station, towards the end anyway, and when someone came, came by, in that crowd someone I thought might be interested, most of them were soldiers of course—so when someone came by I’d ask him in a low voice, a very low voice, you know: ‘Want a good time, sir?’ That’s what I’d ask …” His voice was t
rembling again, and this time it may not have been fear but recollection.

  In my eagerness I forgot to take a drink. “And,” I asked hoarsely, “if he did want to have a good time?”

  “Then,” he said with an effort, and again it seemed to be the recollection that overcame him, “then I’d take him to whichever one of the girls happened to be free.”

  “To a cathouse, you mean?”

  “No,” he said matter-of-factly, “I wasn’t working for the cathouses, I had a few freelancers, you know, a few loners who kept me going. Three without a license. Irma, Lilli and Amadea …”

  “Amadea?” I broke in.

  “Right, that was her name. Funny, eh? She used to tell me that her father had wanted a son and he’d have called him Amadeus so that’s why he called her Amadea. Funny, eh?” He actually managed a little laugh.

  We had both forgotten why we were sitting in that filthy hole. And now I no longer had to pump him: he rattled away without any help from me.

  “Amadea,” he went on, “was the nicest. She was always generous and sad and really the prettiest, too, and …”

  “So,” I interrupted him, “you were actually a pimp, weren’t you?”

  “No,” he carefully explained, “no,” and he sighed again. “Pimps—they’re biggies, they’re tyrants, they make heaps of money, and they sleep with the girls too.”

  “And you didn’t?”

  “No, I was only a tout. It was my job to hook the fish for them to fry and eat, then they’d give me some of the bones to pick …”

  “The bones?”

  “Yes.” He gave a short laugh. “Just a tip, see? And that’s what I lived on after my dad was killed and my mother disappeared. I wasn’t fit to work, see, because of my lung. No, the girls I worked for didn’t have a pimp, thank God. Otherwise I’d have got beaten up all the time. No, they just worked for themselves, all on their own, no license or anything, and they didn’t dare show up in the street like the others—that was too dangerous, so I touted for them.” He sighed. “Mind passing me the bottle again?” While I was reaching down to pick up the bottle, he asked: “And what’s your name?”

  “Hubert,” I said, handing him the bottle.

  “That feels good,” he said, but I couldn’t respond because by then I was holding the bottle to my lips. It was empty, and I let it roll gently to one side.

  “Hubert,” he suddenly said, and now his voice was trembling violently, “look!” He pulled me forward to where he was lying flat on the parapet. “Just look!” If one looked very, very hard one could see very, very far away something like a horizon, a pitch-black line with a suspicion of light over it, and in the lighter darkness above the pitch-black line something was moving like a gentle motion of bushes. It could also be men creeping up, a huge mass of men creeping up without a sound …

  “Why don’t you send up a white flare?” he whispered in an expiring voice.

  “Listen,” I said, placing my hand on his shoulder. “Jak, it’s nothing, it’s just our fear that’s moving out there, it’s all that hell, it’s the war, it’s all that shit that’s driving us crazy—it’s—it’s not real.”

  “But I can see it, I’m sure it’s something—something real—they’re coming—they’re coming …” And again I could hear his teeth chattering.

  “Yes,” I said, “be quiet. It is something real. It’s sunflower stalks, in the morning you’ll see them and laugh, when it’s broad daylight you’ll see and you’ll laugh, it’s sunflower stalks, they’re about half a mile away, and they look as if they’re at the end of the world, don’t they? I know them—dried up, black, dirty, some of them shot to pieces, and the Russians have eaten the pods, and it’s our fear that’s making them move.”

  “Please—please send up a white flare—send up a flare—I can see them!”

  “But I know what they are, Jak!”

  “Please send up a flare! Just one single shell …”

  “Come on, Jak,” I whispered back, “if they were really coming we could hear them—listen!” We held our breath and listened. There was complete silence, nothing to be heard except those ghastly sounds of silence.

  “I hear them,” he whispered, and I could tell from his voice that he was deathly pale, “I do hear them—they’re coming—they’re creeping—they’re crawling over the ground—there, a clink! They’re coming very silently, and when they’re close up it’ll be too late …”

  “Jak,” I said, “I can’t shoot off a flare, I’ve only two cartridges, understand? And I’ll need one in the morning, very early, when the Stukas come, so they know where we are and don’t bomb us to hell. And the other one—I’ll need that when things really get hot. In the morning you’ll be laughing …”

  “In the morning,” he said without emotion. “Tomorrow morning I’ll be dead.” I was so taken aback that I swung round to him. He had spoken firmly and with total conviction.

  “Jak,” I said, “you’re crazy!”

  He said nothing, and we leaned back again. I longed to see his face. The face of a real tout, right up close. I had only ever heard them whisper, at street corners and railway stations in all the cities of Europe, and I had always turned away with a sudden hot fear in my heart.

  “Jak …” I started to say.

  “Please send up a flare!” he whispered, beside himself.

  “Jak,” I said, “you’ll curse me if I do that now. We’ve another four hours to go, d’you realize? And there’ll be a ruckus, I know what to expect. Today’s the twenty-first, and that’s when they’re issued schnapps over there, right now they’ve been given their schnapps with their rations, understand? And in half an hour they’ll start shouting and singing and shooting, and maybe something really will happen. And when the Stukas come in the morning you’ll be sweating with fear, they’ll drop their bombs that close, and if I don’t fire off a white flare we’ll be mincemeat, and you’ll curse me for sending up a flare now when nothing’s happening. Believe me. Tell me some more about yourself. Where did you last do your—touting?”

  He sighed deeply. “In Cologne,” he said.

  “At the main railway station?”

  “No,” he went on listlessly, “not always. Sometimes at the South station. It made more sense, you see, because the girls lived closer by. Lilli near the opera house, and Irma and Amadea off Barbarossa-Platz. You see,” his voice sounding weary as if he were falling asleep, “sometimes when I’d snaffled a fellow at the main station he’d give me the slip on the way, and that was a nuisance; sometimes they got scared on the way or whatever, I don’t know, and then they’d give me the slip, without saying a word. It was just too far, from the main station all the way there, and towards the end I often stood at the South station, because a lot of soldiers used to get out there thinking it was Cologne—I mean the main station. And from the South station it was only a stone’s throw, it wasn’t that easy to give me the slip. First”—now he leaned towards me—“I always went to Amadea, she lived in a building that had a café, later it was destroyed by a fire bomb. Amadea, you know—she was the nicest. She paid me the most, but that wasn’t why I went to her first, it really wasn’t, you must believe me, truly it wasn’t. Oh, you don’t believe me, but that really wasn’t why I went to her first, just because she paid the most, d’you believe me?” By now he was so intense that I simply had to say yes.

  “But Amadea was often busy—funny, wasn’t it? She was very often busy. She had a lot of regulars, and sometimes she’d walk the street, too, if business was slow. And when Amadea was busy I was sad, so next I’d go to Lilli. Lilli wasn’t bad either, but she drank, and women who drink are terrible, unpredictable, sometimes nasty, sometimes nice, but Lilli was still nicer than Irma. Irma, she was a cold fish, let me tell you. She’d pay ten per cent, and that was it. Ten per cent! There I’d often be running half an hour through the cold night, standing for hours at the station or sitting over some lousy beer in a bar, risking being picked up by the police, and then ten pe
r cent! Shit, I tell you! So Irma was always my last choice. The next day, when I brought her the first customer, she’d give me the money. Sometimes only fifty pfennigs, and once only ten pfennigs—would you believe it? Ten pfennigs!”

  “Ten pfennigs?” I asked, horrified.

  “Yes,” he said. “She’d only been paid one mark. That was all he had on him, the bastard.”

  “A soldier?”

  “No, a civilian, and a really old fellow at that. And she gave me hell as well! Oh, Amadea was different! She always paid me plenty. Never less than two marks. Even when she hadn’t been paid anything. And then …”

  “Jak,” I asked, “sometimes she charged nothing?”

  “That’s right, sometimes she charged nothing. Just the opposite, I believe. She’d even give the soldiers cigarettes or sandwiches or just something extra.”

  “Extra?”

  “Yes. Extra. She was very generous. A very, very sad girl, I’m telling you. And she took a bit of an interest in me, too. Wanted to know where I lived and whether I needed any cigarettes and that kind of stuff. And she was pretty, I’d say the prettiest of the lot.”

  I was about to ask what she looked like, but just at that moment the first Russian started yelling like a madman. A kind of howl went up, gathering other voices, and immediately the first shot was fired. I just managed to grab Jak by the edge of his greatcoat; with one leap he would have been over the top and away, straight into the arms of the Russians. They always run into the arms of the Russians, the fellows who clear out. I pulled the trembling figure back, very close to me. “For God’s sake be quiet! It’s nothing. They’re just a bit drunk, and then they yell and shout blindly over the parapet. And you have to keep your head down, because it’s those shots that sometimes find their mark …”

  Now we heard a woman’s voice and, although we couldn’t understand a word, we knew that they must have yelled and sung something very coarse. Her shrill laughter tore the night to shreds.

  “Calm down,” I told the struggling, groaning boy, “it won’t last long, in a few minutes the commissar will notice and slap them about. They’re not allowed to do that, and they’re soon cured of what they’re not allowed to do, just like us …”