But the woman turned around, suddenly, abruptly, as if she had just awakened, and said softly: “You’ll have to leave the house by way of those gardens when it’s completely dark. Believe me, a thousand pairs of eyes have seen you enter the house, and any one of them would recognize you again. They don’t think you’re here anymore, because the house has already been searched.”
He protested in a state of shock: “But that means I’ll have to wait here several more hours.” He felt fear rise within him, wild desires and opposing thoughts, and he was surprised by the joyful smile with which she said: “Do you find it so terrible to be my prisoner until darkness falls?” adding with a wry smile: “But wait a moment …” She walked past him and he heard her leave the house.
He breathed a sigh of relief. Was he so weak and foolish he couldn’t spend two hours beside this beautiful woman without succumbing ineluctably to the terrible sin of betrayal? He had carried the image of his beloved unscathed through all the dangers and temptations, the infinite agonies of war. Was he to give it up now, without wishing to, seduced by the dark, melodious voice of ruin hovering over this city, trapped now in the dusk of this house? Yes, it would be truly stupid to risk his escape for a foolish weakness. Smiling, he lit one of the American’s cigarettes and turned on the light. But it seemed as if the dusk, the sweet sense of being lost, couldn’t be banished by the warm, bright flood of light, either. It hovered among furniture, in the gaps, even above the reddish lamp shade itself, the sweet fragrance of being lost, drawing him into its spell. Ghastly and sweet, it flowed in, as if the joyful visage of the beautiful city was dissolving into insane caresses, blurred and enticing, as if enveloped by the mists of ruin.
The noise of battle spread steadily throughout the city. From time to time it fell silent, only to burst forth again like the dull blasts of a trumpet. The war’s progress could be measured easily by its sounds; it was actually possible to sense the increasing depth and expanse of the blows, to feel the gray soldiers’ weakening resistance, and in the streets, as the curtain lifted, the sounds of life swelled forth again.
The evening slowly filled the last bright light of day with blue shadows. It seemed to fall softly, tenderly, friendly and familiar, no more than the darker sister of the cheerful day. Twilight seemed to smile upon this immense and beautiful city, to drape its vast, dark blue cloak around her, as if it couldn’t be angry with her, enfolding her in a quiet, loving, and ineffably tender embrace, openly, with no thought for the poor hearts of those who stand aside in misery, weeping, weeping in the arms of longing.
Reinhard turned the light back off. For an instant it seemed completely dark, but then the last gleams of daylight plunged through the open window into the thick dusk of the room. The window was like a benevolent shaft in a prison. Delicate reddish gleams flowed in; they seemed mingled inextricably with the confusing, yet bittersweet smells of the evening, breath and light in one, which wafted beneath the gentle trees of the boulevard. They penetrated to the young man hidden behind the curtains and breathing deeply, brushing him like the terrible caress of a beautiful woman who teases but will not yield. He groaned as if his life’s blood were streaming forth, and felt his misery, his total abandonment in this foreign, hostile city, like a single, massive wound, lashed by the inescapable blandishment of his senses. He tore himself away as if he had been anchored to this shadowy play, stumbled through the dusk to the door, pulled it open, and hurried down the hall to the front entrance. But then he paused as if nailed to the spot, for he heard fate itself approaching. The front door opened and the soft steps of the woman came toward him. He saw nothing, nothing at all in the darkness of the hall, as if it were a solid fabric, but never, never in the thousands of seconds that long afternoon had he seen more clearly. He saw her whole, his heart was torn from him, and as the tiny steps approached, he braced himself against the wall, as if forced backward by an invisible power. His eyes closed, his entire being writhed in pain, and he simply reached out, vaguely, as if he were trying to catch a bird flying past, and at the first tender touch he sensed that she too was unable to flee. And as her tears burned upon his cheeks, he longed for the entire darkness of night to crash down around them and bury them in its rubble.
When they awakened, they were so distant ice water might have been flowing between them, distant and cold, lying together a bad dream, while the milky light of the moon streamed mockingly through the open window of the room. She turned her face aside with a shudder and her entire being, mysterious and unfathomable, seemed hidden with her face behind the dark curtain of her hair. Reinhard rose, passed his hand wearily through his hair. He was shivering. Provocative and threatening, the uncanny stillness entered the haze woven of their own confusion within the room, where despairing caresses seemed to have taken hold like poisons.
He slowly pulled on his shoes, which stood beneath the wardrobe as if awaiting him. He shuddered, shuddered again, and a wild fear kept him from turning around; never had he suffered such misery as in this cold night hour, which seemed to mock the tenderness of day and evening, the hour in which, in this deeply foreign city, the myriad dangers of a daring flight ahead, he creeps from the bedroom of a beautiful woman whose sobs express the desolation lodged in his own miserable heart, arid and ineradicable. No, never again in his life could he turn back.
He moved slowly, cautiously, as if fearing to awaken the stillness, to the window; but as he was about to swing over the low sill, the muffled sound of her bare feet froze him in his tracks. He felt the blood flow like ice through his veins and, trembling as if he were about to look directly into the true, naked face of death, he quickly turned his head. And it was strange that this lovely face, sweeter and more beautiful than ever, with its small, smiling bud of a mouth, that this face, like a gently compelling mirror, forced from him a joyful, open, and innocent smile. There was no longer the slightest fiber of his being that this woman desired. Her eyes simply compelled him to throw off the entire burden, and with her small, slender hand, she passed him a slim bundle of banknotes, which he stuck in his pocket without looking. He seized her hand unhesitatingly and pressed it. “This may help you,” she said in a small voice, “and don’t be sad. The three who love us: God, your wife, and my husband, may well forgive us,” and she kissed him quickly and lightly on the forehead. Then he swung himself out and walked toward the cold face of the moon.
THE MAD DOG
The sergeant pushed open the door and said: “Take a look at him. Is he …?” He left his cigarette in his mouth. I approached the motionless figure lying on a bier. Someone perched on a stool beyond the bier rose quickly and said: “Good evening.” I recognized the chaplain and nodded. He installed himself at the head of the body.
I turned irritably to the policeman and glanced at his burning cigarette: “Could I have a little more light, please? I can’t see a thing.” He mounted a chair and arranged the hanging lamp with a cord so that its glow fell directly on the stiffened body. Now that I could see the corpse in full light, I drew back involuntarily. I’ve seen plenty of dead men, but every time I see one I’m disturbed by the realization that I’m looking at a human being, a person who lived, and suffered, and loved.
I saw at once that he was dead. Not by any medical indication; I sensed it and knew it. But I had been summoned to certify his death officially, so I got down to business. It was my legal duty, after all, to go through the well-rehearsed motions with which human science gropes toward mysteries. The recumbent figure looked ghastly.
His reddish hair was soaked and matted with blood and dirt, practically glued to his head. I made out a few wounds inflicted by blows and cuts. A terrible laceration scored his face, as if a rasp had been pulled across it. His mouth was twisted, the small pale nose flattened; his hands cramped at his sides, still clenched in death; the clothes filthy and smeared with blood. You could sense the infernal rage with which he had been hit, kicked, and gashed; he had been killed with bestial pleasure. I took hold of his jacket
resolutely and undid the few buttons that had not been ripped away. Oddly enough his skin was white and tender as a child’s; no blood or dirt had penetrated the cloth.
The policeman suddenly bent over me, so near that I could feel his heavy breath, and with a glance at the body, said indifferently: “The party’s over, huh?” I stared at him for a few seconds, feeling my face twitch with rage, almost with hate.
My eyes must have said enough. He removed the sweetly stinking cigarette from his mouth with a disconcerted air, then slipped away. At the doorway he added: “Just let me know, Doc.” I felt freed somehow. Now I began my examination in earnest. How ridiculous to place a stethoscope upon this chest, to feel this pulse, to carry out the whole helpless charade upon this miserable, flayed body. He couldn’t have died from the wounds to his head. Should I take the easy way out medical science offers these days and write on the death certificate: circulatory failure … exhaustion … malnourishment? I don’t know if I laughed. I could discover nothing but the head wounds, which must have been terribly painful, but could scarcely have been fatal, having barely penetrated the outer structure of the skull. They must have been inflicted in blind rage.
Even in this desolate state his uncannily narrow, white face resembled a knife. He must have been a cold, daring fellow, I thought. I slowly rebuttoned his jacket, instinctively brushing the strands of bloody, dirty hair back from his forehead. It seemed as if he were smiling scornfully, mockingly. Then I looked at the chaplain, who had been standing at my side, pallid and silent, a quiet man I knew well. “Murdered?” I asked softly. He simply nodded, then replied in an even softer voice than mine: “A murderer, murdered.” I gave a start, then stared once more at the knife-sharp, pale face, which seemed to be laughing, even beneath the agonizing wounds and abuse, cold and arrogant. Horror constricted my throat; it was horrible, this corpse in the gloomy room, drenched by the brutal lamp’s harsh circle of light, while everything else lay in darkness. The bare bier … a few old stools … the walls with their crumbling plaster … and this dead body in a tattered gray uniform.
I looked at the chaplain almost imploringly. I was dizzy with exhaustion, fear, and nausea. The policeman’s cigarette had finished me off. I had been going all afternoon on an empty stomach, entering miserable dens, powerless, helpless, absurdly at the mercy of circumstances. Although I had seen many things that day, a murdered murderer was still a rarity, even in this city.
“A murderer?” I asked, lost in thought. The chaplain pushed his stool toward me: “Sit down, please,” and after I had automatically obeyed him, he continued, leaning on the plank-bed: “You don’t know him, then? You really don’t?” He looked at me as if he almost doubted that I had my wits about me. “No,” I said wearily, “I don’t know him.” The chaplain shook his head: “You get around so much, I thought you would have heard of the Mad Dog.” I jumped up in shock … my God! “The Mad Dog, here—that face!” I stood beside the chaplain, both of us staring at the pallid, disfigured corpse.
“Did he have time to receive the sacraments?” I asked softly. I waited some time for his response. The chaplain didn’t appear to have heard me, and I didn’t want to ask again. The silence was nearly stifling, and when the chaplain answered, it seemed as if several minutes had passed: “No … but he could have. I was with him almost an hour. He was tremendously agitated and alert, before he”—he looked at me—“passed away.”
The chaplain stretched his hands out helplessly toward the corpse, as if he wished to caress him. His poor, narrow child’s face appeared rigid with emotion—I can think of no other way to put it. He pushed his blond hair back as if in despair, and then blurted in agitation: “You … you may think I’m crazy, but I’d like to stay with him awhile, until they come to get him, yes, I don’t want to leave him alone. He truly loved only one person in his life, and that person betrayed him; you can laugh if you want, but … aren’t we all guilty? And if I stay with him for a while … perhaps …” He looked at me with a vague, troubled obstinacy in his eyes. They were blue, with dark circles of hunger clinging beneath them, almost like stigmata. No, the word crazy never crossed my mind. And laugh at him, my God! “I’ll stay with you,” I said.
We were silent for the time it takes to say an Our Father and a Hail Mary. Harsh, strident laughter spilled into our silence from the guard room, women’s voices, shrill shrieks. I returned slowly and released the lamp so that it dangled in its former position. The entire room was evenly enveloped in a dull, flat light; the ghastly corpse looked gentler, less rigid, almost more lifelike. Nothing is more merciless than this light, this electric light so appropriate to their cigarettes, their cadaverous faces, their weary lewdness. I hate that electric light.
The laughter from the guard room swelled and receded.
The chaplain started, as if brushed by a private fear, as if some terrible memory had touched him. “Sit down, Doctor,” he said quietly. “I want to tell you something about him.”
I sat down as asked, while the chaplain sat sideways on the plank-bed. We turned our backs to the dead man.
“By strange coincidence,” the chaplain began, “he and I were born in the same year, nineteen twenty-eight. He told me everything; you know, I’m not sure whether he was talking to me, or himself, or someone who wasn’t here. He stared at the ceiling as he spoke, talking feverishly, in fact he probably had a fever. He never knew his parents, you know, never went to school. He was dragged around various places. His first memories, sometime between the war and the inflation, were of the police dragging off the man he thought of up to then as his father, a crude, cowardly fellow, half tramp, half thief, and half laborer, from some block of flats or other on the outskirts of town.
“Picture a squalid room in which a poor, chronically abused woman lives with a perpetually drunken, lazy, and cowardly brute … that’s the whole of it. You know the situation, Doctor. Once his alleged father was sent off to prison for several years his life settled down somewhat. His aunt—he found out later that this eternally irritable, hateful woman was his aunt—got a job at a factory. The police saw that he was sent to school. And there he stood out because of his unusual intelligence. Can you picture it, Doctor”—the chaplain looked at me—“that knife-sharp face slicing through dull classes at school? Well, he became the top student, but what does that say when in fact he towered so far above the others? And he was ambitious. The teachers recommended that he attend the gymnasium; the minister took an interest in the matter, but this woman, his aunt, opposed the idea angrily; it made her furious. She acted as if they wanted to murder him; she did everything she could to restrict him to her own miserable, crude surroundings. She made all sorts of difficulties, you see, insisting on her rights as his guardian; she harassed him whenever he was home … he wasn’t to try to ‘rise’ in the world. But she was evidently no match for the combined powers of his teachers and the priest. He was awarded a scholarship to a boarding school, was taken on as a full-time student, and soon exceeded their highest expectations. Everything came easily to him. He learned Latin and Greek as well as mathematics and German … and he was religious. Yet he wasn’t one of those humble types who accepts everything and quietly grinds away at their studies. He was creative, clever, his knowledge in religious instruction was almost that of a theologian. In short, he was a real star. And not once did he recall the milieu he had escaped with anything but horror and disgust; he felt no compassion for it, he shuddered at the thought of it. He even stayed at school during vacations, making himself useful in the library, in the office. There was no doubt that he would follow in the footsteps of his patrons. But he was willful and arrogant, with stubborn self-confidence. ‘I think deep down I always felt contempt for all of them, without realizing it,’ he said to me. Grinding his teeth in rage, he took whatever punishments his pride occasioned, but was seldom disciplined. He was a star, putting them all to shame. They overlooked things now and then; only when he went too far, or neglected to show the expected humility, w
as he punished.
“But the older he grew, the more the world tempted him. Riches, fame, power: His heart would speed up when he thought of them; and by the time he was sixteen he had already inwardly abandoned the idea of staying in the order, although he said nothing about it, since he wanted to complete his studies. All genuine religious feeling dissolved in the constant tension caused by this new attitude. The world was so tempting, you see, the whole false blossoming of politics back then, like a communal lust for chaos, the fearful life of unburied corpses; it tempted him. On the other hand, he didn’t want to lose his chance to finish school; the misery, the old, terrible domestic misery was still strongly engraved in his memory. He didn’t exactly play the hypocrite, but he became calculating. Quite imperceptibly, calculation poisoned him over the months and years. He almost went bad; at any rate he lost what little faith he had.
“When he completed his degree and coldly informed the fathers of his decision, the whole situation was of course somewhat embarrassing, but he turned his back on them without a hint of shame; he ‘simply burnt his bridges.’ He had his diploma, not a word had been said linking his free education to his entry into the order. He severed all connections with the school and went out into the world, armed only with an excellent education and fierce ambition. He didn’t have one decent suit, not a penny to his name, nothing.
The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll Page 105