The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll

by Heinrich Böll

  “Why?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer but walked away, sat down on her chair by the window, and went on shelling peas. Without looking at me, she said, “Did you know the girl?”

  I kept a tight grip on the photo, looked at my landlady, and told her about the soap factory, about the Number 9 terminus, and the pretty girl who always got on there.

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes,” I said. She tipped the peas into a sieve, turned on the faucet, and I could see her thin back.

  “When you see her, you’ll understand why it’s a good thing he never saw her again …”

  “See her?” I asked.

  She dried her hands on her apron, came over to me, and carefully took away the photo. Her face seemed thinner than ever, her eyes looked past me, but she gently laid her hand on my left arm. “She lives in the room next to yours, Anna does. We always call her our pale Anna because she’s got such a white face. You really mean you haven’t seen her yet?”

  “No,” I said, “I haven’t, though I guess I’ve heard her a few times. What’s wrong with her, then?”

  “I hate to tell you, but it’s better for you to know. Her face has been completely destroyed, it’s full of scars. She was thrown into a plate-glass window by a bomb blast. You won’t recognize her.”

  That evening I waited a long while before hearing steps in the hall, but the first time I was wrong: it was the tall Yugoslav, who looked at me in astonishment when I dashed out into the hall. Embarrassed, I said “Good evening” and went back into my room.

  I tried to imagine her face with scars, but I couldn’t, and whenever I saw her face, it was beautiful even with the scars. I thought about the soap factory, about my parents, and about another girl I used to go out with often at that time. Her name was Elizabeth, but she was known as Puss; when I kissed her, she always laughed, and I felt like an idiot. I had written her postcards from the front, and she used to send me little parcels of homemade cookies that were always in crumbs by the time they arrived; she sent me cigarettes and newspapers, and in one of her letters she wrote, “Our boys will win the war all right, and I’m so proud you’re one of them.”

  But I wasn’t at all proud to be one of them, and when I was due for leave I didn’t write and tell her; I went out with the daughter of a tobacconist who lived in our apartment house. I gave the tobacconist’s daughter soap sent me by my firm, and she gave me cigarettes, and we went to the movies together, and we went dancing, and once, when her parents were away, she took me up to her room and I pressed her down onto the couch in the dark; but when I bent over her, she switched on the light and smiled slyly up at me, and in the glare I saw Hitler on the wall, a colored photo, and all around Hitler’s picture, arranged in the shape of a heart on the pink wallpaper, was a series of men wearing heroic expressions, postcards thumbtacked to the wall, and men in steel helmets cut out of illustrated weeklies. I left the girl lying there on the couch, lit a cigarette, and went away. Later on, both girls wrote postcards to me at the front telling me I had behaved badly, but I didn’t answer …

  I waited a long time for Anna, smoked one cigarette after another in the dark, thought of many things, and when the key was thrust into the lock I was too scared to get up and see her face. I heard her open the door to her room, move around in there humming softly to herself, and after a while I got up and waited in the hall. All of a sudden there was silence in her room, she wasn’t moving about now or humming, and I was afraid to knock. I could hear the tall Yugoslav walking up and down in his room, muttering to himself, could hear the water bubbling in my landlady’s kitchen. But in Anna’s room all was quiet, and through the open door of my own room I could see the black smudges from all those stubbed-out cigarettes on the wallpaper.

  The tall Yugoslav was lying on his bed now, there were no more footsteps, I could just hear him muttering; the kettle in my landlady’s kitchen had stopped bubbling, and I heard the sound of metal on metal as the landlady put the lid on the coffeepot. Anna’s room was still silent, and the thought struck me that later she would tell me everything she had been thinking about while I stood outside her door, and later on she did tell me everything.

  I stared at a picture hanging beside the door: the silvery sheen of a lake and a naiad with wet fair hair emerging from it to smile at a young peasant hiding among some very green bushes. I could see part of the naiad’s left breast, and her neck was very white and a little too long.

  I don’t know when it was, but some time later I took hold of the doorknob, and before I turned the knob and slowly pushed open the door, I knew Anna was mine: her face was covered with little scars of a bluish sheen, the smell of mushrooms simmering in a pan came from her room, and I opened the door wide, laid my hand on Anna’s shoulder, and tried to smile.

  IN SEARCH OF THE READER

  My friend Witt has a strange occupation: he is not afraid of calling himself an author, simply because he has some latent knowledge of spelling, vaguely masters a few rules of grammar, and now covers one typed page after another with stylistic exercises that he calls a manuscript as soon as he has enough to make up a bundle.

  For years he had to eat the sparse grass of this art on the steppes of culture, until he found a publisher. Soon after the publication of his book, I ran across him in a state of deep depression. His report was indeed depressing: according to his publisher’s statement, during the first six months three hundred and fifty copies had been sent out free of charge for reviewing, a few good reviews had appeared, and thirteen copies had actually been sold—resulting in a credit of 5.46 marks for my friend. But he had received an advance of eight hundred marks, and, with sales remaining at that level, this advance would be paid off in roughly a hundred and fifty years.

  Now human life expectancy is generally less than that. Disregarding a few, almost legendary Turks, it is estimated at seventy—and, taking into account the memorable hardships imposed upon our lost generation, one can confidently deduct a further ten years from our life span.

  I advised my friend to write a second book. Upon publication, it received a warm welcome among experts; the number of review copies rose to more than four hundred; the number of copies sold after six months amounted to twenty-nine. I rolled two cigarettes a day for my friend, patted him on the back, and suggested he now write a third book. But, strangely enough, he took this for sarcasm and withdrew in a huff.

  Meanwhile he had passed into literary history as “Standard-Bearer Witt,” and a book that had been published about him sold better than his own books.

  I didn’t see him for almost six months, and imagined him to be puttering around again in the purlieus of a lonely genius. Then he turned up at my place and ruefully confessed that he had started a third book after all. I made the suggestion that he offer this work to the book trade in a mimeographed edition of thirty to fifty copies. But he was under the spell of genuine printer’s ink; besides, he had accepted another advance, his second child was on the way, and he proclaimed his unwillingness to contribute to the unemployment of sundry compositors, printers, and packers. (His social consciousness has always been very strong!)

  Meanwhile nearly a hundred good reviews of his work had appeared and more than ninety copies of his two books had been sold. His publisher had started an action that he called “In Search of the Reader.” Handbills had been sent to all bookstores requesting that every Witt purchaser be identified and immediately reported to the publisher with a view to establishing contact between author and reader.

  The success of this action was not long in coming. A month after it was launched, a man evidently appeared in the far north who asked for one of my friend’s books, bought it, and paid for it. The owner of the bookstore immediately sent off a telegram: WITT PURCHASER HERE—WHAT DO I DO? Meanwhile he kept the customer engaged in conversation, poured coffee, opened packs of cigarettes—behavior to which the customer, albeit astonished, was quite happy to submit himself. Then came the publisher’s reply, by top-
priority wire: “SEND PURCHASER TO ME, ALL EXPENSES PAID.” Fortunately the customer was a high-school teacher, it was a vacation time, and he had no objection to a free trip to southern Germany. The first day he traveled as far as Cologne, where he spent the night in a good hotel, and the next day his train took him south beside the beautiful Rhine, a journey he greatly enjoyed.

  By about four o’clock of the second day he had reached his destination, took a taxi from the station to the publishing house, and spent a stimulating hour over coffee and cakes with the publisher’s charming wife. Then he was supplied with additional travel funds, taken back to the station, and now traveled second class to that quiet little town where my friend serves the Muses. As the second child had been born some time before, my friend’s wife had gone to a movie—a relaxation that, despite all financial embarrassment, should not be denied the wives of authors. So the purchaser happened to find my friend in the process of warming up the children’s evening milk and keeping them quiet by singing them a song in which a vulgar word was prominent. This word threw an ugly light on modern German literature …

  My friend welcomed his reader enthusiastically, pressed the coffee grinder into his hand, and swiftly disposed of his paternal duties. Before long, the water for the coffee was boiling, and the conversation could have begun. But they were both such shy people that they first regarded each other in mutual, silent admiration for quite a while, until my friend burst out with a cry of “You are a genius—an absolute genius!”

  “Oh, no,” the guest said diffidently, “I was thinking that of you.”

  “You’re mistaken,” said my friend, and finally poured the coffee. “The hallmark of a genius is his rarity, and you belong to a rarer class of human beings than I do.”

  The visitor tried to put forward some modest objections but was brusquely corrected: “Nothing doing,” said my friend. “Writing a book isn’t half as bad as it’s made out to be. Finding a publisher is child’s play, but to buy a book—that I call an act of genius. Do you take milk and sugar?”

  The man helped himself, then shyly drew from the right inside pocket of his overcoat the book he had bought in the far north and asked my friend to inscribe it.

  “On one condition only,” my friend said sternly. “Only on condition that you inscribe my manuscript!”

  From a shelf he took down a file, from it removed a stack of typed sheets, placed the stack beside his guest’s coffee cup, and said, “Do me the pleasure!”

  The guest, a bit flustered, drew out his fountain pen and wrote hesitatingly on the lower edge of the last manuscript page: “In sincere admiration—Günther Schlegel.”

  But half a minute later, while my friend was still trying to dry the ink by waving his manuscript above the stove, the guest drew from the left inside pocket of his overcoat a bundle of typed sheets and asked my friend to submit this work, which he regarded as his contribution to modern literature, to the publisher for an opinion.

  My friend told me that for several minutes he had been speechless with disappointment. His concern for the fate of this man, he said, had filled him with profound bitterness.

  So once again they sat silently facing one another for several minutes, until my friend said in a low voice, “I implore you, don’t do it—you’re forfeiting your originality!”

  The guest remained stubbornly silent, clutching his manuscript.

  “You will never again receive travel funds,” said my friend, “you will never again be served cream cakes. The publisher’s wife will put on her sourest expression. For your own sake, I implore you: forget about it!”

  But the guest doggedly shook his head, and my friend, in his strenuous efforts to rescue a human being, did not shrink from bringing in his publisher’s statements. But all this did not interest Schlegel.

  At this point my friend usually broke off his account, and I assume that he simply got into an argument with his visitor. At any rate, a pause ensued while my friend pensively regarded his clenched fists and muttered unintelligibly to himself. But I did learn that Schlegel departed after a curt goodbye, leaving his manuscript behind.

  Meanwhile Schlegel’s novel, Woe Unto You, Penelope!, the story of a returning prisoner of war, has caused quite a stir, and rightly so, among the experts. Schlegel has given up his teaching career—in other words, abandoned a genuine profession in order to devote himself to another profession that I still do not consider to be one …

  THE TIDINGS OF BETHLEHEM

  The door was not a proper door: it was no more than a few planks loosely nailed together and closed by a wire loop hung over a nail in the doorpost. The man stopped and waited. It’s really a disgrace, he thought, that a woman should have to have her child here. He carefully lifted the wire loop off the nail, pushed open the door—and was startled to see the child lying in the straw, the mother, very young, seated on the ground beside it, smiling at the child … Farther back, against the wall, stood someone whom the man didn’t dare look at too closely: it might be one of those whom the shepherds had taken for angels. The figure leaning against the wall was wearing a mouse-gray robe and holding flowers in each hand: slender, creamy lilies. The man felt fear mounting in him and thought: Maybe there’s some truth after all in the wild tales the shepherds have been telling in town.

  The young woman raised her eyes, gave him a friendly, questioning look, and the young man said softly, “Does the master carpenter live here?”

  The young woman shook her head. “He’s not a master carpenter—just a carpenter.”

  “Never mind,” said the man. “I imagine he’ll be able to fix a door if he’s brought his tools along.”

  “He has,” said Mary, “and he can fix doors. He used to do that in Nazareth too.”

  So they really were from Nazareth.

  The figure holding the flowers now looked at the man and said, “There’s no need to be afraid.” The voice was so beautiful that again the man was startled, and he glanced up: the mouse-gray figure looked benevolent but also sad.

  “He means Joseph,” said the young woman. “I’ll go and wake him up. Do you want him to fix a door?”

  “Yes, at the inn called the Red Man, just to run the plane over the groove a bit and check the jamb. The door keeps sticking. I’ll wait outside, if you wouldn’t mind getting him.”

  “You’re welcome to wait in here,” said the young woman.

  “No, I’d rather wait outside.” He glanced across at the mouse-gray figure, who nodded at him with a smile. Then he retreated, walking backward and carefully closing the door by lifting the wire loop over the nail. Men with flowers had always struck him as comical, but the mouse-gray figure didn’t look like a man, and not like a woman either, and certainly hadn’t struck him as comical.

  When Joseph came out with his tool box, the young man took him by the arm, saying, “This way, we have to go around to the left.” They went around to the left, and now at last the young man plucked up enough courage to say what he had wanted to say to the young woman but had been afraid to because the figure with the flowers had been standing there. “The shepherds,” he said, “have been telling wild tales in town about you people.” But Joseph, instead of answering, merely said, “I hope at least you have a chisel—the handle of mine is broken. Is there more than one door?”

  “Just the one,” said the man, “and we do have a chisel. We need to fix the door in a hurry. We’re having some soldiers billeted in our house.”

  “Billeted? Now? I haven’t heard about any maneuvers.”

  “No, there are no maneuvers, but a whole company of soldiers is coming to Bethlehem. And our house,” he said proudly, “our house is getting the captain. The shepherds …” But he broke off, stopped; Joseph stopped too. At the street corner stood the mouse-gray figure with an armful of flowers, white lilies, giving them away to little children who could scarcely toddle: more and more children arrived, as well as mothers with children in arms, and the man who had come for Joseph was much alarmed, for the
mouse-gray figure was weeping—the voice, the eyes, had already alarmed him, but the tears were more alarming still. The figure touched the children’s mouths, their foreheads, with outstretched hand, kissed their small, dirty hands, and gave each child a lily.

  “I was looking for you,” Joseph told the mouse-gray figure. “Just now, while I was asleep, I dreamed …”

  “I know,” said the mouse-gray figure, “we must leave at once.”

  He waited for a moment until a very small, dirty girl had come up to him.

  “Am I not to fix the door for this captain after all?”

  “No, we must leave immediately.” The figure turned away from the children and took Joseph by the arm, and Joseph said to the man who had come for him, “I’m sorry, it looks as if I won’t be able to do it.”

  “Oh, never mind,” said the man. His gaze followed the other two as they walked back to the stable; then he looked down the street where the laughing children were running around with their big white lilies. At that moment he heard the clatter of horses’ hooves behind him, turned around, and saw the company riding into town from the highway.

  I’ll catch it again, he thought, because the door hasn’t been fixed.

  The children stood by the roadside, waving their flowers at the soldiers. So the soldiers rode into Bethlehem between two lanes of white lilies, and the man who had come for Joseph thought: I believe the shepherds were right in everything they told us …

  THE TASTE OF BREAD

  At the entrance to the basement he was met by stifling, sour-smelling air. He walked slowly down the slimy steps, groping his way into a yellowish darkness: from somewhere water was dripping, there must be a leak in the roof or a pipe must have burst. The water mingled with dust and rubble, making the steps as slippery as the bottom of a fish tank. He walked on. From a door at the back came some light; in the semidarkness he could make out a sign on his right saying “X-RAY ROOM. DO NOT ENTER.” He walked toward the light; it was yellow and soft, and the way it flickered told him that it must be a candle. As he walked on, he looked into dark rooms where he could discern a jumble of chairs, leather sofas, and collapsed cupboards.