The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (132 page)

“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, was 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.

“But then one of his schoolmates, a certain Becker, turned out to be a real friend. Becker, whose parents were rich, was studying theology. He supported him financially, talking his parents out of some of the money and providing the rest from his own savings. So Herold left the school … By the way, did you know that he was named Theodor Herold?” The chaplain looked at me inquiringly. How would I know his name? I shook my head.

The noise from the guard room kept threatening to drown us out. Noise … shouts … the senseless bellowing of those who voluntarily allow themselves to be incarcerated in the prison of a uniform. The chaplain fell silent, then seemed almost to choke on his words as he said: “What good does it do to tell you all this? We should be praying instead; it’s just about the only thing one can do, don’t you think?” He gave me a tormented look, as if he were about to collapse beneath an invisible weight. Then he folded his hands. I took him gently by the arm, and I don’t know if it was curiosity that impelled me to say: “Go on with your story, please. I want to know everything.”

The chaplain looked uneasily at me; he almost seemed mentally disturbed. He stared at me blankly, as if he didn’t recognize me, and seemed to be searching his memory to recall who I was; then he took his head in his hands. “Oh, yes,” he said in a despairing voice, “Pardon me … I … I …” He gestured helplessly. And then he continued:

“It appears that Becker truly wanted to help Herold. They were studying at a university, and although Becker was somewhat restricted by living in a church hostel, he visited him often, talked with him, and no doubt tried to reawaken his buried religious impulse. But his support was in no way dependent upon this. They argued at times, that’s clear, discussing things all young men not yet dead discuss: religion and the concept of the
Volk
and so on, but remained friends through it all. And, although he never said so, he respected Becker, the only person he didn’t despise. He loved Becker; and not simply because he supported him, but for the unconditional manner in which he gave the money. Well, no doubt you have some idea of the relationship. Becker must have been an ardent young man who still believed in grace. For the first few semesters all the theology students still believed in grace, which was later often unconsciously replaced by belief in the vicar-general.

“Herold was just as great a phenomenon of intelligence and wit at the university as he had been in school. He not only despised his frivolous and less able fellow students, but his professors too, none of whom, as he put it, could be considered ‘a true spiritual guide.’ In the meantime he prepared for a possible career in politics. You can imagine how quickly the party absorbed such an intelligent young man.

“But then something terrible happened: He became a soldier, and there was no antidote for that. He hated the military beyond anything
he’d known, hated it deeply, for when he tried to make a career there, a strange thing happened: That same officer caste which had welcomed dim-witted criminals from the dankest swamps of society insisted that new recruits meet certain social standards: and of course he failed to meet the conditions of this hierarchy of ignorance. His hatred now firmly established, he made his first declaration of war against society. He saw through the absolute political cowardice of these yes-men. He glowed with white-hot rage and scorn, but of course got nowhere against the well-established clique, and the dull and dreary life in the barracks seemed even more terrible than the misery of his childhood years. War seemed to offer him salvation, and he volunteered for one of those units which, steeped in that spirit which denies all true values, considered the murder conducted behind the lines, known as the destruction of racially inferior types, equivalent to the murder at the front, called war.” The chaplain paused in misery and covered his face with his hands, breathing heavily. “Imagine that razor-sharp face among those troops, filled with hate, in that social order which became blinder and more cold-blooded with every passing year under the terrible pressures of war, yoked to the triumphal car of a criminal who denied all values—that gloomy triumphal car whose rotten wheels were soon to crumble, and which collapsed at last in a flood of stinking gasoline fumes.

“Repelled at first by his associates in spite of having volunteered, then increasingly entangled in emotions that bind a bloodthirsty mob, Herold still kept in touch with Becker, who wrote to him, warned him, admonished him. Herold even visited him on leave, congratulating him on his ordination as a priest. Even afterward he maintained contact with Becker, whom he truly loved, a word he never used, given his unusual shyness. He sent Becker packages with items that were scarce back home: cigars, soap, lard, and so on. He wrote letters, sent small packets, but revealed nothing of his spiritual condition. No more discussions on religion and worldviews. He felt irrevocably bound to the gang he had stumbled into, often filled with bitter regret, horrified by the streams of blood mingled with dirt, terrified by bestial cruelties, all these emotions jumbled together with unexamined notions of race, honor, and unconditional obedience, the Fatherland, the master race. He became an officer in those units, was wounded several times, distinguished himself,
was decorated. But none of that could expunge the uneasy feeling of guilt. He seemed deeply troubled.

“And in the chaos of anxiety, hatred, and remorse, the worst for him was that Becker ceased writing. He heard nothing from him for over a year. He attributed his silence to the breakdown of communications, the total confusion of an ‘incomparable system.’ Although he blamed it on these external factors the dark suspicion remained that Becker no longer cared about him. And the closer the end came, the inevitable, disastrous end, the more defiled he felt, burdened with indescribable acts of cruelty.

“Only the thought of Becker, who might perhaps help him, sustained him. A series of clever maneuvers allowed him to avoid capture by the Russians. He managed to smuggle himself through the Russian front lines as a Russian soldier until he reached the area controlled by the Western powers. Here he disappeared, well furnished with money and provisions, somewhere in his devastated hometown, in one of the thousands of hiding places no one would ever discover; and here too he avoided capture. Then he began a careful search for Becker. For him, Becker symbolized salvation. He had no clear idea what sort of help he expected; he was totally broken. The dark water of fear, disgust, and guilt had risen to his chin; he simply wanted to speak with someone who wouldn’t threaten him, wouldn’t reject him. He saw Becker as the representative of a religion which, contrary to all secular custom, did not judge, did not condemn—the religion that he himself had loved as a child and young boy, whose reflected splendor still shone upon him, without his knowledge.

“Disguised as a disabled soldier, he limped out of his hiding place and began, amid the hopeless chaos, to search for Becker, whom he knew had been a chaplain in a small town. He finally managed to reach the town by hitching a ride in an American military truck. He found the village undamaged, its inhabitants still frightened and confused. And he found Becker. His heart pounding with happiness, he entered the rectory.

“Becker was cold and indifferent. He had broken off the correspondence intentionally. Their entire friendship had died, and Becker acted strangely, treating him as if he’d met him once years ago and had simply run into him again, just another former acquaintance. Herold
was shocked by the cool reserve with which his only friend received him, but the dark tumult of torment, blood, and guilt which had gathered within him was too powerful to restrain. He opened his heart to Becker, telling him everything, every single thing, things he could never have written. And when he had finished, and he had nothing more to say or ask, he stared helplessly at Becker. He told me that for the first time in his life, he found himself totally defenseless.