“No,” I said …
He put his hand on my shoulder and took off his cap, and now I saw that his face, thank God, wasn’t all that brand new.
“Young man,” he said, “tell me frankly—what do you live on?”
“On life,” I answered.
He looked at me: “Hm. Can one live on that?”
“Certainly,” I said, “but it’s difficult, there is so little life.”
The man put on his cap again, glanced round, then looked down into the black, empty tunnel leading to the platforms. The entire little station was dead. Then he looked at me again, pulled out his tin of tobacco, and asked: “Roll or fill?”
“Roll,” I said.
He offered me the open tin and filled his pipe with his broad thumb, while I deftly rolled myself a cigarette.
I sat down at his feet on the floor of the little booth where he usually sits, and we smoked in silence while the clock hand over our heads moved quietly on. The soft sound came to me almost like the purring of a cat … “Well,” he said suddenly, “if you don’t mind waiting for the eleven-thirty, you’re welcome to sleep at my place. Where are you going anyway?”
“To Sperling.”
“Who’s that?”
“A man who sometimes gives me money to buy life.”
“For nothing?”
“No,” I said, “I sell him a piece of my life, and he prints it in his newspaper.”
“Oh,” he cried, “he has a newspaper?”
“Yes,” I said.
“In that case,” he said,” … in that case,” and he pensively spat out the juice of his pipe, barely missing my head, “… in that case …”
We were silent again in that semi-dark, musty station hall where the only sound was the gentle, steady purring of the clock hand, until the eleven-thirty arrived. An old woman and a pair of lovers passed through the barrier, then the man closed the iron grille, plucked my sleeve, and helped me up.
By the time we reached his little house, Friedenstadt was enveloped in darkness, and I knew: Sperling’s brutish snoring had now reached its climax: it would be roaring through the house, making the windowpanes and the house plants tremble, but I still had a whole night ahead of me …
UNCOLLECTED STORIES
Many of these stories were collected in Böll’s 1979 Du fährst zu oft nach Heidelberg (Too Many Trips to Heidelberg), which, though never published in English as stand-alone volume, was partially published in English translation as part of the The Stories of Heinrich Böll, published by Knopf in 1986. “Christmas Not Just Once a Year” was first published in Germany in 1952.
A number of these stories were first published in translation in American magazines. “The Staech Affair” and “No Tears for Schmeck” were first published in Encounter. English translations of “Rendezvous with Margret or: Happy Ending” and “On Being Courteous When Compelled to Break the Law” both first appeared in Harper’s Magazine, in the September 1979 and March 1981 issues. “Confession of a Hijacker” was first published in English in the October 8, 1978, issue of The New Yorker.
ADVENTURES OF A HAVERSACK
In September 1914 a man by the name of Joseph Stobski was called up for military service in one of the red brick barracks at Bromberg. Although according to his papers he was a German citizen, he had only a smattering of the mother tongue of his official fatherland. Stobski was twenty-two years old, a watchmaker, and, for reasons of “constitutional debility,” had not yet performed any military service. He came from a sleepy little Polish-speaking place called Niestronno, where he had spent his days working in a back room of his father’s cottage, tracing designs on gold-plated bracelets—delicate designs—repairing the farmers’ watches, and at intervals feeding the pig, milking the cow. In the evenings, when darkness fell over Niestronno, he hadn’t gone off to the tavern, hadn’t gone to a dance, but had sat stewing over an invention, his oily fingers fiddling with innumerable little wheels and rolling cigarettes—almost all of which he allowed to burn out on the edge of the table—while his mother counted the eggs and complained about the consumption of kerosene.
So now he moved with his cardboard box into the red brick barracks at Bromberg and learned German insofar as it covered the vocabulary of regulations, orders, and rifle parts; he was also familiarized with the trade of infantryman. During instruction, he said “brrett” instead of “bread,” “canonn” instead of “cannon”; he cursed in Polish, prayed in Polish; and in the evening he would look gloomily into his dark-brown locker at the little package containing the oily wheels before going off into town to wash down his justified sorrows with schnapps.
He swallowed the sand of Tuchel Heath, wrote postcards to his mother, received bacon from home, managed to get out of regulation church service on Sundays, and would sneak into one of the Polish churches where he could throw himself down onto the tiled floor and weep and pray, although such fervor was ill-suited to anyone wearing the uniform of a Prussian infantryman.
By November 1914 Stobski was considered sufficiently trained to rank as fit to make the journey all across Germany to Flanders. He had thrown sufficient hand grenades into the sand of Tuchel Heath, he had banged away sufficiently often in the rifle ranges, and he sent off the little package containing the oily wheels to his mother, along with a postcard. He was then stuffed into a cattle car and started out on the journey all across his official fatherland, whose mother tongue, insofar as it covered orders, he had learned to master. He allowed rosy-cheeked German girls to pour him coffee and stick flowers into his rifle, he accepted cigarettes, was once even kissed by an elderly woman; and a man wearing a pince-nez who was leaning on a barrier at a railroad crossing called out to him in a very distinct voice a few Latin words of which Stobski understood only tandem. For help with this word he turned to his immediate superior, Corporal Habke, who in turn mumbled something about “bicycles,” declining any further information. Thus the unwitting Stobski, kissing and being kissed, showered with flowers, chocolate, and cigarettes, crossed the Oder, Elbe, and Rhine rivers, and after ten days was unloaded in the dark at a dingy Belgian railway station. His company assembled in a farmyard, and the captain shouted something in the dark that Stobski didn’t understand. Next came stew with noodles to be quickly gulped down from a field kitchen in an ill-lit barn. Sergeant Pilling once again made the rounds and took a brief roll call, and ten minutes later the company marched off in the night toward the west. From that western sky there came the notorious thunderous roar, the sky being intermittently lit up by reddish flashes, and it began to rain. The company left the road, and some hundred and fifty pairs of feet plodded along muddy cart tracks. The artificial thunderstorm came closer and closer, the voices of the officers and sergeants grew hoarse and acquired a disagreeable undertone. Stobski’s feet hurt, hurt him very much; besides, he was tired, very tired, but he dragged himself on, through dark villages, along muddy paths, and the closer they came to the thunderstorm the more odious, the more artificial, it sounded. Then the voices of the officers and sergeants became strangely gentle, almost mild, and from left and right came the sound of countless feet tramping along invisible paths and roads.
Stobski realized that they were now in the very heart of that artificial thunderstorm, in fact had actually left some of it behind, for ahead as well as behind them there were reddish flashes. When the order came to fan out, he left the path and ran off to the right, keeping close to Corporal Habke. He could hear shouting, banging, shooting, and now the voices of the officers and sergeants were hoarse again. Stobski’s feet still hurt, hurt him very much, and leaving Habke to his own devices he sat down in a wet meadow that smelled of cow dung and thought something that in Polish might have been an approximation of the French word merde. He removed his steel helmet, put down his rifle beside him in the grass, unhooked his pack, thought about his beloved oily wheels, and, surrounded by the din of battle, fell asleep. He dreamed of his Polish mother making pancakes in the little warm kitchen, and in
his dream it struck him as odd that as soon as the pancakes seemed to be almost ready they exploded in the pan with a bang, and nothing was left of them. His little mother kept ladling dough into the pan, faster and faster; little pancakes would form, bursting an instant before they were ready, and in a sudden rage his little mother—in his dream Stobski had to smile, for his little mother had never really been in a rage—had poured the entire remaining contents of the mixing bowl into the frying pan. Now a great fat yellow pancake lay there, as big as the frying pan, thickened, turned crisp, swelled; Stobski’s little mother was already beaming with satisfaction as she picked up the spatula, slid it under the pancake, and—boom!—there was an especially horrible bang, and Stobski had no time to be wakened by it, for he was dead.
A week later, a quarter of a mile from the spot where Stobski had been killed by a direct hit, soldiers from his company found his haversack, together with a piece of his shredded belt, in an English trench: all that was ever found of him on this earth. And when Stobski’s haversack containing a piece of homemade hard sausage, his iron rations, and a Polish prayer book were found in this English trench, it was assumed that on the day of the assault Stobski had run with incredible heroism deep into the English lines and been killed there. And so the little Polish mother in Niestronno received a letter from Captain Hummel, informing her of the great heroism of Private Stobski. The little mother had the letter translated by her priest, wept, folded up the letter, laid it between the sheets in her closet, and ordered three Masses for the dead.
But quite suddenly the English reconquered this section of the trench, and Stobski’s haversack fell into the hands of the English soldier Wilkins Grayhead, who ate up the sausage, looked at the Polish prayer book, and with a shake of his head threw it into the Flanders mud. Then he rolled up the haversack and stowed it away in his own pack. Two days later Grayhead lost his left leg; he was transported to London, discharged nine months later from the British army, granted a small pension, and, being no longer able to pursue the honorable occupation of tram driver, found employment as a commissionaire at a London bank.
Now, the wages of a commissionaire are not munificent, and Wilkins Grayhead had brought back two vices from the war: he drank and he smoked, and, since his income was inadequate, he began to sell articles he found superfluous, and he found almost everything superfluous. He sold his furniture, drank up the proceeds, sold his clothes except for a single shabby suit, and, when he had nothing left to sell, bethought himself of the dirty bundle he had put away in the cellar after his discharge. So now he sold the rusting army pistol he had neglected to turn in, a tarpaulin, a pair of shoes, and Stobski’s haversack. (As for Wilkins Grayhead, to put it very briefly: he went to the dogs. A hopeless alcoholic, he forfeited respect and job, turned to crime, and, in spite of his lost leg that was reposing in Flanders soil, landed in prison where, corrupt to the marrow, he dragged out the rest of his life as a stool pigeon.)
Stobski’s haversack, however, remained in the gloomy vaults of a Soho junk dealer for exactly ten years—until 1926. In the summer of that year, the junk dealer, Luigi Banollo by name, read with close attention a letter from a certain firm called Handsuppers Ltd. which displayed such obvious interest in war surplus of all kinds that Banollo rubbed his hands. Together with his son he searched through his entire inventory and brought to light: 27 army pistols, 58 mess kits, more than 100 tarpaulins, 35 knapsacks, 18 haversacks, and 28 pairs of shoes—all from a wide variety of European armies. For this entire consignment Banollo received a check for 810 pounds sterling drawn on one of the soundest banks in London. Banollo had made a profit of roughly five hundred percent while Banollo junior saw the disappearance of the shoes with a relief that almost defies description, for it had been his responsibility to knead, grease, in short look after those shoes, a responsibility the extent of which is obvious to anyone who has ever had to look after even a single pair of shoes.
Handsuppers Ltd. then proceeded to sell, at a profit of eight hundred and fifty percent (their normal margin), all the items they had bought from Banollo to a South American state that three weeks previously had suddenly realized that it was being threatened by a neighboring state and was now determined to forestall this threat. Private Stobski’s haversack, having survived the crossing to South America in the hold of a tramp steamer (the firm of Handsuppers made use of tramp steamers only), fell into the hands of a German by the name of Reinhold von Adams, who had espoused the cause of that South American state for a bounty of forty-five pesetas. Von Adams had spent only twelve of the forty-five pesetas on drink when he was requested to live up to his commitment and, under the command of General Lalango, advance to the border of the neighboring state with the cry of “Victory and loot!” on his lips. But Adams received a bullet smack in the center of his head, and Stobski’s haversack passed into the possession of a German called Wilhelm Habke, who, for a bounty of only thirty-five pesetas, had espoused the cause of the other South American state. Habke appropriated the haversack and the remaining thirty-three pesetas and found in addition a piece of bread and half an onion, which had already transferred its odor to the peseta bills. But Habke’s ethical and aesthetic scruples were minimal; he added his own bounty and obtained an advance of thirty pesetas after being promoted to corporal in the victorious national army. On opening the flap of the haversack and discovering it to be stamped in black ink with the number “VII/2/II”, he remembered his uncle Joachim Habke, who had served in that regiment and been killed. Wilhelm Habke was overcome by violent homesickness. He retired from the army, was presented with a photograph of General Gublanez, and eventually arrived in Berlin. When he took the streetcar from the Zoo station to Spandau, he rode—unwittingly—past the army ordnance department where Stobski’s haversack had lain for a week in 1914 before being sent to Bromberg.
Habke was joyously welcomed by his parents and resumed his real occupation, that of a dispatcher; but it soon became apparent that he tended toward political errors. In 1929 he joined the party, with its ugly, dung-colored uniforms, and took down the haversack that he had hung beside the picture of General Gublanez on the wall over his bed to turn it to account for practical purposes: he wore it with his dung-colored uniform when he went off to Sunday training periods on the heath. During these exercises Habke shone with his military knowledge: he boasted quite a bit, promoted himself to battalion commander in that South American war, and explained in detail where, how, and why he had deployed his heavy weapons at the time. He had totally forgotten that all he had done was shoot poor von Adams in the head, rob him of his pesetas, and appropriate his haversack. In 1929 Habke married, and in 1930 his wife bore him a son, who was given the name Walter. Walter throve, although his first two years in life were spent under the sign of the dole; but by the time he was four years old he was already being given cookies, canned milk, and oranges every morning, and when he was seven, his father presented him with the faded haversack, saying, “Treat this object with respect. It used to belong to your great-uncle Joachim Habke, who rose from the ranks to be a captain, survived eighteen battles, and was executed by Red mutineers in 1918. I myself wore it in the South American war, in which I was only a lieutenant colonel although I could have become a general if the Fatherland hadn’t had need of me.”
Walter venerated the haversack. He wore it with his own dung-colored uniform from 1936 to 1944, frequently recalled his heroic great-uncle and his heroic father, and, when he had to spend the night in a barn, placed the haversack carefully under his head. In it he kept bread, soft cheese, butter, and his army song book; he brushed it, washed it, and was happy to see the faded tan gradually turn to soft white. He had no idea that the legendary heroic great-uncle had died as a corporal on muddy Flanders soil, not far from the place where a direct hit had killed Private Stobski.
Walter Habke turned fifteen, laboriously studied English, math, and Latin at Spandau High School, venerated the haversack, and believed in heroes until he was forced to be on
e himself. His father had departed some time before for Poland, to create some kind of order somewhere, and shortly after his father had returned, fuming, from Poland, smoking cigarettes and muttering “Betrayal” as he paced up and down the cramped Spandau living room—shortly after that, Walter Habke was forced to be a hero.
One night in March 1945 he lay behind a machine gun on the outskirts of a Pomeranian village, listening to the dark, thunderous rumbling that sounded exactly as it had in the movies; he pressed the trigger of the machine gun, shot holes into the dark night, and felt an urge to weep. He heard voices in the night, unfamiliar voices, went on shooting, inserted a new belt, fired, and after emptying the second belt it struck him that everything was very quiet: he was alone. He stood up, adjusted his uniform belt, made sure he had his haversack, and walked slowly off into the night toward the west. He had started to do something that is very injurious to heroism: he had started to think—he thought of the cramped but cozy living room, without knowing that he was thinking of something that no longer existed. By this time young Banollo, who had at one time held Walter’s haversack in his hand, was forty, had circled in a bomber over Spandau, opened the bomb hatch, and destroyed the cramped but cozy living room, and now Walter’s father was pacing up and down in the cellar of the next-door house, smoking cigarettes, muttering “Betrayal,” and feeling uncomfortable at the thought of the order he had created in Poland.
That night, Walter walked on pensively toward the west, finally found an abandoned barn, sat down, pulled the haversack around onto his stomach, opened it up, and ate some army bread, margarine, and a few candies. That was how the Russian soldiers found him: asleep, with tearstained face, a fifteen-year-old boy, empty cartridge belts around his neck, his breath smelling sourly of candy. They shoved him into a column, and Walter Habke marched eastward. Never again was he to see Spandau.
The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll Page 83