The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (98 page)

That really woke me up, and in no time I’d thrown off my jacket and cap. I dived into the cold water and started swimming. It was hard work, but luckily the current carried him toward me. Then suddenly he was gone, gone under, dammit, and my shoes were full of water, they felt like lead on my feet, my shirt was like lead too, and it was cold, icy cold, and not a sign of the kid anywhere … I paddled on, then trod water for a bit and shouted, yes shouted … and dammit if the kid didn’t come up again, he was already a bit downstream, and I hadn’t thought the current was that fast. Now my body seemed to warm up a bit, with panic, at the sight of that lifeless bundle being swept off in that grey dirty water, and me after it, and when I was less than two yards away—I could actually see the blond hair—he was gone again, just gone, dammit … but I was after him, head down, and Christ Almighty! I’d grabbed hold of him.

Nobody in the world can know how relieved I was when I’d grabbed hold of him. In the middle of the Rhine, and there was only grey, cold, dirty water, and I was as heavy and cold as lead, and yet I felt relieved. It’s just that I had no more fear, that’s what it must have been … and I swam slowly across the current with him to the shore and was surprised at how close the shore was.

Jesus, I had no time to shiver or moan, although I’d had a lousy time of it. I’d swallowed a whole lot of water, and the dirty stuff made me feel sick as a dog, but I rested till I got my breath back, then I grabbed his arms and pumped them up and down, up and down, up and down, just like they tell you to, and I got pretty damn hot over it … There wasn’t a living soul up there on the river bank, and no one
heard it or saw it. Then the kid opened his eyes, a pair of bright blue child’s eyes, for God’s sake, and he sicked up water, kept sicking it up … Dammit, I thought, the kid’s got nothing but water in his stomach, and nothing but water came up, and then he felt he had to smile, the kid actually smiled at me …

By that time I was as cold as hell in those wet things, and I thought, you’ll catch your death, and he was shaking like a leaf too.

Then I pulled him up and said: “Go on, boy … run!” and I just grabbed him by the arm and ran up the ramp with him, he was as limp as a rag doll in my arm, then he stopped again and sicked up some more grey water, dirty grey Rhine water, that was all, then he could run better.

Goddamn, I thought, he has to get warm and you have to get warm, and in the end we ran pretty good, right up to the avenue and then a bit along the avenue. I began to feel quite warm and I sure was panting, but the kid was still shaking like a leaf. Dammit, I thought, he needs to get indoors and then into a bed, but there were no houses there, just a few piles of rubble and some rails, and it was already getting dark. But then one of our vehicles turned up, a Jeep, and I dashed out onto the street and waved my arms. First it drove on, there was a black driving it, but I yelled at the top of my voice: “Hey there, bud …” and he must have heard from my voice that I was an American—you see, I wasn’t wearing a jacket or a cap. So he stopped, and I hauled the kid over, and the black shook his head and said: “Poor kid—almost drowned, did he?”

“Yes,” I answered, “let’s go, and step on it!” I told him where my billet was.

The boy sat next to me and gave me another of those pathetic smiles, enough to make me feel pretty weird, and I felt his pulse a bit, it seemed okay.

“Hurry!” I shouted to the black. He turned around and grinned and really did speed up, and all the time I was saying: “Make a left, now right, right again,” and so on till we actually stopped at my billet.

Pat and Freddie were standing in the hallway and laughed when they saw me coming: “Boy oh boy, is that your charming Gertrud?” But I told them: “Don’t laugh, fellows, help me, I’ve just fished this kid here out of the Rhine.” They helped me carry him upstairs to our room, Pat’s
and my room, and I told Freddie: “Make us some coffee.” Then I threw him down on the bed, pulled off his wet things, and rubbed him for a long time with my towel. God, how skinny the kid was, how terribly skinny … he looked like … like, hell, like a long, limp, white noodle.

“Pat,” I said, for Pat was standing there watching me, “you go on rubbing, I have to get out of these wet things.” I was as wet as a drowned rat, too, and scared to death of getting the flu. Then Pat handed me the towel, for the lanky kid on the bed was now red all over like a baby, and he smiled again … and Pat felt his pulse and said: “Okay, Johnny, he’s going to be all right, I guess.”

The boys were damn good about it; Freddie brought us some coffee, and Pat scrounged some underwear for the kid, who lay on the bed drinking coffee and smiling, and Pat and I sat on the chairs, and Freddie went off, I guess he went off to the girls again.

Jesus, I thought, what a scramble, but it turned out okay, thank God!

Pat stuck a cigarette between the kid’s lips, and you should’ve seen how he smoked! These Germans, I thought, they all smoke like crazy, they suck on those things as if they contained life itself, their faces go all queer. And then I remembered that my jacket was still lying down there by the water, with the photo, and my cap too, but shit, I thought, why would I still need that photo …

It was real peaceful and quiet, and the kid was happily chewing away, for Pat had given him some more bread and a can of corned beef and kept refilling his mug with coffee.

“Pat,” I said after a while as I lit up too. “Pat, d’you suppose it’s all right to ask him why he tried to drown himself?”

“Sure,” Pat replied, and asked him.

The lad gave us a wild look and said something to me, and I looked at Pat and Pat shrugged his shoulders. “He’s saying something about food, but there’s one word I can’t understand, I just don’t get it …”

“What word?” I asked.

“Marken,”
Pat said.

“
Marken
?” I asked the boy.

He nodded and said another word, and Pat said: “He’s lost them—those things, those
Marken …
”

“What’s that,
Marken
?” I asked Pat. But Pat didn’t know.

“Marken,”
I said to the boy. “
Was ist das?
”—that being one phrase I could say properly in German, and I could say
Liebe
too, that’s all. That goddamn broad had taught me …

The boy looked baffled; then with his thin fingers he drew a funny kind of square on the top of the bedside table and said:
“Papier.”

I can understand
Papier
too, and I thought I knew now what he was trying to say.

“Ah,” I said, “pass, you’ve lost your pass!”

He shook his head: “
Marken
.”

“Damn it all, Pat,” I said, “this
Marken
is driving me nuts. It must be something pretty special to make him want to drown himself.”

Pat refilled our mugs, but that damned
Marken
kept nagging at me. My God, hadn’t I seen that youngster standing up there, not moving, not making a sound, in the gap of the ruined bridge, and Splash! goddammit?

“Pat,” I said, “look it up, you’ve got a dictionary.”

“Sure,” said Pat, jumping up and bringing the dictionary from his locker.

Meanwhile I nodded at the boy and gave him another cigarette, he’d eaten the whole can of corned beef and all the bread, and the coffee must’ve done him a power of good. And Jesus, the way these guys smoke, it’s crazy, they smoke the way we sometimes used to smoke in the war when things got tough. They always smoke as if it was wartime, these Germans.

“Here we are!” Pat cried. “Got it!”, and he jumped up, took a letter out of his locker, and showed the kid the stamp on it, but the boy just shook his head and even smiled a bit.

“Nee,”
he said, and he repeated that crazy word that had made him try and drown himself, and I’d never heard it.

“Hold it,” Pat said, “I’ve got it, it’s a word that means ‘ration cards’,” and he quickly turned over the pages of his dictionary.

“Still hungry?” I gestured to the kid. But he shook his head and poured himself another cup of coffee. Jesus, the way they can put away coffee, by the bucket, I thought …

“Damn it all,” Pat cried, “these dictionaries, these crappy dictionaries, these goddamn fucking dictionaries—a kid like that tries to drown himself for some reason or other, and you can’t even find it in the dictionary.”

“Look,” I said to the boy, in English of course, “just tell us what it is, take your time, we’re all human, we must be able to understand each other. Tell him, tell Pat,” and I pointed to Pat, “just tell this guy.” And Pat laughed, but he listened very carefully and the boy told him slowly, very slowly, the poor kid was all embarrassed, taking his time about it, and I understood some of it, and Pat’s expression turned very serious.

“I’ll be damned!” Pat exclaimed. “How can we be so dumb! They get their food on ration cards, right? They have ration cards, get it? Goddammit, we never thought of it, and that’s what he’s lost, and that’s why he jumped into the Rhine.”

“I’ll be damned,” I muttered. “A kid like that jumps into the river, and we don’t know why, can’t imagine …”

We should at least be able to imagine it, I thought, at the very least, even if we can’t actually experience it, we should at least be able to imagine it …

“Pat,” I said, “if he’s lost them, they’ll have to give him some new ones. It’s just paper, and they can print them, they simply have to give him some new paper—it’s not money, after all. It can happen to anyone, you know, losing them, surely there must be plenty of that printed stuff around …”

“Balls,” Pat replied, “they’ll never do it. Because there’s some people who just
say
they’ve lost them, and they sell them or eat twice as much, and the authorities get fed up. Christ, it’s like in the war, when you’ve lost your rifle and suddenly there’s a guy coming at you, and you simply can’t shoot because you haven’t got a rifle. It’s just a goddamn war they’re carrying on with their paper, that’s what it is.”

Okay, I thought, but that’s terrible, then these folks end up having nothing to eat, nothing, nothing at all, and there’s not a thing to be done about it, and that’s why he ran like a maniac and threw himself into the Rhine …

“Yes,” Pat said, as if answering my thoughts, “and he’s lost them all, the whole lot, for—I believe it’s six people, and some other cards too, I just don’t get what he means—for a whole month …”

Jesus, I thought, what are they going to do if that’s how it is! They can’t do a thing, that kid goes and loses all the ration cards, and I thought to myself I’d drown myself too if I was him. But I still couldn’t imagine it … no, I guess nobody can imagine it.

I stood up, went over to my locker and got two packs of cigarettes for the kid but then I really had a shock, the way he looked at me. He sure gave me a weird look, he’s going to go out of his mind on us, I thought, clear out of his mind, that’s the kind of face the kid was making.

“Pat,” I shouted—yes, I guess I shouted. “Do me a favour and take that boy away, take him away,” I shouted. “I can’t stand it, that face, those grateful eyes, all for two packs of cigarettes, I can’t stand it—I tell you, it’s as if I’d given him the whole world. Pat,” I shouted, “take him away, and make him a parcel of everything we’ve got here, pack it all up and give it to him!”

Jesus, was I glad when Pat left with the kid. Pat’ll make him a nice big parcel, I thought; and there you sat beside the dirty grey water, chatting a bit with the river all because of some skinny girl’s face and thinking: throw yourself in, throw yourself in, let yourself be carried all the way to … ha, Holland, for Christ’s sake! But that child threw himself in, splash! threw himself in because of a few scraps of paper that were worth maybe less than a dollar.

I did exactly as I had been told: without knocking I pushed open the door and walked in. But then it was a shock suddenly to find myself confronting a tall, stout woman whose face had something strange about it, a fantastic complexion: it was healthy, it positively shone with health, calm and confident.

The expression in her eyes was cold; she was standing at the table cleaning vegetables. Beside her was a plate with the remains of a pancake which a big fat cat was sniffing at. The room was cramped and low-ceilinged, the air stale and greasy. A sharp, choking bitterness caught at my throat while my shy gaze roamed restlessly between pancake, cat and the woman’s healthy face.

“What d’you want?” she asked without looking up.

With trembling hands I undid the clasp of my briefcase, hitting my head against the low doorframe; finally I brought the object to light: a shirt.

“A shirt,” I said huskily, “I thought … perhaps … a shirt.”

“My husband has enough shirts for ten years!” But then she raised her eyes as if by chance, and her gaze fastened on the soft, rustling, green shirt. When I saw an ungovernable craving flare up in her eyes, I was sure the battle was won. Without wiping her fingers, she grabbed the shirt, holding it up by the shoulders; she turned it round, examined every seam, then muttered something indistinguishable. Impatient and anxious, I watched her go back to her cabbage, cross to the stove, and lift the lid of a sizzling saucepan. The aroma of hot, good-quality fat spread through the room. Meanwhile the cat had been sniffing at the pancake, apparently not finding it good or fresh enough. With a lazy, graceful leap, the cat jumped onto the chair, from the chair onto the floor, and slipped past me through the door.

The fat bubbled, and I thought I could hear the crackling bits of bacon hopping about under the saucepan lid, for by this time some
ancient memory had told me that it was bacon, bacon in that saucepan. The woman went on scrubbing her cabbage. Somewhere outside a cow was lowing softly, a cart creaked, and still I stood there at the door while my shirt dangled from a dirty chairback, my beloved, soft, green silk shirt, for whose softness I had been longing for seven years …

I felt as if I were standing on a red-hot grill while the silence oppressed me unutterably. By now the pancake was covered by a black cloud of sluggish flies: hunger and revulsion, a dreadful revulsion, combined in an acrid bitterness that closed my throat; I began to sweat.