The Clown

by Heinrich Böll

  All this took place in our enormous drawing room with the heavy dark oak furniture, with Grandfather’s hunting trophies up there on the wide oak shelf, the beer mugs and the great bookcases with their leaded-glass doors. I heard the artillery off in the Eifel Mountains, hardly more than ten miles away, sometimes even a machine gun. Herbert Kalick, pale, fair-haired, with his fanatical face, behaving like a kind of prosecutor, kept on beating the sideboard with his knuckles and demanding: “We’ve got to be ruthless, ruthless.” I was sentenced to dig a tank trap in the garden under Herbert’s supervision, and that very afternoon, true to the Schnier tradition, I dug up the German soil, although—contrary to the Schnier tradition—with my own hands. I dug the trench clear across Grandfather’s favorite rosebed, aiming directly at the copy of the Apollo of Belvedere, and I was looking forward to the moment when the marble statue would fall to my excavatory zeal. I rejoiced too soon: it was demolished by a small freckled boy called Georg. He blew up himself and the Apollo with a bazooka which he let off by mistake. Herbert Kalick’s comment on this accident was laconic: “What a good thing Georg was an orphan.”

  5

  In the phone book I looked up the numbers of all the people I would have to call; on the left I made a list of the names of all those I could ask for a loan: Karl Emonds, Heinrich Behlen, both old classmates of mine, one of them had been a theological student and was now a high school teacher, the other a chaplain, then Bella Brosen, my father’s mistress—on the right, a list of all the others, whom I would only ask for money as a last resort: my parents, Leo (whom I could ask for money but he never has any, he gives it all away), the group members: Kinkel, Fredebeul, Blothert, Sommerwild; and between these two columns: Monika Silvs, around whose name I drew a nice little loop. I had to send Karl Emonds a wire and ask him to call me. He doesn’t have a phone. I would have liked to call Monika first but I would have to call her last. Our relationship was at a stage where it would be both physically and metaphysically discourteous to slight her. Here I was in a terribly difficult position: a monogamist, I had been living a celibate life—against my will yet at the same time in accordance with my nature—ever since Marie had deserted me in “metaphysical horror,” as she called it. To be quite honest, I had slipped in Bochum more or less on purpose, and had fallen onto my knee so that I could break off the tour and go to Bonn. I was suffering almost unbearably from what Marie’s religious books mistakenly referred to as “desires of the flesh.” I was much too fond of Monika to satisfy my desire for another woman with her. If these religious books were to say: Desire for a woman, that would be bad enough, but a good deal better than “desires of the flesh.” All I know of flesh is butchers’ shops, and even those are not entirely fleshly. When I imagine Marie doing with Züpfner this thing which she ought only to do with me, my depression becomes despair. I hesitated a long time before looking up Züpfner’s telephone number as well and writing it in the column of those who I didn’t intend to borrow from. Marie would give me money, right away, all she had, and she would come to me and stand by me, especially when she heard of the series of failures that had befallen me, but she wouldn’t come alone.

  Six years is a long time, and she has no business in Züpfner’s house, nor at his breakfast table, nor in his bed. I was even prepared to fight for her, although the word fight has for me almost entirely physical connotations, in other words, a ridiculous idea: a brawl with Züpfner. Marie was not yet dead for me the way my mother is, so to speak, dead for me. I believe that the living are dead, and that the dead live, not the way Protestants and Catholics believe it. For me a boy like Georg, who blew himself up with a bazooka, awkward boy standing there on the grass in front of the Apollo, hear Herbert Kalick shouting: “Not like that, not like that—”; hear the explosion, a few screams, not very many, then Kalick’s comment: “What a good thing Georg was an orphan,” and half an hour later at supper, at the very table where they had sat to pronounce sentence on me, my mother said to Leo: “You’ll do better than that silly boy, won’t you!” Leo nodded, my father looked across at me, and found no comfort in the eyes of his ten-year-old son.

  Meanwhile for years my mother has been president of the Executive Committee of the Societies for the Reconciliation of Racial Differences; she goes to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, sometimes even to America, and lectures to American women’s clubs about the remorse of German youth, still in the same gentle, mild voice she probably used when saying goodbye to Henrietta. “Be a good girl, dear.” That voice I could hear over the phone any time, but Henrietta’s voice never again. She had had a surprisingly dark voice and light laughter. Once in the middle of a game of tennis she dropped her racket, she stood quite still on the tennis court and stared dreamily up at the sky; another time she dropped her spoon in the soup during dinner, my mother shrieked, complained of the stains on her dress and the tablecloth; Henrietta was not even listening, and when she came to she merely picked up the spoon from her soup plate, wiped it on her serviette, and went on eating. On a third occasion, when we were playing cards by the fire and she went off into a trance like this, my mother got really angry. She shouted: “Stop this ridiculous dreaming!” and Henrietta looked up and said quietly: “What’s the matter? I simply don’t want to play any more,” and threw the cards she was still holding into the fire. My mother picked the cards out of the fire, burning her fingers as she did so, and salvaged them all except for the seven of hearts, which was singed, and we could never play cards again without thinking of Henrietta, although my mother tried to behave “as if nothing had happened.” She is not spiteful at all, just incredibly stupid, and stingy. She would not allow us to buy a new pack of cards, and I assume the scorched seven of hearts is still in that pack and that my mother is quiet unconcerned when it turns up while she is playing patience. I would have like to phone Henrietta, but the theologians have not yet invented this kind of dialing. I looked up my parents’ number, which I always forget, in the phone book: Schnier, Alfons, Dr., Managing Director. The “Dr.” was something new—it must be an honorary degree. While I was dialing the number I walked home in my mind’s eye, down Koblenzstrasse, turning into the Ebertallee, then to the left toward the Rhine. Barely half an hour’s walk. I heard the maid’s voice:

  “Dr. Schnier’s residence.”

  “May I speak to Mrs. Schnier?” I said.

  “Who’s calling, please?”

  “Hans Schnier,” I said, “son of the lady in question.” She swallowed, thought for a moment, and I felt along the four miles of telephone wires that she was hesitating. She smelled very nice, incidentally, just of soap, and a little fresh nail polish. Obviously she knew of my existence, but she had been given no positive instructions about me. Probably only dark rumors in her ear: outsider, a radical type.

  “Would you please assure me,” she finally asked, “that this is not a joke?”

  “You may rest assured,” I said, “if need be I am willing to give details of my mother’s distinguishing marks. A mole on the left side of her face under her mouth, a wart …”

  She laughed and said: “All right!” and switched me through. Our telephone system is a complicated one. My father alone has three extensions: a red phone for the brown-coal, a black one for the stock exchange, and a private one, white. My mother has only two phones: a black one for the Executive Committee of the Societies for the Reconciliation of Racial Differences, and a white one for private use. Although my mother has a private bank account running into six figures, the telephone bills (and of course her traveling expenses to Amsterdam and elsewhere) are charged to the Executive Committee. The maid had used the wrong switch, my mother answered the black telephone in her business voice: “Executive Committee of the Societies for the Reconciliation of Racial Differences.”

  I was speechless. If she had said: “Mrs. Schnier speaking,” I would probably have answered; “Hans here, how are you, Mother?” Instead I said: “I am a delegate of the Executive Committee of Jewish Yankees, just pas
sing through—may I please speak to your daughter?” I even startled myself. I heard my mother exclaim, then she sighed in a way which told me how old she has become. She said: “I suppose you can never forget that, can you?” I was almost in tears myself and said softly: “Forget? Ought I to, Mother?” She was silent, all I could hear was that old woman’s weeping that shocked me so much. I had not seen her for five years and she must be over sixty by now. For a moment I had really believed she could put me through to Henrietta. She is always saying that perhaps she has “a private line to heaven”; she says it archly, the way everyone these days talks about their private lines: a private line to the Party, to the university, to television, to the Ministry of the Interior.

  I would have liked to hear Henrietta’s voice so much, even if she had only said “nothing” or for that matter “Oh shit.” From her lips it had not sounded vulgar at all. That time she said it to Schnitzler, when he spoke of her mystical gift, it had sounded as beautiful as snow (Schnitzler was a writer, one of the parasites who lived with us during the war, and whenever Henrietta went off into one of her trances he always spoke of a mystical gift, and she had simply said “Oh shit” when he began talking about it). She could have said something else: “Today I beat that stupid Peter again,” or something in French, “La condition du Monsieur le Comte est parfaite.” Sometimes she used to help me with my homework, and it always made us laugh how she was so good at other people’s homework and so bad at her own.

  Instead all I heard was my mother’s old woman’s weeping, and I asked: “How’s Father?”

  “Oh,” she said, “he’s an old man now—old and wise.”

  “And Leo?”

  “Oh, Le, he works very hard, very hard,” she said, “they say he has a future as a theologian.”

  “My God,” I said, “Leo of all people with a future as a theologian.”

  “Of course it was pretty hard on us when he converted,” said my mother, “but the spirit moveth where it listeth.”

  By now she had her voice completely under control again, and for a moment I was tempted to ask her about Schnitzler, who is still constantly in and out of our house. He was a rather plump, well-groomed fellow, who at that time was always raving about the noble European spirit, about Germanic consciousness. Later on, out of curiosity, I once read one of his novels. “French Love Affair,” not as interesting as the title promised. Its highly original feature was the fact that the hero, a French lieutenant, a prisoner of war, was fair, and the heroine, a German girl from the Moselle, was dark. He winced every time Henrietta said—I believe it was twice altogether—“Oh shit,” and maintained that a mystical gift could very well go hand in hand with the “compulsion to hurl dirty words” (although in Henrietta’s case it was not the least compulsive and she did not “hurl” the word at all, she simply said it), and as proof he dragged out a five-volume work on Christian Mystics. Needless to say, there was a lot of grand stuff in his novel, in which “the names of French wines ring out like crystal goblets which lovers raise and touch in mutual adoration.” The novel ends with a secret wedding; however, this brought on the displeasure of the National Socialist Writers’ Association and he was suspended from writing for some ten months. The Americans welcomed him with open arms as a resistance fighter and gave him a job in their cultural information service, and today he is running all over Bonn telling all and sundry that he was banned under the Nazis. A hypocrite like that doesn’t even have to tell lies to be always on the right side of the fence. And yet he was the one who forced my mother to make us join up, me in the Hitler Youth and Henrietta in the BDM. “In this hour, dear lady, we simply all have to pull together, stand together, suffer together.” I can still see him standing in front of the fireplace, holding one of Father’s cigars. “Certain injustices of which I have been the victim cannot obscure my clear and objective realization of the fact that the Führer”—his voice actually trembled—“the Führer already holds our salvation in his hands.” Spoken about a day and a half before the Americans took Bonn.

  “What’s Schnitzler doing these days?”

  “Oh he’s doing splendidly,” she said, “they can’t get along without him at the Foreign Office.” Naturally she has forgotten all that, it is surprising that the Jewish Yankees still arouse any memories at all in her. Now I wasn’t sorry any more that I had begun my conversation with her like that.

  “And Grandfather, what’s he doing?” I asked.

  “He is amazing,” she said, “indestructible. He will soon be ninety. I simply don’t know how he does it.”

  “That’s easy,” I said, “these old boys are not bothered by either memories or conscience. Is he at home now?”

  “No,” she said, “he’s gone to Ischia for six weeks.”

  We were both silent, I was still not quite sure of my voice, whereas she was perfectly in command of hers when she asked me: “But the real reason for your call—I hear you’re having money troubles. You’ve had bad luck in your job, so they tell me.”

  “Is that so?” I said. “You’re probably afraid I’ll ask you and Father for money, but you don’t have to worry about that, Mother. You wouldn’t give me any anyway. I shall take it up with my lawyer; you see, I need the money to go to America. Someone over there has offered me a chance. A Jewish Yankee, as a matter of fact, but I’ll do my best to see that racial differences don’t arise.” She was further from tears than ever. All I heard before I hung up was her saying something about principles. And she had smelled as she always smelled: of nothing. One of her convictions is: “A lady gives off no odor of any kind.” This is probably why my father has such a pretty mistress: no doubt she gives off no odor of any kind, but she looks as though she would smell nice.

  6

  I tucked all the cushions within reach behind my back, put up my sore leg, drew the phone closer, and wondered whether I shouldn’t go out to the kitchen, open the refrigerator, and bring in the bottle of cognac.

  That “bad luck in your job” coming from my mother had sounded particularly spiteful, and she had made no attempt to conceal her gloating. It was probably naive of me to have supposed that no one here in Bonn knew of my debacles. If Mother knew about them, Father did too, and so did Leo, and through Leo Züpfner, the whole group and Marie. It would be a terrible blow for her, worse than for me. If I gave up drinking entirely again, I would soon be once more on the level which Zohnerer, my agent, called “nicely above average,” and that would be enough to carry me through the twenty-two years I still had to go till I reached the gutter. What Zohnerer always speaks so highly of is my “good background as a craftsman”; he has no idea of art anyway, with almost inspired simplicity he judges it entirely by its degree of success. But he does know something about craftsmanship, and he is well aware that I can still play the music halls, keeping above the thirty-mark level, for another twenty years. With Marie it’s different. She will be distressed at my “artistic decline” and my poverty, which I myself don’t find so terrible at all. For the outsider—and everyone in this world is an outsider in relation to everyone else—something always seems worse or better than it does for the one directly concerned, whether that something is good luck or bad luck, an unhappy love affair or an “artistic decline.” I wouldn’t at all mind doing some honest slapstick or just plain clowning in stuffy halls to an audience of Catholic housewives or Protestant nurses. The only thing is, these denominational groups have an unfortunate idea of fees. Naturally one of these good ladies, the club president, thinks fifty marks is a nice sum, if he gets that twenty times a month he ought to be able to manage. But when I show her my make-up bill and tell her that in order to practice I need a hotel room somewhat larger than eight by ten, she probably thinks my mistress is as expensive as the Queen of Sheba. But when I then tell her I live almost exclusively on soft-boiled eggs, consomme, meatballs and tomatoes, she crosses herself and thinks I must be undernourished because I don’t have a “good hearty meal” every day. Then if I go on to tell he
r that my private vices consist of evening papers, cigarettes, and parchesi, she probably takes me for a liar. I gave up talking long ago to anyone about money or art. When these two things meet, something is always wrong: art is either under- or overpaid. In an English traveling circus I once saw a clown who was twenty times better than I am as a craftsman and ten times better as an artist, and who got less than ten marks a night: his name was James Ellis, he was in his late forties, and when I invited him for supper—we had ham omelet, salad, and apple pie—he was overcome with nausea: it was ten years since he had eaten so much all at once. Ever since I met James I have given up talking about money and art.

  I take it as it comes and expect to end up in the gutter. Marie has quite different ideas; she is always talking about a “message,” everything was a message, even what I was doing; she said I was so cheerful, so devout and chaste in my own way, and so on. It is ghastly what goes on in the minds of Catholics. They can’t even drink a good wine without somehow twisting and turning, they must at all costs be “aware” of how good the wine is, and why. As far as awareness is concerned, they are as bad as the Marxists. Marie was horrified when I bought a guitar a few months ago and said I would soon be singing songs to the guitar which I had composed myself. She thought this was “beneath” me, and I told her the only thing beneath the gutter was the canal, but she didn’t understand what I meant, and I hate explaining a metaphor. Either you understand it or you don’t. I am no exegete.