The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (57 page)

But before long we moved away, I got older, found out what a whore was, thought I knew what disgusting was, saw dancers, but liked none of them as well as Elsa Baskoleit, of whom I never heard again. We moved to another town, war came, a long war, and I thought no more of Elsa Baskoleit, I didn’t even think of her when we moved back to the old town. I tried my hand at all sorts of jobs, till I became a truck driver for a wholesale vegetable dealer: handling a truck was the only thing I was good at. Each morning I was given a list, cases of apples and oranges, baskets of plums, and drove into town.

One day, while I was standing on the ramp where my truck was being loaded and checking what the warehouseman was loading on the truck against my list, the bookkeeper emerged from his cubbyhole, which is plastered with banana posters, and asked the warehouseman, “Can we supply Baskoleit?”

“Has he ordered something? Purple grapes?”

“Yes.” The bookkeeper removed the pencil from behind his ear and looked at the warehouseman in surprise.

“Once in a while,” said the warehouseman, “he orders something—purple grapes, I don’t know why—but we can’t supply him. Get a move on!” he shouted to the helpers in their gray smocks. The bookkeeper went back to his cubbyhole, and I ceased to check whether they were really loading the stuff that was on my list. I saw the rectangular, brightly lit frame of the basement window, I saw Elsa Baskoleit dancing, thin and pale, dressed in bright green, and that morning I took a different route from the one I was supposed to take.

Of the lampposts we had played beside, only one was still standing, and even this one was minus its head, most of the houses were in ruins, and my truck jolted through deep potholes. There was only one child in the street, which used to swarm with children: a pale, dark-haired boy sitting on a bit of broken wall and drawing lines in the whitish dust. He looked up as I drove by, but then let his head droop again. I stopped in front of Baskoleit’s house and got out.

His small windows were dusty, pyramids of packages had collapsed, and the green cardboard was black with dirt. I looked up at the patched housewall, hesitatingly opened the door, and stepped slowly down into the shop: there was an acrid smell of damp soup mix, which was stuck together in lumps in a cardboard box by the door, but then I saw Baskoleit’s back, saw his gray hair below his cap, and could sense how he disliked having to fill a bottle with vinegar from a big barrel. He evidently didn’t know how to manage the spigot properly, the sour fluid ran over his fingers, and down on the floor a puddle had formed, a rotting, sour-smelling place in the wood, which squeaked under his feet. A thin woman in a rust-brown coat was standing by the counter, watching him with indifference. At last he seemed to have filled the bottle, he put in the cork, and once again I said what I had already said at the door, quietly said, “Good morning,” but no one answered. Baskoleit put the bottle on the counter. His face was pale and unshaven, and he looked at the woman now and said, “My daughter has died—Elsa—”

“I know,” said the woman hoarsely, “I’ve known that for five years. I need some scouring powder too.”

“My daughter has died,” said Baskoleit. He looked at the woman as if it had just happened, looked at her helplessly, but the woman said, “The loose kind—a pound.” And Baskoleit pulled out a black barrel from under the counter, poked around in it with a metal scoop, and with his trembling hands conveyed some yellowish lumps into a gray paper bag.

“My daughter has died,” he said. The woman said nothing, and I looked around. All I could see was some dusty packages of noodles, the vinegar barrel, which had a dripping tap, and the scouring powder and an enamel sign showing a grinning fair-haired boy eating a brand of chocolate that hasn’t existed for years. The woman put the bottle into her shopping bag, stuffed the scouring powder in next to it, threw a few coins onto the counter, and as she turned round and walked past me she tapped her forehead briefly with her finger and smiled at me.

I thought of a lot of things, thought of the days when I had been so small that my nose was still below the edge of the counter, but now I could look without effort over the glass showcase bearing the name of a biscuit company and now containing only dusty packets of breadcrumbs; for a few seconds I seemed to shrink, I felt my nose below the
dirty edge of the counter, felt the pfennigs for candies in my hand, I saw Elsa Baskoleit dancing, heard people shouting across the courtyard, “Whore!” and “It’s disgusting!” till I was roused by Baskoleit’s voice.

“My daughter has died.” He said it mechanically, almost without emotion, he was standing by the showcase now, looking out into the street.

“Yes,” I said.

“She is dead,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. He turned his back to me, his hands in the pockets of his gray smock, which was stained.

“She loved grapes—the purple kind—but now she’s dead.” He did not say, “What would you like?” or “May I help you?,” he stood near the dripping vinegar barrel beside the showcase, saying, “My daughter has died” or “She is dead,” without looking at me.

I seemed to stand there for an eternity, oblivious and forgotten, while around me time trickled away. It was only when another woman came into the shop that I could rouse myself. She was short and plump, and held her shopping bag against her stomach, and Baskoleit turned to her and said, “My daughter has died,” the woman said, “Yes,” began suddenly to cry, and said, “Some scouring powder, please, a pound of the loose kind,” and Baskoleit went behind the counter and poked around in the barrel with the metal scoop. The woman was still crying when I left.

The pale, dark-haired boy who had been sitting on the bit of broken wall was standing on the running board of my truck, looking closely at the dashboard. He reached in through the open window and raised the right, then the left indicator. The boy jumped when I suddenly stood behind him, but I grabbed him, looked into his pale frightened face, took an apple from one of the cases on my truck, and gave it to the boy. He looked at me in amazement when I let him go, in such amazement that I was startled, and I took another apple, and another, stuffed them into his pocket, shoved them under his jacket, a lot of apples, before I got in and drove off.

When Lasnov got back from the station, he brought a message that a case had arrived for Kop. Every day Lasnov met the train from Odessa and tried to make deals with the soldiers. During the first year he had paid for socks, saccharine, salt, matches, and lighter flints with butter and oil—and had enjoyed the generous margins that are always involved in bartering; later on the rates had become more established, and there was tough bargaining over this money that kept on decreasing in value as the fortunes of war declined. There was no more butter to trade, and no oil, and for a long time now none of those juicy hunks of bacon for which in the beginning you could get a French double-bed mattress. Trade had become acute, sour and exasperating, ever since the soldiers had begun to despise their own money. They laughed when Lasnov ran along beside the train with his bundles of notes, calling through the open windows in an agitated, singsong voice, “I pay top prices for everything. Top prices for everything.”

Only occasionally did a novice turn up who let himself be talked out of a coat or an undervest, carried away by the sight of the bank notes. And the days were now few and far between when Lasnov had to negotiate so long over a more valuable article—a pistol, a watch, or a telescope—that he was obliged to bribe the stationmaster to keep the train waiting till Lasnov had finished his business. In the early days each minute had cost only a mark, but the greedy stationmaster, a heavy drinker, had long since raised the cost of one minute to six marks.

On this particular morning there had been no business at all. A gendarme paced up and down alongside the waiting train, compared his wristwatch with the stationmaster’s pocketwatch, and shouted at the ragged boy who ran along by the train looking for cigarette ends. But the soldiers had stopped throwing away cigarette ends a long time ago: they would carefully scrape off the black ash and hoard their remnants of tobacco like jewels in their tobacco tins; they were no longer
generous with bread either, and when the boy could not find any bits of tobacco and ran along by the train waving his arms and chanting most impressively in a howling singsong voice, “Bread, bread, bread, comrades!”, all he got was a kick from the gendarme. When the train pulled out, he pressed himself against the wall, and a paper bag rolled to his feet. In it were a slice of bread and an apple. The boy grinned as Lasnov passed him on his way to the waiting room. The waiting room was empty and cold. Lasnov left the station and stood outside, hesitating. He felt as if the train had yet to arrive; it had all been over too quickly, correctly, punctually, but he could hear the rusty creak: the signal arm was slipping back into Stop.

Lasnov jumped when someone put a hand on his shoulder. The hand was too light for the stationmaster’s; it was the boy’s, and he was holding out the apple he had bitten into and mumbling, “It’s so sour, the apple—but what’ll you give me for this?” From his left pocket he pulled out a red toothbrush and held it out to Lasnov. Lasnov opened his mouth and involuntarily drew his forefinger across his strong teeth, which felt slightly furry; he shut his mouth, took the toothbrush from the boy, and studied it; its red handle was transparent, the bristles were white and firm.

“A nice Christmas present for your wife,” said the boy. “She has such lovely white teeth.”

“You monkey,” Lasnov said softly, “what are you doing looking at my wife’s teeth?”

“Or for your kids,” said the boy. “You can look through it—like this.” He took the toothbrush from Lasnov, held it up to his eyes, looked at Lasnov, the station, the trees, the dilapidated sugar factory, and gave the brush back to him. “You try,” he said, “it looks nice.” Lasnov took the brush and held it up to his eyes. On the inside of the handle the refractions were broken: the station looked like a long, long barn, the trees like broken-off brooms, the boy’s face was distorted into a squat grimace, the apple he was holding up to his face looked like a red sponge. Lasnov handed the toothbrush back to the boy. “Yes,” he said, “not bad at all.”

“Ten,” said the boy.

“Two.”

“No,” whimpered the boy, “no, it’s so pretty.” Lasnov turned away.

“Give me five at least.”

“All right,” said Lasnov, “here’s five.” He took the toothbrush and gave the boy the money. The boy ran back into the waiting room, and Lasnov saw him carefully and systematically going through the ashes of the stove with a stick, looking for cigarette ends; a gray cloud of dust rose up, and the boy murmured something to himself in his singsong voice which Lasnov was unable to make out.

The stationmaster came up just when Lasnov had decided to roll a cigarette and was checking his tobacco supply in the palm of his hand, separating the dust from the shreds of tobacco. “Well, now,” said the stationmaster, “that looks like enough for two.” He took some, without asking permission, and the two men stood smoking at the station corner, looking out into the street where booths, stalls, and dirty tents were being set up. Everything was gray, brown, or dirt-colored; there wasn’t a spot of color even on the children’s carrousel.

“Someone,” said the stationmaster, “once gave my kids some coloring books; on one page you could see the finished pictures, in color, and on the opposite page the outlines where you had to put in the colors. But I didn’t have any paints, or any crayons either, and the kids filled it all in with pencil—I always have to think of that when I look at this marketplace. I guess they ran out of colors, all they had was pencil—gray, dirty, dark …”

“Yes,” said Lasnov, “there’s no business at all; the only thing to eat is Rukhev’s corn cakes, but you know how he makes those.”

“Raw corncobs pressed together, I know,” said the stationmaster, “then smeared with dark-colored oil to make you think they’ve been cooked in oil.”

“Well,” said Lasnov, “I’ll see if I can’t do something anyway.”

“If you see Kop, tell him a case has arrived for him.”

“A case? What’s in it?”

“I don’t know. It’s from Odessa. I’ll send the boy over to Kop with my handcart. Will you let him know?”

“Sure,” said Lasnov.

As he strolled through the square, he kept looking over to the station to see if the boy was coming with the case. And he told everyone that a case had come for Kop from Odessa. The rumor spread quickly through the market, got ahead of Lasnov, and, as he slowly approached Kop’s stall, came back to him on the other side of the street.

When he reached the children’s carrousel, the owner was just harnessing the horse. The horse’s face was thin and dark, ennobled by hunger: it reminded Lasnov of the nun of Novgorod whom he had once seen as a child. Her face had also been thin and dark, ennobled by abstinence; you could look at her in a dark-green tent at fairs, and it had cost nothing to go in; people were merely asked, when they left the tent, to make a donation.

The carrousel owner came up to Lasnov, leaned over, and whispered, “Have you heard about the case that’s supposed to have come for Kop?”

“No,” said Lasnov.

“They say it’s got toys in it, cars you can wind up.”

“No,” said Lasnov, “I heard it was toothbrushes.”

“No, no,” said the carrousel owner, “toys.”

Lasnov stroked the horse’s nose affectionately, went wearily on, and thought bitterly of the deals he used to be able to make. He had bought and sold so much clothing that he could have outfitted a whole army, and now he had sunk so low that this kid had talked him into buying a toothbrush. He had sold butter and bacon and barrels of oil, and at Christmas time he had always had a stall with candy canes for the kids; the colors of the candy canes had been as piercing as the joys and sufferings of the poor—red like the love that was celebrated in doorways or beside the factory wall while the bittersweet smell of molasses came wafting over the wall; yellow like the flames in a drunk man’s brain, or pale green like the pain you felt when you woke up in the morning and looked at the face of your sleeping wife, a child’s face, whose sole protection from life was those frail pink lids, fragile little covers which she had to open as soon as the children began to cry. But this year there weren’t even any candy canes, and they would spend Christmas sitting at home, sipping thin soup, and taking turns looking through the handle of the toothbrush.