Billiards at Half-Past Nine

by Heinrich Böll

  Whispering became audible in the committee room; the Abbot was evidently talking to Gralduke. But only the green-topped table, the ash trays, the carafe were visible. Conflict hung in the air. The panel of judges seemed to be still at odds.

  Gralduke came out, took two glasses from Meeser’s tray, stood there hesitantly a second and looked in Krohl’s direction. Gralduke was large, of powerful build, correct in manner, as one might have told from the bags under his eyes. Gralduke represented the Law. He kept watch over the juristic correctness of the judgmental proceedings, took charge of protocol. Gralduke had almost become a monk. For two years he had sung Gregorian liturgies and still liked them. But he had returned to the world to marry a girl who was as pretty as a picture, by whom he had five daughters, all pretty as pictures. Now he lorded it as provincial governor. He had had preserves of land established, fields, meadows and woodlots released, in laborious detail, from land registry office complications, and had had to disencumber miserable little ponds of special fishing rights, realize on mortgages, set banks and insurance people’s minds at rest.

  Slowly the meeting in the committee room resumed. A wave of the Abbot’s slender hand commanded Meeser’s presence, whereupon Meeser disappeared for half a minute, reappeared, raised his voice and called down the corridor, ‘I’m instructed to tell the gentlemen of the panel that the recess is over.’ First to come from the Dutch corner was Schwebringer, all by himself. Quickly he went into the room. Hubrich was the last, looking pale, stricken to death, shaking his head as he went by the three aggrieved ones. Meeser shut the door after him, looked at his tray, at the freshly emptied cognac glasses, scornfully jingled his poor take in tips. I went up to him and threw him a thaler on the tray. It rang hard and loud and the three aggrieved ones looked up with a start. Meeser grinned, put his finger to his cap in thanks and whispered, ‘And you’re only a sexton’s son, and he off his rocker at that!’

  For a long time now there had been no sound of hackney carriages going by. La Traviata had started. The attendants, forming a lane, stood stiffly by, amid legionaries and matrons, and broken temple columns. An uproar broke like a wave of heat into the cold evening. Newspapermen had run by the first attendant and already the second was helplessly raising an arm, while the third looked toward Meeser, who was hissing a command to be quiet. A young reporter who had whisked past Meeser came up to me, wiped his nose on his sleeve and said, ‘All yours! It’s in the bag!’ Two dignified art magazine editors, bearded, black-hatted and all hollowed out by the pathos of soulful verse, waited in the background and held the less worthy masses in check, that is, a bespectacled girl and a haggard socialist. Until the Abbot quickly opened the door, came to me breathlessly like a young man, put his arms around me, while a voice cried, ‘Faehmel, Faehmel!’

  Noise from below could be heard in the office. Ten minutes after the window ledge had stopped trembling, laughing working girls left through the big gate, bearing proud sensuousness into the evening hours of after-work. Into the warm fall day, with the grass by the cemetery wall sweetly smelling. Today Gretz had not sold his wild boar, dark and dry its bloody snout. Over there, kaleidoscopically framed, the roof garden: the white table, the green wooden bench, the pergola with the tired nasturtiums. Would Joseph’s children, Ruth’s children, come and go there, reading Love and Intrigue? Had he ever seen Robert over there, ever? Never. That one either stuck in his room working or practiced in the garden. A roof garden was too small for his kind of sport: rounders, the hundred-meter dash.

  I was always a little afraid of him, always looking for the unexpected with him, and I wasn’t even surprised when the man with the sloping shoulders came to pick him up. If I’d only known the name of the youngster who threw Robert’s little messages into our letter box. I never found out what it was, and even Johanna was never able to get it out of Droescher. The memorial they will set up for me really should go to the boy. I never did get around to showing Nettlinger the door or forbidding that Vacano to go to Otto’s room. They brought the Host of the Beast into my house, they changed the boy I loved into a stranger, the same little fellow I used to take to the construction jobs with me and up on the scaffolding. Taxi? Taxi? Was it the year 1936 taxi, the one I took Johanna in to The Anchor at the Upper Harbor? Or the 1942 taxi, when I took her to the asylum? Or the 1951 one, that I rode in with Joseph to Kisslingen, to show him the building site where he, my grandson, Robert’s and Edith’s son, was to work for me? The Abbey destroyed, a desolate heap of stone and dust and mortar. Brehmockel, Grumpeter and Wollersein would certainly have exulted over the sight. But I did not exult when I first saw the piles of ruins in the year 1945. I walked around reflecting more calmly, plain to see, than they had expected. Had they anticipated tears? Indignation? ‘We’ll find out who did it!’ ‘Why?’ I asked, ‘let them go their way in peace.’ I would have given two hundred abbeys if I could have had Edith back, Otto, or the anonymous young fellow who threw the little notes into our letter box and had to pay so dearly for it. And even if the exchange had not been accepted, I at least was glad to have paid the price: a heap of stones, the ‘work of my youth.’ I offered it up for Otto and Edith, for the young fellow and the carpenter’s apprentice, even though I knew it would do them no good. For they were dead. Did this pile of ruins belong to the unforeseen that I had longed for so keenly? The monks were amazed at my smiles, and I by their indignation.

  “The taxi? Coming right away, Leonore. Think over my invitation. Seven o’clock at the Cafe Kroner, birthday celebration. There won’t be any champagne. I hate champagne. Take the flowers down at the porter’s place along with you when you go, the boxes of cigars and the congratulatory telegrams. And, my child, don’t forget to spit on my monument.”

  It was election placards that were being printed in overtime. Stacks of them blocked the corridor, the stairway, and were piled up right to his door, each bundle with an identifying sample stuck on the outside of it. All of them smiled at him, well-dressed samples indeed, the worsted of their suits recognizable even on the placards. Bourgeois earnestness and bourgeois smiles besought confidence and trust. Young ones and old ones, yet to him the young seemed more frightful than the old. He declined with a little nod the doorman’s invitation to come in and look over the beautiful flowers that had come for him, to open the telegrams and the presents. He got into the taxi, the driver holding the door open for him, and quietly said, “To Denklingen, please, the hospital.”

  5

  Blue sky, a whitewashed wall, alongside which the poplars, like ladder rungs, led down and away to the outer yard, where a sanatorium attendant was shoveling leaf mold into the compost pit. The wall was too high, the rungs too far apart. He would need four or five steps to cover each intervening space. Watch out! Why did the yellow bus have to travel so close to the wall, creeping along like a beetle? Today it had brought only one passenger—him. But was it really he? Who? If only he could climb the poplar ladder, go hand over hand from rung to rung. But no. Always upright and unbending, never lowering himself, that was the way it had to be with him. Only when he knelt in a pew, or at a starting line, did he abandon his upright stance. Was it he? Or who?

  On the trees in the garden, in Blessenfeld Park, there had been neatly painted signs, saying: 25, 50, 75, 100. He had knelt at the starting line, to himself muttered, ‘On your mark … get set … go!’ Then sprinted off, slowed down, went back and read off the time from his stopwatch. Again he knelt down at the starting line, murmured the starting signal to himself, dashed away, this time lengthening out the trial stretch just a little. Often it was a long time before he even got past the 25-meter mark, still longer before he reached the 50 and eventually ran the entire course right to the 100 mark. Then he entered his time in his notebook: 11:2. It was like a fugue, precise, exciting, yet marred by intervals of intense boredom, yawning eternities on summer afternoons in the garden, or in the Blessenfeld Park. Start, return, start, a minimal increase, then back to the starting point once more. And
when he had sat down beside her, to evaluate and comment on the figures in his notebook, and reflect on his system, it had been at once exciting and a bore. His training had smelled of fanaticism. The strong, slender boy’s body gave off the serious sweaty smell of those who know nothing as yet of love. Her brothers, Bruno and Friedrich, had smelled like that, too, when they got off their bikes, heads full of times and distances, and went into the garden to try and relax their fanatical leg muscles by means of fanatical compensating exercises. Father had also smelled like that when he swelled out his chest at choir practice, when breathing had become a kind of sport in itself, and singing had lost all its pleasure. Bourgeois earnestness, mustache-framed, had taken its place. Seriously they had sung and seriously had ridden their bicycles, and their leg muscles, chest muscles, mouth muscles, all had been serious. On their cramped legs, cramped cheeks, hideous purple blotches had appeared. They’d stood for hours on end on cold fall nights to shoot hares hiding among the cabbage stalks. And only at dawn, at long last, had the hares taken pity on straining human muscles and taken off zigzag through a hail of shot. Whywhywhy? Where was he now, the one who carried that secret laughter inside him, hidden spring in hidden clockwork, which lightened the unbearable pressure, eased the strain? He, the only one who had never partaken of the Host of the Beast? Laughter behind the pergola, Love and Intrigue; she was leaning over the parapet, watching him come out by the printery gate, and go, light of step, toward the Cafe Kroner. He carried that secret laughter inside him like a spring. Was he her quarry, or she his?

  Careful, careful! Why always so upright, so unbending? One false step and you’ll topple into blue infinity, or be dashed to pieces on the concrete walls of the compost pit. Dead leaves won’t cushion the impact, the granite side of the steps won’t be any pillow. Was it he? Who, then? Huperts, the sanatorium attendant, was standing meekly at the door. Would the visitor like tea, coffee, wine or cognac? Let me think; Friedrich would have come on horseback. He would never have come by the yellow bus, crawling alongside the wall like a beetle. And Bruno, he’d always had his stick with him, when he came. He beat time with it, till time was dead, chopped up time, slashed it into bits. Or snipped it into pieces with his playing cards, which he flung in the face of time like blades, night after night, day after day. Friedrich would have come on horseback, Bruno never without his stick. No cognac for Friedrich, no wine for Bruno now. They were dead, those foolish Uhlans, had ridden into machine-gun fire at Erby le Huette, believing they could fulfill bourgeois virtue through bourgeois vice, meet the obligations of piety with obscenities. Actually, naked dancers on clubhouse tables did not offend respectable ancestors as much as one might have thought, these ancestors having been in fact much less respectable than they looked in their gallery portraits. Cognac and wine struck off the list of drinks forever, my dear Huperts. Then, how about beer? Otto’s gait was not so elastic. His was a marching step, drumming en-em-y, en-em-y on the hallway tiles and en-em-y on the pavement, all the way down Modest Street. He, Otto, had gone over to the Beast very early. Or had his brother, when he was dying, passed on the name ‘Hindenburg’ to Otto? Fourteen days after Heinrich’s death, Otto had been born, to die at Kiev. No use fooling myself any more, Huperts. Bruno and Friedrich, Otto and Edith, Johanna and Heinrich, all dead.

  Nor will my visitor be wanting coffee, either, Huperts. He is no longer the one whose secret laugh I could hear in his every step. He’s older. For him, tea, fresh and strong, Huperts, with milk but no sugar, for my upright and unbending son, Robert, the one who always fed on secrets. Even now he’s carrying one around with him, locked in his breast. They beat and furrowed his back, but he didn’t bend, didn’t give up his secret, didn’t give my cousin George away, the one who’d mixed gunpowder for him in the Huns’ apothecary. He swung himself down between the two ladders and like Icarus hung poised with outstretched arms at the doorway. He’d never land in the compost pit or be smashed to smithereens on the granite. Tea, my dear Huperts, fresh and strong, with milk but no sugar. And cigarettes, please, for my archangel. He brings me somber messages that smack of blood, messages of rebellion and revenge. They’ve killed the blond boy. He ran the hundred meters in 10:9. Whenever I saw him, and I saw him only twice, he was laughing. He mended the little lock on my jewel box for me with his clever hands, something the carpenters and locksmiths had been trying to do, but couldn’t, for forty years. He just picked the thing up and it worked again. He was no archangel, just an angel, name was Ferdi. He was blond and fool enough to think he could use firecrackers against the ones who’d eaten the Host of the Beast. He didn’t drink tea or wine, beer, coffee or cognac, just put his mouth to the water tap and laughed. If he were still alive, he’d get me a gun. Either he or that other one, a dark angel that one, the one who didn’t know how to laugh, Edith’s brother. They called him Schrella, he was the kind you never call by his given name. Ferdi would have done it. He’d have ransomed me out of this crazy-house where they’ve stuck me, done it, he would have, with a gun. But here I am, doomed and damned. It takes giant ladders to reach the world. My son, see, is climbing down one to me.

  “Good afternoon, Robert, you do like tea, don’t you. Don’t flinch when I kiss you on the cheek. You look like a man, a man of forty; you’re getting gray at the temples and you’re wearing narrow trousers and a sky-blue waistcoat. Isn’t that too conspicuous? But perhaps it’s good to go around disguised as a middle-aged gentleman. You look like the kind of office boss people would like to hear cough, just once anyway, but who’s too refined to permit himself such a thing as cough. Forgive me if I laugh. How clever the barbers are today. That gray hair looks real, and the stubble on your chin like a man’s who has to shave twice a day but does it only once. Clever. Only the red scar hasn’t changed. They’ll know by that, anyway. But maybe there’s a remedy for that, too?

  No, you needn’t worry, they didn’t touch me, they left the whip hanging on the wall, just asked, ‘When did you see him last?’ And I told the truth: ‘In the morning, when he went to catch the streetcar to go to school.’

  ‘But he never arrived at school.’

  I didn’t say a word.

  ‘Has he tried to get in touch with you at all?’

  The truth again. ‘No.’

  You’d left too plain a trail, Robert. A woman from the barracks district near Baggerloch brought me a book with your name and home address on it. Ovid, gray-green hard cover with chicken muck on it. And your school text was found five kilometers away. The box-office girl from a movie house brought it to me, with one page missing. She came into the office pretending to be a client and Joseph showed her in to me.

  A week later they asked me again: ‘Have you been in touch with him at all?’ And I said, ‘No.’ Later on, the one who’d been to the house so often, Nettlinger, he came, too. He said, ‘For your own sake, tell the truth.’ But I had; only now I knew you had gotten away from them.

  Nothing from you for months on end, son. Then Edith came, and said, ‘I’m expecting a child.’ I was terrified when she said, ‘The Lord has blessed me.’ Her voice filled me with fear. Forgive me, but I’ve never liked mystics. The girl was pregnant and alone. Father under arrest, brother disappeared, you gone, and on top of that they had held her in custody and questioned her for fourteen days. No, they didn’t lay a hand on her. How easily the few lambs had been scattered, and now only one, Edith, remained. I took her in. Children, the Lord was certainly pleased with your foolishness. But you might at least have killed him with your homemade bomb; now he’s become chief of police. God preserve us from martyrs who live to tell the tale. Gym teacher, chief of police; goes riding through the city on his big white horse, leads the beggar raids personally. Why didn’t you at least kill him? With a bullet through the head. Firecrackers don’t kill, my boy. You should have come to me. Death’s made of metal. Copper cartridges, lead, cast iron, shrapnel—they bring death, whining and wailing, raining on the roof at night and rattling on the pergola. Fluttering li
ke wild birds: the wild geese rush through the night, and dive down on the lambs. Edith is dead. I had her certified insane. Three authorities wrote out their opinions in elegantly unreadable writing on white parchment with an impressive letterhead. That saved Edith from them. Forgive me for laughing. Such a lamb she was. Her first child at seventeen, the second at nineteen and always so know-it-all. The Lord has done this, the Lord has done that, the Lord has given, the Lord has taken away. The Lord, the Lord! She never realized the Lord is our brother, and that among brothers you can laugh sometimes and feel at ease, even if you can’t among Lords and Masters. As for myself, I had not realized that wild geese preyed on lambs; I’d always thought they were peaceful, plant-eating birds. Edith lay there as if our family coat-of-arms had come alive, a lamb with the blood flowing out of her breast. Though in her case there were no martyrs or cardinals, hermits, knights or saints standing around in adoration. And there she was, dead. Try and smile, my boy. I tried to myself, but couldn’t manage it, least of all with Heinrich. He played with you and hung sabres on you and put helmets on your head, and made you into a Franceman or Rooshian or Englandman, and sang—that quiet boy—got to get a gun, get a gun. And when he was dying he whispered that horrible password to me, that Beast’s name, ‘Hindenburg.’ He wanted to learn that poem by heart, he was such an obedient little boy, but I tore up the piece of paper and scattered the pieces like snowflakes into Modest Street.