The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (121 page)

It was a dismal year. Total financial collapse, not exactly a classic “failure,” merely a “compromise with creditors,” a procedure I didn’t understand, but at any rate it sounded more dignified than “bankruptcy.” It was somehow connected with the collapse of an artisans’ bank whose manager, if I remember correctly, ended up behind bars. Abuse of confidence, forfeited guarantees, unwise speculations. Our house in the suburbs had to be sold, and not a penny remained of the sales price. Upset and confused, we moved into a large—too large—apartment on Ubier-Ring in Cologne, across from what was then the vocational school.

Bailiffs, bailiffs, affixing seal after seal. We pulled these off while they were still fresh, ignoring this preliminary step to seizure; later we became indifferent and left them in place, and eventually some pieces of furniture (the piano, for instance) bore whole accumulations of seals. We got along fine with the bailiffs. There was irony on both sides, rudeness on neither.

I can remember the appearance of that four-pfennig piece, something to do with political emergency regulations, and the tobacco tax. This four-pfennig piece was a large, attractively designed copper coin, but it may not have appeared until a year or so later, perhaps 1931–32. The Nazis marched triumphantly into the Reichstag. Brüning was chancellor. We read the
Kölnische Volkszeitung
. My older brothers and sisters swore by the
RMV
(
Rhein-Mainische-Volkszeitung
).

I said goodbye to outdoor games. Sadly. Out in the suburb of Raderberg we had still been able to play hockey on the streets (with old umbrella handles and empty condensed-milk cans); rounders often, soccer less often, in Vorgebirg Park. We used to decapitate roses in the park with our “tweakers,” known elsewhere in Germany as slings. Our hoop-tossing consisted of flinging old bicycle-wheel rims down a gentle grassy slope; the one whose hoop rolled the farthest was the winner. Records were established, and we rolled our hoops all the way around the block: it wasn’t “done” to use bought, wooden hoops. Ping-Pong on the terrace, the swing in the garden; target practice with air rifles on burned-out light bulbs, which in those days were still of the bayonet type. We never found anything military, let alone militaristic, about this target practice. Ten years of freedom and many free games, too numerous for me to list. (St. Martin’s torches, building and flying paper kites, marbles.)

In the long corridor of the apartment on Ubier-Ring we continued our target practice, now with regulation targets and bolts that we called “plumets” (the dictionary tells me this comes from the Latin
pluma:
the bolts had little colored tufts attached to them). During target practice, of course, whoever wanted to go into the bathroom, the kitchen, or the bedroom, or happened to be in there, had to be warned. Overall mood: recklessness and fear, not mutually exclusive. Needless to say, not all our income was revealed to the bailiff. There was moonlighting, income from renting out woodworking machinery. Recently I read in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s
Enemies, a Love Story
, “If one wanted to live, one had to break the law, because all laws condemned one to death.” We wanted to live.

We lived on a modest scale, yet modesty did not become our guiding principle. We had more than enough worries and debts. The rent, food, clothing, books, heating, electricity. The only thing that kept us going was a temporary lightheartedness which, of course, we only achieved temporarily. Somehow, after all, money had also to be found for movies, for cigarettes, for the indispensable coffee: something we didn’t always, but did sometimes, achieve. We discovered pawnshops.

It wasn’t all as carefree as it may sound. The more modest the scale, the less did modesty become our guiding principle. I gratefully remember the devotion of my older brothers and sisters, who must have made life easier for me, the youngest, by letting me have a little something
from time to time. What scared me most during that period was my father’s cough. He was of slight build (between the ages of twenty and eighty-five his weight varied by only two or three pounds; only after the age of eighty-five did he start to lose weight). He was moderate in his habits but liked to smoke, never inhaled, and he refused to do without (or at least entirely without!) his “Lundi”—those thin, pungent cigarillos packed in round cans. He was sad in these circumstances, and also powerless against conditions, and I sometimes think that we children never paid enough attention to his sadness.

His cough drowned out even the roar of streetcar Number 16, and we could hear his cough from far away. But the place where I was most worried by his cough was crowded St. Severin’s Church on Sundays. We never went to Mass en bloc, always individually, rarely did two or three of us youngsters sit together in one pew, so we waited, each in his own seat, full of nervous tension, for our father’s cough, knowing it would start up, increase almost to the point of suffocation, and then, as my father left the church, subside. He would then probably stand outside and smoke a “Lundi” for his cough.

Now the same age as my father was then, I find that I (and I am not the only one) have apparently inherited his cough. There are some people in our household who, as I park outside amid heavy traffic, recognize me through the noise of all those cars by my cough. I hardly ever have to ring the bell or use my key: someone is opening the front door before I do either.

My cough must be on a wavelength that penetrates not only traffic noises and screeching brakes but even police sirens, yet I don’t believe that my cough can be called “penetrating.” It consists of variations on differing forms of hoarseness, usually denotes embarrassment, is seldom a sign of a cold; and there are some people who know that it is more than a cough—and less. A granddaughter, for example, who is a year old, apparently regards it as a form of speech or address; she imitates it, coughing dialogues develop between us of an ironically amused nature, dialogues in which we apparently both have something to communicate. I am reminded of Beuys, who once made a speech consisting only of harrumphings and little coughs—and a very clever speech it was, by the way.

Perhaps one should establish harrumphing schools, at least consider harrumphing as a school subject; anyway, rid it of its silly admonitory
function—to stop someone from making that tactless remark, for instance.
L’art pour l’art
as applied to coughing and harrumphing.

It might also be worth considering whether clever heads shouldn’t invent the harrumphing letter-to-the-editor.

The journey there was pleasant: the Rhine still under early-morning mist; weeping willows, barges, sirens, the trip taking precisely as long as I needed for my breakfast. Coffee and rolls acceptable, eggs fried; no baggage, just cigarettes, newspaper, matches, return ticket, ballpoint pen, wallet, and handkerchief, and the certainty of seeing Margret again. After so many years, after several abortive meetings, after knowing her for more than forty years, I had been surprised and stirred by something I had never seen before: her handwriting, strong yet graceful, and the words, written on the death announcement with surprising firmness: “do come—it would give me so much pleasure to see you again.” The small “d” in “do” made me suspect that she had never come to terms with the capital “D”; we all have a letter or two that we stumble over.

On arrival I got rid of my largest piece of baggage, the newspaper. I left it behind in the dining car and reached the cemetery in good time after my own fashion: too late for the
Largo
, the
De Profundis
, and the incense in the chapel, too late also to join the cortège. I was just in time to see the acolytes taking off their vestments and bundling them under their arms as they walked away. The taller one unscrewed the processional cross into three sections, packing it away in a case obviously designed for that purpose, and as they got into the waiting taxi they all lit cigarettes: priest, driver, and acolytes. The driver offered the priest a light, the younger acolyte did the same for the older one, and at that point one of them must have made a joke: I saw them all laugh, saw the older acolyte coughing with laughter and cigarette smoke, and I had to laugh too, when I thought of the sacristy cupboards where in another five minutes they would be putting away their paraphernalia: oak, baroque, three hundred years old, the pride of the parish of St. Francis Xavier, which in 1925 had been renamed St. Peter Canisius; and it wasn’t I, it was the deceased who had just been buried, on whose
coffin clods of earth were still falling, he who had saved the day in 1945 by his inspired recollection of the depth of those cupboards where, behind the neat piles of altar linen and various sacred utensils, we had hidden cigarettes and coffee stolen from the Americans when they left their Jeeps unattended or invited us in groups to a kind of Werewolf-reeducation. It was he, not I, who, with the corrupt cunning of the European, had correctly sized up the Americans’ naïve awe of ecclesiastical institutions, and for years I had wondered why, instead of claiming credit for this inspiration, he had always ascribed it to me. Much later, long after I had left home, it dawned on me that a story of that kind would have done no service to his respectability, whereas it “fitted” me, although I never really had that idea nor ever would have.

I approached the Zerhoff family grave with circumspection, avoiding the paths on which I would have encountered men with and without top hats, ladies with and without Persian lamb coats, former schoolmates and knights of Catholic orders, schoolmates
as
knights of Catholic orders. I walked along the familiar path between the rows of graves to our own family grave, where the last burial—my father’s—had taken place five years ago; it had been insinuated that he had died brokenhearted because neither of his two sons had begotten a male heir in any woman’s womb; well, he had no female heir either. The burial plot was well cared for, the lease paid; the gravel was truly snow-white, the beds of pansies heartshaped, the pansies in turn—nine or eleven to a bed—planted in the shape of a heart. The names of Mother, Father, and Josef on the lectern-shaped marble gravestones; above Josef’s name, the inevitable iron cross; the gravestones of long-dead ancestors overgrown with ivy and, rising above all the graves, the simple, classicistic, vaguely Puritan cross, to which had later been added a scroll proclaiming in neo-Gothic script: “Love never endeth.” A gravestone was ready for me, too, the last bearer of the name; the dash after my name and birth date, that graphic “to,” had something ominous about it. Who would continue to pay the (not inconsiderable) lease when my earthly days were done? Margret, probably. She was a woman in good health, well off, childless, a tea drinker, a moderate smoker, and in the melody of her handwriting, particularly in the small “d,” I could perceive a long life for her.

I stood behind the tamarisk hedge, now grown quite dense, that separated the Zerhoff burial plot from ours, and then I saw her: she seemed more attractive than ever, more so than the girl of fifteen with whom I had lain in the grass, more so than the woman of twenty, thirty, and thirty-five with whom I had had those embarrassing and abortive reunions, the last one fifteen years ago in Sinzig when she turned on her heel outside the hotel room and drove away; she hadn’t even allowed me to take her to the station. She must be close to fifty now, her thick, rather coarse blond hair had turned an attractive gray, and black suited her.

As children we had often had to come out here on summer evenings to water the flowers: my brother Josef, Margret, myself, and her brother Franzi, into whose grave the last members of the cortège were just then throwing their flowers or their shovelfuls of earth; the familiar drumming of earth on wood, the impact of the bunches of mimosa like the alighting of a bird. Often we had spent our streetcar money on ice cream, setting out on the long homeward journey on foot and, in the summer heat, soon regretting our recklessness, but invariably Josef had produced some hidden “reserves” and paid our fares home, and on the streetcar, relieved and tired, we would argue about whether he had paid for our ice cream or our fares.

I still had to fight back my tears when I thought of Josef, and I still didn’t know, after thirty-four years I didn’t know, whether it was his death or his last wish that brought tears to my eyes. At the very end of the platform, beyond the station roof, before the arrival of the leave train, we had once again discussed ways and means of not returning to the front, fever, accident, medical certificates—and in the end it was Margret who broke the taboo and spoke of—what do they call it?—“desertion,” and Father had stamped his foot in rage and said, “There is no such thing as desertion in our family!” and Josef had laughed and said, “Where to? Am I supposed to swim across the Channel or to Sweden, or across Lake Constance to Switzerland—and Vladivostok, you know, is a pretty long way off,” and he was already standing on the steps, the stationmaster had blown his whistle, when he leaned down once more and said clearly, more to me than to my father, “Please, no priests at my grave, no mumbo jumbo at any memorial service.” He was nineteen, had given up the study of theology, and Margret was at that time considered almost his fiancée. We never saw him again. We winced,
I more than my father, Margret less, as if whipped by his last words; and of course, when the news of his death arrived, I reminded Father of Josef’s last wish, not repeating his words, I was too scared to do that, but simply saying, “You know what he asked for, what his last wish was.” But Father had waved me away and, I need hardly say, not done as Josef had asked. They had indeed had their memorial service, with incense, Latin, and catafalque; in solemn pomp they had executed their precise choreography, in their black, gold-embroidered brocade robes, and they had even rounded up a choir of theology students who sang something in Greek. The Eastern Churches were already becoming very fashionable. I have never entered a church since, except as an acolyte and in my later capacity as salesman of devotional supplies; and when Franzi Zerhoff and I had assisted at solemn requiems, they had sometimes reminded me, in their heavy, gold-embroidered brocade robes, of Soviet marshals with their bulky gold shoulder pieces and their chests covered with about a hundred and fifty decorations. Always plenty of Latin, male choir in red-and-white sashes, top hats trembling in their hands, and the air trembling with the vehemence of their chest tones.