The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (21 page)

After a few seconds a tall, pale-faced, silent man entered the room wearing the light-brown uniform of the preliminary interrogator. He sat down without a word and looked at me.

“Status?”

“Ordinary comrade.”

“Date of birth?”

“1/1/1,” I said.

“Last occupation?”

“Convict.”

The two men exchanged glances.

“When and where discharged?”

“Yesterday, Building 12, Cell 13.”

“Where to?”

“The capital.”

“Certificate.”

I produced the discharge certificate from my pocket and handed it to him. He clipped it to the green card on which he had begun to enter my particulars.

“Your former crime?”

“Happy face.”

The two men exchanged glances.

“Explain,” said the interrogator.

“At that time,” I said, “my happy face attracted the attention of a police officer on a day when general mourning had been decreed. It was the anniversary of the Leader’s death.”

“Length of sentence?”

“Five.”

“Conduct?”

“Bad.”

“Reason?”

“Deficient in work enthusiasm.”

“That’s all.”

With that the preliminary interrogator rose, walked over to me, and neatly knocked out my three front center teeth—a sign that I was to be branded as a lapsed criminal, an intensified measure I had not counted on. The preliminary interrogator then left the room, and a fat fellow in a dark-brown uniform came in: the interrogator.

I was beaten by all of them: by the interrogator, the chief interrogator, the supreme interrogator, the examiner, and the concluding examiner. In addition, the policeman carried out all the physical punitive measures demanded by law, and on account of my sad face they sentenced me to ten years, just as five years earlier they had sentenced me to five years on account of my happy face.

I must now try to make my face register nothing at all, if I can manage to survive the next ten years of Joy and Soap …

My stay here was a brief one. I had an appointment in the late afternoon with the representative of a firm that was toying with the idea of taking over a product which has been causing us something of a headache: candles. We put all our money into the manufacture of tremendous stocks on the assumption that the electricity shortage would continue indefinitely. We have worked very hard, been thrifty and honest, and when I say “we” I mean my wife and myself. We are producers, wholesalers, retailers; we combine every stage in the holy estate of commerce: we are agents, workmen, traveling salesmen, manufacturers.

But we put our money on the wrong horse. There is not much demand for candles these days. Electricity rationing has been abolished, even most basements now have electric light again; and at the very moment when our hard work, our efforts, all our struggles, seemed about to bear fruit—the production of a large quantity of candles—at that precise moment the demand dried up.

Our attempts to do business with those religious enterprises dealing in what are known as devotional supplies came to nothing. These firms had hoarded candles in abundance—better ones than ours, incidentally, the fancy kind, with green, red, blue, and yellow ribbons, embroidered with little golden stars, winding around them, like Aesculapius’ snake—and enhancing both their reverent and aesthetic appeal. They also come in various lengths and sizes, whereas ours are all identical and of simple design: about ten inches long, smooth, yellow, quite plain, their only asset the beauty of simplicity.

We were forced to admit that we had miscalculated; compared with the splendid products displayed by the devotional-supply houses, our candles look humble indeed, and nobody buys anything humble-looking. Nor has our willingness to reduce our price resulted in any increase in sales. On the other hand, of course, we lack the money to plan new designs, let alone manufacture them, since the income we
derive from the limited sale of the stock we have produced is barely enough to cover our living expenses and steadily mounting costs. I have, for instance, to make longer and longer trips in order to call on genuinely or apparently interested parties, I have to keep on reducing our price, and we know we have no alternative but to unload the substantial stocks still on our hands and find some other means of making a living.

I had come to this town in response to a letter from a wholesaler who had intimated that he would take a considerable quantity off my hands at an acceptable price. I was foolish enough to believe him, came all the way here, and was now calling on this fellow. He had a magnificent apartment, luxurious, spacious, furnished in great style, and the large office where he received me was crammed with samples of all the various products that make money for his type of business. Arranged on long shelves were plaster saints, statuettes of Joseph, Virgin Marys, bleeding Sacred Hearts, mild-eyed, fair-haired penitents whose plaster pedestals bore the name, in a variety of languages and embossed lettering (choice of gold or red), Madeleine, Maddalena, Magdalena, Magdalene; Nativity scenes (complete or sectional), oxen, asses, Infant Jesuses in wax or plaster, shepherds, and angels of all ages: tots, youths, children, graybeards; plaster palm leaves adorned with gold or silver Hallelujahs, holy-water stoups of stainless steel, plaster, copper, pottery, some in good taste, some in bad.

The man himself—a jovial, red-faced fellow—asked me to sit down, affected some initial interest, and offered me a cigar. He wanted to know how we happened to get into this particular branch of manufacturing, and after I had explained that we had inherited nothing from the war but a huge pile of stearin which my wife had salvaged from four blazing trucks in front of our bombed-out house and which no one had since claimed as their property, after I had smoked about a quarter of my cigar, he suddenly said, without any preamble, “I’m sorry I had you come here, but I’ve changed my mind.” Perhaps my sudden loss of color did strike him as odd after all. “Yes,” he went on, “I really am sorry about it, but after considering all the angles I’ve come to the conclusion that your product won’t sell. It won’t sell! Believe me, I know! Sorry!” He smiled, shrugged his shoulders, and held out his hand. I put down the half-smoked cigar and left.

By this time it was dark, and I was a total stranger in the town. Although, in spite of everything, I was aware of a certain relief, I had the terrible feeling that I was not only poor, deceived, the victim of a misguided idea, but also ridiculous. It would seem that I was unfit for the so-called battle of life, for the career of manufacturer and dealer. Our candles would not sell even for a pittance, they weren’t good enough to hold their own in the field of devotionalist competition, and we probably wouldn’t even be able to give them away, whereas other, inferior candles were being bought. I would never discover the secret of business success, although, with my wife, I had hit upon the secret of making candles.

I lugged my heavy sample case to the streetcar stop and waited a long time. The darkness was soft and clear, it was summer. Streetlights were on at the crossings, people were strolling about in the evening, it was quiet; I was standing beside a big circular traffic island fringed by dark, empty office buildings. Behind me was a little park; I heard the sound of running water, and on turning round I saw a great marble woman standing there, with thin jets of water spouting from her rigid breasts into a copper basin. I felt chilly and realized I was tired. At last the streetcar arrived; soft music poured from brightly lit cafés, but the station was in an empty, quiet part of town. All I could glean from the big blackboard there was the departure time of a train which would get me only halfway home and which, if I took it, would cost me a whole night of waiting room, grime, and a bowl of repulsive soup at the station in a little place with no hotel. I turned away, went outside again, and counted my money by the light of a gas lamp: nine marks, return ticket, and a few pfennigs. Some cars were standing there that looked as if they had been waiting there forever, and little trees, cropped like new recruits. Dear little trees, I thought, nice little trees, obedient little trees. Doctors’ white nameplates showed up against a few unlighted houses, and through a café window I looked in on a gathering of empty chairs for whose benefit a writhing violinist was producing sobs that might have moved stones but hardly a human being. At last, in a lane skirting the bulk of a dark church, I came upon a painted green sign: R
OOMS
. I stepped inside.

Behind me I could hear the streetcar on its return trip to the better-lit, more populated part of town. The hall was empty, and I turned to the right into a little room containing four tables and twelve chairs;
to the left, bottles of beer and lemonade stood in metal display stands on a built-in counter. Everything looked clean and plain. Green hessian, divided by narrow strips of brown wood, had been tacked to the walls with rosette-shaped copper nails. The chairs were green too, upholstered in some soft, velvety material. Pale-yellow curtains had been drawn closely across the windows, and behind the counter a serving hatch opened into a kitchen. I put down my suitcase, drew a chair toward me, and sat down. I was very tired.

How quiet it was here, even quieter than the station which, strangely enough, was some distance from the business center, a gloomy, cavernous place filled with the muffled sounds of an invisible bustle: bustle behind closed wickets, bustle behind wooden barriers.

I was hungry too, and I found the utter futility of this journey very depressing. I was glad of the few minutes to myself in this quiet, unpretentious room. I would have liked to smoke but found I had no cigarettes, and now I regretted having abandoned the cigar in the wholesale devotionalist’s office. Although I might well be depressed at having gone on yet another wild-goose chase, I was aware of a growing sense of relief that I couldn’t quite define or account for, but perhaps in my heart I rejoiced at my final expulsion from the devotional-supply trade.

I had not been idle after the war. I had helped clear away ruins, remove rubble, scrape bricks clean, build walls, haul sand, shift lime; I had submitted applications—many, many applications—thumbed through books, carefully watched over my pile of stearin. On my own, with no help from those who might have given me the benefit of their experience, I had found out how to make candles, beautiful, simple, good-quality candles, tinted a soft yellow that gave them the luster of melting beeswax. I had done everything to get on my feet, as they say: to find some way of earning a living, and although I ought to have been sad, the very futility of my efforts was now filling me with a joy such as I had never known.

I had not been ungenerous. I had given away candles to people living in cramped unlighted holes, and whenever there had been a chance of profiteering, I had avoided it. I had gone hungry and devoted myself single-mindedly toward this method of making a living; but although I might have expected a reward for what one might call my integrity, I almost rejoiced to find myself evidently unworthy of any reward.

The thought also crossed my mind that perhaps we would have done better after all to manufacture shoe polish, as someone had advised us, to mix other ingredients with the basic material, to get hold of some formulas, acquire a stock of cardboard containers, and fill them up.

In the midst of my musings the landlady entered the room, a slight, elderly woman. Her dress was green, the green of the beer and lemonade bottles on the counter. “Good evening,” she said pleasantly. I returned her greeting, and she asked, “What can I do for you?”

“I would like a room, if you have one.”

“Certainly,” she said. “What price had you in mind?”

“The cheapest.”

“That would be three marks fifty.”

“Fine,” I said, relieved. “And perhaps something to eat?”

“Certainly.”

“Bread, some cheese and butter, and”—I ran my eyes over the bottles on the counter—“perhaps some wine.”

“Certainly,” she said, “a bottle?”

“No, no! A glass and—how much will that come to?”

She had gone behind the counter and was already pushing back the hook to open the serving hatch, but she paused to ask, “All together?”

“Yes, please, all together.”

She reached under the counter, took out pad and pencil, and again it was very quiet while she slowly wrote and added up. Despite the reserve in her manner, her whole presence, as she stood there, radiated a reassuring kindness. And she endeared herself to me still further by apparently making several mistakes in her addition. She slowly wrote down the items, frowned as she added them up, shook her head, crossed them out, rewrote everything, added up again, this time without frowning, and in gray pencil wrote the result at the bottom, finally saying in her soft voice, “Six-twenty—no, six, I beg your pardon.”

I smiled. “That’s fine. And have you any cigars?”

“Certainly.” She reached under the counter again and held out a box. I took two and thanked her. The woman quietly gave the order through to the kitchen and left the room.

Scarcely had she gone when the door opened and in walked a young man, of slight build, unshaven, wearing a light-colored raincoat; behind him was a girl in a brown coat, hatless. The couple approached
quietly, almost diffidently, and with a brief “Good evening” turned toward the counter. The boy was carrying the girl’s shabby leather bag, and although he was obviously at pains to appear undaunted and to display the bravado of a man who regularly spends the night with his girl in a hotel, I could see his lower lip trembling and tiny beads of sweat on the stubble of his beard. The couple stood there like customers awaiting their turn in a store. The fact that they were hatless and that the bag was their only luggage made them look like refugees who had arrived at some transit camp. The girl was beautiful, her skin alive, warm, and slightly flushed, and her heavy brown hair hanging loosely over her shoulders seemed almost too heavy for her slender feet; she nervously moved her black dusty shoes, shifting her weight from one foot to the other more often than was necessary; the young man kept brushing back a few strands of hair as they fell over his forehead, and his small round mouth expressed a painful but at the same time elated determination. I could see they were deliberately avoiding each other’s eyes, and they did not speak to one another, while I for my part was glad to be busily occupied with my cigar, to be able to clip it, light it, look critically at the tip, relight it, and start smoking. Every second of waiting must be agony, I knew; for the girl, no matter how unabashed and happy she might look, continued to shift her weight as she tugged at her coat, while the boy continued to pass his hand over his forehead although there were no more strands of hair to brush back. At last the woman reappeared, quietly said “Good evening,” and placed the bottle of wine on the counter.