The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (71 page)

“Excuse me,” he said, and took up a position outside the entrance. The soapsuds ran between his feet across the asphalt into the gutter. This is the best place, he thought, it’s hanging directly in front of me, round, like a big moon, and I’m bound to hit it. He took the pistol out of his pocket, released the safety catch, and smiled before he raised it and took aim. He no longer felt something had to be destroyed, and yet he had to shoot: there were some things that had to be done, and if he didn’t shoot, Griff wouldn’t go to Lübeck, wouldn’t see the white arms of the cute girls, and would never go with one of them to the movies. He thought: God, I hope I’m not too far away—I
must
hit it, I
must;
but he had already hit it: the crash of the falling glass was almost louder than the noise of the shots. First a round piece broke out of the sign—the beer mug; then the swords fell, he saw the plaster of the house wall jump out in little clouds of dust, saw the metal ring that had held the glass sign, splinters of glass were clinging to the edge like a fringe.

Drowning out everything else were the screams of the woman; she had rushed out of the passageway and then ran back and went on screaming inside in the dark. Men were shouting too, a few people came out of the station; a great many rushed out of the tavern. A window was opened, and for a moment Drönsch’s face appeared up above. But no one came near him because he was still holding the pistol. He looked up toward the churchyard: Griff had gone.

An eternity passed before someone came and took the pistol from him. He had time to think of many things: Now, he thought, Father has been yelling all over the house for the past ten minutes, putting the blame on Mother—Mother, who found out ages ago that I climbed up to Katharina’s room; everyone knows about it, and nobody will understand why I did it and why I did this, shot at the lighted sign. Maybe it would have been better if I had shot into Drönsch’s window. And he thought: Maybe I ought to go and confess, but they won’t let me; it was eight o’clock, and after eight you couldn’t confess. The Lamb has not drunk my blood, he thought, O Lamb.

There are only a few pieces of broken glass, and I have seen Katharina’s breasts. She’ll come back. And for once Father has good reason to clean his pistol.

He even had time to think of Griff, now on his way to Dreschen-brunn, over the slopes, past the vineyards, and he thought
of the tennis balls and the jar of jam, which he already imagined completely overgrown.

A lot of people were standing around him at some distance. Drönsch was leaning out of the window on his arms, his pipe in his mouth. Never will I look like that, he thought, never. Drönsch was always talking about Admiral Tirpitz. “Tirpitz was the victim of injustice. One day history will see that justice is done to Tirpitz. Objective scholars are at work to find out the truth about Tirpitz.” Tirpitz? Oh well.

From behind, he thought, I might have known they would come from behind. Just before the policeman grabbed hold of him, he smelled his uniform: its first smell was of cleaning fluid, its second, furnace fumes, its third …

“Where do you live, you young punk?” asked the policeman.

“Where do I live?” He looked at the policeman. He knew him, and the policeman must know him too: he always brought round the renewal for Father’s gun license, a friendly soul, always refused a cigar three times before he accepted it. Even now he was not unfriendly, and his grasp was not tight.

“That’s right, where do you live?”

“I live in the Valley of the Thundering Hoofs,” said Paul.

“That’s not true,” shouted the woman who had been scrubbing the passageway, “I know him, he’s the son—”

“All right, all right,” said the policeman, “I know. Come along,” he said, “I’ll take you home.”

“I live in Jerusalem,” said Paul.

“Now stop that,” said the policeman. “Come along with me.”

“All right,” said Paul, “I’ll stop.”

The people were silent as he walked down the dark street just ahead of the policeman. He looked like a blind man: his eyes fixed on a certain point, and yet he seemed to be looking past everything. He saw only one thing: the policeman’s folded evening paper. And in the first line he could read “Khrushchev” and in the second “open grave.”

“Hell,” he said to the policeman, “you know where I live.”

“Of course I do,” said the policeman. “Come along!”

For thirty-two years I have been trying to finish writing a story, the beginning of which I read in the
Bockelmunden Parish News
but the promised continuation of which I never got to see, since, for unknown reasons (probably political—it was in 1933) this modest publication ceased to appear. The name of the author of this story is engraved on my memory: he was called Jacob Maria Hermes, and for thirty-two years I have tried in vain to find other writings by him; no encyclopedia, no authors’ society index, not even the Bockelmunden parish register, still extant, lists his name, and it looks as though I must finally accept the fact that the name of Jacob Maria Hermes was a pseudonym. The last editor of the
Bockelmunden Parish News
was Vice-Principal Ferdinand Schmitz (retired), but by the time I had finally tracked him down I was unduly delayed by prewar, wartime, and postwar events, and when at last in 1947 I trod my native soil again, I found that Ferdinand Schmitz had just died at the age of eighty-eight.

I freely admit that I invited myself to his funeral, not only to do final honor to a man under whose editorship at least half of
the
most masterly short story I had ever read had been published; and not only because I hoped to find out more about Jacob Maria Hermes from his relatives—but also because in 1947 attendance at a country funeral meant the promise of a decent meal. Bockelmunden is a pretty village: old trees, shady slopes, half-timbered farmhouses. On this summer’s day, tables had been set up in the yard of one of the farms, there was home-slaughtered meat from the Schmitz family storerooms, there was beer, cabbage, fruit, later on cakes and coffee—all served by two pretty waitresses from Nellessen’s inn; the church choir sang the hymn that is
de rigueur
on the occasion of schoolteachers’ funerals, “With wisdom and honor hast thou mastered the school.” Trumpets sounded, club banners were unfurled (illegally, for this was still prohibited at that time); when the jokes grew broader, the atmosphere—as it is so nicely
put—became more relaxed, I sat down beside each person there and asked them all in turn if they knew anything about the editorial estate of the deceased. The answers were unanimous and shattering: in five, six, or seven cartons (the information varied only as to quantity), the entire archives, the entire correspondence of the
Bockelmunden Parish News
had been burned during the final days of the war “as a result of enemy action.”

Having eaten my fill and drunk a little too much, yet without obtaining any precise information on Jacob Maria Hermes, I returned home with that sense of disappointment familiar to anyone who has ever tried to catch two butterflies with one net but has only managed to catch the vastly inferior butterfly while the other, the gorgeous shimmering one, flew away.

Nothing daunted, I tried for the next eighteen years to do what I had been trying to do for the previous fourteen years: finish writing the best short story I had ever read—and all attempts were in vain for the simple reason: I couldn’t get the seventh trunk open!

I regret having to expatiate a little here; not thirty-two but thirty-five years ago I fished out of the bargain barrel in a secondhand bookstore in the Old Town of Cologne a pamphlet entitled “The Secret of the Seventh Trunk, or, How to Write Short Prose.” This remarkable publication consisted of only a few pages; the author was called Heinrich Knecht and described himself as “temporarily conscripted into service with the Deutz Cuirassiers.” The pamphlet had been published in 1913 by “Ulrich Nellessen, Publisher and Printer, corner of Teutoburg and Maternus Street.” Underneath, in small print, was the remark: “The author may also be reached at this address in his (very limited) free time.”

I could, of course, hardly suppose that in 1939 anyone would still be serving in the Cuirassiers as he had been in 1913, for, although I did not (and still do not) know what a Cuirassier is, I did know that that part of the Republic in which I was living had been spared the presence of the Army (not forever, unfortunately, as it turned out five years later for the first time, and twenty-five years later for the second)—but there was a slight chance that the printer and publisher were still to be found at this corner, and somehow I am quite touched at the thought of that thirteen-year-old boy immediately mounting his bicycle and
racing from a westerly part of the city to that southerly one to discover that the two streets do not form a corner at all. To this day I admire the persistence with which I rode from the northern entrance of Römer Park, where at that time the built-up right-hand side of Maternus Street came to an end, to the Teutoburg Street, which had (and still has) the impudence to end shortly before the western entrance to Römer Park—from there to the office of the Tourist Association where with a pencil I furtively extended the right side of Maternus Street and the left side of Teutoburg Street on the city map hanging there, to discover that, if these two streets formed a corner, they would do so in the middle of the Rhine. So Heinrich Knecht, the old so-and-so, provided he was halfway honest, must have lived roughly fifty yards north of Marker 686 in a caisson at the bottom of the Rhine and have swum every morning a mile and a half down-river to report for duty at his Cuirassiers’ barracks.
Today
I am no longer so certain that he really did not live there, perhaps still does: a deserter from the Cuirassiers, the color of the river, with a green beard, consoled by naiads—little knowing that for deserters times are still bad.
At the time
I was simply so shattered by all this hocus-pocus that I bought the first three cigarettes in my life with my last nickel; I enjoyed the first cigarette, and since then I have been a fairly heavy smoker. Needless to say, there was no trace either of the Nellessen printing shop. I did not even attempt to find Knecht—perhaps I ought to have got hold of a boat, dived in fifty yards north of Marker 686, and taken hold of Heinrich Knecht by his green beard. The thought never occurred to me at the time—
today
it is too late: I have smoked too many cigarettes since then to risk a dive, and Knecht is to blame for that.

I need hardly mention that I soon knew Knecht’s treatise by heart; I carried it with me, on my person, in war and peace; during the war I lost it, it was in a haversack that also contained (I beg forgiveness of all militant atheists!) a New Testament, a volume of poems by Trakl, the half-story by Hermes, four blank furlough certificates, two spare paybooks, a company stamp, some bread, some
ersatz
spread, a package of fine-cut, and some cigarette paper. Cause of loss: enemy action.

Today, enriched, saturated almost, by literary insight and hindsight, and a little more perspicacious too, I have, of course, no difficulty in realizing that Knecht and Hermes must have known about
each other, that both names were perhaps pseudonyms for Ferdinand Schmitz—that the name Nellessen linking the two should have put me on the track.

These are unpleasant, embarrassing assumptions, terrible consequences of an education that was forced upon me, betrayal of that earnest, flushed boy riding his bicycle right across Cologne that summer’s day to find a street corner that did not exist. It was not until much later, actually only now that I am writing it down, that I realized that names, all names, are but sounding brass: Knecht, Hermes, Nellessen, Schmitz—and the only thing that matters is: someone actually wrote this half of a short story, actually wrote “The Seventh Trunk,” so when I am asked to acknowledge who encouraged me to write, who influenced me, here are the names: Jacob Maria Hermes and Heinrich Knecht. Unfortunately I cannot reproduce the Hermes short story word for word, so I will merely relate what happened in it. The central character was a nine-year-old girl who, in a school playground surrounded by maple trees, was persuaded, duped, perhaps even forced, by a nun who in a nice way was not quite right in the head to join a brotherhood whose members undertook to attend Holy Mass on Sundays, “reverently,” not once but twice. There was only one weak sentence in the story, and I can recall it—the weaknesses of one’s fellow writers are always what one remembers best—word for word. The sentence goes: “Sister Adelheid suddenly became aware of her senselessness.” First of all I am firmly convinced that there was a typographical error here, that instead of senselessness it should have been sensualness (in my own case it has happened three times that printers, typesetters, and proofreaders have made senselessness out of sensualness); secondly: an outright psychological statement of this kind was utterly out of keeping with Hermes’ prose style, which was as dry as immortelles. In the preceding sentence a spot of cocoa on the little girl’s blue blouse had been mentioned. He must have meant sensualness. I swear with even greater emphasis: a man of the stature of a Jacob Maria Hermes does not regard nuns as senseless, and nuns who become aware of their senselessness simply do not belong in his repertoire, especially as three paragraphs further on, in a prose as arid as the steppes, he let the little girl become fourteen years old without having her suffer complexes, conflicts, or convulsions, although usually she went only once to church, on many Sundays not at all, and only on
a single occasion twice. Nowadays one does not have to even get wind of ecclesiastical wrath, one has only to be an ardent TV-viewer, to know that both terms, senselessness and sensualness, as applied to a nun, will find their way directly into the Church Council chamber and out again. For some Council fathers would immediately attack the term senselessness as applied by a nun in an internal monologue to her own existence; others would defend it; and needless to say it would not be the attackers but the defenders who would cause an author considerable trouble, for he would have to point to a printer’s error, send them a notarized copy of his manuscript, and still they would interpret his allusion to a typographical error as cowardice and maintain that he was “attacking progress from the rear.”