The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (49 page)

“Here,” he said, pulling a pack of tobacco out of his pocket. He opened it and held out the pale-yellow, fresh, fine-cut tobacco for me to smell. “It’s yours for two cakes of soap—fair enough?”

I nodded, felt around in my coat pocket for the soap, gave him two cakes, and put the tobacco in my pocket. He gave me his submachine gun to hold while he hid the soap in his pockets; he sighed as I handed it back to him. “These lousy things,” he said, “we’ll have to go on carrying them around for a while yet. You fellows aren’t half as badly off as you think. What are you crying about?”

I pointed toward the right: the Rhine. We were approaching Dormagen. I saw that Tom Thumb was about to open his mouth and said quickly, “For God’s sake shut up, can’t you? Shut up.” He had probably wanted to ask me whether the Rhine reminded me of anything. Thank God he was deeply offended now and said no more till we got to Bonn.

In Cologne there were actually some houses still standing; somewhere I even saw a moving streetcar, some people too, women even: one of them waved to us. From the Neuss-Strasse we turned into the Ring avenues and drove along them, and I was waiting all the time for the tears, but they didn’t come; even the insurance buildings on the avenue were in ruins, and all I could see of the Hohenstaufen Baths was a few pale-blue tiles. I was hoping all the time the truck would turn off somewhere to the right, for we had lived on the Carolingian Ring; but the truck did not turn. It drove down the Rings—Barbarossa Square, Saxon Ring, Salian Ring—and I tried not to look, and I wouldn’t have looked if the truck convoy had not got into a traffic jam up front at Clovis Square and we hadn’t stopped in front of the house we used to live in, so I did look.

The term “totally destroyed” is misleading: only in rare cases is it possible to destroy a house totally. It has to be hit three or four times and, to make certain, it should then burn down; the house we used to live in was actually, according to official terminology, totally destroyed, but not in the technical sense. That is to say, I could still recognize it; the
front door and the doorbells, and I submit that a house where it is still possible to recognize the front door and the doorbells has not, in the strict technical sense, been totally destroyed. But of the house we used to live in there was more to be recognized than the doorbells and the front door. Two rooms in the basement were almost intact, on the mezzanine, absurdly enough, even three: a fragment of wall was supporting the third room that would probably not have passed a spirit-level test; our apartment on the second floor had only one room intact, but it was gaping open in front, toward the street; above this, a high, narrow gable reared up, bare, with empty window sockets. However, the interesting thing was that two men were moving around in our living room as if their feet were on familiar ground; one of the men took a picture down from the wall, the Terborch print my father had been so fond of, walked to the front, carrying the picture, and showed it to a third man who was standing down below in front of the house. This third man shook his head like someone who is not interested in an object being auctioned, and the man up above walked back with the Terborch and hung it up again on the wall; he even straightened the picture—I was touched by this mark of neatness—stepped back to make sure the picture was really hanging straight, then nodded in a satisfied way. Meanwhile the second man took the other picture off the wall: an engraving of Lochner’s painting of the cathedral, but this one also did not appear to please the third man standing down below. Finally the first man, the one who had hung the Terborch back on the wall, came to the front, formed a megaphone with his hands, and shouted, “Piano in sight!” and the man below laughed, nodded, likewise formed a megaphone with hands, and shouted, “I’ll get the straps.” I could not see the piano, but I knew where it stood: on the right in the corner I couldn’t see into and where the man with the Lochner picture was just disappearing.

“Whereabouts in Cologne did you live?” asked the Belgian guard.

“Oh, somewhere over there,” I said, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the western suburbs.

“Thank God, now we’re moving again,” said the guard. He picked up his submachine gun, which he had placed on the floor of the truck, and straightened his cap. The lion of Flanders on the front of his cap was rather dirty. As we turned into Clovis Square, I could see why there had been a traffic jam: some kind of raid seemed to be going on. English
military police cars were all over the place, and civilians were standing in them with their hands up, surrounded by a sizable crowd, quiet yet tense. A surprisingly large number of people in such a silent, ruined city.

“That’s the black market,” said the Belgian guard. “Once in a while they come and clean it up.”

Before we were even out of Cologne, while we were still on the Bonn-Strasse, I fell asleep and I dreamed of my mother’s coffee mill: the coffee mill was being let down on a strap by the man who had offered the Terborch without success, but the man below rejected the coffee mill; the other man drew it up again, opened the hall door, and tried to screw the coffee mill back where it had hung before, immediately to the left of the kitchen door, but now there was no wall there for him to screw it onto, and still the man kept on trying (this mark of tidiness touched me even in my dream). He searched with the forefinger of his right hand for the pegs, couldn’t find them, and raised his fist threateningly to the gray autumn sky which offered no support for the coffee mill. Finally he gave up, tied the strap around the mill again, went to the front, let down the coffee mill, and offered it to the third man, who again rejected it, and the other man pulled it up again, untied the strap, and hid the coffee mill under his jacket as if it were a valuable object; then he began to wind up the strap, rolled it into a coil, and threw it down into the third man’s face. All this time I was worried about what could have happened to the man who had offered the Lochner without success, but I couldn’t see him anywhere; something was preventing me from looking into the corner where the piano was, my father’s desk, and I was upset at the thought that he might be reading my father’s diaries. Now the man with the coffee mill was standing by the living-room door trying to screw the coffee mill onto the door panel; he seemed absolutely determined to give the coffee mill a permanent resting place, and I was beginning to like him, even before I discovered he was one of our many friends whom my mother had comforted while they sat on the chair beneath the coffee mill, one of those who had been killed right at the beginning of the war in an air raid.

Before we got to Bonn, the Belgian guard woke me up. “Come on,” he said, “rub your eyes, freedom is at hand,” and I straightened up and
thought of all the people who had sat on the chair beneath my mother’s coffee mill: truant schoolboys whom she helped to overcome their fear of exams, Nazis whom she tried to enlighten, non-Nazis whom she tried to fortify—they had all sat on the chair beneath the coffee mill, had received comfort and censure, defense and respite. Bitter words had destroyed their ideals and gentle words had offered them those things which would outlive the times: mercy to the weak, comfort to the persecuted.

The old cemetery, the market square, the university. Bonn. Through the Koblenz Gate and into the park. “So long,” said the Belgian guard, and Tom Thumb with his tired child’s face said, “Drop me a line some time.”

“All right,” I said, “I’ll send you my complete Tucholsky.”

“Wonderful,” he said, “and your Kleist too?”

“No,” I said, “only the ones I have duplicates of.”

On the other side of the barricade through which we were finally released, a man was standing between two big laundry baskets; in one he had a lot of apples, in the other a few cakes of soap. He shouted, “Vitamins, my friends, one apple—one cake of soap!” And I could feel my mouth watering. I had quite forgotten what apples looked like; I gave him a cake of soap, was handed an apple, and bit into it at once. I stood there watching the others come out; there was no need for him to call out now: it was a wordless exchange. He would take an apple out of the basket, be handed a cake of soap, and throw the soap into the empty basket; there was a dull thud when the soap landed. Not everyone took an apple, not everyone had any soap, but the transaction was as swift as in a self-service store, and by the time I had just finished my apple, he already had his soap basket half full. The whole thing took place swiftly and smoothly and without a word; even the ones who were very economical and very calculating couldn’t resist the sight of the apples, and I began to feel sorry for them. Home was welcoming its homecomers so warmly with vitamins.

It took me a long time to find a phone in Bonn; finally a girl in the post office told me that the only people to get phones were doctors and priests, and even then only those who hadn’t been Nazis. “They’re
scared stiff of the Nazi Werewolf underground,” she said. “I s’pose you wouldn’t have a cigarette for me?” I took my pack of tobacco out of my pocket and said, “Shall I roll one for you?,” but she said no, she could do it herself, and I watched her take a cigarette paper out of her coat pocket and quickly and deftly roll herself a firm cigarette. “Who do you want to call?” she said, and I said, “My wife,” and she laughed and said I didn’t look married at all. I also rolled myself a cigarette and asked her whether there was any chance of selling some soap: I needed money, train fare, and didn’t have a pfennig. “Soap,” she said, “let’s have a look.” I felt around in my coat lining and pulled out some soap, and she snatched it out of my hand, sniffed it, and said, “Real Palmolive! That’s worth—worth—I’ll give you fifty marks for it.” I looked at her in amazement, and she said, “Yes, I know, you can get as much as eighty for it, but I can’t afford that.” I didn’t want to take the fifty marks, but she insisted, she thrust the note into my coat pocket and ran out of the post office; she was quite pretty, with that hungry prettiness which lends a girl’s voice a certain sharpness.

What struck me most of all, in the post office and as I walked slowly on through Bonn, was the fact that nowhere was there a student wearing colored ribbons; and the smells: everyone smelled terrible, all the rooms smelled terrible, and I could see why the girl was so crazy about the soap. I went to the station, tried to find out how I could get to Oberkerschenbach (that was where the one I married lived), but nobody could tell me; all I knew was that it was a little place somewhere in the Eifel district not too far from Bonn. There weren’t any maps anywhere either, where I could have looked it up; no doubt they had been banned on account of the Nazi Werewolves. I always like to know where a place is, and it bothered me that I knew nothing definite about this place Oberkerschenbach and couldn’t find out anything definite. In my mind I went over all the Bonn addresses I knew, but there wasn’t a single doctor or a single priest among them; finally I remembered a professor of theology I had called on with a friend just before the war. He had had some sort of trouble with Rome and the Index, and we had gone to see him simply to give him our moral support; I couldn’t remember the name of the street, but I knew where it was, and I walked along the Poppelsdorf Avenue, turned left, then left again, found the house, and was relieved to read the name on the door.

The professor came to the door himself. He had aged a great deal, he was thin and bent, his hair quite white. I said, “You won’t remember me, Professor. I came to see you some years ago when you had that stink with Rome and the Index—can I speak to you for a moment?” He laughed when I said stink, and said, “Of course,” when I had finished, and I followed him into his study; I noticed it no longer smelled of tobacco, otherwise it was still just the same, with all the books, files, and house plants. I told the professor I had heard that the only people who got phones were priests and doctors, and I simply had to call my wife. He heard me out—a very rare thing—then said that, although he was a priest, he was not one of those who had a phone, for “You see,” he said, “I am not a pastor.” “Perhaps you’re a Werewolf,” I said. I offered him some tobacco, and I felt sorry for him when I saw how he looked at my tobacco; I am always sorry for old people who have to go without something they like. His hands trembled as he filled his pipe, and they did not tremble just because he was old. When he had at last got it lit—I had no matches and couldn’t help him—he told me that doctors and priests were not the only people with phones. “These nightclubs they’re opening up everywhere for the soldiers,” they had them too, and I might try in one of these nightclubs; there was one just around the corner. He wept when I put a few pipefuls of tobacco on his desk as I left, and he asked me as his tears fell whether I knew what I was doing, and I said, yes, I knew, and I suggested he accept the few pipefuls of tobacco as a belated tribute to the courage he had shown toward Rome all those years ago. I would have liked to give him some soap as well, I still had five or six pieces in my coat lining, but I was afraid his heart would burst with joy; he was so old and frail.

“Nightclub” was a nice way of putting it, but I didn’t mind that so much as the English sentry at the door of this nightclub. He was very young and eyed me severely as I stopped beside him. He pointed to the notice prohibiting Germans from entering this nightclub, but I told him my sister worked there, I had just returned to my beloved fatherland, and my sister had the house key. He asked me what my sister’s name was, and it seemed safest to give the most German of all German girls’ names, so I said, “Gretchen.” Oh yes, he said, that was the blond one,
and let me go in. Instead of bothering to describe the interior, I refer the reader to the pertinent “Fräulein literature” and to movies and TV. I won’t even bother to describe Gretchen (see above). The main thing was that Gretchen was surprisingly quick on the uptake and, in exchange for a cake of Palmolive, was willing to make a phone call to the priest’s house in Kerschenbach (which I hoped existed) and have the one I had married called to the phone. Gretchen spoke fluent English on the phone and told me her boyfriend would try to do it through the army exchange, it would be quicker. While we were waiting, I offered her some tobacco, but she had something better; I tried to pay her the agreed fee of a cake of soap in advance, but she said no, she didn’t want it after all, she would rather not take anything, and when I insisted on paying she began to cry and confided that one of her brothers was a prisoner of war, the other one dead, and I felt sorry for her, for it is not pleasant when girls like Gretchen cry. She even let on that she was a Catholic, and just as she was about to get her first communion picture out of a drawer the phone rang, and Gretchen lifted the receiver and said “Reverend,” but I had already heard that it was not a man’s voice. “Just a moment,” Gretchen said, and handed me the receiver. I was so excited I couldn’t hold the receiver; in fact, I dropped it, fortunately onto Gretchen’s lap. She picked it up, held it against my ear, and I said, “Hello—is that you?”