The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll

by Heinrich Böll

  He walked back slowly to the stairwell and descended. The white stucco decorations on the ceiling and walls were now defaced islands, scrawled for the most part with all sorts of graffiti.

  Descending slowly, step by step, he wondered if he should leave.

  Perhaps, he thought, it would be better to go now, before I discover I have no choice; I may spare the menacing angel with the sword the painful duty of driving me out, of watching over my departure with torch and sword. Perhaps I may kneel humbly at the angel’s feet, on the threshold, kneel two minutes in his presence, bearing the burden of the last thirty years of my life on my knees.

  He paused on a landing and looked through a broken section in the board planks into the back garden. There was the small rusty gate through which he had left back then. It led to a neighboring property, with a well-preserved, well-tended garden; the house, newly roofed and plastered, radiated affluence, security, and serenity. The long, shiny, handsomely painted shutters could close at night or for evening banquets, covering the equally charming, tall and narrow windows. The lawn had been turned and newly seeded. He saw the tiny, deliciously soft shimmer of the first touch of green, the soft down of spring, saw the flower beds with their orderly rows of pansies, and a slender young woman at the side of an equally slender young man, smiling proudly as they strolled slowly along, admiring their garden. The woman was wearing a long, dark brown dress, somewhat darker than the reddish tone of her luxuriantly gleaming hair, with a high-necked yellow sweater, which revealed a narrow strip of her blindingly white throat, like a simple but precious necklace. They looked like clever mechanical dolls, with clever smiles, carefully nuanced, well tempered. Their gestures and steps were so skillfully rehearsed there was no need to note that they were stand-ins in a film that would come to a surprisingly strange end.

  He continued slowly to the ground floor and saw that the children were still playing ball at the entrance. It was lovely the way the plump balls flew back and forth so cheerfully in the gray frame of bright light at the door, bouncing softly off the sandstone pilasters, and he heard the bright, eager, unflagging count of the young girls’ voices in the contest.

  Only now that he was outside did he realize that people must be living in the cellar as well. Rusty brown pipes jutted out of the openings, emitting smoke along with all sorts of cooking odors. Behind the windows, which extended halfway above ground level, he could see a few dismal yellow lights. He heard a radio and voices, and suddenly realized that his hands, seemingly listless within his pockets, were perspiring with fear: He feared the music coming from overbearing mechanical speakers throughout the world, feared the piping, soft, congested voices that undermined the world with their calm, soft security. No place was safe from this so-called music, a steady stream of slime dripping into the ears of humanity from a million speakers. And the smell of onions, fish, vinegar, and fried potatoes permeated the world. He wanted to bury himself deep in the earth and plug his ears, and only now and then, taking a shallow breath, listen to the song of silence, the gentle and lost fragments of paradise.

  He wiped his hands on the inner lining of his pockets and walked slowly to the bench where he had been sitting with the old man just a few minutes ago. Having waited years to see her again, the prospect of waiting another hour filled him with a frantic impatience that left him indecisive. He didn’t know where to go, the pale wall of her room stood clearly before his eyes, the play of light and shadow from the shutter forming a pattern of silver and black stripes upon it, and over the door the large black crucifix with the white body. He longed to be there on the carpet, the knapsack under his head, looking at the crucifix and waiting, perhaps sleeping as well, but he knew that he would flee from this strange void again, this solid black wall, invisible yet real, thin yet unutterably strong. This wall kept him from entering, throwing open the window, and taking possession of everything, the bed, the view from the window, kept him from gazing out toward the city on the distant horizon, now leveled flat, that he had glimpsed for a moment back then. He had always known the past could never be restored, but actually to experience the fact was frightening. Never, never again … Yet he knew she would never forget him. The trace of his eyes on the things in her room could never be effaced, sharper than the bold and regal line of the firmest brush was the trace of his eyes upon her forehead, upon the painting, the carpet, upon the distant horizon, upon every tiny place on her body.

  He saw a man working with a shovel and hoe in another garden plot. He went up to him, looked into a tired, unfriendly face, lit his pipe, still half-filled with tobacco, and sat down on the bench, staring at the ground, which was brown, a dark, moist brown, slightly damp, flecked with traces of the white gravel that had once covered the entire semicircular area. The white specks had turned dark; the gradients of the path had been rolled and flattened. Here and there cornstalks, now rotted black, had been trampled into the path, along with rusty nails, burned matches with blackened heads, and in the center, half of a black trouser button.

  His thought about the marble-white benches on the clef-shaped paths through the shrubbery, almost certainly overgrown, now struck him as foolish. He had intended to seek out the bench on the left of the grove, to make his way through the undergrowth and touch its cold, damp surface, but now all he could remember was the fear he’d felt as, leaving that very bench, he had emerged from the grove with Maria and approached the terrace, where laughing guests were drinking wine and chatting softly in the mild humidity of a warm autumn evening.

  He had paused at the rim of the fountain, looking up at her room on the upper story by the dangling gutter, already feeling the pain of departure. The house stood quiet and calm, wrapped in twilight; between the rows of poplars he had glimpsed the bright dresses of the women, the glowing tips of cigars, heard the voice of a young woman hired to sing. Only a few people lived in the house back then, it was always quiet, always slightly run-down.

  At the fountain’s rim he had taken his leave. They’ll have to have it repaired, he thought, looking at the dangling gutter. Walking past everyone, he led Maria toward her room. Once inside the door of the building she had walked ahead of him, and in the half darkness of the hall he had seen the long folds of her gray dress, her white throat, and as she turned to step into the room, her soft profile.

  Later, in Romania, in a White city, he had entered a shop to barter two handkerchiefs and a pair of socks. It was evening, a lively dark bustle of gray uniforms in the narrow lanes, men in long white coattails, and women. All was quiet and gloomy, filled with the voluptuousness of dissolution and decline. They were near the front, and they could hear the impact of the shells, not the soft, thick sound of dough being pounded in the distance, but close by, strident and savage, as if the earth were a piece of flimsy plywood smashed and splintered by hammers. Sometimes they even heard machine-gun fire, rapid and hopeless, like the grinding of worn-out brakes. In one of those streets that at first seem totally empty and turn out to be teeming with life, he stepped into a store, opened a door that led into the darkness, and found himself in a secondhand shop where musty-smelling clothes dangled on hangers from dismal racks, like corpses hanging their heads, their legs amputated. Cheap knickknacks, utensils, Japanese figurines, and watches damned to inactivity stood behind the clothes racks on bluish shelves. He leaned against the low, greasy counter and lit a cigarette.

  Suddenly a young Jewish boy emerged silently behind the counter, pale, his face a mixture of boldness, fear, and nameless sadness. He laid his brand-new handkerchiefs on the counter along with the pair of socks. The boy shook his head gently, then was shoved aside by a woman wearing a wrinkled yellow dress. Her profile reminded him of Maria’s, as she emerged with him from the garden, walking ahead.

  The woman greeted him with a silent nod. He watched as she bent over his things, and her thick hair seemed a dark, dark green. Her hands fingered the linens and he saw that they were small and surprisingly delicate, like the hands of a child. The linen
s disappeared quietly and briskly under the counter and a banknote lay pale blue against the black wood of the counter. Then she covered the banknote quickly with one hand, lifted her head, and in her face, pale and pretty, with painted lips, he read a weary, indifferent offer.

  He took the banknote quickly and banged the door behind him, leaving the clothescorpses swaying slightly on their racks and the Japanese figurines and utensils rattling against one another. He hurried back to the main street, and although it was almost jammed solid with fleeing people, with tanks, some of them damaged, and with carts, and although orders were being shouted to awaken a sense of urgency, he went into a tavern and drank the money up. A crowd of soldiers in the tavern were saying there was still plenty of time, things weren’t so bad, the Russians didn’t have the strength to advance any farther, and he learned that the front was just two miles off, if it could still be called a front. Then he turned to wine and schnapps, drowning his fear of the secondhand shop with its hanging clothescorpses, the boy, and the profile of the woman who smiled at him with lethargic willingness. Later, because he had a slight leg wound, a medical corps sergeant let him jump on a train for the wounded as it was leaving a station, steadily shelled at regular intervals by the Russians.

  As he gazed at the tips of his shoes, sharply outlined against the brown soil mixed with gravel, everything came back to him, how in the dark train rumbling into the night, someone had given him a piece of sausage reeking of garlic, and a dry, musty piece of bread. He had been dying of thirst, and only later, much later, after rocking through an interminable night, at a dark and crowded station platform where people were huddled silently for the night, did they receive a little coffee, in a small tin can.

  That’s how it always was: He would recall Maria’s throat, or her profile, and a myriad memories would tumble after them, as if the first small image were simply the initial link in an infinitely long chain that must glide through him whether he wished it or not. But he forced back these thoughts, stared again at the black tips of his English military shoes, and tried to imagine what lay ahead.

  Sometimes he tried to imagine he would find some job to earn a little money, enough to lie in that room, on the bed. Now he tried to picture what it would be like on the bed, his gaze fixed on the crucifix that would always be in her field of vision. Maria would be standing at the stove, delicate and slightly helpless, and he would ask her please not to fix fish with vinegar and sliced onions, and perhaps the window would be standing open, and the rain would pour through the broken gutter, and the poplars would shield her room from the echo of countless radios.

  But suddenly he realized that another pair of shoes had entered his field of vision. They were beautiful, brown, high-quality men’s oxfords, cleaned and polished, looking as if they belonged in a display case, yet standing on the edge of the small path, the heels projecting halfway over the furrow. He had always liked his own shoes, black English military-issue shoes from camp, but now they seemed crude, ugly, and shapeless compared to these handsome, polished, high-quality store-window shoes. But the shoes in a store window lacked socks, nor were they topped by soft, light brown, good-looking trousers that almost matched, with a crease that seemed to have a long, sharp knife hidden inside.

  He knocked out his pipe, realizing he couldn’t have been smoking more than three minutes on what little tobacco he had left, and he thought how long three minutes could be, how it could last years and years. He lifted his head, looked into a face, and knew that he would never lie on the bed, staring at the black crucifix on the green wall, that Maria would never stand at the stove, that he would never let the rain pour through the damaged gutter. He knew it, even though he realized that short of death, there was nothing that must surely come to pass.

  The face was calm and broad, the mouth somewhat thin, the eyes slightly narrow, but the forehead was high and noble; his hair, however, was curly, combed with unnecessary care; he had never liked men with wavy hair …

  In the matching hands below, the man carried a brown attaché case, and pressed against the attaché case with the thumb, a soft, light gray hat, with an immaculate sweatband.

  The man said to him: “Oh, I see, you’re the one over her bed.” And he said the same thing he’d said to the pretty woman: “Probably so.”

  Then he took his hand from his pocket, still clutching the note, which he undid carefully, and held it out, saying: “This must be for you …”

  “Oh, yes,” said the other, “it’s for me. So she’ll be back at eight.” And he looked at his wristwatch and said: “Over an hour yet.”

  They looked at each other, the man chewing on his lower lip, and he, on the bench, knew now that she belonged to this man, to him alone, and that nothing and no one in the world could take her from him, just as surely as he knew that he would never lie upon that bed.

  Now they looked past each other, and then he looked at the ground again and saw that the man’s shoes were tapping restlessly. He kept tapping his toes, and between the tips of the shoes, separated by the regulation distance, the man sitting on the bench saw half of a black trouser button, trampled into the ground.

  “Perhaps,” the voice now said above him, “we should spend the hour in conversation.”

  I stood up and followed him, and as I stood, in that tenth of a second, that fractional fraction of the tiniest space of time, I knew that she was lost to me, finally and irrevocably. As long as the garden paths were too narrow to walk side by side he remained in front of me, then he paused for a moment as we reached the broader paths, let me draw up alongside him, and we walked back in silence on the long, straight path that led through the grove toward the entrance, to that rusted gate no one opened anymore. Then we turned left toward one of the gaps in the wall, and I saw a car parked under the thick green roof of the trees, a black, high-quality, solid, and expensive piece of workmanship, reliable, clean, rugged, and sturdy. We slowed down as we approached one of the largest gaps; now we stopped and looked at each other. I saw he was trembling, his lips quivered, the solid, large, well-formed face seemed to come unhinged, and he said to me: “We were married yesterday, no one knows.” I simply nodded, looked at the ground, and then at him again.

  His eyes spoke a huge truth of which he could not be aware—together with his pain, his poverty, his trembling, all his unknown, repressed pain—the truth that there are things that can’t be bought or won, that can only come as a gift, and one of these is love.

  I nodded again and walked away. I climbed carefully over the wall, crossed the avenue, and made my way along a rough, treeless road toward the city, where I could catch a train. Behind me the sun stood low on the horizon, casting my shadow so far forward that I could scarcely see the large round dot of my head. Only when I came to some obstacle, a fence, a shed, or a partially collapsed wall, would the shadow of my head pause before me, growing larger and larger, until it flowed beyond the object it had struck, flying from me again, far, far away, so far beyond my flat field of vision that I could no longer see it, and I knew that I would never, never reach it again.

  The Essential

  HEINRICH BÖLL

  “His work reaches the highest level of creative originality and stylistic perfection.” —The Daily Telegraph

  THE CLOWN

  Translated by Leila Vennewitz / Afterword by Scott Esposito

  978-1-935554-17-2 | $16.95 / $19.95 CAN

  “Moving … highly charged … filled with gentleness, high comic spirits, and human sympathy.” —Christian Science Monitor

  BILLIARDS AT HALF-PAST NINE

  Translated by Patrick Bowles / Afterword by Jessa Crispin

  978-1-935554-18-9 | $16.95 / $19.95 CAN

  “The claim that Böll is the true successor to Thomas Mann can be defended by his novel Billiards at Half-Past Nine.”

  —The Scotsman

  IRISH JOURNAL

  Translated by Leila Vennewitz / Introduction by Hugo Hamilton

  978-1-935554-19-6 | $14.95
/ $16.95 CAN

  “Irish Journal has a beguiling … charm that perfectly suits the landscape and temperament of its subject.”

  —Bill Bryson, The New York Times Book Review

  THE SAFETY NET

  Translated by Leila Vennewitz / Introduction by Salman Rushdie

  978-1-935554-31-8 | $16.95 / $19.95 CAN

  “The strongest response to modern terrorism by a serious novelist; an artful, gripping novel.” —Kirkus Reviews

  THE TRAIN WAS ON TIME

  Translated by Leila Vennewitz / Afterword by William T. Vollmann

  978-1-935554-32-5 | $14.95 / $16.95 CAN

  “Böll has feelingly symbolized a guilty Germany doing penance for its sins through suffering and death.” —Time

  GROUP PORTRAIT WITH LADY

  Translated by Leila Vennewitz

  978-1-935554-33-2 | $18.95 / $21.50 CAN

  “His most grandly conceived [novel] … the magnum opus which so far crowns his work.”

  —The Nobel Prize Committee

  WHAT’S TO BECOME OF THE BOY? OR, SOMETHING TO DO WITH BOOKS

  Translated by Leila Vennewitz / Introduction by Anne Applebaum

  978-1-61219-001-3 | $14.95 / $16.95 CAN

  “The depth of Böll’s vision into the human soul can be breathtaking.” —The Washington Post

  THE COLLECTED STORIES

  Translated by Leila Vennewitz and Breon Mitchell

  978-1-61219-002-0 | $29.95 / $29.95 CAN

  “This is a most impressive collection, confirming Böll’s standing as one of the best writers of our time. It would form an admirable introduction to his work for those who don’t yet know it. It is the work of affirmation, for it proclaims the values of humanity and the unquenchable vitality of the spirit.” —The Scotsman