The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (9 page)

“Ma’am,” I replied, “possibly your idea of a black-market operator’s life is a little on the rosy side. Speaking personally, I was, one might say, at the front.”

“What?” She stamped her foot again on the porch floor, the children having set up a rather protracted and demented howling. Once again the boy’s head appeared above the railing.

“Well?” he asked curtly.

“Play Refugees now,” the woman said quietly. “You must flee from the burning city, understand?”

The boy’s head vanished again, and the woman asked me, “What?” Oh, she hadn’t lost the thread, not she.

“Right at the front,” I said, “I was right in the front lines. Is that your idea of an easy way to make a living?”

“At the corner?”

“Well, at the station, actually; you know where I mean?”

“I do. And now?”

“I’d like some kind of a job. I’m not lazy, I assure you, ma’am, I’m not lazy.”

“Excuse me,” she said. Turning her delicate profile toward me, she called into the trailer, “Carlino, isn’t the water boiling yet?”

“Hang on,” called a bored voice. “I’m just making the coffee.”

“Are you going to have some?”

“No.”

“Then bring two cups, if you don’t mind. You’ll have a cup, won’t you?”

I nodded. “And I’ll invite you to a cigarette.”

The screams below the porch now became so piercing that any further conversation would have been impossible. The Half-Woman leaned over the geranium box and called, “You must run for your lives, hurry, hurry—the Russians have reached the village!”

“My husband,” she said, turning round, “isn’t here at the moment, but when it comes to hiring I can …”

We were interrupted by Carlino—a slightly built, taciturn, swarthy fellow wearing a hairnet—emerging with cups and coffeepot. He looked at me suspiciously.

“Why won’t you join us?” the woman asked him as he turned abruptly away.

“Not thirsty,” he mumbled, disappearing inside the trailer.

“When it comes to hiring, I can act pretty well on my own. All the same, you would have to have some kind of skill. Nothing is nothing.”

“Perhaps, ma’am,” I said humbly, “I could grease wheels or take down the tents, drive the tractor, or be the Strong Man’s knockabout.”

“Driving the tractor is out,” she said, “and there’s quite an art to greasing wheels.”

“Or operate the brakes,” I continued, “on the gondola swings …”

She raised her eyebrows haughtily, for the first time giving me a slightly disdainful look. “Operating the brakes,” she said coldly, “is a science, and it wouldn’t surprise me if you broke all the customers’ necks. Carlino is our brakeman.”

“Or …” I was about to suggest diffidently, but a little dark-haired girl with a scar across her forehead came dashing up the half dozen steps that put me in mind of a gangplank.

Throwing herself into her mother’s lap she sobbed indignantly, “I’ve got to die …”

“What?” asked the Half-Woman, aghast.

“I’m supposed to be the little refugee who freezes to death, and Freddi wants to sell my shoes and everything …”

“Well,” said her mother, “if you will insist on playing Refugees …”

“But why always me?” said the child. “It’s always me who has to die. I’m always the one who’s got to die. When we play Bombs or War or Tightrope Walkers, it’s always me that’s got to die.”

“Tell Freddi he’s got to die; tell him I said it’s his turn to die now.” The little girl ran off.

“Or?” asked the Half-Woman. Oh, she didn’t lose the thread that easily, not she.

“Or straighten nails, peel potatoes, ladle out soup, anything you say,” I cried in despair. “Just give me a chance!”

She stubbed out her cigarette, poured us each another cup of coffee, and gave me a long, smiling look. Then she said, “I’ll give you a chance.
You’re good at figures, aren’t you? You had to be, didn’t you, in your former occupation, so”—she hesitated a second—“I’ll make you cashier.”

I had no words, I was literally speechless, I just got up and kissed her small hand. We said no more. It was very quiet; all we could hear was Carlino humming to himself inside the trailer, the way a man hums when he is shaving …

They have patched up my legs and given me a job I can do sitting down: I count the people crossing the new bridge. They get such a kick out of it, documenting their efficiency with figures; that senseless nothing made up of a few numbers goes to their heads, and all day long, all day long, my soundless mouth ticks away like clockwork, piling number on number, just so I can present them each evening with the triumph of a figure.

They beam delightedly when I hand over the result of my day’s labors, the higher the figure the broader their smiles, and they have every reason to hug themselves when they climb into bed, for many thousands of pedestrians cross their new bridge every day …

But their statistics are wrong. I am sorry, but they are wrong. I am an untrustworthy soul, although I have no trouble giving an impression of sterling integrity.

Secretly it gives me pleasure to do them out of one pedestrian every so often, and then again, when I feel sorry for them, to throw in a few extra. I hold their happiness in the palm of my hand. When I am mad at the world, when I have smoked all my cigarettes, I just give them the average, sometimes less than the average; and when my spirits soar, when I am in a good mood, I pour out my generosity in a five-digit number. It makes them so happy! They positively snatch the sheet from my hand, their eyes light up, and they pat me on the back. How blissfully ignorant they are! And then they start multiplying, dividing, working out percentages, God knows what all. They figure out how many people crossed the bridge per minute today, and how many will have crossed the bridge in ten years. They are in love with the future-perfect tense, the future-perfect is their specialty—and yet I can’t help being sorry that the whole thing is a fallacy.

When my little sweetheart crosses the bridge—which she does twice a day—my heart simply stops beating. The tireless ticking of my heart just comes to a halt until she has turned into the avenue and
disappeared. And all the people who pass by during that time don’t get counted. Those two minutes are mine, all mine, and nobody is going to take them away from me. And when she returns every evening from her ice-cream parlor, when she walks along on the far side, past my soundless mouth which must count, count, then my heart stops beating again, and I don’t resume counting until she is out of sight. And all those who are lucky enough to file past my unseeing eyes during those minutes will not be immortalized in statistics: shadow-men and shadow-women, creatures of no account, they are barred from the parade of future-perfect statistics.

Needless to say, I love her. But she hasn’t the slightest idea, and I would rather she didn’t find out. I don’t want her to suspect what havoc she wreaks in all those calculations, I want her to walk serenely off to her ice-cream parlor, unsuspecting and innocent with her long brown hair and slender feet, and to get lots of tips. I love her. It must surely be obvious that I love her.

Not long ago they checked up on me. My partner, who sits across the street and has to count the cars, gave me plenty of warning, and that day I was a lynx-eyed devil. I counted like crazy, no speedometer could do better. The chief statistician, no less, posted himself across the street for an hour, and then compared his tally with mine. I was only one short. My little sweetheart had walked past, and as long as I live I won’t allow that adorable child to be whisked off into the future-perfect tense; they’re not going to take my little sweetheart and multiply her and divide her and turn her into a meaningless percentage. It made my heart bleed to have to go on counting without turning round to watch her, and I am certainly grateful to my partner across the street who has to count the cars. It might have cost me my job, my very existence.

The chief statistician clapped me on the shoulder and said I was a good fellow, trustworthy and loyal. “To be out one in one hour,” he said, “really makes no odds. We allow for a certain margin of error anyway. I’m going to apply for your transfer to horse-drawn vehicles.”

Horse-drawn vehicles are, of course, a piece of cake. There’s nothing to it. There are never more than a couple of dozen horse-drawn vehicles a day, and to tick over the next number in your brain once every half hour—what a cinch!

Horse-drawn vehicles would be terrific. Between four and eight they are not allowed across the bridge at all, and I could walk to the ice-cream parlor, feast my eyes on her or maybe walk her partway home, my little uncounted sweetheart …

We were in that bleak, miserable mood that comes when you have already said good-bye but can’t part because the train hasn’t left yet. The station was like all stations, dirty and drafty, filled to its vaulted roof with vapory haze and noise, the noise of voices and railway coaches.

Charlotte was standing at the window of the long corridor, constantly jostled and shoved from behind, the object of much cursing, but during these final precious minutes, the last we would ever share, we needed more than just a wave from an overcrowded compartment …

“It was nice of you,” I said, for the third time, “it really was nice of you to stop by on your way to the station.”

“Don’t be absurd, look how long we’ve known each other. Fifteen years.”

“That’s right, we’re thirty now. Still … you needn’t have.”

“Please. Yes, we’re thirty now. As old as the Russian Revolution.”

“As old as dirt and hunger …”

“A bit younger …”

“You’re right: we’re terribly young.”

She laughed.

“Did you say something?” she asked nervously: she had been bumped from behind with a heavy suitcase.

“No, it was my leg.”

“You must do something about it.”

“Yes, I will do something about it, it really talks too much.”

“Is it all right for you to stand so long?”

“Yes …” What I really wanted to tell her was that I loved her, but I couldn’t find the words; for fifteen years I hadn’t been able to find the words.

“What was that?”

“Nothing. Sweden, so you’re going to Sweden.”

“Yes, I feel a bit ashamed, this has become part of our life, really, the dirt and rags and ruins, and I feel a bit ashamed. I feel like a deserter …”

“Nonsense, that’s where you belong. Be glad you’re going to Sweden.”

“Sometimes I am glad, you know, the food, that must be marvelous, and no ruins, no ruins at all. His letters sound so enthusiastic …”

The voice that always announces the train departures sounded out now one platform closer, and I held my breath, but it was not our platform. The voice was only announcing the arrival of an international train from Rotterdam to Basel, and as I looked at Charlotte’s small, delicate face, I suddenly recalled the smell of soap and coffee, and I felt utterly wretched.

For a moment a desperate courage filled me, I wanted to drag this little person out of the window and keep her here, for she was mine, I loved her …

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” I said, “be glad you’re going to Sweden.”

“I am. His vitality is fantastic, don’t you agree? A prisoner of war for three years in Russia, that hair-raising escape, and now he’s in Sweden lecturing on Rubens.”

“Fantastic, it really is.”

“You must get busy too, get your degree at least …”

“Oh, shut up!”

“What?” she asked, horrified. “What?” She had gone quite pale.

“Forgive me,” I whispered, “I mean my leg. I talk to it sometimes …”

She didn’t look in the least like Rubens, she looked more like Picasso, and I kept wondering why on earth he had married her. She wasn’t even pretty, and I loved her.

It was quieter now on the platform; everyone had got onto the train, a few people stood around seeing their friends off. Any moment now the voice would say the train was leaving. Any moment might be the last …

“You really must do something, anything, you can’t go on like this.”

“No, I can’t,” I said.

She was the very opposite of Rubens—slim, long-legged, high-strung—and she was as old as the Russian Revolution, as old as the hunger and dirt in Europe, as old as the war.

“I can’t believe it … Sweden … it’s like a dream.”

“It is all a dream.”

“Do you think so?”

“Of course. Fifteen years. Thirty years … another thirty years. Why bother about a degree? It’s not worth the effort. Be quiet, damn you!”

“Are you talking to your leg?”

“Yes.”

“What does it say?”

“Listen.”

We were quite silent, we looked at one another and smiled, and we told one another without saying a word.

She smiled at me. “Do you understand now, is it all right?”

“Yes … yes.”

“Truly?”

“Yes, yes.”

“You see,” she went on softly, “it’s not important to be together and all that. That’s not what really matters, is it?”

The voice that announces the train departures was right above me now, official, distinct, and I winced, as if a great gray, impersonal whip had come swishing down under the vaulted roof.

“Good-bye!”

“Good-bye!”

Very slowly the train started to move, sliding away in the darkness under the great roof.

Do you know those dreadful little places where you keep wondering why the railroad ever built a station there; where infinity seems to have congealed over a handful of dirty houses and a dilapidated factory, with fields on all sides condemned to eternal sterility; where you are suddenly aware that they are without hope because there is not a tree, not even a steeple, in sight? The man with the red cap—at last, at last, he gives the signal for the train to pull out—vanishes beneath a signboard bearing an imposing name, and you feel he is paid just to sleep twelve hours a day under a blanket of boredom. A gray horizon is draped over bleak fields cultivated by no one.

Yet I was not the only person to get out: an old woman carrying a large brown-paper parcel stepped down from the next compartment, but by the time I had emerged from the grimy little station she had disappeared as if swallowed up by the ground, and for a moment I was at a loss, not knowing whom to ask for directions. The scattering of brick houses with their dead windows and yellowish-green curtains defied all idea of human habitation, and at right angles to this token street ran a black wall that seemed on the point of collapse. I walked toward this grim-looking wall, afraid to knock at one of the houses of the dead. Then I turned the corner, and next to the grubby, barely legible sign saying I
NN
, I read the words M
AIN
S
TREET
in clear, neat white lettering on a blue ground. A few more houses forming a crooked façade, crumbling plaster, and on the opposite side, long and windowless, the dingy factory wall like a barricade to the land of desolation. Following my instinct I turned left, but here the place suddenly came to an end; the wall continued for another ten yards or so, then came a leaden-gray field with a barely visible shimmer of green; somewhere the field merged with the gray, limitless horizon, and I had the terrible feeling that I was standing at the end of the world on the brink of a bottomless abyss, as if condemned to be dragged down into that silent, sinister, irresistible undertow of utter hopelessness.