Irish Journal

by Böll, Heinrich

  The movie is supposed to start at 9 P.M., but if there is one thing subject to change it is this hour. Even the vaguest formula for an appointment, as when one says “around nine,” is by comparison a term of utmost precision, for “around nine” is over by half-past nine, when “around ten” begins; this “9 P.M.,” the unadorned precision with which it appears on the poster, is a snare and a delusion.

  The strange thing is that no one is in the least annoyed at the delay. “When God made time,” the Irish say, “He made plenty of it.” There is no doubt that this saying is as much to the point as it is worth meditating on: if we imagine time to be a substance that has been given to us in order that we may settle our affairs here on earth, we have certainly been given enough, for there is always “plenty of time.” The man who has no time is a monster, a fiend: he steals time from somewhere, secretes it. (How much time must have been wasted, how much must have been stolen, to make the unjustly famed military punctuality so proverbial: billions of stolen hours of time are the price for this prodigal kind of punctuality, not to mention the monsters of our day who have no time! They always seem to me like people with not enough skin.…)

  There is ample time to meditate, for by now it is long after nine-thirty, perhaps the priests have got as far as the biology teacher, a minor subject after all, possibly a spur to hope. But even those who do not make use of the delay for meditation are looked after: records are played unstintingly, chocolate, ice cream, cigarettes are offered for sale, for here—what a blessing—smoking is permitted. There would probably be a rebellion if smoking at the movies were prohibited, for among the Irish the passion for moviegoing is coupled with that of smoking.

  The rosy glow from the shells on the walls gives out a feeble light, and in the semidarkness the atmosphere is as lively as at a fair. Conversations are carried on across four rows of seats, jokes are shouted over eight; up front in the cheap seats the children are making the kind of cheerful racket heard otherwise only in school breaks; chocolates are proffered, cigarette brands exchanged, somewhere out of the dark comes the promising squeak of a cork being pulled out of a whisky bottle; make-up is renewed, perfume sprayed; somebody starts singing, and for those who do not allow that all these human sounds, movements, and activities are worth the trouble of occupying the passing time, there remains time for meditation; when God made time, He made plenty of it. Certainly in the use of time there is as much extravagance as thrift, and paradoxically enough it is the time-squanderers who also manage to save it, for they always have time when you ask them for some; time to take someone quickly to the station or the hospital; just as you can always ask money-squanderers for money, so time-squanderers are the savings banks where God deposits His time, keeping a reserve for when some is suddenly needed on an occasion where one of those people who never have enough time has spent it in the wrong place.

  However: we have gone to the movies to see Ann Blyth, not to meditate, although meditation comes surprisingly easily and is pleasant enough in this fairground of lighthearted gaiety, where bog farmers, peat cutters, and fishermen offer cigarettes to and accept chocolates from seductively smiling ladies who drive around during the day in great cars, where the retired colonel chats with the postman about the merits and demerits of East Indians. Here classless society has become reality. It is a pity, though, that the air gets so stale: perfume, lipstick, cigarettes, the bitter smell of peat from clothes, even the music from the phonograph records seems to smell: it exudes the raw eroticism of the thirties, and the seats, splendidly upholstered in red velvet—if you are lucky you get one where the springs are not yet broken—these seats, probably deemed elegant in 1880 in Dublin (they must have seen Sullivan’s operas, perhaps also Yeats, Synge, and O’Casey, and early Shaw), these seats smell the way old velvet smells that resists the harshness of the vacuum cleaner, the savagery of the brush—and the theater is an unfinished new building, still without proper ventilation.

  Well, the chatting priests and chaplains don’t seem to have got to the biology teacher after all, or are they discussing the janitor (an inexhaustible topic), or their first furtive cigarettes? Those who find the air too stale can go out and lean for a few minutes against the wall of the building: a clear, mild evening outside; the light from the lighthouse on Clare Island, twelve miles away, is not yet visible; the eye falls on the quiet sea across thirty, forty miles, beyond the edge of the bay as far as the mountains of Connemara and Galway—and looking to the right, westward, you see high cliffs, the last two miles of Europe lying between you and America. Wild, the perfect setting for a witches’ sabbath, covered with bog and heather, rises the most westerly of Europe’s mountains, a sheer drop of two thousand feet on the ocean side; facing you on its slope in the dark green of the bog, a paler, cultivated square patch with a large gray house: this is where Captain Boycott lived, the man for whom the inhabitants invented boycotting: this is where the world was given a new word; a few hundred yards above this house, the remains of a crashed airplane—American pilots, a fraction of a second too early, had thought they had reached the open sea, the smooth surface between them and their native land: Europe’s last cliff, the last jag of that continent, was their doom.

  Azure spreads over the sea, in varying layers, varying shades; wrapped in this azure are green islands, looking like great patches of bog, black ones, jagged, rearing up out of the ocean like stumps of teeth.…

  Finally (or unfortunately—I am not sure which) the priests have finished or broken off their school reminiscences, they have also arrived to look at the feast promised by the poster: Ann Blyth. The rosy shells are dimmed, the racket in the cheap seats dies away, this whole classless society sinks into silent anticipation, while, honeyed, colored, and wide-screened, the film begins. Now and again one of the four- or three-year-old children begins to bawl when pistols bang too realistically, or blood, looking too genuine, flows from the hero’s forehead, or dark-red drops even appear on the heroine’s neck: Oh, must this lovely neck be pierced? It isn’t permanently pierced, don’t worry; a piece of chocolate quickly stuffed into the mouth of the bawling child, and pain and chocolate melt away in the darkness. At the end of the film one has that feeling unknown since childhood—of having eaten too much chocolate, indulged in too many sweets: Oh that painful precious heartburn from intensely enjoyed forbidden pleasures! After so much saccharine a spicy preview: black and white, gambling hell—hard thin women, ugly bold heroes, more of the inevitable pistol shots, more chocolate stuffed into the mouth of the three-year-old. A program of generous dimensions; it lasts three hours, and here too, when the rosy shells begin to glow again, the doors are opened, on people’s faces what is always to be seen on people’s faces at the end of a movie: a slight embarrassment, disguised by a smile; one is a little ashamed of the emotion one has involuntarily invested. The beautiful creature from the fashion magazine climbs into her great car, enormous blood-red tail lights, glowing like lumps of peat, move away toward the hotel—the peat cutter plods wearily off to his cottage; silent grown-ups, while the children, twittering, laughing, scattering far into the night, repeat to each other the story of the film.

  It is past midnight, the light from Clare Island lighthouse has been shining across for some time, the blue silhouettes of the mountains are deep black, a few yellow lights far off in the bog; Grandma is waiting there, or Mother, or the husband or wife, to be told what they are going to see for themselves in a day or two, and they will sit by the fire till two, three in the morning, for—when God made time, He made plenty of it.

  Donkeys bray in the warm summer night, passing on their abstract song, that crazy noise as of badly oiled door hinges, rusty pumps—incomprehensible signals, magnificent and too abstract to sound credible, an expression of limitless pain and yet resignation. Cyclists whir by like bats on unlit wire steeds, until finally only the quiet peaceful footsteps of the pedestrians fill the night.

  9

  THOUGHTS ON IRISH RAIN

  The rain
here is absolute, magnificent, and frightening. To call this rain bad weather is as inappropriate as to call scorching sunshine fine weather.

  You can call this rain bad weather, but it is not. It is simply weather, and weather means rough weather. It reminds us forcibly that its element is water, falling water. And water is hard. During the war I once watched a burning aircraft going down on the Atlantic coast; the pilot landed it on the beach and fled from the exploding machine. Later I asked him why he hadn’t landed the burning plane on the water, and he replied:

  “Because water is harder than sand.”

  I never believed him, but now I understood: water is hard.

  And how much water can collect over three thousand miles of ocean, water that rejoices in at last reaching people, houses, terra firma, after having fallen only into water, only into itself. How can rain enjoy always falling into water?

  When the electric light goes out, when the first tongue of a puddle licks its way under the door, silent and smooth, gleaming in the firelight; when the toys which the children have left lying around, when corks and bits of wood suddenly start floating and are borne forward by the tongue, when the children come downstairs, scared, and huddle in front of the fire (more surprised than scared, for they also sense the joy in this meeting of wind and rain and that this howling is a howl of delight), then we know we would not have been as worthy of the ark as Noah was.…

  Inlander’s madness, to open the door to see what’s up outside. Everything’s up: the roof tiles, the roof gutters, even the house walls, do not inspire much confidence (for here they build temporarily, although, if they don’t emigrate, they live forever in these temporary quarters—while in Europe they build for eternity without knowing whether the next generation will benefit from so much solidity).

  It is a good thing always to have candles, the Bible, and a little whisky in the house, like sailors prepared for a storm; also a pack of cards, some tobacco, knitting needles and wool for the women; for the storm has a lot of breath, the rain holds a lot of water, and the night is long. Then when a second tongue of rain advances from the window and joins the first one, when the toys float slowly along the narrow tongue toward the window, it is a good thing to look up in the Bible whether the promise to send no more floods has really been given. It has been given: we can light the next candle, the next cigarette, shuffle the cards again, pour some more whisky, abandon ourselves to the drumming of the rain, the howling of the wind, the click of the knitting needles. The promise has been given.

  It was some time before we heard the knocking on the door—at first we had taken it for the banging of a loose bolt, then for the rattle of the storm, then we realized it was human hands, and the naïveté of the Continental mentality can be measured from the fact that I expressed the opinion it might be the man from the electric company. Almost as naïve as expecting the bailiff to appear on the high seas.

  Quickly the door was opened, a dripping figure of a man pulled in, the door shut, and there he stood; with his cardboard suitcase sopping wet, water running out of his sleeves, his shoes, from his hat, it almost seemed as if water were running out of his eyes—this is how swimmers look after taking part in a life-saving contest fully clothed; but such ambitions were foreign to this man: he had merely come from the bus stop, fifty paces through this rain, had mistaken our house for his hotel, and was by occupation a clerk in a law office in Dublin.

  “D’you mean to say the bus is running in this weather?”

  “Yes,” he said, “it is, and only a bit behind schedule. But it was more of a swim than a drive … and you’re sure this isn’t a hotel?”

  “Yes, but.…”

  He—Dermot was his name—turned out, when he was dry, to know his Bible, to be a good card-player, a good storyteller, a good whisky-drinker; moreover, he showed us how to bring water quickly to the boil on a tripod in the fireplace, how to broil lamb chops on the same ancient tripod, how to toast bread on long forks, the purpose of which we had not yet discovered—and it was not till the small hours that he confessed to knowing a little German; he had been a prisoner-of-war in Germany, and he told our children something they will never forget, must never forget: how he buried the little gypsy children who had died during the evacuation of the Stuthof concentration camp; they were so small—he showed us—and he had dug graves in the frozen ground to bury them.

  “But why did they have to die?” asked one of the children.

  “Because they were gypsies.”

  “But that’s no reason—you don’t have to die because of that.”

  “No,” said Dermot, “that’s no reason, you don’t have to die because of that.”

  We stood up; it was light now, and at that moment it became quiet outside. Wind and rain had gone away, the sun came up over the horizon, and a great rainbow arched over the sea; it was so close we thought we could see it in substance—as thin as soap bubbles was the skin of the rainbow.

  Corks and bits of wood were still bobbing about in the puddle when we went upstairs to the bedrooms.

  10

  THE MOST BEAUTIFUL FEET IN THE WORLD

  To take her mind off her worries, the doctor’s young wife had begun to knit, but she soon threw the needles and ball of wool into the corner of the sofa; then she opened a book, read a few lines, shut the book again; she poured herself some whisky, pensively emptied the glass in small sips, opened another book, closed that one again too; she sighed, reached for the telephone receiver, replaced it: who was there to call?

  One of her children muttered in its sleep, the young woman walked softly across the passage into the children’s bedroom, covered the children up again, smoothed sheets and blankets on four children’s beds. In the passage she stopped in front of the large map which, yellow with age, covered with mysterious signs, looks almost like an enlargement of the map of Treasure Island; surrounded by sea, the mountains dark brown like mahogany, the valleys light brown, the roads and paths black, the little cultivated patches around the tiny villages green, and everywhere the blue tongue of the sea thrusting into the island in bays: small crosses: churches, chapels, cemeteries; little harbors, lighthouses, cliffs—slowly the woman’s forefinger with the silver-lacquered nail moves along the road by which her husband left two hours ago: a village, two miles of bog, a village, three miles of bog, a church—the young woman crosses herself as if she were really driving past the church—five miles of bog, a village, two miles of bog, a church—a sign of the cross; the filling station, Teddy O’Malley’s bar, Beckett’s shop, three miles of bog—slowly the silvery fingernail moves across the map like a shiny toy car, until it reaches the Sound where the thick black line of the highway swings across the bridge to the mainland, while the road her husband has to take, now only a fine black line, follows the edge of the island and in places coincides with the edge. The map is dark brown here, the coastline jagged and uneven like the cardiogram of an irregular heartbeat, and someone has written with a ballpoint on the blue of the sea: 200 feet—380 feet—300 feet, and next to each of these figures is an arrow to show that the figures apply not to the depth of the sea but to the height of the cliffs, which at these places coincide with the road. Time and again the silvery fingernail halts, for the young woman knows every step of the way; she has often accompanied her husband on his calls at the only house along that six-mile stretch of coast. On sunny days tourists enjoy this drive, with a slight shiver at being able for several miles to look down perpendicularly from the car onto the writhing white sea; a moment’s inattention, and the car will be wrecked down there on those cliffs where many a ship has foundered. The road is wet, strewn with stones and rocks, covered with sheep dung at the places where the old sheep trails cross the road—suddenly the fingernail halts: here the road descends steeply into a little bay, rises again on the other side: the sea roars into a canyonlike gorge; it is millions of years old, this rage that has eaten deep in under the rocks—again the finger halts: here there used to be a little cemetery for
unbaptized children; a single grave is still to be seen, bordered with pieces of quartz: all the other bones have been carried away by the sea—the car now carefully crosses an old bridge that has lost its railing, it turns, and the glare of the headlights reveals the waving arms of waiting women: in this remote corner lives Aedan McNamara, whose wife is expecting a child tonight.

  The doctor’s young wife shivers, shakes her head, walks slowly back to the living room, piles on more peat, pokes the glowing embers till the flames leap up; the woman reaches for her knitting bundle, throws it back into the corner of the sofa, gets up, goes over to the mirror, stands there for half a minute in thought, head lowered, suddenly throws back her head and looks into her face: with the heavy make-up her child’s face looks even more childlike, almost like a doll’s, but this doll has four children. Dublin is so far away—Grafton Street—O’Connell Bridge—the wharves; movies and dances—the Abbey Theatre—every weekday morning at eleven, Mass at St. Theresa’s, where you have to arrive early to find a seat—with a sigh the young woman goes back to the fireplace. Must Aedan McNamara’s wife always have her children at night and always in September? But Aedan McNamara works from March to December in England, comes home only at Christmas, for three months, to cut his peat, repaint the house, repair the roof, do a bit of furtive fishing along this rugged stretch of coast, to look for jetsam—and to beget the next child: so Aedan McNamara’s children always come in September, around the twenty-third: nine months after Christmas, when the great storms come, and the angry foam makes the sea snow-white for miles. Aedan is probably now standing at a bar in Birmingham, anxious like all expectant fathers, cursing the obstinacy of his wife, who refuses to budge from this solitude: a dark-haired, defiant beauty, whose children are all September children; among the dilapidated houses in the village, she lives in the only one that has not yet been abandoned. At this spot on the coast, whose beauty hurts because on sunny days you can see for twenty, thirty miles without a human habitation: only azure, islands that are not real, and the sea. Behind the house rises the bare hillside, four hundred feet high, and three hundred paces from the house the coast falls a sheer three hundred feet; black, naked rocks, gorges, caves penetrating fifty, seventy yards into the rocks; from which on stormy days the foam rises up threateningly, like a white finger, the storm carrying the joints away one by one.