The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll by Heinrich Böll
“Whereabouts in Cologne did you live?” asked the Belgian guard.
“Oh, somewhere over there,” I said, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the western suburbs.
“Thank God, now we’re moving again,” said the guard. He picked up his submachine gun, which he had placed on the floor of the truck, and straightened his cap. The lion of Flanders on the front of his cap was rather dirty. As we turned into Clovis Square, I could see why there had been a traffic jam: some kind of raid seemed to be going on. English military police cars were all over the place, and civilians were standing in them with their hands up, surrounded by a sizable crowd, quiet yet tense. A surprisingly large number of people in such a silent, ruined city.
“That’s the black market,” said the Belgian guard. “Once in a while they come and clean it up.”
Before we were even out of Cologne, while we were still on the Bonn-Strasse, I fell asleep and I dreamed of my mother’s coffee mill: the coffee mill was being let down on a strap by the man who had offered the Terborch without success, but the man below rejected the coffee mill; the other man drew it up again, opened the hall door, and tried to screw the coffee mill back where it had hung before, immediately to the left of the kitchen door, but now there was no wall there for him to screw it onto, and still the man kept on trying (this mark of tidiness touched me even in my dream). He searched with the forefinger of his right hand for the pegs, couldn’t find them, and raised his fist threateningly to the gray autumn sky which offered no support for the coffee mill. Finally he gave up, tied the strap around the mill again, went to the front, let down the coffee mill, and offered it to the third man, who again rejected it, and the other man pulled it up again, untied the strap, and hid the coffee mill under his jacket as if it were a valuable object; then he began to wind up the strap, rolled it into a coil, and threw it down into the third man’s face. All this time I was worried about what could have happened to the man who had offered the Lochner without success, but I couldn’t see him anywhere; something was preventing me from looking into the corner where the piano was, my father’s desk, and I was upset at the thought that he might be reading my father’s diaries. Now the man with the coffee mill was standing by the living-room door trying to screw the coffee mill onto the door panel; he seemed absolutely determined to give the coffee mill a permanent resting place, and I was beginning to like him, even before I discovered he was one of our many friends whom my mother had comforted while they sat on the chair beneath the coffee mill, one of those who had been killed right at the beginning of the war in an air raid.
Before we got to Bonn, the Belgian guard woke me up. “Come on,” he said, “rub your eyes, freedom is at hand,” and I straightened up and thought of all the people who had sat on the chair beneath my mother’s coffee mill: truant schoolboys whom she helped to overcome their fear of exams, Nazis whom she tried to enlighten, non-Nazis whom she tried to fortify—they had all sat on the chair beneath the coffee mill, had received comfort and censure, defense and respite. Bitter words had destroyed their ideals and gentle words had offered them those things which would outlive the times: mercy to the weak, comfort to the persecuted.
The old cemetery, the market square, the university. Bonn. Through the Koblenz Gate and into the park. “So long,” said the Belgian guard, and Tom Thumb with his tired child’s face said, “Drop me a line some time.”
“All right,” I said, “I’ll send you my complete Tucholsky.”
“Wonderful,” he said, “and your Kleist too?”
“No,” I said, “only the ones I have duplicates of.”
On the other side of the barricade through which we were finally released, a man was standing between two big laundry baskets; in one he had a lot of apples, in the other a few cakes of soap. He shouted, “Vitamins, my friends, one apple—one cake of soap!” And I could feel my mouth watering. I had quite forgotten what apples looked like; I gave him a cake of soap, was handed an apple, and bit into it at once. I stood there watching the others come out; there was no need for him to call out now: it was a wordless exchange. He would take an apple out of the basket, be handed a cake of soap, and throw the soap into the empty basket; there was a dull thud when the soap landed. Not everyone took an apple, not everyone had any soap, but the transaction was as swift as in a self-service store, and by the time I had just finished my apple, he already had his soap basket half full. The whole thing took place swiftly and smoothly and without a word; even the ones who were very economical and very calculating couldn’t resist the sight of the apples, and I began to feel sorry for them. Home was welcoming its homecomers so warmly with vitamins.
It took me a long time to find a phone in Bonn; finally a girl in the post office told me that the only people to get phones were doctors and priests, and even then only those who hadn’t been Nazis. “They’re scared stiff of the Nazi Werewolf underground,” she said. “I s’pose you wouldn’t have a cigarette for me?” I took my pack of tobacco out of my pocket and said, “Shall I roll one for you?,” but she said no, she could do it herself, and I watched her take a cigarette paper out of her coat pocket and quickly and deftly roll herself a firm cigarette. “Who do you want to call?” she said, and I said, “My wife,” and she laughed and said I didn’t look married at all. I also rolled myself a cigarette and asked her whether there was any chance of selling some soap: I needed money, train fare, and didn’t have a pfennig. “Soap,” she said, “let’s have a look.” I felt around in my coat lining and pulled out some soap, and she snatched it out of my hand, sniffed it, and said, “Real Palmolive! That’s worth—worth—I’ll give you fifty marks for it.” I looked at her in amazement, and she said, “Yes, I know, you can get as much as eighty for it, but I can’t afford that.” I didn’t want to take the fifty marks, but she insisted, she thrust the note into my coat pocket and ran out of the post office; she was quite pretty, with that hungry prettiness which lends a girl’s voice a certain sharpness.
What struck me most of all, in the post office and as I walked slowly on through Bonn, was the fact that nowhere was there a student wearing colored ribbons; and the smells: everyone smelled terrible, all the rooms smelled terrible, and I could see why the girl was so crazy about the soap. I went to the station, tried to find out how I could get to Oberkerschenbach (that was where the one I married lived), but nobody could tell me; all I knew was that it was a little place somewhere in the Eifel district not too far from Bonn. There weren’t any maps anywhere either, where I could have looked it up; no doubt they had been banned on account of the Nazi Werewolves. I always like to know where a place is, and it bothered me that I knew nothing definite about this place Oberkerschenbach and couldn’t find out anything definite. In my mind I went over all the Bonn addresses I knew, but there wasn’t a single doctor or a single priest among them; finally I remembered a professor of theology I had called on with a friend just before the war. He had had some sort of trouble with Rome and the Index, and we had gone to see him simply to give him our moral support; I couldn’t remember the name of the street, but I knew where it was, and I walked along the Poppelsdorf Avenue, turned left, then left again, found the house, and was relieved to read the name on the door.
The professor came to the door himself. He had aged a great deal, he was thin and bent, his hair quite white. I said, “You won’t remember me, Professor. I came to see you some years ago when you had that stink with Rome and the Index—can I speak to you for a moment?” He laughed when I said stink, and said, “Of course,” when I had finished, and I followed him into his study; I noticed it no longer smelled of tobacco, otherwise it was still just the same, with all the books, files, and house plants. I told the professor I had heard that the only people who got phones were priests and doctors, and I simply had to call my wife. He heard me out—a very rare thing—then said that, although he was a priest, he was not one of those who had a phone, for “You see,” he said, “I am not a pastor.” “Perhaps you’re a Werewolf,” I said. I off
“Nightclub” was a nice way of putting it, but I didn’t mind that so much as the English sentry at the door of this nightclub. He was very young and eyed me severely as I stopped beside him. He pointed to the notice prohibiting Germans from entering this nightclub, but I told him my sister worked there, I had just returned to my beloved fatherland, and my sister had the house key. He asked me what my sister’s name was, and it seemed safest to give the most German of all German girls’ names, so I said, “Gretchen.” Oh yes, he said, that was the blond one, and let me go in. Instead of bothering to describe the interior, I refer the reader to the pertinent “Fräulein literature” and to movies and TV. I won’t even bother to describe Gretchen (see above). The main thing was that Gretchen was surprisingly quick on the uptake and, in exchange for a cake of Palmolive, was willing to make a phone call to the priest’s house in Kerschenbach (which I hoped existed) and have the one I had married called to the phone. Gretchen spoke fluent English on the phone and told me her boyfriend would try to do it through the army exchange, it would be quicker. While we were waiting, I offered her some tobacco, but she had something better; I tried to pay her the agreed fee of a cake of soap in advance, but she said no, she didn’t want it after all, she would rather not take anything, and when I insisted on paying she began to cry and confided that one of her brothers was a prisoner of war, the other one dead, and I felt sorry for her, for it is not pleasant when girls like Gretchen cry. She even let on that she was a Catholic, and just as she was about to get her first communion picture out of a drawer the phone rang, and Gretchen lifted the receiver and said “Reverend,” but I had already heard that it was not a man’s voice. “Just a moment,” Gretchen said, and handed me the receiver. I was so excited I couldn’t hold the receiver; in fact, I dropped it, fortunately onto Gretchen’s lap. She picked it up, held it against my ear, and I said, “Hello—is that you?”
“Yes,” she said. “Darling, where are you?”
“I’m in Bonn,” I said. “The war’s over—for me.”
“My God,” she said, “I can’t believe it. No—it’s not true.”
“It is true,” I said, “it is—did you get my postcard?”
“No,” she said, “what postcard?”
“When we were taken prisoner, we were allowed to write one postcard.”
“No,” she said, “for the last eight months I haven’t had the slightest idea where you were.”
“Those bastards,” I said, “those dirty bastards. Listen, just tell me where Kerschenbach is.”
“I”—she was crying so hard she couldn’t speak, I heard her sobbing and gulping till at last she was able to whisper—“at the station in Bonn, I’ll meet you,” then I could no longer hear her, someone said something in English that I didn’t understand.
Gretchen put the receiver to her ear, listened a moment, shook her head, and replaced it. I looked at her and knew I couldn’t offer her the soap now. I couldn’t even say “Thank you,” the words seemed ridiculous. I lifted my arms helplessly and went out.
I walked back to the station, in my ear the woman’s voice which had never sounded like marriage.
18 STORIES
18 Stories was published in English by McGraw-Hill in 1966. Most of these stories were collected in German as part of Erzählungen, Hörspiele, Aufsätze (Stories, Radio Plays, Essays), published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 1961.
LIKE A BAD DREAM
That evening we had invited the Zumpens over for dinner, nice people; it was through my father-in-law that we had got to know them. Ever since we have been married he has helped me to meet people who can be useful to me in business, and Zumpen can be useful: he is chairman of a committee which places contracts for large housing projects, and I have married into the excavating business.
I was tense that evening, but Bertha, my wife, reassured me. “The fact,” she said, “that he’s coming at all is promising. Just try to get the conversation round to the contract. You know it’s tomorrow they’re going to be awarded.”
I stood looking through the net curtains of the glass front door, waiting for Zumpen. I smoked, ground the cigarette butts under my foot, and shoved them under the mat. Next I took up a position at the bathroom window and stood there wondering why Zumpen had accepted the invitation; he couldn’t be that interested in having dinner with us, and the fact that the big contract I was involved in was going to be awarded tomorrow must have made the whole thing as embarrassing to him as it was to me.
I thought about the contract too: it was a big one, I would make twenty thousand marks on the deal, and I wanted the money.
Bertha had decided what I was to wear: a dark jacket, trousers a shade lighter, and a conservative tie. That’s the kind of thing she learned at home, and at boarding school from the nuns. Also what to offer guests: when to pass the cognac, and when the vermouth, how to arrange dessert. It is comforting to have a wife who knows all about such things.
But Bertha was tense too: as she put her hands on my shoulders, they touched my neck, and I felt her thumbs damp and cold against it.
“It’s going to be all right,” she said. “You’ll get the contract.”
“Christ,” I said, “it means twenty thousand marks to me, and you know how we need the money.”
“One should never,” she said gently, “mention Christ’s name in connection with money.”
A dark car drew up in front of our house, a make I didn’t recognize, but it looked Italian. “Take it easy,” Bertha whispered, “wait till they’ve rung, let them stand there for a couple of seconds, then walk slowly to the door and open it.”
I watched Herr and Frau Zumpen come up the steps: he is slender and tall, with graying temples, the kind of man who fifty years ago would have been known as a “ladies’ man”; Frau Zumpen is one of those thin, dark women who always make me think of lemons. I could tell from Zumpen’s face that it was a frightful bore for him to have dinner with us.
Then the doorbell rang, and I waited one second, two seconds, walked slowly to the door and opened it.
“Well,” I said, “how nice of you to come!”
Cognac glasses in hand, we went from room to room in our apartment, which the Zumpens wanted to see. Bertha stayed in the kitchen to squeeze some mayonnaise out of a tube onto the appetizers; she does this very nicely: hearts, loops, little houses. The Zumpens complimented us on our apartment. They exchanged smiles when they saw the big desk in my study; at that moment it seemed a bit too big even to me.
Zumpen admired a small rococo cabinet, a wedding present from my grandmother, and a baroque Madonna in our bedroom.
By the time we got back to the dining room, Bertha had dinner on the table. She had done this very nicely too; it was all so attractive yet so natural, and dinner was pleasant and relaxed. We talked about movies and books, about the recent elections, and Zumpen praised the assortment of cheeses, and Frau Zumpen praised the coffee and the pastries. Then we showed the Zumpens our honeymoon pictures: photographs of the Breton coast, Spanish donkeys, and street scenes from Casa
After that we had some more cognac, and when I stood up to get the box with the photos of the time when we were engaged, Bertha gave me a sign, so I didn’t get the box. For two minutes there was absolute silence, because we had nothing more to talk about, and we all thought about the contract; I thought of the twenty thousand marks, and it struck me that I could deduct the bottle of cognac from my income tax. Zumpen looked at his watch and said, “Too bad, it’s ten o’clock; we have to go. It’s been such a pleasant evening!” And Frau Zumpen said, “It was really delightful, and I hope you’ll come to us one evening.”
“We would love to,” Bertha said, and we stood around for another half minute, all thinking again about the contract, and I felt Zumpen was waiting for me to take him aside and bring up the subject. But I didn’t. Zumpen kissed Bertha’s hand, and I went ahead, opened the doors, and held the car door open for Frau Zumpen down below.