Because he spoke so nicely about his wife and children, I volunteered the information that, together with some business associates, I was engaged in opening up a new market for good icon reproductions: the Soviet Union, which we were supplying—illegally, of course—with excellent reproductions that were mounted over there on old wood panels, preferably worm-eaten, and painted over by skilled craftsmen, and for which there was a good demand. Since artists, craftsmen, and dealers naturally preferred foreign currency, quite a few of these reproductions were finding their way back via the tourist black market. Not exactly sharing in the profits, but doing its best to help, was an organization calling itself “Pictures for the Eastern Churches”; too many Soviet citizens in all the republics had sold off their family icons and now, caught up in the religious wave, found themselves without images. And, inwardly uneasy because Margret was still moving around and had not yet sat down, I went on to tell Bertholdi the trade’s classic story of that long-dead colleague who, putting his trust in the religious currents prevalent during World War I, found himself stuck with some 10,000 portraits of Pope Benedict XV and lacked the financial and mental resources to save his business by profiting from the long reigns of the two Piuses. When asked by Bertholdi whether I would still invest much in Paul VI, I said, “As a contemporary, perhaps; as a dealer in devotional supplies, no,” adding that the only pope who had remained in demand after his death was John XXIII.
Bertholdi thanked me for this insight into the “subtleties” of my business and returned the compliment with an autobiographical sketch: he was a senior official in the educational system, complained neither of his children nor of the youth of today, spoke affectionately of his wife, laughingly discussed his pension with all its probable progressions and deductions; he hoped, he was confident, that he would be able to take early retirement so that he would finally have time to read Proust and Henry James. At last Margret came and sat down beside me, beckoned to a waitress to bring me a little pot of mocha, placed her hand on my arm, and said, “I remember how you hate bad coffee, and”—she didn’t take away her hand—“just now, when I saw you standing there, it occurred to me, after all these years it occurred to me, that he didn’t curse God at all.”
“No,” I said, “it was only those cursed by God whom he cursed. And that curse was the blessing that he gave us.”
Willi Offermann, seated across from us next to the priest, tried to bait me by speaking of Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulcher, and of people who had no religion yet lived very well off it. Did he mean me, or the dealers in devotional supplies in Jerusalem? Do I have no religion and live very well off it? Both questions filled me with doubts. True, I did live off it, but not as well as he seemed to believe, not even my gravestone agency brought in as much, although I can offer the latest designs and good African stones; and sometimes when I was checking a new shipment of rosaries (for which there was no longer much demand, at least not at the moment, in spite of Lefebvre), I would grasp one and recite the entire rosary. So as not to be looking constantly at Margret, who had got up again to tell a waiter carrying a plate of onion rings and slices of blood sausage to take it over to where Aunt Marga was indeed sitting, I looked at Offermann’s wife: she was next to the priest and leaning across him in an effort to calm down her husband on the other side when Offermann suddenly raised his voice and started abusing the “Red scum!”—which was nonsense, because he hadn’t seen me for thirty-one years and could have no idea whether I was red or green; besides, a minimum of logic should have told him that no sensible dealer in devotional supplies—and that’s what I was—would ever vote for any party without the prefix “Christian.” This was so obvious that he could have saved himself his uninformed provocation; I behaved as if he certainly couldn’t mean me and smiled at his wife, who looked so nice that he couldn’t possibly have deserved her.
Then Margret was beside me again, pouring mocha and remembering that I took whipped cream with it; she had brought over a little dish of it. She smelled of soap, toilet water, and perspiration, a smell that I perceived as familiar—yet it couldn’t possibly be familiar to me. It was as if we had spent these thirty-four years together, her years becoming mine, a common tally of the years: some things neglected but nothing missed. I found her much more beautiful than on that June night; actually she had never been a beauty, she had always seemed like a girl who had been bicycling too fast and broken into a sweat, yet she had never been on a bicycle. As I looked at her she became younger and younger, until I could see her playing ball on the path between our two houses, flushed, eager, yet quiet, and she was, after all, the first and only woman from whose lips I had heard the word “desertion.”
She kept her hand on my arm, and Offermann grew even angrier, prophesying doom, and seeming to hold me, me personally, responsible for the simultaneous decline in morals and faith; and not even when he spoke of my brother Josef (“Of course, if your brother Josef were still alive, but then the best always get killed!”) did I allow myself to be provoked into saying something like You didn’t get killed either, nor did Margret—who turned pale and whose hand on my arm was trembling. Finally Offermann attacked the priest, whom he accused of being too passive, and it was I who, in order to calm him down, whispered the opening lines of The Odyssey to him across the table. That actually had an effect: his face relaxed, and his wife smiled at me gratefully; the priest was relieved. I had looked at the time and found it was only twelve o’clock and that we would be able to catch the 14:22, and during my Homer recitation I thought of coffee and cakes on the train, thought of the crowded dining car, which was now moving beside the Rhine toward the Lorelei rock, and that probably they still served nothing but that seed cake that was enough to choke a person. But it was a long time since I had last ridden in the dining car in the afternoon, I merely remembered that Margret liked that damn cake. Once, on the train to Sinzig, she had told me it reminded her of a deceased aunt of whom she had been very fond. I beckoned to the waitress and asked her to order me a taxi for a quarter to two.
NOSTALGIA OR: GREASE SPOTS
The night before Erica’s wedding I changed my mind and did drive to the hotel to have another talk with Walter. I had known both him and Erica, his fiancée, for a long time; after all, I had lived with Erica for four years, in Mainz, while working on a construction job and at the same time going to night school. Walter had been working on the same construction site and also going to night school. It wasn’t a pleasant period. I recall it without nostalgia: the arrogance of our teachers, who were more critical of our accents than of our performance, was so insidious that it was more painful than wordy abuse would have been. Apparently most of them couldn’t bear the idea that, with our unabashed dialect, we might eventually acquire a university degree, and they forced us to speak in a way that we used to call “night-school German.”
When I came off shift—sometimes at the same time as Walter—the first thing was always a shower, then fresh clothes and a general sprucing up, yet we still had lime under our fingernails, traces of cement in our eyelashes. We slogged away at math, history, Latin even, and when we actually did pass our exams, our teachers behaved as if it were some sort of canonization. After we’d gone on to university there were still—for a while—traces of lime in our hair, of cement behind our ears, sometimes in our nostrils, in spite of Erica’s careful inspection of me, after which she would shake her head and whisper in my ear, “You’ll never get rid of it, that proletarian background of yours.” I felt no regret for my construction job when I won a scholarship and eventually obtained a degree, a B.Comm., with a correct accent, quite good manners, a reasonably decent job in Koblenz, and the prospect of being granted leave of absence to work toward my master’s degree.
I was never quite sure whether Erica had left me or I her: I couldn’t even remember whether it had been before or after I got my B.Comm. I only remember the bitter half sentences with which she reproached me for having become too stuck up for her, and I reproached he
r for having remained too vulgar, a word I still regret; over the years her vulgarity had lost its naturalness, it had become deliberate, especially when she came out with details about her job in a lingerie shop, or teased me when I asked her to help me look for traces of cement behind my ears long after I had given up my construction job. To this day, although I haven’t set foot on a construction site for eight years (not even on my own—we’re building a house, Franziska and I), I sometimes catch myself carefully inspecting my eyelashes and eyebrows in the mirror. This prompts a gentle headshake from Franziska: not knowing the reason for my concern, she ascribes this behavior to an excess of vanity.
In Mainz, Walter had often joined us for supper in our cramming days: on the table a package of margarine, hastily ripped open, potato salad or chips from the store, mayonnaise in a cardboard container; if we were lucky, two fried eggs prepared on the hotplate that never worked properly (Erica was genuinely scared of that hotplate: a thread of egg white had once given her an electric shock); also a loaf of bread from which we hacked off thick slabs—and my perpetual fear of grease spots on books and notebooks lying on the table between mayonnaise and margarine. And I was constantly confusing Ovid with Horace, and of course grease spots did appear on the books, and I happen to loathe grease spots on printed paper, even on newspapers. Even as a child I used to be disgusted when I had to take home pickled or kippered herrings wrapped in newspaper. My father would turn to my mother and say with a note of mockery, “What makes him so fastidious, I wonder? He doesn’t get it from me, and certainly not from your family.”
It was already quite late, nearly ten, when I reached the hotel. On the eighth floor, as I walked along the corridor looking for Walter’s room, I tried to estimate from the distances between doors whether he had a single or a double room: I couldn’t face an encounter with Erica. In those seven years I had heard from her only once, a postcard from Marbella on which all she had written was “Boring, boring, boring—and not even any grease spots!”
It was a single room; even before I saw Walter I saw his dark suit on a hanger outside the clothes closet, black shoes underneath, a silver-gray tie on the crossbar of the hanger. My next glance was through the open bathroom door and took in a wet cigarette in a puddle of bathwater: the shreds of tobacco dyed the puddle yellow. Walter had evidently misjudged the size of hotel bathtubs and put in too much bath oil. I saw the glass of whiskey and soda on the plastic stool before I discovered him behind clouds of foam.
“Come right in!” he said. “I imagine you’ve come to warn me.” He wiped the foam from his face and neck and laughed at me.
“Only don’t forget our difference in rank: after all, I do have my Ph.D., and you don’t—I wonder whether, if it came to a duel, you’d be qualified to challenge me—and don’t kid yourself that you can talk me out of marrying her! There’s just one thing you should know, just one: in Mainz there was never anything between us, never.”
I was glad he didn’t laugh as he said that. I closed the bathroom door, sat down on his bed, and looked at the dark suit: that was how, the night before our wedding, my own suit had hung outside a hotel clothes closet in Koblenz, and my tie had also been silver-gray.
I watched Walter come out of the bathroom, rub himself down in his bathrobe, put on his pajamas, throw the bathrobe onto the floor, and, with a laugh, run the silver-gray tie through his hand. “Believe me,” he said, “I only met her again a year ago, quite by chance, and—well, now we’re getting married. Will you be there tomorrow?”
I shook my head and asked, “In church too?”
“Yes, in church too, because of her parents, who love a good cry at weddings. The civil ceremony alone isn’t enough for the tear ducts—and she’s still vulgar, but already we’re using a butter dish.”
“Cut it out,” I said, taking the glass of whiskey he held out to me.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I really am. Let’s have no old-timers’ reminiscences, no explanations, no confessions—and no warnings.”
I thought of what I had intended to tell him: what a tramp she really was; that she couldn’t handle money; that sometimes I had found hairs in the margarine and always those goddamn grease spots, on books, newspapers, even on photos; how hard it had been to get her out of bed in the morning, and her naïve/proletarian ideas of breakfast-in-bed being the acme of luxury, and the resulting jam spots on the sheets and brown coffee stains on the quilt; yes, and she was lazy, too, and not even clean, I had literally had to force her to wash: sometimes I had actually grabbed hold of her and dumped her in the tub, bathed her the way one bathes a child, with much screaming and spluttering; yes, and that sometimes she had got mad yet had never been in a bad mood, no, never in a bad mood. At that point I remembered the house we were building, to which I never went, leaving it all to Franziska and the architect.
“And just imagine,” said Walter, “she doesn’t want us to start building a house, and I’ve always looked for a wife who didn’t want that. Now I’ve found her, at last—she hates building and construction.”
I was just about to say, “So do I,” but all I said was “Give her my regards. I suppose it’s quite final, is it?”
“Final,” he said, “in fact, irrevocable if only because of those parental tears. We can’t do that to them, we can’t deprive them of that.”
“As for tears,” I said, “they could also shed those if it didn’t come off.”
“But those wouldn’t be the kind of tears they’re after, they want the genuine kind, the real kind, with organ music and candles and all that—and they want the barely audible ‘I do.’ No. And the honeymoon—where d’you think we’re going?”
“Venice?”
“Right—gondolas and color photos. Go ahead and cry a bit on your way down in the elevator.”
I finished my whiskey, shook his hand, and left, and on my way down in the elevator I cried a bit more than a bit, and I didn’t bother to dry my tears as I walked past the concierge out to my car. I had told Franziska I wanted to say hello to an old friend, and that was really all it had been.
IN WHICH LANGUAGE IS ONE CALLED SCHNECKENRÖDER?
It wasn’t at all the way he had imagined it: at worst the white van with the red thing—what was it called?—on it. From the white van into the white bed, from the white bed into the white engine room; green caps, surgical masks, lonely eyes above, red blood in plastic tubes, hurriedly whispered orders, before one was far, far, very far away. Bed? White? Van? Imagined? Ear? Ear? So he did remember something, and he tried to touch them, realized he couldn’t find them, couldn’t touch them, his ears, yet he could hear: female giggles, male groans, behind a—whatever was it called, what was the word for it?—rectangular, painted sky-blue with a pink border, a bluish light bulb above it, like in an air-raid shelter? Damn it, he knew that all right: air-raid shelter, knew bed, van, white, but what was the word for that rectangular, sky-blue thing with a pink border? Entrance wasn’t right, that much he knew, entrance was something that led from the outside to the inside, and this one led from the inside to a still further inside. Could it be “intrance”? In this inside there was male laughter now, and female groaning, and damn it, someone was whispering “Paternoster,” and clearly, unmistakably, someone else was whispering “Ave Maria.” They must be Catholics, that much was certain. Catholics, Protestants, Jews; now he found his ears, they were still there, even his nose, he could feel it as well as his ears, but not his—what were those things called that one used for touching, grasping? He couldn’t feel them, didn’t know what the red thing on the white van was called. Van. Car. There had been something about a car. His nose even became aware of smells: soups, sauces, he could even hear them gently bubbling, a woman’s voice saying “Los!,” the “o” in “Los!” sounded strange, he had heard that “o” before, it wasn’t Russian, or French, or Italian, wasn’t—what was the language he couldn’t remember?—wasn’t English, wasn’t Swedish, or Danish, or Dutch—he could think of all the languages,
even Arabic—just that one, the one whose name he was looking for, he couldn’t think of that, only the word with that “o” he had heard before popped into his mind—olvidados—and that was Spanish. Was he in Spain? The rectangular thing that wasn’t an entrance yet led somewhere, the things one grasped with, the red thing on the white van, the language, the language he thought and cursed in—he couldn’t think of its name; those other things, the ones one saw with, those he could think of right away: eyes. They wouldn’t open, he couldn’t raise his—and he even knew that word—eyelids! He couldn’t raise his eyelids, he touched them, pushed as he had pushed when trying to lift that damn heavy garage shutter in the house he had once lived in, that damn shutter that always seemed as heavy as lead. Shutter? No, it wasn’t a shutter, that sky-blue, rectangular thing with a pink border, it was something one opened yet not a shutter, and not an entrance either. The things one grasped with were finding it hard to hold up his eyelids. And, true enough, he could see: aluminum pans with that pungent brew bubbling in them, spoons, plates, cold stuff beside them: cucumbers, tomatoes, mustard. Yes, it was called mustard, that yellow stuff in the smeared jar with the wooden spatula, all words he knew: soup, mustard, sauce, cucumber—he knew all those words and couldn’t remember the things one grasped with and that red thing on the white van he hadn’t wanted to be put into; those were spoons, or ladles actually, and a woman, nice, not thin, not old, her hair not smart at all, she was the one who had pronounced the “o” in such a Spanish way. There was also a pot of steaming noodles; did the Spanish eat noodles? The Mexicans—do they eat noodles? Whatever were they called, those people who ate such a lot of noodles? Paternoster, Ave Maria—damn it, whatever was going on behind that rectangular sky-blue thing had nothing to do with praying, or were they praying at the same time? Catholics, of course—obviously—how wonderful that he could remember a word like “obviously”!—obviously this was a snack bar—yes, that’s what they were called!—and simultaneously—fancy his remembering the word “simultaneously”!—simultaneously one of those places where the same thing went on as behind the entrance that wasn’t an entrance. One thing he couldn’t do, and that was what the woman was doing when she said “Los!”—speak, that’s what it was, he couldn’t speak—or did the groaning, the giggling, the laughing, the praying have nothing to do with that? Was it a kind of prayer hall or room for confession? Yes, it was called speaking, what the woman did when she said “Los!”—he couldn’t speak; he had to lower the things one grasps with, his eyelids were growing too heavy, leaden shutters, and on bottles and posters he read those damned “os,” so many “os”—and how had he managed to see the sky-blue thing before he pushed up his eyelids? He had seen it before, and the thing one spoke with was called mouth, in the mouth was the tongue: he tried to touch it—nothing, there was nothing to touch, to feel—but smell, hear, see, he could do all that, yet he couldn’t speak, and the language spoken by the people who also ate noodles, whatever was that called? Of course: the super-noodle-eaters were the Italians, but the people whose language he spoke, when he could speak, also ate noodles: white noodles, he’d eaten those at home too, white van, white bed, white engine room, green caps, skullcaps actually, lonely eyes; bluish light beyond the sky-blue rectangle, before—before the thing happened that he had imagined so differently. He knew that, before his eyelids fell and his mouth disappeared, he had gone through that sky-blue rectangle—bluish light from loose bulbs, intermittent contacts, that much he knew: intermittent contacts—smiling corpses in bluish intermittent light. He wished he were home in bed—bed? Yellow sheets, blue pillows, the orange reading lamp, and around the bed, who would be standing there? A woman, his wife? Did he have one? He must have one, since there were those whom one had together with a wife, children, so he did have a wife, and children with her, and he also had a—what was it called, what one did when busy earning a living? How did he earn his living? Traveling, a lot of traveling in his—he had just had it, the word for what was revealed on opening the garage; red cross? No, white car, no red cross on it. How had he got to Mexico by car? To this snack bar? Garage shutter—no, not shutter, door, now at last he had it, now he wouldn’t have to keep thinking laboriously of the “sky-blue rectangle with a pink border.” Door was easier. Here by the door soups and sauces were being ladled out of pans, and all the words on bottles and posters ended in “os.” Was he a Spaniard, a Mexican? Then how come the noodles, and what was the name of the woman with whom he had those children? What was she called? He had been with her a long time, after all. One thing was certain: the things one grasped with were fingers, and the fingers were attached to hands. Door, fingers, hands, the red thing on the white van was a cross, and of course he had been beyond that door, someone had pushed him in, someone else had pushed him out. Far away a fragmented word was hovering as if on a celestial course, in lunar spheres, torn shreds flew toward him: Otte-lie-les, that “les” must somehow be related to the “os.” Related? That made him laugh, and laughing hurt him around his mouth, the mouth that was no longer there; gone was the mouth along with everything in it, yet it hurt inside and out. Hurt? Everything hurt, everything, his ears, his eyes, his nose, and—what were they called?—his fingers, only his mouth didn’t hurt, it wasn’t there and only hurt when he laughed about “related”; he could even reverse the “les” and turn it into “sel”—Lie-otte-sel, everything was turning, not turning around, just turning: far, far away everything was rampaging among the pathways of the stars, the glitter of the universe, the shimmer of the moon—the soups and sauces were too spicy, spices, pungent, pathways of the heavens, glitter of the universe, shimmer of the moon, and when he pushed his eyelids up again, with an effort, such an effort, like that damn garage shutter he had once had, he saw the nice woman behind the pans of soups and sauces pushing back one breast into her blue blouse. No more Paternoster, no more Ave Maria, beyond the door, silence, garage, Otte? Clot? Spot? Charlotte? Gavotte? Knot? Charlotte? And then the shreds flew together, linking up like space shuttles, and there it was LIESELOTTE, that was his wife’s name; not Spanish, or Mexican, but in a language that contained hardly any words ending in “os.” Carlos. Olvidados.
The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll Page 98