The Clown

by Heinrich Böll

  It might have been thought that my puppet strings had broken; on the contrary, I had them firmly in my grasp and saw myself lying there in Bochum on that club stage, drunk, my knee grazed, I heard the sympathetic murmuring in the hall and was ashamed of myself; I had not deserved that much sympathy, and I would rather have had a few catcalls; even the limp was not quite in keeping with the injury, although I actually had hurt myself. I wanted Marie back and had begun to fight, in my own way, simply for the sake of the thing which in her books was described as “desires of the flesh.”

  7

  I was twenty-one, she was nineteen, when one evening I simply went to her room to do the things with her that men and women do with one another. I had seen her that afternoon with Züpfner, they had been coming out of the Youth Club hand in hand, they were both smiling, and it gave me a pang. She did not belong to Züpfner, and this silly holding hands made me sick. Almost everybody in town knew Züpfner, mainly because of his father, who had been kicked out by the Nazis; he had been a schoolteacher and after the war he had refused to return right away to the same school as principal. Someone had even wanted to make him a Minister, but he had got very angry and said: “I am a teacher, and I want to be a teacher again.” He was a tall, quiet man who as a teacher I found a bit boring. He substituted once for our German teacher, and read us a poem, the one about the beautiful young Lilofee.

  As far as school is concerned, my opinion means nothing. It was simply a mistake to keep me in school for longer than the law required; even that would have been too long. I have never blamed the teachers for the school, only my parents. Actually this idea of “But he has to graduate” is something which should be taken up by the Executive Committee of the Societies for the Reconciliation of Racial Differences. It is really a race matter: graduates and non-graduates, grade school teachers, high school teachers, academic types, non-academic types, all different races, that’s all. When Züpfner’s father had finished reading the poem he waited a few minutes and then asked with a smile: “Well, has anyone anything to say?” and I jumped up at once and said: “I think it is a wonderful poem.” The whole class burst out laughing at this, but not Züpfner’s father. He smiled, but not superciliously. I found him very nice, only a bit on the dry side. I didn’t know his son very well, but better than his father. Once I had been walking past the sports ground where he was playing football with his friends, and as I stood there looking on he called out to me: “Don’t you want to play?” and I at once said Yes and joined the team playing against Züpfner as left wing. After the game he said: “Won’t you come along?” I asked: “Where to?” and he said: “To our club evening,” and when I said: “But I’m not a Catholic,” he laughed, and the others laughed too; Züpfner said: “We sing—and I bet you like to sing.” “Yes,” I said, “but I’ve had enough of youth clubs, I was at boarding school for two years.” Although he laughed, he was offended. He said: “Well, if you feel like it, come and play football with us again.” I played football a few more times with his group, went with them to eat ice cream, and he never invited me again to come to the club evening. I also knew that Marie and her crowd had their evenings at the same youth club, I knew her well, very well, as I saw a lot of her father, and sometimes in the evening I went to the sports ground when she played volleyball with the other girls, and I watched them. Or to be more precise: her, and sometimes she waved to me in the middle of the game and smiled and I waved back and smiled too; we knew each other very well. At that time I often went to see her father, and sometimes she would sit with us when her father tried to explain Hegel and Marx to me, but at home she never smiled at me. When I saw her that afternoon coming out of the club hand in hand with Züpfner, a pang went through me. I was in an awkward position. I had left school at twenty-one in Grade 10. The padres had been very nice, they had even had a goodbye party for me, with beer and sandwiches, cigarettes and chocolate for the non-smokers, and I had put on some of my turns for my classmates: Catholic sermon and Protestant sermon, workman with pay envelope; also some tricks and Chaplin imitations. I even made a farewell speech “on the Mistaken Assumption that Graduation is Essential to Eternal Bliss.” It was a terrific evening, but at home they were bitter and angry. My mother was just horrible to me. She advised my father to send me down into the pit, and my father kept on asking me what I wanted to be, and I said, “a clown.” He said: “You mean an actor—very well, perhaps I can send you to drama school.” “No,” I said, “not an actor but a clown—and schools are no use to me.” “But what have you got in mind?” he asked. “Nothing,” I said, “nothing. I’ll get out of here.” Those were two terrible months, because I couldn’t pluck up enough courage to really get out, and with every mouthful I ate my mother looked at me as if I were a criminal. And yet for years she had been feeding all kinds of stray hangers-on, but those were “artists and writers”; Schnitzler, that corny fellow, and Gruber, who wasn’t bad at all. He was a fat, taciturn, dirty poet who lived with us for six months and never wrote a single line. When he came down to breakfast in the morning, my mother always looked at him as if she were expecting to see signs of his nightly struggle with the demon. It was almost indecent, the way she looked at him. One day he vanished without trace, and we children were amazed and scared when we discovered a whole pile of dog-eared mystery stories in his room, and a few scraps of paper on his desk on which was written the one word, “Nothing,” on one piece it was written twice, “Nothing, nothing.” For people like that my mother even went down to the basement and brought up an extra chunk of ham. I believe if I had begun to buy some giant easels and had painted some stupid stuff on enormous canvases, she would have been able to reconcile herself to my existence. Then she could have said, “Our Hans is an artist, he will find his own path. He is still struggling.” But like this I was nothing but a rather elderly tenth grader, and the only thing she knew about him was that he was “quite good at some kind of tricks.” Naturally I refused to pay for that bit of food with “examples of my talent,” so I spent hours with old man Derkum, Marie’s father, whom I helped a bit in the shop and who gave me cigarettes, although he was not very well off. I only spent two months at home like that, but they seemed an eternity, much longer than the war. I only saw Marie occasionally, she was busy preparing for graduation and was studying with her friends. Sometimes old man Derkum caught me not listening to him at all but staring at the kitchen door, then he would shake his head and say, “She’ll be late today,” and I would blush.

  It was a Friday, and I knew that on Friday evenings Mr. Derkum went to the movies, but I didn’t know whether Marie would be at home or cramming with one of her friends. I didn’t think about anything, and yet about almost everything, even about whether she would be able to write her exams “afterwards,” and I already knew what turned out later to be true, that not only would half Bonn be shocked at the seduction but would add “and just before her graduation, too.” I even thought about the girls in her crowd for whom it would be a disappointment, I was terribly afraid of what a boy at boarding school had once called “the physical details,” and the question of potency worried me. The surprising thing was that I felt no trace whatever of “carnal desire.” I also thought about it being unfair of me to use the key her father had given me to enter the house and go up to her room, but I had no choice, I had to use the key. The only window in Marie’s room faced the street, which was so busy till two in the morning that I would have landed in the police station—and I had to do this thing with Marie today. I even went into a drugstore and with the money I had borrowed from my brother Leo bought some kind of stuff which they had said in school would increase male potency. My face was scarlet when I went into the drugstore, luckily a man waited on me, but I spoke so softly that he shouted at me and told me to say what I wanted “loud and clear,” and I told him the name of the stuff, was given it, and paid the druggist’s wife, who shook her head as she looked at me. Of course she knew me, and when she heard next morning what had happe
ned she probably reproached herself, quite without reason, for two blocks further on I opened the box and let the tablets roll into the gutter.

  At seven, when the movies had begun, I walked to Gudenaug Lane, key in hand, but the shop door was still open, and as I went in Marie put her head out on the landing upstairs and called, “Hullo, is there anyone there?” “Yes,” I called, “it’s me”—I ran up the stairs and she looked at me in astonishment as without touching her I forced her slowly back into her room. We had never talked very much, just looked and smiled at each other, and with her too I didn’t quite know what to call her. She had on the gray, threadbare dressing gown she had inherited from her mother, her dark hair was tied back with a piece of green cord; later, when I undid the knot I saw it was a bit of her father’s fishing line. She was so startled that there was no need for me to say anything, and she knew exactly what I wanted. “Go,” she said, but she said it automatically, I knew she had to say it, and we both knew that it was meant seriously as well as said automatically, but the moment she said “Go” and not “You must go,” the matter was settled. There was so much tenderness in that little word, enough, so it seemed to me, to last a lifetime, and I could have wept; she said it in such a way that I was absolutely certain: she had known I would come, at any rate she was not completely taken by surprise. “No, no,” I said, “I’m not going—where do you want me to go?” She shook her head. “Shall I borrow twenty marks and go to Cologne—and then marry you later?” “No,” she said, “don’t go to Cologne.” I looked at her and was scarcely afraid any more. I was no longer a child, and she was a woman, I looked at the place where she held her dressing gown together, I looked over to her table by the window and was glad none of her school books were lying around there: just sewing things and a dress pattern. I ran down into the shop, locked the door and put the key in the place where it has been put for the last fifty years: between the gumdrops and the writing pads. When I got upstairs again she was sitting on her bed, crying. I sat down on the bed too, on the other corner, lit a cigarette, gave it to her, and she smoked her first cigarette, unskillfully; we had to laugh, she blew the smoke so funnily out of her pursed mouth that it looked almost flirtatious and when once it happened to come out of her nose I laughed: it looked so depraved. Finally we started to talk, and we talked a good deal. She said she was thinking of the women in Cologne who did “this thing” for money and evidently believed it could be paid for with money, but it was not to be paid for with money, and so all the women whose husbands went there were in their debt, and she didn’t want to be in the debt of these women. I talked a lot too, I said I thought everything I had read about so-called physical love and about the other kind of love was nonsense. I couldn’t separate one from the other, and she asked me if I thought she was pretty and loved her, and I said she was the only girl I wanted to do “this thing” with, and I had always thought only of her when I thought of this thing, even at school; only of her. Finally Marie stood up and went into the bathroom while I stayed sitting on her bed, went on smoking and thought of the awful tablets I had let roll into the gutter. I began to get scared again, went over to the bathroom, knocked, Marie hesitated a moment before she said Yes, then I went in and as soon as I saw her my fear left me again. The tears were running down her face as she rubbed hair lotion into her hair, then powdered her face, and I said, “Whatever are you doing?” and she said: “I’m making myself beautiful.” The tears had made little furrows in the powder, which she had put on much too thick, and she said: “Won’t you really go away?” And I said “No.” She dabbed on some Eau de Cologne while I sat on the edge of the bath and wondered if two hours would be long enough; we had already wasted more than half an hour talking. At school there had been specialists in these things: how difficult it was, for instance, to make a woman of a girl, and I kept thinking of Gunther who had to send Siegfried on ahead, and I thought of the frightful Nibelung carnage which resulted from this thing, and how at school, when we were doing the Nibelung saga, I had stood up and said to Father Wunibald, “Surely Brunhild was really Siegfried’s wife,” and he had smiled and said: “But he was actually married to Krimhild, my boy,” and I had got mad and maintained that was a typical priest’s interpretation. Father Wunibald was furious, struck the desk with his finger, invoked his authority, and said he would not put up with being “insulted.”

  I stood up and said to Marie: “Please don’t cry,” and she stopped crying and smoothed out the tear furrows with the powderpuff. Before we went to her room we stood for a moment at the landing window and looked down onto the street: it was January, the street was wet, the lights over the asphalt were yellow, the sign over the grocery opposite green: Emil Schmitz. I knew Schmitz, but I didn’t know his first name was Emil, and it seemed to me that Emil did not go well as a first name with Schmitz as a second name. Before we went into Marie’s room I opened the door a little and switched off the light inside.

  When her father came home we were not yet asleep; it was nearly eleven, we heard him go into the shop downstairs and get some cigarettes before coming upstairs. We both thought he would be bound to notice something: after all, what had happened was so tremendous. But he noticed nothing, listened a moment at the door, and went on upstairs. We heard him taking off his shoes and throwing them on the floor, later on we heard him coughing in his sleep. I wondered how he would react to this thing. He was no longer a Catholic, he had left the church long ago, and he had spoken contemptuously to me of the “hypocritical sexual morals of bourgeois society” and was furious “with the swindle the priests carry on with marriage.” But I was not sure whether he would accept what I had done with Marie without raising hell. I liked him very much, and he liked me, and I was tempted to get up in the middle of the night, go to his room, and tell him the whole thing, but then it occurred to me I was old enough, twenty-one, and Marie was old enough too, nineteen, and that certain kinds of manly frankness are more embarrassing than keeping quiet, and I also felt: it really didn’t concern him as much as I thought. After all, I could hardly have gone to him in the afternoon and said: “Mr. Derkum, I want to sleep with your daughter tonight”—and what had happened he would find out in good time.

  A little later on Marie got up, kissed me in the dark and pulled the sheets off the bed. It was quite dark in the room, no light came from outside, we had drawn the heavy curtains, and I wondered how she knew what had to be done now: pull the sheets off and open the window. She whispered to me: I’m going to the bathroom, you wash here, and she drew me by the hand out of bed, led me in the dark to the corner where her washstand was, guided my hand to the jug, the soap dish, the basin, and went out carrying the sheets. I washed, got back into bed, and wondered why Marie was taking so long bringing the clean sheets. I was dead tired, glad I was able to think of that wretched Gunther without getting into a panic, and then began to feel scared something might have happened to Marie. At school they used to tell terrible stories. It was not pleasant lying there on the mattress without sheets, it was old and lumpy, I had nothing on but my undershirt and I felt cold. I thought once more of Marie’s father. Everyone assumed he was a communist, but when after the war he was supposed to become mayor the communists saw to it that he didn’t, and every time I started to compare the Nazis with the communists he got mad and said: “There’s a difference, my boy, whether someone gets killed in a war which is carried on by a soft soap company—or whether he dies for a cause in which one can believe.” What he really was I still don’t know, and when Kinkel once called him a “brilliant sectarian” in my presence, it was all I could do not to spit at Kinkel. Old man Derkum was one of the few men I respected. He was thin and bitter, much younger than he looked, and being a heavy smoker he had trouble with his breathing. All the time I was waiting for Marie I heard him up there in his bedroom coughing, I felt like a skunk, and yet I knew I wasn’t. He had said to me once: “Do you know why in the houses of the rich, like your parents’, the maids’ rooms are always next to tho
se of the young sons? I’ll tell you: it is an age-old speculation on human nature and compassion.” I wished he would come down and find me in Marie’s bed, but to go upstairs and report to him, so to speak, that was something I didn’t want to do. It was getting light outside. I felt cold, and the shabbiness of Marie’s room depressed me. The Derkums had long been considered to have come down in the world, and the decline was attributed to the “political fanaticism” of Marie’s father. They had had a small printing plant, a small publishing business, a book-store, but now all they had was this little stationery shop where they also sold candy to school kids. My father once said to me: “Now you see how far fanaticism can drive a man—yet after the war Derkum had an excellent chance of having his own newspaper since he was a victim of political persecution.” Strangely enough I had never found Derkum fanatical, but perhaps my father had confused fanaticism and principles. Marie’s father did not even sell prayer books, although that would have brought him in a little extra money, especially before White Sundays.

  When it got light in Marie’s room I saw how poorly off they really were: she had three dresses hanging in the closet: the dark green one, which I felt I had been seeing on her for a hundred years, a kind of yellow one that was almost threadbare, and the curious dark blue suit she always wore in processions, her old bottle-green winter coat, and only three pairs of shoes. For a moment I felt tempted to get up, open the drawers, and have a look at her underwear but I didn’t. I don’t think even if I were properly married to a woman I would ever look at her underwear. Her father had stopped coughing long since. It was after six when Marie finally came out of the bathroom. I was glad I had done with her what I had always wanted to do with her, I kissed her and felt happy to see her smiling. I felt her hands on my neck: ice cold, and I whispered: “What have you been doing?” She said: “What do you think I’ve been doing? I’ve been washing the sheets. I would have liked to bring you some clean ones, but we only have four pairs, there are always two on the beds and two in the laundry.” I drew her down beside me, covered her up and put her ice-cold hands in my armpits, and Marie said they felt wonderful there, warm as birds in a nest. “After all, I couldn’t give the sheets to Mrs. Huber,” she said, “she does our washing for us, and like that the whole town would have heard about what we’ve done, and I didn’t want to throw them away either. I did think for a moment of throwing them away, but then I felt it would be a pity.” “Didn’t you have any hot water?” I asked, and she said: “No, the boiler has been broken for ages.” Then quite suddenly she started to cry, and I asked her what she was crying for now, and she whispered: “For Heaven’s sake, I’m a Catholic, you know I am—” and I said that any girl, Protestant or atheist, would probably cry too, and I knew why; she looked at me questioningly, and I said: “Because such a thing as innocence really does exist.” She kept on crying and I didn’t ask her why she was crying. I knew: she had belonged to this group of girls for quite a few years and had always taken part in the procession, and she must have constantly talked about the Virgin Mary with the other girls—and now she felt like a cheat or a traitor. I could imagine how terrible it was for her. It really was terrible, but I couldn’t have waited any longer. I told her I would talk to the girls, and she sat up in alarm and said: “What—who with?” “With the girls in your group,” I said, “it really is a terrible thing for you, and if the worst comes to the worst I don’t mind your saying I raped you.” She laughed and said: “No, that’s nonsense, what are you going to tell the girls?” I said: “I shall say nothing, I shall simply appear before them, do a few of my turns and imitations, and they will think: Oh, so that’s that Schnier who did this thing with Marie—that will be much better than just having rumors going around.” She thought for a moment, laughed again, and said softly: “You aren’t so stupid.” Then she suddenly began crying again and said: “I can’t show my face here any more.” I asked: “Why?” but she only wept and shook her head.