Billiards at Half-Past Nine

by Heinrich Böll

  “Now he’s going to go into the Abbey and find out what you ought to have told him yourself.”

  I wiped away the letters chalked between St. John and St. Peter’s feet, and the little X in the guest-house cellar. He would never find it, and never find out, never find out from me.

  “For three days,” he said, “the front was spread out between Denklingen and the city, and in the evenings we prayed with Mrs. Kloschgrabe for Grandfather’s safety. Then one evening he came back from the city, pale and sad as I’d never seen him before, and walked through the rubble of the Abbey with us, mumbling what the peasants were mumbling, what Grandmother had always muttered in the air-raid shelter, whywhywhy.”

  “How happy he must be that you’re helping to rebuild the Abbey.”

  “Yes,” said Joseph, “but I can’t prolong that happiness. And don’t ask me why.”

  He kissed her, drew her hair behind her ears and with outspread fingers combed out the pine needles and the grains of sand.

  “Soon Father came out of prison and took us into the city, even though Grandfather protested and said it would be better for us not to grow up among the rubble, but Father said, ‘I can’t live in the country, and I want the children with me now, I hardly know them.’ We didn’t know him either and at first we were scared of him, and we sensed that Grandfather was scared of him, too. We were living at the time in Grandfather’s studio, for our house was unlivable, and there was a huge plan of the city hanging on the studio wall. All that had been destroyed was marked on it in heavy black chalk, and when we did our homework at Grandfather’s draughting table we often listened when Father and Grandfather and other men were standing in front of the map. They often used to quarrel, for Father always said, ‘Away with it—blow it up,’ and drew an X over the black spot, and the others would say, ‘For God’s sake, we can’t do that,’ and Father said, ‘Do it, before people come back into the city—there’s no one living there now so you needn’t worry, tear it all down.’ And the others said, ‘But there are the remains of a lintel from the sixteenth century, and there’s still part of a chapel from the twelfth,’ and Father threw his black chalk down and said, ‘All right, do as you wish, but let me tell you, you’ll regret it—do as you wish, but then do it without me.’ And they said, ‘But my dear Faehmel, you’re our best demolition expert, you can’t leave us in the lurch,’ and Father said, ‘But I am leaving you in the lurch if I have to worry about every chicken-run from the time of the Romans. Walls are walls as far as I’m concerned, and believe you me there are good ones and bad ones. Away with all the rubbish. Blow it up and make some breathing space.’ When they’d gone, Grandfather laughed and said, ‘My God, you really ought to understand their feelings,’ and Father laughed. ‘I do understand their feelings, but I don’t respect them.’ And then he said, ‘Come on, children, we’re going to buy some chocolate,’ and he took us to the black market, bought cigarettes for himself and chocolate for us, and we crept into gloomy, half-destroyed doorways with him, and climbed up stairways, because he also wanted to buy cigars for Grandfather. He always bought, but never sold. When we got bread or butter from Stehlingen or Goerlingen we always had to take his share to school with us, and he let us give it to anyone we wanted; and once we bought some butter we had given away, bought it back on the black market. Mrs. Kloschgrabe’s note was still on it; she had written, ‘Sorry, only a kilo for you this week.’ But Father only laughed and said, ‘Oh well, people need money for cigarettes too.’ The Mayor came again and Father said to him, ‘I’ve found some fourteenth-century fingernail dirt in the rubble of the Franciscan Monastery. Don’t laugh. It’s demonstrably fourteenth-century since it’s mixed with some fiber, the remains of a woolen yarn demonstrably produced only in our city during the fourteenth century. An absolutely unique historical relic, Mr. Mayor.’ And the Mayor said, ‘Really Mr. Faehmel, you’re going too far,’ and Father said, ‘I’ll go farther, Mr. Mayor.’ Ruth laughed; she was sitting beside me scribbling her sums in her exercise book; she laughed aloud, and Father came over to her, kissed her on the forehead and said, ‘Yes, it is a joke, sweetheart,’ and I was jealous because he’d never yet kissed me on the forehead. We loved him, Marianne, but we were still a little scared of him, when he stood there with his black chalk in front of the city plan and said, ‘Blow it up—get rid of it.’ He was always strict where my homework was concerned. He used to say to me, ‘There are only two possibilities: either know nothing or everything. Your mother knew nothing, I don’t think she even finished elementary school, and yet I would never have married anyone else, so make up your own mind.’ We loved him, Marianne, and when I realize he can’t have been much more than thirty at the time, I can’t believe it, for I always looked on him as being much older, even though he didn’t look old at all. He even joked at times, which he doesn’t do any more today. When we all crawled out of bed in the mornings he would already be standing at the window, shaving, and used to call to us, ‘The war’s over, kids,’ although the war had been over at least four or five years by then.”

  “We ought to go now,” said Marianne, “we can’t keep them waiting such a time.”

  “Don’t worry, let them wait,” he said. “I still want to know all about what they did to you, little lamb. I hardly know anything about you.”

  “Little lamb?” she said. “What made you say that?”

  “It just came to me,” he said. “Tell me what they did to you. It always makes me laugh when I hear the Doderingen accent in your voice. It doesn’t go with you, and all I know is that you went to school there but that you weren’t born there, and that you help Mrs. Kloschgrabe with the baking and cooking and ironing.”

  She drew his head down onto her lap, covered his eyes and said, “To me? Do you really want to know what they did to me? They threw bombs at me and didn’t hit me, although the bombs were so big and I so small. The people in the air-raid shelter put tidbits in my mouth and the bombs fell and didn’t hit me; I only heard how they exploded, and the shrapnel whizzed through the night like fluttering birds, and someone in the air-raid shelter sang, ‘The wild geese rush through the night.’ My father was big, very dark and handsome; he wore a brown uniform with a lot of gold on it, and a kind of sword at his belt that glittered silver. He fired a bullet into his mouth, and I don’t know if you’ve ever seen anyone who’s fired a bullet into his mouth? No, I suppose not. Then thank God you’ve been spared the sight. He lay there on the carpet, the blood flowing over the Turkish colors, over the Smyrna pattern—genuine Smyrna, my dear. My mother, however, she was big and blonde and wore a blue uniform with a smart little hat, but no sword at her hip. And I had a small brother, much smaller than I was, and blond, and my small brother dangled in the doorway with a rope round his neck, and I laughed, and went on laughing while my mother put a rope noose round my neck too, murmuring to herself, He ordered me to, but then a man came in, without any uniform or gold braid or sword; he only had a pistol in his hand which he pointed at my mother, and wrenched me out of her hands, while I cried because I had the noose round my neck already and wanted to play the game they had let my little brother play up there, the He ordered me to game, but the man put his hand over my mouth, dragged me downstairs, took the noose off my neck and lifted me into a truck.…”

  Joseph tried to take her hands away from his eyes, but she held them fast and asked, “Don’t you want to hear any more?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Then you must let me hold your eyes shut and you can give me a cigarette.”

  “Here in the woods?”

  “Yes, here in the woods.”

  “Take one out of my shirt pocket.”

  He felt her unbuttoning his shirt pocket and taking out the cigarettes and matches, while her right hand held his eyes shut.

  “I’m giving you one too,” she said, “here in the woods. At that time I was exactly five years old and so sweet that they even pampered me in the truck, sticking tidbits in my mouth and washing
me with nice soap when the truck stopped. And they fired on us with cannon and machine guns but they didn’t hit us. We drove for a long time, I don’t know how long but certainly for two weeks; and when we stopped, the man who had interrupted the He ordered me to game took me with him, rolled me in a blanket and laid me down beside him, in the hay and in the straw and sometimes in a bed, and said, ‘Call me Father, go on,’ but I couldn’t say Father, I had always called the man in the fine uniform Daddy, but I learned to say ‘Father.’ I said it to the man who had interrupted the game, for thirteen years. I got a bed, a blanket and a mother; she was strict and loved me, and I lived nine years in a nice neat house. When I went to school the priest said, ‘Look what we’ve got here, we’ve got a real natural genuine little heathen-child,’ and all the other children, none of whom were heathens, laughed and the priest said, ‘But we’ll very soon make a little child of Christ out of our little heathen-child, out of our good little lamb.’ And so they made me into a little child of Christ. And the little lamb was good and happy, played ring-around-the-rosy and hopscotch and later on played skip-rope and basketball and loved her parents very much. Then one day in school a few tears were shed, a few speeches were made and some allusion to a new threshold of life, and little lamb was apprenticed to a dressmaker and learned to use needle and thread very well, and learned from her mother how to polish and bake and cook, and everyone in the village said, ‘She’ll marry a prince one day, she won’t settle for less than a prince,’ but one day a very large and very black car drove into the village, and the bearded man at the wheel stopped in the village square and from inside the car asked them, ‘Can you tell me where the Schmitzes live, please?’ and they said, ‘There’s a whole lot of Schmitzes here, which ones do you mean?’ and the man said, ‘The ones that have the adopted child,’ and they said, ‘Yes, that’s the Edward Schmitzes, they live back there, look, just behind the smithy, the house with the box tree in front of it.’ And the man said, ‘Thank you,’ and the car drove on, but they followed him since it was only fifty steps at the most from the village square to Edward Schmitz’s. I was sitting in the kitchen cleaning lettuce; I loved doing that, cutting off the leaves, throwing the bad ones away and the good ones into the colander, where they lay so green and fresh, and Mother was saying to me, ‘You mustn’t let it upset you, Marianne, boys are that way—when they get to thirteen or fourteen, or sometimes even at twelve, they start behaving like that, it’s nature, and nature isn’t easy to control.’ And I said, ‘I’m not upset about that.’ ‘About what, then?’ my mother asked. I said, ‘I was thinking about my brother, the way he hung there, and I laughed without knowing at all how frightful it was—and he hadn’t even been baptized.’ And before my mother could answer me, the door opened—we hadn’t heard any knocking—and I recognized her straightaway. She was still big and blonde and wore a smart little hat, only she wasn’t wearing the blue uniform any more. She came up to me at once, opening her arms and saying, ‘You must be my Marianne—can’t you feel it in your blood?’ I held the knife still for a moment, then trimmed clean the next lettuce leaf and said, ‘No, I can’t feel it in my blood.’ ‘I’m your mother,’ she said. ‘No,’ I said. ‘She’s my mother, there. My name is Marianne Schmitz.’ I paused a moment, then said, ‘He ordered me to—and you tied the noose round my neck, Madam.’ That was something I’d learned from the dressmaker—address women like that with ‘Madam.’

  She screamed and cried and tried to put her arms round me, but I held the knife in front of me, point forward. She went on talking about schooling and studies, screamed and cried, but I ran out through the back door into the garden, and across the field to the priest, and told him all about it. He said, ‘She is your mother, Nature’s rights are Nature’s rights; and until you’re of age, she has a right to you. It’s bad business.’ And I said, ‘Didn’t she give up her rights when she played that He ordered me to game?’ And he said, ‘You’re a smart little thing. Remember that argument.’ I remembered it and brought it out every time they talked about feeling it in the blood, and I kept on saying, ‘I don’t feel it in my blood, I simply don’t feel it.’ They said, ‘It’s inconceivable, cynicism like that is unnatural.’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He ordered me to—that was unnatural.’ They said, ‘But that’s more than ten years ago, and she’s sorry for it.’ And I said, ‘There are some things you can’t be sorry for.’ ‘Do you,’ they asked me, ‘intend to be harder than God in His judgment?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not God, and that’s why I can’t be as forgiving as He is.’ So, I stayed with my parents. But there was one thing I couldn’t prevent. My name wasn’t Marianne Schmitz any more, but Marianne Droste, and I felt as if something had been cut out of me.—I still think of my little brother,” she said softly, “who had to play the He ordered me to game—and do you still believe there’s something worse, so bad that you can’t tell me about it?”

  “No, no,” he said, “Marianne Schmitz, I’ll tell you about it.”

  She took her hand away from his eyes, and he straightened up and looked at her; she was trying not to smile.

  “Your father really can’t have done anything as bad as that,” she said.

  “No,” he said, “it wasn’t as bad as that, but it was bad enough.”

  “Come on,” she said, “tell me about it in the car, it’s almost five o’clock and they’ll be waiting now; if I had a grandfather I wouldn’t keep him waiting, and if I had one like yours I’d do everything for him.”

  “And for my father?” he asked.

  “I don’t know him yet,” she said. “Come on. And don’t keep it back, tell him as soon as you have an opportunity. Come on.”

  She pulled him up, and he put his arm round her shoulders as they went back to the car.

  9

  The young bank clerk looked up pityingly as Schrella pushed his five English shillings and thirty Belgian francs across the marble counter.

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes,” said Schrella, “that’s all.”

  The young clerk set his adding machine in motion, and peevishly cranked the handle—even the small number of cranks he had to make expressed contempt—jotted a few figures on a form and pushed a five-mark note, four groschen and three pfennigs across the counter.

  “Next, please.”

  “Blessenfeld,” asked Schrella quietly, “can you tell me if No. 11 still goes there?”

  “Does No. 11 still go to Blessenfeld? This isn’t the streetcar information office,” said the young clerk, “and in any case I really don’t know.”

  “Thank you,” said Schrella, sliding the money into his pocket. He made way at the window for a man who pushed a bundle of Swiss francs across the counter. And heard the handle of the adding machine respectfully begin to make a large number of respectful turns.

  ‘Politeness is really the most effective form of contempt,’ he thought.

  The railroad station. Summer. Sun. Gaiety. Weekend. Hotel bellboys lugging suitcases toward the platforms. A young woman was holding up a sign: “Travelers to Lourdes assemble here.” Newspaper vendors, flower stalls, youngsters with brightly colored beach towels under their arms.

  Schrella walked across the square, stood on the traffic island and studied the streetcar schedule. No. 11 still did go to Blessenfeld. There it was, waiting at the red traffic light between the Prince Heinrich Hotel and the chancel of St. Severin’s. Then it moved along, stopped, emptied and Schrella joined the line of people waiting to pay at the conductor’s box. He sat down, took off his hat, wiped the sweat from his eyebrows, dried the lenses of his spectacles and waited in vain, as the car began to move, for feelings to come to him. Nothing. As a schoolboy, he’d gone back and forth on No. 11 four thousand times, his fingers stained with ink, listening to the other children’s silly chatter which had always been a source of appalling embarrassment to him; conic sections, the pluperfect, Barbarossa’s beard which went on growing and growing through the table, Love and Intrigue, Livy, Ovid bound in gr
ay-green cardboard, and the farther from the city the streetcar went, on its way to Blessenfeld, the quieter grew the chatter. At the edge of the old town, those with the most educated voices had got off, splitting up amid the wide, gloomy streets of substantial houses. Those with the next-best-educated voices got off at the edge of the new town, splitting up amid narrower streets of less substantial houses. Only two or three remained who went all the way to Blessenfeld, which had the least substantial buildings of all. And as the streetcar rocked on past allotment gardens and gravel pits to Blessenfeld, conversation returned to normal. ‘Is your father on strike too? They’re giving four and a half per cent discount at Gressigmann’s. Margarine is five pfennigs cheaper.’ There was the park, with the green of summer long since trampled flat, and the sandy strip around the wading pool stirred up by thousands of children’s feet and covered with litter, paper and bottle tops. And there Gruffel Street, where the junk dealers’ lots were continually filled to overflowing with scrap metal, rags, paper and bottles; where a lemonade stall had been opened up in the midst of wretched poverty, an attempt by a skinny unemployed laborer to set up as a trader. And, before long, he’d got fat and his stall was decked out with chrome and plate glass, and glittering automats had been installed. Getting hog-fat on pfennigs, getting bossy though only a few months before he’d been forced to obsequiously lower the price of a lemonade by two pfennigs, meanwhile whispering anxiously, ‘But don’t tell anyone else.’