The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (99 page)

At last I reached out hesitantly for the shirt. “You,” I said, my voice even huskier than before, “you … don’t want it?”

“What d’you want for it?” she asked coldly, without looking up. Her quick, deft fingers had finished cleaning the cabbage; she placed the leaves in a colander, ran water over them, stirred them all under the water, then again lifted the lid of the saucepan where the bacon was sizzling. She slid the leaves into the saucepan, and the delicious hiss again revived old memories: memories of a time that might have lain a thousand years in the past, yet I am only twenty-eight …

“Well, what d’you want for it?” she asked somewhat impatiently.

But I’m no good at bargaining, no, although I have visited every black market between Cap Gris Nez and Krasnodar.

I stammered: “Bacon … bread … maybe some flour, I thought …”

Now for the first time she raised her cold blue eyes and looked at me coolly, and at that moment I knew I was done for … never, never again in this life would I know the taste of bacon, bacon would forever remain no more than a wave of painful aromatic memory. Nothing mattered any more, her gaze had struck me, transfixed me, and now my whole self was draining out …

She laughed. “Shirts!” she cried scornfully. “I can have shirts for a few bread ration coupons.”

I snatched the shirt from the chair, knotted it round the neck of this virago and strung her up like a drowned cat on the nail beneath the big crucifix that hung black and threatening on the yellow wall above her face … but I did this only in my imagination. In reality I grabbed my shirt, bundled it up, and stuffed it back into the briefcase, then turned to the door.

The cat was crouching in the hallway over a saucer of milk, greedily lapping it up. As I passed, it lifted its head and nodded as if wanting
to acknowledge and comfort me, and in its green, veiled eyes there was something human, something unutterably human …

But because I had been advised to be patient, too, I felt obliged to try again. If only to escape the oppressive brilliance of the sky, I made my way under crippled apple trees, among cowpats and busily pecking chickens, towards a somewhat larger farmhouse situated to one side under the solid shade of some ancient linden trees. The bitterness must have blurred my vision, for it was only at the last moment that I noticed a brawny young farm lad sitting on a bench in front of the house and calling out endearments to two grazing horses. When he saw me he laughed, and called through an open window into the house: “Number eighteen’s coming, Ma!” Then he slapped his thigh with glee and began to fill a pipe; his laughter was answered indoors by a throaty chuckle, and the shiny, crimson face of a woman appeared for a second in the window like a dripping pancake. I turned on my heel and ran like a madman, my briefcase tucked tightly under my arm. I didn’t slow up until I reached the village street again and walked down the hill that I had climbed half an hour earlier.

I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the friendly, grey snake of the highway below me, bordered with gentle trees. My pulse slowed down, the bitterness subsided, while I rested at the crossing where the cobbled, neglected, fetid village street emerged into the freedom of the highway.

I was dripping with sweat.

Suddenly I smiled, lit my pipe, pulled off my old, sticky, soiled shirt, and slipped into the cool, soft silk; it flowed gently down my body and right through me, and all my bitterness melted away, all of it, to a mere nothing; and as I walked back along the highway towards the railway station I felt welling up inside me a yearning for the poor, abject face of the city, behind whose contorted features I had so often seen the humanity bred by misery.

At first when I woke up I couldn’t believe it—no, it couldn’t be true. Once more I stuck my hand out from under the blanket and took it back again. Was I still dreaming? It couldn’t be true; could the cold really have broken overnight? It was warm … and mild; but oh, was I suspicious! I don’t know whether you were also born in 1917—we are a very suspicious lot, the survivors of that generation, as rare as cigarettes among so-called honest folk. Well, in the end I had to trust my senses: I got up. Yes, it really was mild, the sunshine was warm and gentle, the windows were entirely free of ice … they shimmered moistly, like the eyes of young girls who still believe in love.

My heart felt so light while I was dressing—what a relief that the cruel, murderous cold had broken. I looked out of the window: surely people were striding out more freely and happily, although the street was wet, but with a benign wetness, and from between grey clouds shone a moist sun … and yes, I could almost believe that the trees were turning green! What arrant nonsense, in the middle of January. But you see how little one can trust one’s senses and how right I was to be suspicious; oh, careful, careful! You will find it ridiculous, but after walking only a few hundred yards I felt myself sweating … I really was. You will think: 1917, born during one war and cracked up during another … No, no, it’s really true, I was sweating …

And I felt so light, the mild air and the sun and the dreamlike certainty that the cold seemed really to have broken made me reckless; at the corner I bought a good cigarette with almost the last of my money, pumped it voluptuously through my lungs, and blew the thin, grey smoke into the springlike air. I responded with a regretful smile to a pretty, red-haired girl who offered me bread-ration coupons and the next moment I had jumped onto a tram passing at full speed. Wasn’t there, in spite of all the misery, a gleam of relief in people’s eyes that the cruel cold had been conquered by a “warm air front”?

Didn’t the sweet, tender air vibrate with sighs of relief? I even found a valid tram ticket in the depths of my coat lining, which meant that I could keep the fifty-pfennig piece intact in my pocket.

I smoked the entire cigarette without pinching it out. That hadn’t happened for a long time—how reckless! I calculated in a kind of daze: since April 1945 … that meant for almost two years, since my first days as a prisoner of war, I hadn’t smoked an entire cigarette without pinching it out. Was some fundamental change taking place in me? I spat the butt, which was almost burning my lips, out into the street. The conductress called out cheerfully: “Main station!” I got off deep in thought …

What bliss, to submerge oneself in the bustle of the huge waiting-room! You will say, or at least think: how can a man who was a soldier for many years, who has had to wait to the point of stupefaction for so many trains in all the waiting-rooms of Europe—how can a man like that enjoy sitting in a waiting-room? Oh, you don’t understand. In this swarm of harried, weighed-down fellow creatures who, in the aftermath of war, are travelling—must travel—to somewhere from somewhere—in the midst of this bustle I pursue the secrets of solitude, of that blissful solitude which I was never allowed to find … Here I can be truly alone, truly, truly alone and dream, dream to my heart’s content. Silence is not for us … silence scares us; with cruel fingers silence rips off the frail blanket of stoicism that we have spread over our memories and thrusts straight into the teeming, bloodied darkness of our brief, pain-fraught life. Silence … silence is like a great snow-white screen onto which we project the joyless film of our lives. Silence can offer us no rest …

But here, in this impersonal hum, the ebb and flow of outlandish images, in the midst of sounds I do not hear, of apparitions I do not see … here there is a kind of peace, that’s right, some kind of peace: here I can abandon myself to my dreams.

You will find this very foolish; but I have meanwhile discovered that there is nothing more pleasant than foolishness. Unfortunately we were never given enough time to be foolish … that was the trouble. We were too young when the horror broke over us, and now we are too old to “learn”. Or would you care to tell me what I am supposed to learn? With that mild, warm air, hadn’t hope reawakened in those grey, pathetic faces of the homeless?

I idly jingled my fifty-pfennig piece against a bunch of safety pins I carried in my pocket, a habit I had picked up in the army—I always have to carry some safety pins in case buttons are ripped off or fabric gets torn; a cheap little quirk, you must admit, not an expensive indulgence.

I drank my beer straight down; today the insipid stuff tasted marvellous—I was really thirsty; but what had happened to my appetite? I sat down on a chair that had just been vacated and wondered about my appetite, which seemed to have vanished with the cold … or had the cigarette absorbed it? I was profoundly shocked; where was my hunger, that faithful companion of so many years, that many-headed creature, often searing and vicious, sometimes just gently growling or amiably prompting: that mysterious monster that was second nature to me, fluctuating between wolfish greed and pitiful pleading?

One day, by the grace of God, I shall write a poem, a poem about my hunger. I became very uneasy.

Not only because of my hunger, not only because of this unexpected spring, not only because of my faraway, phantom beloved, perhaps unborn, or perished in the ghastly embrace of the war, for whom I sometimes waited here with a quaking heart … no, no, I was also here for a purely practical reason. I was waiting for Edi. Edi was to tell me whether the deal would come off; if so, I would be the richer by three hundred marks—if not, well, I wouldn’t be. But if it did come off I could buy a violin, which I craved … it would make me happy, even happier, even freer … oh, a violin! I love music almost more than I do that faraway, phantom beloved, who, I often believe, will appear any moment in the door of the waiting-room, so that I look tensely and with a trembling heart in that direction … breathless and intoxicated by the thought that she has now become flesh and blood and will walk towards me with a smile.

So I was waiting for Edi. You may sometimes have wondered what people in waiting-rooms are waiting for! You probably believe that they are all waiting for arriving and departing trains. If you only knew the kind of things a person can wait for. One can wait for anything that exists between Nothing and God. Yes, there are even people waiting for Nothing.

My hair is now considerably thinner; illnesses, usually found only among the aged, plague me according to the season; and if I—please
don’t be alarmed!—take off my shirt, you can see some scars that might affect you like a painting by Goya; and the scars you could look at if I … but since you are a lady I will say no more. You won’t believe that I finished school ten years ago, by the skin of my teeth incidentally, and that during those ten years I have never been out of uniform, except for the last five months, since my return from P.O.W. camp—and I have never hated anything in my life so totally and profoundly as that uniform! I didn’t know what occupation to enter on my release papers. High-school student? High-school graduate? Oh, if only I could have said, with a clear conscience: labourer. But with thinning hair and at almost thirty … high-school graduate? It didn’t seem funny to me—at that moment my eyes were opened …

It was the biggest mistake of my life to listen, against my better judgment, to the advice of so-called sensible older people who told me to “volunteer”: because it was inevitable, “then you’ll have it over with!” and so on. And the same people give me all kinds of advice today: learn a trade, go to university. Perhaps you will understand that today I am very suspicious of these so-called sensible older people who, after all—I should have thought of that!—are also the voters of those earlier days.

Waiting-room! By the grace of God I may one day write a wonderful poem about you. Not a sonnet. Some formless, ardent, passionate creation, as irrational as love … O waiting-room, thou art the wellspring of my wisdom, thou art my oasis … and I have found many a decent cigarette butt in thy depths when my heart was heavy.

I find the relative freedom of a civilian to be extremely pleasant and amusing; it is a glorious thing to be truly free, as free as a person can be without money. With money, of course, this freedom would have an even more golden face.

Don’t talk to me about careers! I’ll get by … tramp, you think, gypsy? So what? Do you find that very anti-social? So what?… I won’t go under that easily.

Even in the waiting-room the air was—yes, lighter, I’d say. Hadn’t the burden of those terrible hours of waiting been lightened for the travellers now that the icy cold had disappeared overnight as if by magic? And yet there was this waiting, waiting …

There are even some people who await something—note the difference between waiting and awaiting. Waiting is the condition of a
certain impatient hopelessness; awaiting is an expectant certainty: slack sails are filled with the intoxicating breath of hope.

But Edi didn’t turn up. I became impatient, restless. Oh, if only I hadn’t involved myself in this deal! Time and again I regretted it, and time and again I fell for it; you sell all your freedom when you begin to make deals. Involuntarily, you think of some stupid “compensation”, as they call it … it bores its way, deeper and deeper, gnawing like a worm at the precious peace of dreams and freedom. Always that net you have to slip through. I made up my mind never to get involved in such things again. Why not simply take up begging? How wonderful to be able to rattle off some phrase or other that would yield a modicum of bread and cash.

Of course Edi didn’t turn up. Not that he is unreliable: I know him well—we spent many a dark Russian night together in cold and heat, in the dark womb of the earth which is the infantry’s element. Edi is quite a smart fellow, although he has been laughing at me for as long as we’ve known each other, and although he is just a shade too dressy for my taste. But he’s loyal. He found me a place when I returned from P.O.W. camp, and he kept my head above water for those first few weeks. And he is reliable. If he doesn’t turn up, there must be some good reason … perhaps they had caught him—who knows?—he’s probably involved in all sorts of murky deals I know nothing about; his hands often tremble so strangely, he seems so jittery. And how calm he always used to be! Nothing could faze him or frighten him. But this strange peace in which we children of the war find ourselves has utterly corrupted Edi; he is sinking, I can feel it; he’s gradually going under … the temptation to become unscrupulous is so great that scarcely anyone can resist it. Oh, Edi … I shall tell him, in a calm and friendly manner, that I won’t make any more deals with him, not even the so-called legitimate ones.