The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (103 page)

Wenk turned on the tap, placed his briefcase on the bed, hung the man’s jacket over a chair and his own over the brass knob of the
bedpost, and took off his shirt. He washed slowly and thoroughly, cleaned his teeth and shaved. Welter neither moved nor spoke. His only movement consisted of occasionally opening his thick, swollen-looking lips and puffing out clouds of smoke. On either side of the projecting shutters, the smoke rose into the white triangles of sky.

Wenk felt much refreshed after his wash, lit a cigarette, then lay down on his bed and fell asleep. When he awoke, he found the other man had got up and was shaving. The air had cooled off, and a light breeze gently swayed the shutters. Outside the street was still quiet; somewhere in one of the neighbouring houses a girl was practising an étude, appropriately enough for a Sunday afternoon. She played badly, with many wrong notes, and at one place where the young man expected a cluster of semi-quavers she invariably stumbled or stopped.

Welter was standing in front of the mirror, vigorously swishing his foam-tipped shaving brush around on his face. He still had his pipe clenched between his teeth, but it seemed to have gone out. His shirt sleeves were rolled up, and the movements of his hairy, powerful arms were brisk. Wenk got up, relit his cigarette, and stood by the window. The street was empty, grey and quiet; in the house across the street, a slight, deeply tanned man in a singlet was leaning on the window-sill smoking a black cigar. Farther back in the room he saw a woman in a red petticoat powdering under her arms. The girl at the piano was now playing a folk tune, but that too she played badly, although softly and almost shyly.

“I envy you,” Welter said suddenly in a warm, attractive voice, “being able to sleep in this heat.”

“When you’ve been travelling for thirty-six hours …” said Wenk, turning to Welter, who was just wiping the lather from his razor.

“Pharmacist?” asked Welter.

“No,” laughed the young man, “I thought you …”

“For heaven’s sake!” Now Welter was laughing. “Although I’ve nothing against pharmacists, in fact I wish I were a pharmacist … By the way,” he continued, lighting his pipe, “I’ve also been travelling thirty-six hours, yet I couldn’t sleep—I wish to heaven I were a pharmacist!”

After so many hints Wenk felt obliged to ask, out of politeness: “You mean your job’s such a terrible one?”

But Welter was busy rinsing the lather from his face and cleaning his brush. Outside in the street it was growing noisier and, leaning
out, Wenk saw what seemed to be a victorious football team in yellow jerseys, surrounded by a crowd of fans, pass by below. Across the street the woman was now leaning out beside the man. She was plump and young, and both she and the man looked bored. Welter had finished now; he was just putting on his tie and asked casually: “Which route did you take?”

“Munich–Hamburg, Hamburg–Cologne.” Wenk had meanwhile removed his jacket from the bedpost.

“Good idea. Let’s go for a bite to eat, shall we? I hope I’m not intruding …” Welter asked.

The two men spent the whole evening together; they seemed to take to each other. They sat, drank some wine, strolled along the Rhine, and Wenk even persuaded Welter at one point to have an ice cream sundae. But he did not find out about Welter’s occupation until later, after they had returned to the hotel. The wind had subsided, and beyond the shutters there was now a heavy, oppressive heat. They were both lying on their beds smoking. From the street came a mild jumble of voices and the sounds of turned-down radios. For a long time they were silent. Wenk smoked his cigarettes quickly one after another, hastily, greedily, until they almost stuck to his lips; then he would toss them across the room into the wash basin. The glow of Welter’s pipe swelled from time to time in the dark, then contracted again, covered by ash.

“And why,” Welter finally said quietly, “why have you been travelling such a long way?”

Wenk hesitated for a moment, then said: “I’ve been following a woman …”

“Is she beautiful at least?”

“I think so, yes.”

They fell silent again and continued to smoke. From the hot streets and the scorching pavements, the heat rose in oppressive clouds.

“Ah yes,” Welter sighed. “You see, I’d say you were twenty-eight years old, fair hair, about six feet tall. What would you do if you had five thousand marks?”

Wenk was silent, but the silence was suddenly different. “Yes,” Welter sighed again. “What would you do? The thing is, I’m looking for someone who’s about six feet tall, twenty-eight years old, with fair hair. My boss relies on my intuition. ‘Welter,’ he said, ‘go and look for him.
We must have him. Your intuition will help you.’ Oh,” he gave a scornful laugh, “my own intuition makes me sick. In this heat everything makes me sick. But tell me, what would you do?”

Wenk remained silent for a while. When he began to speak, his voice was subdued, tired, slightly ironic. In the darkness he had flushed and was smiling. From outside still came that gentle, impersonal hum, and Wenk lit another cigarette. He said: “I think I would do as they do in movies. Become a surfer or some such thing … Riviera … Florida … surfing. D’you know about surfing?” Welter didn’t answer. Only the glow of his pipe swelled in the dark and subsided again.

“Just for once, to have no worries for three weeks or three hours,” Wenk continued, “or three minutes, three seconds, like those rich whores with their johns who go surfing. Can you understand that?”

“Oh yes,” Welter said softly.

Again they were silent for a while as they smoked. Then Welter asked suddenly: “You wouldn’t take the girl along, the one you’ve been following?”

Wenk burst out laughing. In the dark he groped for his jacket, threw it across to Welter’s bed, and said: “You win, it’s been in my breast pocket the whole time—it’s all there …”

Welter did not stir or make any move to pick up or search the jacket. After a minute he merely asked: “Do you think you’ll be able to sleep?”

“No,” said Wenk.

“Then we might as well get started.”

By the time I reached Friedenstadt, it was too late to phone Sperling. The station was surrounded by darkness, the little square filled with the kind of silence that even in small towns doesn’t begin to descend until around eleven. Once again I had miscalculated, just as, while gambling that afternoon, I hadn’t won, as I’d expected to, but had lost everything. To look up Sperling at eleven at night would have meant the permanent loss of his favour. That big hunk of a man, almost six foot six, slept at this hour as if pole-axed, while his brutish snoring filled the heavily curtained bedroom.

During the two minutes I stood hesitating on the topmost step outside the station, the few people who had got off the train with me had disappeared. I walked slowly back into the musty, semi-dark hall and looked round for somebody, but there was no one there except the man at the barrier, who seemed to be lost in thought as he stared out at the platform. His shiny cap gave him an air of solidity. I approached him; he raised a peevish face to me.

“Excuse me, sir,” I stammered, “I find myself in a predicament. I wonder if you …”

He interrupted me, coolly waved his ticket punch past my nose, and said in a bored tone of voice: “You’re wasting your time—you can take my word for it. I haven’t a penny in my pocket.” The expression in the fellow’s eyes was icy.

“But …” I tried again.

“You’re wasting your time, I tell you. I don’t lend money to strangers—even if I had any. Besides …”

“The fact is …”

“Besides,” he went on imperturbably, pronouncing each syllable like a veritable lead weight, “besides, even if—and you can take my word for it—even if I was a millionaire, I wouldn’t give you anything, because …”

“Good heavens …”

“…   because you’ve cheated me. No, don’t go away!” I turned back and watched him take the used tickets out of his pocket and carefully search through them, as if counting the little bits of pasteboard like money.

“Here,” he said, holding up a pale blue object, “a platform ticket, and it came from you.”

“Sir!”

“And it came from you! You should be grateful I’m not having you arrested, but instead … instead you’re trying to cadge money from me. Don’t go away!” he shouted at me, since I was trying again to sneak off in the dark. “Do you deny it?” he asked in a cold, insistent voice.

“No,” I said …

He put his hand on my shoulder and took off his cap, and now I saw that his face, thank God, wasn’t all that brand new.

“Young man,” he said, “tell me frankly—what do you live on?”

“On life,” I answered.

He looked at me: “Hm. Can one live on that?”

“Certainly,” I said, “but it’s difficult, there is so little life.”

The man put on his cap again, glanced round, then looked down into the black, empty tunnel leading to the platforms. The entire little station was dead. Then he looked at me again, pulled out his tin of tobacco, and asked: “Roll or fill?”

“Roll,” I said.

He offered me the open tin and filled his pipe with his broad thumb, while I deftly rolled myself a cigarette.

I sat down at his feet on the floor of the little booth where he usually sits, and we smoked in silence while the clock hand over our heads moved quietly on. The soft sound came to me almost like the purring of a cat … “Well,” he said suddenly, “if you don’t mind waiting for the eleven-thirty, you’re welcome to sleep at my place. Where are you going anyway?”

“To Sperling.”

“Who’s that?”

“A man who sometimes gives me money to buy life.”

“For nothing?”

“No,” I said, “I sell him a piece of my life, and he prints it in his newspaper.”

“Oh,” he cried, “he has a newspaper?”

“Yes,” I said.

“In that case,” he said,” … in that case,” and he pensively spat out the juice of his pipe, barely missing my head, “…   in that case …”

We were silent again in that semi-dark, musty station hall where the only sound was the gentle, steady purring of the clock hand, until the eleven-thirty arrived. An old woman and a pair of lovers passed through the barrier, then the man closed the iron grille, plucked my sleeve, and helped me up.

By the time we reached his little house, Friedenstadt was enveloped in darkness, and I knew: Sperling’s brutish snoring had now reached its climax: it would be roaring through the house, making the windowpanes and the house plants tremble, but I still had a whole night ahead of me …

In September 1914 a man by the name of Joseph Stobski was called up for military service in one of the red brick barracks at Bromberg. Although according to his papers he was a German citizen, he had only a smattering of the mother tongue of his official fatherland. Stobski was twenty-two years old, a watchmaker, and, for reasons of “constitutional debility,” had not yet performed any military service. He came from a sleepy little Polish-speaking place called Niestronno, where he had spent his days working in a back room of his father’s cottage, tracing designs on gold-plated bracelets—delicate designs—repairing the farmers’ watches, and at intervals feeding the pig, milking the cow. In the evenings, when darkness fell over Niestronno, he hadn’t gone off to the tavern, hadn’t gone to a dance, but had sat stewing over an invention, his oily fingers fiddling with innumerable little wheels and rolling cigarettes—almost all of which he allowed to burn out on the edge of the table—while his mother counted the eggs and complained about the consumption of kerosene.

So now he moved with his cardboard box into the red brick barracks at Bromberg and learned German insofar as it covered the vocabulary of regulations, orders, and rifle parts; he was also familiarized with the trade of infantryman. During instruction, he said “brrett” instead of “bread,” “canonn” instead of “cannon”; he cursed in Polish, prayed in Polish; and in the evening he would look gloomily into his dark-brown locker at the little package containing the oily wheels before going off into town to wash down his justified sorrows with schnapps.

He swallowed the sand of Tuchel Heath, wrote postcards to his mother, received bacon from home, managed to get out of regulation church service on Sundays, and would sneak into one of the Polish churches where he could throw himself down onto the tiled floor and weep and pray, although such fervor was ill-suited to anyone wearing the uniform of a Prussian infantryman.

By November 1914 Stobski was considered sufficiently trained to rank as fit to make the journey all across Germany to Flanders. He had thrown sufficient hand grenades into the sand of Tuchel Heath, he had banged away sufficiently often in the rifle ranges, and he sent off the little package containing the oily wheels to his mother, along with a postcard. He was then stuffed into a cattle car and started out on the journey all across his official fatherland, whose mother tongue, insofar as it covered orders, he had learned to master. He allowed rosy-cheeked German girls to pour him coffee and stick flowers into his rifle, he accepted cigarettes, was once even kissed by an elderly woman; and a man wearing a pince-nez who was leaning on a barrier at a railroad crossing called out to him in a very distinct voice a few Latin words of which Stobski understood only
tandem
. For help with this word he turned to his immediate superior, Corporal Habke, who in turn mumbled something about “bicycles,” declining any further information. Thus the unwitting Stobski, kissing and being kissed, showered with flowers, chocolate, and cigarettes, crossed the Oder, Elbe, and Rhine rivers, and after ten days was unloaded in the dark at a dingy Belgian railway station. His company assembled in a farmyard, and the captain shouted something in the dark that Stobski didn’t understand. Next came stew with noodles to be quickly gulped down from a field kitchen in an ill-lit barn. Sergeant Pilling once again made the rounds and took a brief roll call, and ten minutes later the company marched off in the night toward the west. From that western sky there came the notorious thunderous roar, the sky being intermittently lit up by reddish flashes, and it began to rain. The company left the road, and some hundred and fifty pairs of feet plodded along muddy cart tracks. The artificial thunderstorm came closer and closer, the voices of the officers and sergeants grew hoarse and acquired a disagreeable undertone. Stobski’s feet hurt, hurt him very much; besides, he was tired, very tired, but he dragged himself on, through dark villages, along muddy paths, and the closer they came to the thunderstorm the more odious, the more artificial, it sounded. Then the voices of the officers and sergeants became strangely gentle, almost mild, and from left and right came the sound of countless feet tramping along invisible paths and roads.