The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (60 page)

This time he was sure he had really heard her “No,” but he could also hear that this “No” did not come from the corner of the room where their beds had been. Evidently Anna had moved her bed under the window. “It’s an umbrella,” he said, “two books and a little piano made of chocolate; it’s as big as an encyclopedia, the keys are made of marzipan and brittle.” He stopped, listened for a reply, nothing came from the dark rectangle, but when he asked, “Are you pleased?” the “Yes” came quicker than the two “No’s” had done …

He turned out the light in the kitchen, undressed in the dark, and got into bed. Through the curtains he could see the Christmas trees in the building across the street, and downstairs there was singing, but he had regained his hour, he had two “No’s” and a “Yes,” and when a car came up the street, the headlights made Anna’s profile leap up out of the darkness for him …

Fink walked over to the side entrance of the church. Right and left of the cracked asphalt were tiny triangular garden plots bordered with black iron railings: sour, gray-black earth and two box shrubs with leaves as tough and desiccated as leather. Leaning his shoulder against the brown padded door, he opened it and found himself in a musty entrance with another padded door ahead. This one he punched open with his fist, and before entering the church he glanced at a notice on a plywood board which read: “Third Order of St. Francis—Announcements.…”

The church was filled with a greenish half-light, and on a wall painted a nondescript color Fink saw a white placard showing a hand, done in black, pointing straight down. Above the stiff, exaggeratedly long forefinger were the words: Confessional Bell. Underneath, in brown holders, were bell-pushes of dark ivory, and name plates. He did not bother to decipher the names but pressed one of the buttons at random, and it seemed to him that this act represented something irrevocable, final. Then he listened—not a sound.

He dipped his finger into a pink plaster stoup in the form of a shell; in the dim light it resembled a great artificial palate with a few bits chipped out of it. Slowly he crossed himself and entered the center nave. On either side he saw two dark confessionals, their red curtains drawn shut, and he now noticed that bomb damage had caused the stucco roof between the gothic columns to crumble away: the ugly masonry of yellow brick was laid bare, somehow it reminded him of an old-fashioned public bathhouse. What was once the main entrance had been walled up with rough stones, and squashed in among them was a crooked old window frame from which the white paint had flaked off.

Fink knelt down in the center nave and tried to pray, but over his folded hands he had to keep watching the four confessionals and peering into the dimness so as not to miss the priest who might suddenly appear from somewhere. He would probably come from the sacristy,
up front, where in the semi-darkness Fink could make out a brass bell with a red velvet rope next to the perpetual light. Toward the middle the church got lighter, and he now saw that the whole center nave had been repaired: the ruined, jagged walls supported temporary, almost flat rafters boarded up with grimy old planks—some of the planks were dark with floor varnish—and the saints against the columns were all minus their heads, a helpless, pathetic double rank of strange plaster figures with their heads knocked off and their emblems torn from their grasp, somber truncated torsos which seemed to be holding out their mutilated hands to him in supplication.

Fink tried to summon feelings of remorse and contrition, but without success; he found it hard to concentrate, and from within him there arose a welter of stumbling, spasmodic, imploring prayers, interspersed with memories and the ever-recurring desire to get all this over with quickly and leave, get out and away from this town.

He could already sense it: the thing he wanted to confess was starting to become a memory, to acquire luster; imperceptibly it was emerging from the level of the sordid daily grind, and it seemed to him that one day, soon—he would somehow rise above it and look down: a beautiful, sinful adventure, while in reality—and this he knew too—he had simply followed the rules of the game out of a sort of politeness, rules so depressingly casual and so grimly serious that he had been appalled. Even before it happened, he had been seized with disgust, but he had joined in the game, persuading himself that after all it was nothing but a mechanical act, dictated by nature, while in his heart he knew that the arrow, already quivering in the bow, was going to be released, and would strike him unerringly in that invisible something for which he could find no other name than soul.

He sighed, and began to feel impatient; in his mind’s eye the images—those which were gradually acquiring a golden patina, and the real ones—were hovering beside, above, below one another, occasionally merging for an instant, and his gaze traveled in agonizing suspense past the headless saints against their columns to that velvet rope beside the bell.

It occurred to him that possibly the bell was not even working, or that the priest whose name he had not bothered to read was not there. He was not familiar with this form of confession; in the old
days they used to make jokes about it. He was just about to get up and go over to the bell-pushes again when he saw in the motionless background of the empty church a dark figure which emerged from the sacristy, genuflected before the altar, and crossed over to the confessionals on the right-hand side. His tense gaze followed the monk; he was tall and slight, and the circle of hair left by the tonsure was thick and black.

Fink quickly tried once more to summon a sense of remorse and contrition, he silently intoned the formulas he had known by heart for twenty years, and stood up. As he stepped into the aisle he stumbled; somewhere in the red and white tiles with their pattern of lilies there must be a damaged place; he steadied himself against a prayer stool and heard the priest switch off the tiny light and pull the curtain aside. As he knelt down in the airless, dark and very uncomfortable little space and made out the pale ear behind the grille, he felt his heart pounding in his throat; he was too agitated to speak.

“Praise be to Jesus Christ,” said a colorless, detached voice.

He forced out a “For ever and ever Amen” and was silent. The sweat was pouring down his back, making his shirt cling to his skin, closely and relentlessly, as if it had been soaked in water; there seemed to be no room left to breathe. The priest cleared his throat.

“I have committed adultery,” stammered Fink, and he knew that with that he had said about all he was capable of saying.

“Are you married?”

“No.”

“But the woman is?”

“Yes.”

“How many times?” The question brought him instantly to his senses. Everything that had been swimming in front of his vision, this large white ear, which looked enormous to him, and the grille—of a strange, crisp brown like the latticework on an apple pie—all this he now saw quite clearly, in all its reality, and he looked into the drooping sleeve of the priest’s propped-up arm, a dark cavity between the monk’s habit and the pale skin covered with light hairs.

“Once,” and a deep involuntary sigh escaped him.

“When?” The questions came tersely, rapidly, impersonally, like a doctor’s during an examination.

“Today,” he said. Actually it had already receded far into the past for him, but the word brought it back again before his eyes, like a camera zooming toward its object to fix it for ever. One was compelled to look closely at something one did not want to look at closely.

“Avoid seeing this woman.”

Now for the first time Fink realized he would be seeing her again; a pretty little housewife with a firm neck and wearing a red housecoat, with eyes which were both boring and sad, and he pictured her with such intensity that he almost missed the priest’s question.

“Do you love her?”

He could not say no; to say yes seemed even more monstrous. He thought about it, while the sweat accumulated hot and burning above his eyebrows. “No,” he said quickly, adding: “It will be very difficult to avoid seeing her.”

The priest was silent, and for a moment Fink saw the lowered lids jerk up, a pair of very quiet gray eyes.

“I am a salesman for a firm that makes prefabricated houses,” he said, “and the—the lady has ordered a house from us.”

“And you have that territory?”

“Yes.” He thought of how he would have to negotiate with her, present plans, discuss estimates, advise on details—countless details which, if one wanted to, could be dragged out for months.

“You must see that you are transferred.”

Fink was silent.

The voice became more forceful. “You must do all you can not to see her again. Habit is strong, very strong. You have the sincere desire and resolve not to see the woman again?”

“Yes,” said Fink at once, and he knew that for the first time he was really speaking the truth.

“Try; do everything in your power. Think of the Bible message: If thy left hand offend thee, cut it off. Accept the possibility of material loss.” He was silent for a moment. “I know it is not easy, but Hell doesn’t make things easy for us.”

His voice had lost its personal quality again when he said: “Anything else?”

Fink was startled. He was not familiar with this kind of confession, although by this time he realized it was serious, extremely serious, more
serious than that regular mechanical hygiene he underwent at home every three months with the chaplain.

“Anything else?” asked the voice impatiently. “When did you last confess?”

“Eight weeks ago.”

“And go to Mass?”

“Four.”

In a monotonous voice the priest began to intone the Commandments, the way he did with the penitents he was accustomed to, people who scarcely knew the Creed, whose religious vocabulary consisted of Our Father and Hail Mary. Fink was feeling uncomfortable, he wanted to leave.

“No,” he said each time quietly, as far as the fifth Commandment. The priest left out the sixth.

“Stealing,” said the priest without emotion, “and lying, the seventh and eighth Commandments.”

Fink felt his color rising, it surged hot into his ears. For God’s sake, he wasn’t a thief.

“Have you told a lie?”

Fink said nothing. Never before had anyone asked him whether he had told a lie. In any case it seemed to him he had never confessed before. These crude formulas struck him like hammer blows, and while he was thinking he had never confessed before, he muttered: “Oh well, the houses, our houses are not quite the way they look in the catalogue—I mean, they—people are often disappointed when they actually see them.…”

The priest could not suppress an “Aha.” He said: “We must be honest about that too, although …” he groped for words, “although it seems impossible. But it is a lie to sell something of whose value one is not convinced.” He cleared his throat again, and Fink saw the propped-up arm disappear as the priest began to whisper: “Now we will take it all together and fervently beseech Our Lord Jesus Christ to obtain our forgiveness. He died on the Cross to free us from our sins, and each one of our sins nails Him once more to the Cross. Summon remorse and contrition within yourself again, and as a penance recite one decade of the Sorrowful Mystery.”

The priest sat up straight in the center of the confessional, murmuring with closed eyes, then he suddenly turned his face toward Fink
again, pronounced the
Absolvo te
in a clear voice, and made the sign of the Cross over him.

“Praise be to Jesus Christ—”

“For ever and ever Amen!” said Fink.

He was stiff all over, and he felt as if hours had gone by. He sat down in a pew and pulled out his handkerchief, and as he began to dry the sweat off he noticed the priest disappearing again into the sacristy.

Fink was tired. He tried to pray, but the words tumbled back inside him like a heavy fall of rock, and while he fought against sleep he saw through half-closed lids that in the dark corner next to the side door candles were now burning in front of the altar of the Mother of God: the cheap paraffin tapers flickered restlessly, consuming themselves in feverish haste, and their shimmer swung the silhouette of a small, old woman onto the wall of the center nave, in gigantic and outlandish detail: single hairs protruding from her forehead stood out hard and black on the wall, a childlike nose and the tired slackness of her lips moving silently: a fleeting memorial, towering above the truncated plaster figures and seeming to grow out beyond the edge of the roof.

Every morning, after entering Broadcasting House, Murke performed an existential exercise. Here in this building the elevator was the kind known as a paternoster—open cages carried on a conveyor belt, like beads on a rosary, moving slowly and continuously from bottom to top, across the top of the elevator shaft, down to the bottom again, so that passengers could step on and off at any floor. Murke would jump onto the paternoster but, instead of getting off at the second floor, where his office was, he would let himself be carried on up, past the third, fourth, fifth floors; he was seized with panic every time the cage rose above the level of the fifth floor and ground its way up into the empty space where oily chains, greasy rods, and groaning machinery pulled and pushed the elevator from an upward into a downward direction; Murke would stare in terror at the bare brick walls, and sigh with relief as the elevator passed through the lock, dropped into place, and began its slow descent, past the fifth, fourth, third floors. Murke knew his fears were unfounded: obviously nothing would ever happen, nothing could ever happen, and even if it did, it could be nothing worse than finding himself up there at the top when the elevator stopped moving and being shut in for an hour or two at the most. He was never without a book in his pocket, and cigarettes; yet as long as the building had been standing, for three years, the elevator had never once failed. On certain days it was inspected, days when Murke had to forgo those four and a half seconds of panic, and on these days he was irritable and restless, like people who had gone without breakfast. He needed this panic, the way other people need their coffee, their oatmeal, or their fruit juice.