He tumbled through the open door and gathered enough strength to whisper to the dark figure: “Quick … quick … shut the door …”
Blinded by the light, overwhelmed by misery, he stood sobbing, pitiful and dirty, leaning against the wall, squinting painfully at the startled chaplain. Music, a fragment of some fading, melancholy melody, reached his ears, and it seemed as if the whole of mankind’s dark longing for paradise were concentrated in that one brief phrase of music, sweet and heavy, clouded with sorrow. It struck him like a death blow; he fell as if shot.
When he opened his eyes again, he first saw only books. He stared at an entire wall of them, their bright titles gleaming softly in the dull glow of a desk lamp. He felt the warmth of a stove at his back; he was sitting in a large, soft armchair, with comfortable cushions, to his right a large, flat desk of dark-stained wood. A friendly man’s voice asked: “Well?” and as he turned around with a start, he was looking into the narrow, pale face of the chaplain, bending over him. The first thing he noticed was the marvelous fragrance of good tobacco and good soap, mingled with the pleasant neutral odor of the confession box. Large, intelligent gray eyes peered at him from the white planes of the face, veiled by a cool reserve, regarding him with almost impersonal curiosity. Then came the second question: “What now?”
But Joseph was staring at the carpet, lost in dreams, a magnificent, clean, warm, yellow carpet, beautiful, tasteful etchings on the wall. A dream of domesticity and warmth, beauty and security, enveloped the room. The contrast with the sties they lived in at camp was so shocking that tears came to his eyes again. My God, this armchair, soft and human, actually made to sit on! The chaplain’s pale face glanced nervously toward the desk, where a few books lay open and various papers were strewn about. “Well?” he asked again, but banished the impatient look from his face at once, as if he were ashamed. Joseph turned slowly to face him.
“Do you have something I could eat? I should wash up, too, and then … and then …” He stood up quickly and gestured helplessly at himself. “They’re after me … I have to be gone in half an hour … My God, I’m dreaming …” He tightened his hands impatiently into fists and stood trembling.
The chaplain spread his hands at once and said regretfully: “My housekeeper’s—” but then interrupted himself, motioned for the pitiful figure to follow him, and stepped out into the hall. Joseph slipped after him.
“You’re from the camp?” he asked on the way to the kitchen. Joseph mumbled hoarsely: “Yes.” The kitchen was so sparkling clean it looked as if no one had ever cooked there. It seemed meant only for show; everything gleamed in the glow of the glass lamp, not a speck of dust to be seen, not a dish in sight. The cupboards were closed, and the stove was obviously ice cold. The chaplain tugged awkwardly at a cupboard. “For heaven’s sake,” he said, shaking his head, “she always takes the key with her …” But Joseph had grabbed the poker from the tidy coal box and said tersely, with a strange, almost coldly cynical set to his lips: “If you’ll permit me …” The chaplain turned, startled and concerned, but Joseph pushed him aside, wedged the poker between the doors of the cupboard, and forced it open with a jerk. He regarded the splendors with almost predatory eyes, sighing.
Indignation mixed with a slight disdain showed on the chaplain’s face. He watched, clutching his hands nervously behind his back, as the man wolfed down thick slices of bread covered with butter and sausage. The ragged, filthy figure in greasy denim was a bizarre sight, with tousled, dirty hair and ravenous hunger in his large, gray, oddly gleaming eyes. The only sound in the stillness was his noisy chewing and at times a strange snuffling, as if the man had a cold and no handkerchief. The chaplain couldn’t take his eyes off him, but the visitor no longer seemed to notice him.
It seemed as if time had stopped, and that the world consisted only of this kitchen in which he sat trembling beside a vagabond who ate and ate.
Joseph held the loaf of bread in his left hand and the knife in his right, seeming to hesitate; but then he dropped the knife on the table, shoved the bread aside, and stood up. “You could at least have offered me something to drink; you’ve never eaten a dozen slices like that,” he said in genuine irritation, then went over to the sink, fished the soap from a niche in the wall with annoying self-confidence, and began washing his face, puffing noisily. He found the hand towels under a clean cloth behind the oven, as if he knew the layout of the house forward and backward. “Clean underwear, now that would be just fine … and my feet washed …” he mumbled through the hand towel, drying his face and head roughly, almost relishing it. He hung up the towel and was about to ask for a comb when he looked the chaplain full in the face for the first time. “My God,” he said softly, with childlike amazement. “You’re not angry with me, are you?”
“No,” laughed the chaplain with an annoyed snort. “You’re the most charming fellow I’ve ever met!” He stood waiting by the door. Shaking his head, Joseph walked past him into the hall, heading for the study. He was still shaking his head as he sat down again in the armchair.
The chaplain had turned off the outside lights, relocked the doors, and returned quickly, as if he were afraid to leave the man alone. His face was masked with a strange severity like that of a welfare worker.
“I’ll need to ask you for a couple of other things,” Joseph said, speaking in an almost businesslike tone. “First a comb; you know how it is, a person feels so unfinished somehow, when he’s washed up but hasn’t combed his hair … thanks.” He took the black comb and combed his hair contentedly. “And a cigar, if you have one … and, I’m sorry, a sip of wine … then I think I’ll make it across the border easily. I’m feeling stronger now and I’m not afraid anymore.” The chaplain wordlessly handed him a cigar, along with a box of matches. “Now I know why the hangman’s men, even though they’re stupid, can still lord it over us in camp—because we’re always hungry and dirty.” He puffed deeply, regarding the cigar and his fingernails in turn. Then he said softly: “Excuse me,” and cleaned his nails with a broken matchstick. “There, now I almost feel good … almost.” He gazed intently into the chaplain’s eyes, and a trace of sympathy appeared on his face. “I really don’t know what you’re so annoyed about.” The chaplain rose with a jerk, as if a fire had started under him; he paced agitatedly in front of the bookcases, his face an odd mixture of fear, sorrow, indignation, and uncertainty.
“In fact,” Joseph continued, when he received no answer, “I’m the one who could be offended, since you’re not offering me any wine. And viewed objectively, I am a rather charming fellow.”
The chaplain paused abruptly before him and stammered: “Are you … are you … a criminal?”
Joseph’s eyes narrowed and hardened; he looked at him searchingly. “Of course, I committed a crime against the state, and I think you’re about to as well.” He glanced at the scattered pages of the manuscript covering the desk. “That is, if you truly represent the ideas that your uniform stands for.”
“You let me worry about that.” The chaplain laughed, apparently trying to salvage a little humor from the situation. Joseph asked again about wine, but the chaplain merely smiled uncertainly, then paled in fear and nearly cried aloud as Joseph stepped up to him, cowering defensively as Joseph seized him by the top button of his soutane. “All right,” he said softly, very softly, “I’ll get you some wine.”
But Joseph threw his cigar angrily down on the desk and released his hold. “Oh”—he waved him off wearily—“if you only understood what wine it is I want from you. What good do all these treasures do you?” He gestured roughly at the books. “You’ve learned as little from them as your confrères fifty years ago learned from the fulsome pandects we find so contemptible today …” He struck the bookcase dully with his fist. Then he hesitated as he saw the chaplain’s tortured face, but his words gushed like a spring released by a drill. “You soak in your certainties like a man in a bathtub of lukewarm water, indecisive, hardly daring to get out and dry
off. But you forget that the water is turning cold according to inexorable laws, as cold as reality.” His voice had lost its accusatory tone and was almost imploring. He released his gaze from the shocked face of the chaplain and ran his eyes over the book titles. “Here,” he said sadly. “You wanted to know my crime.” And he threw the slim brochure onto the desk: “There it is … and now, goodbye.” He took a deep breath and looked around the room a final time, then knelt and said softly: “Bless me, Father, I have a dangerous road ahead.” The priest folded his hands and made the sign of the cross over him, and as he tried to hold him back with a helpless smile, Joseph said quietly: “No, forgive me … I have to go now, my life is at stake.” And before he left the house, he made the sign of the cross over the figure in black.
It was now totally dark outside, as if the night had rolled itself into a tight ball. The village seemed to cower in darkness, like a flock in a gloomy cave, swallowed by brute silence. It seemed as if loneliness braced itself icily against Joseph as he wended his way cautiously through the dark alleys to the open fields. As if in final farewell, the bells of the church rang in consolation through the night. Four times they sounded from the tower, bright and almost joyful, then twice, dark and heavy, as if God’s hammer were falling through all eternity.
In the silent gloom the tones were like a reminder to hold fast to his faith.
Soon he could distinguish the ground’s surface and larger obstacles, hedges and bushes and ditches. He could go only by sixth sense, instinctively following the street, which angled away toward the country road. He felt almost nothing, his heart heavy with silence, the infinite silence of one who suffers, for whom there is no answer under the heavens, no answer but God’s promise, spanning the earth, wherever any person suffers for the sake of the cross. He was so far, so far from all hate and all bitterness, that prayers formed in him like pure, steady flames rising from the garden of faith, hope, and love, innocent and beautiful as flowers.
He crossed a wooded area, feeling his way cautiously from tree to tree to keep from stumbling in the darkness. Emerging into the open, he saw lights. To the right, ghostly and distant, rose tall structures, illuminated by yellow light, steel-ribbed skeletons. Behind them glowed the red jaws of the blast furnaces, like the gullet of the underworld. My God, those must be the factories at Gordelen! The border lay just beyond them. It couldn’t be more than a half hour away. The field fell away before him and was bordered by a line of trees, their silhouette outlined against the distant light, and he saw how the trees ran on ahead, far across the dark, level fields, toward the factory. It must be a road. Everything beyond it lay in darkness; a thick forest seemed to extend into the distance, perhaps even beyond the border.
Nothing could be heard but the strange, distant, grinding murmur from the blast furnaces and pits.
The field before him appeared smooth, a treeless meadow without bushes. He headed to the left, but there was no cover that would allow him to reach the road. He hesitated, saw with increasing clarity the motionless line of trees on the dark base of the road, like an endless row of teeth. Fear overwhelmed him again, tugging violently and mockingly at the cloak of his self-composure. He seemed to see the monstrous grin of a bestial mouth stretched across the face of the night. He pushed off from the tree, almost violently, and began to run. The steep meadow seemed to swallow him; he hadn’t realized how abruptly it would fall away.
Suddenly, the heavens seemed to split in two, and the dazzling beam of a searchlight shot out in front of him, as if he had brought it to life. He fell to the ground as if struck by lightning, landing painfully on his chin. His face pressed deep into the bitter, cool damp of the earth while the searchlight sailed back and forth over him like a huge yellow whip. With his face in the soil he failed to hear the sentry’s challenge, then a burst of fire raced like an apocalyptic gurgle across the earth in front of him, the bullets thudding into the ground. He lay there, nailed fast by the murderous light, like a target set on the meadow’s slope. And before the next series of shots ripped through him he screamed, screamed so loudly in his forsakenness that the heavens would surely collapse. He raised his head again and screamed, blinded by the light, before a final burst from the snarling muzzle extinguished his cries.
All was still as his tormentors surrounded him, shining their flashlights on his torn body, which resembled the earth so closely that it might have been the earth itself that bled. “Yes … that’s him,” said an indifferent voice.
YOUTH ON FIRE
Heinrich Perkoning was sixteen years old when, for the first time, he felt like dying. On a gray December day, strolling through the large city he called home, he saw an elderly gentleman he knew follow a bold young prostitute into her house. He was overwhelmed by such infinite pain that he wanted to die. The anguish he felt, which seemed immeasurable, increased with each passing day. He saw so many ugly and evil things, and so few that gave joy to his soul, that he decided to kill himself. He didn’t say a word to anyone. He suffered for a year, and no one sensed his pain. He was often on the verge of confiding in someone he thought he could trust but always recoiled at the merely superficial interest they showed, and he closed his heart.
Now he was walking—on yet another December day—along the bank of a broad river, thinking of only one thing: killing himself, taking his own life. Trembling, he slowly descended the stone steps leading to the water. He paused on the bottom step. The water lapped intimately at the stones, as if in gentle encouragement. He’d planned everything carefully in advance: He would drape his coat loosely around his shoulders and sew it up tightly from the inside, preventing any possible swimming motion. He thought again with a shudder of all those who would suffer at the nature and manner of his death. His mother and father, his siblings, and a few others, friends, one or two young women among them, who thought they loved him. They all passed through his mind, slowly and silently. A scarcely perceptible wave of love and longing rose in him yet could not hold him back. He had struggled far too often against such feelings. And he saw the face of a suffering young priest, whispering to him, “The Son of Man knew not where to lay his head, so forsaken was he, so miserable and forsaken among men. Even his disciples deserted him in his hour of need. Only the power of the Holy Spirit could have given them strength to bear the terrible agony and pain, for the sake of God. And yet the Son of Man still loved them. He knew how ugly and evil the world was, but he was filled with love for a mankind that had strayed—and gave his life for them, and for you. If you believe in him—as you’ve always claimed—then follow his example and love them all, the bad, those who have lost their way, all those who suffer.” Heinrich trembled violently and groaned: “I can’t bear it!” But a voice within him, more powerful than he had ever heard, roared: “God’s mercy and love flow everywhere; have faith in Him!” And Heinrich turned and ascended the stairs.
He walked along the broad passage beneath the arch of the bridge. Across the street stood a brightly painted wooden pavilion surrounded by shrubs and small trees, a disreputable café. Heinrich reached in his pocket, counted his money, and crossed the street. He entered the grimy place and sat down wordlessly in one of several booths surrounding a small dance floor. An aged, slovenly waitress brought the coffee he ordered. The walls were decorated with stylized red nudes. Lecherous men of various ages sat about with prostitutes. A pretty young girl around seventeen years old, dressed like a prostitute, sat down beside him. She smiled strangely as he waved her away with a tired gesture. Heinrich took out the New Testament he always carried and began to read. The young woman’s eyes were so striking he trembled in confusion. He tried to concentrate on the text, but kept glancing into her smiling eyes, which were staring fixedly at him. She propped her elbows on the table and put her chin in her hands. Her brown hair was soft and thick, her face clever and charming, her eyes pure and beautiful, almost childlike. At first Heinrich viewed her with mistrust, but with each glance he grew more surprised. Her large, dark eyes were fill
ed with sorrow; they were pure like those of a child, and sad like those of … But she’s a prostitute all the same, he thought, she’s trying to seduce me, I must be wrong, she’s no good. He returned to his reading. Still, he felt compelled to keep looking up, until, no longer able to bear the terrible uncertainty, he asked in a harsh, brusque voice: “What are you doing here?” She seemed to have been waiting for this question. She loosened a chain with a crucifix from her neck and said in a firm, clear voice, pointing to the cross: “I come in the name of this sign.”
Heinrich looked down and blushed in confusion. “I don’t really understand, but I believe you.” The young woman smiled gently and continued: “Let me explain; it’s really quite simple. I’ve taken a job in this … place … as a prostitute—you know about such things—on a rescue mission. I want to save people, and since I don’t think I’m strong enough to battle with lecherous older men, I’m trying to save the young ones. There are countless young men on the verge of ruin. You’re not the first I’ve approached under the mask of sin, but of those I’ve joined, you’re the first who didn’t need my help.” Heinrich gazed at her speechlessly, as if he couldn’t believe his ears. Beneath his almost enraptured gaze, she turned serious and her smile faltered. Now that the sadness in her eyes was no longer muted by her smile, he could see clearly into the bottomless depths of sorrow in her soul.
He wanted to ask if she’d saved anyone yet, but was ashamed to demand an accounting, and waited for her to continue. She sat in mystical beauty, leaning forward slightly, with the suffering visage of an apocalyptic angel. Heinrich could tell that something strange and unexpected was taking place inside her, and in a powerful new rush of shame he covered his face with his hands. All at once he loved this young woman. She continued, her voice now trembling with excitement: “I actually managed to save one of them. He came stumbling in the first week I was here. I could tell he wasn’t drunk, but simply weak from hunger. He was as pale as death, his black hair unkempt, and yet he lived. He sat down and shouted almost madly for a woman. I took his arm and led him to my room to save him from scorn, for I could see he was practically insane with misery. I gave him something to eat and let him tell his story. Then he fell asleep.
The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll Page 101