The Clown

by Heinrich Böll

  Her hands warmed up under my arms, and the warmer her hands got the sleepier I became. Soon it was her hands that were warming me, and when she asked me again whether I loved her and thought she was pretty, I said of course I did, but she said she wanted to hear me say it and I mumbled sleepily, yes, yes, she was pretty and I loved her.

  I woke up when Marie got out of bed, washed and dressed. She was not shy, and I found it quite natural to watch her. It was even more obvious than before: how poor her clothes were. While she was doing up all the hooks and buttons I thought of all the nice things I would buy her if I had money. I had often stood in front of shopwindows and looked at skirts and sweaters, shoes and handbags, and pictured how they would all suit her, but her father had such strict ideas about money that I would never have dared to buy her anything. He had said to me once: “It is terrible to be poor, but it’s not very pleasant either just to get by, which is the way most people are.” “And to be rich?” I had asked, “what’s that like?” I had flushed. He had looked at me keenly and flushed too, and had said: “You’ll regret it, my boy, if you don’t give up thinking. If I had the courage and faith to believe one could accomplish something in this world, do you know what I would do?” “No,” I said. His color mounting again he said, “I would found some kind of society to look after the children of the rich. The idiots always apply the term antisocial only to the poor.”

  A lot of things went through my mind as I watched Marie dress. It made me glad and at the same time unhappy to see how she took her body for granted. Later on, when we moved together from hotel to hotel, I always stayed in bed in the morning so I could watch her wash and dress, and when the bathroom was so placed that I couldn’t watch her from the bed, I lay in the bathtub. On this particular morning in her room I would have liked to go on lying in bed indefinitely and could have wished she would never finish getting dressed. She washed her neck, arms and breasts thoroughly and brushed her teeth vigorously. Personally I have always tried to get out of washing in the morning, and I still loathe cleaning my teeth. I prefer having a bath, but I always enjoyed watching Marie, she was so clean and everything was so natural, even the little gesture with which she screwed the top on the toothpaste tube. I also thought about my brother Leo, who was very devout, conscientious, and precise, and who was always assuring me he “had faith” in me. He was just about to graduate too, and somehow he was ashamed that he had managed to do it at nineteen, while at twenty-one I was still getting annoyed at the phony interpretation of the Song of the Nibelungs. Leo even knew Marie from some study groups or other where young Catholics and Protestants discussed democracy and religious tolerance. By this time Leo and I both regarded our parents just as a kind of couple running a foster home. It had been a terrible shock for Leo when he found out Father had a mistress for nearly ten years. It was a shock for me too, but not a moral one, I could well imagine how awful it must be to be married to my mother, whose deceptive meekness was a meekness of i and e. She hardly ever said a sentence containing a, o or u, and it was typical of her to have abbreviated Leo’s name to Le. Her favorite expression was: “We simply see things differently”—her next favorite was: “In principle I am right, I’m ready to listen to reason.” For me the shock of finding out Father had a mistress was more of an esthetic one: it wasn’t like him. He is neither passionate nor vigorous, and if I was not to assume that she was some kind of nurse or spiritual therapist for him (in which case the dramatic expression mistress is not appropriate), then the thing that bothered me was that it didn’t suit Father. In actual fact she was a nice, pretty, not terribly intelligent singer, for whom he didn’t even arrange extra engagements or concerts. He was too upright for that. To me the whole thing seemed pretty confused, for Leo it was bitter. He was wounded in his ideals, and the only way my mother could describe Leo’s condition was to say “Le is in a state of crisis,” and when he then got a D in an exam she wanted to haul him off to a psychologist. I managed to prevent this by first of all telling him all I knew about this thing men and women do together and then by giving him so much help with his homework that the next time he got a C and then a B—and then my mother didn’t think the psychologist was necessary any more.

  Marie put on the dark green dress, and although she had trouble with the zipper I didn’t get up to help her: it was so wonderful to watch the way she reached behind her with her hands, her white skin, her dark hair, and the dark green dress; I was glad too to see that she didn’t get irritated; she finally came over to the bed, and I raised myself up and closed the zipper. I asked her why she got up so terribly early, and she said her father did not go to sleep properly till nearly dawn and would stay in bed till nine, and she had to take in the newspapers and open up the shop, as sometimes children came before mass to buy notebooks, pencils, or candy, and “besides,” she said, “you had better be out of the house by half-past seven. I’m going to make coffee now, and in five minutes you can come down quietly into the kitchen.” I felt almost married when I went down to the kitchen and Marie poured me out some coffee and buttered me a roll. She shook her head and said: “Face not washed, hair not combed, do you always come to breakfast like that?” and I said, yes, not even at school had they managed to get me to wash regularly in the early morning.

  “Then what do you do?” she asked, “you must freshen up somehow?”

  “I always rub myself down with Eau de Cologne,” I said.

  “That’s pretty expensive,” she said, and immediately blushed.

  “Yes,” I said, “but I always get it as a gift, a big bottle, from an uncle who has an agency for the stuff.” In my embarrassment I looked round the kitchen I knew so well: it was small and dark, just a sort of back room to the shop; in the corner stood the little coal stove where Marie had kept the briquettes glowing the way all housewives do: in the evening she wraps them in wet newspaper, in the morning she stokes up the embers and gets the fire going with kindling and new briquettes. I hate the smell of briquette ash which hangs about the streets in the mornings and on this particular morning hung about the stuffy little kitchen. It was so cramped that whenever Marie took the coffee pot off the stove she had to get up and push the chair out of the way, and probably her grandmother and her mother had had to do exactly the same thing. This morning the kitchen I knew so well seemed for the first time workaday. Perhaps I was realizing for the first time what this workaday world meant: having to do things which are no longer determined by the desire to do them. I had no desire to leave this cramped house ever again and assume any obligations outside; the obligation to confess what I had done with Marie to her friends, to Leo, even my parents would hear of it somewhere. I would have liked to stay here and sell candy and writing pads to the end of my days, get into bed with Marie at night and sleep with her, really sleep with her, as we had the last few hours before we got up, with her hands in my armpits. I found it terrible and magnificent, this workaday world, with coffee pot and rolls and Marie’s washed-out blue and white apron over her green dress, and it seemed to me that it was only women who took the workaday world as much for granted as their bodies. I was proud that Marie was my woman and I did not feel quite as grown-up as I would have to behave from now on. I stood up, went round the table, took Marie in my arms and said: “Do you remember how you got up during the night and washed the sheets?” She nodded. “And I won’t forget,” she said, “how you warmed my hands in your armpits—now you must go, it is nearly half-past seven, and the first children will soon be coming.”

  I helped her bring in the bundles of newspapers from outside and unpack them. Across the street Schmitz was just coming back from market with his vegetable truck, and I jumped back into the shop so he wouldn’t see me—but he had already seen me. Even the devil’s eyes can’t be as sharp as the neighbors’. I stood there in the shop and looked at the early morning papers which most men are so crazy about. I am only interested in newspapers in the evening or in the bath, and in the bath the most solemn morning papers seem
to me as ridiculous as the evening papers. The headline this morning was: “Strauss: With unshakeable determination!” It might after all be better to leave the composing of an editorial or the headlines to a computing machine. There are limits beyond which idiocy should be prohibited. The shop bell went, a little girl, eight or nine years old, with black hair and red cheeks and freshly washed, her prayer book under her arm, entered the shop. “Gumdrops,” she said, “a nickel’s worth.” I didn’t know how many gumdrops could be bought for a nickel, I opened the glass jar and counted twenty into a paper bag and for the first time was ashamed of my not quite clean fingers which were magnified through the thick candy jar. The little girl looked at me in amazement as twenty candies fell into the bag, but I said: “It’s all right, run along,” and I took her nickel from the counter and threw it into the till.

  Marie laughed when she came back and I proudly showed her the nickel. “Now you must go,” she said.

  “But why?” I asked, “can’t I wait till your father comes down?”

  “When he comes down, at nine, you have to be back here again. Now go,” she said, “you must tell your brother Leo before he hears about it from someone else.”

  “Yes,” I said, “you’re right—and how about you,” I was blushing again, “don’t you have to go to school?”

  “I’m not going today,” she said, “I’m never going again. Hurry back.”

  I found it hard to leave her, she came with me as far as the shop door, and I kissed her in the open doorway so Schmitz and his wife across the street could see. They goggled like fish who suddenly discover to their surprise that they have swallowed the hook.

  I went off without looking back. I felt cold, turned up my collar, lit a cigarette, made a little detour across the market place, walked along the Franziskanerstrasse and at the corner of Koblenzstrasse jumped on the moving bus, the conductress opened the door for me, wagged a finger at me when I stood beside her to pay, shook her head and pointed to my cigarette. I stubbed it out, put it in my pocket, and went through to the middle. I just stood there, looking out into Koblenzstrasse, and thought about Marie. Something in my face seemed to annoy the man next to me. He even lowered his paper, stopped reading his “Strauss: With unshakeable determination,” pushed his glasses down onto his nose, looked at me, shook his head, and murmured “Incredible.” The woman sitting behind him—I had almost fallen over a big bag of carrots which was standing next to her—nodded at his comment, shook her head too, and moved her lips soundlessly.

  For once I had combed my hair with Marie’s comb in front of her mirror, the jacket I was wearing was gray, clean, and quite ordinary, and my beard was never so heavy that one day without shaving would have made me look “incredible.” I am neither too tall nor too short, and my nose is not so long that it is noted in my passport under Distinguishing Marks. It says there: None. I was neither dirty nor drunk, and yet the woman with the bag of carrots was quite upset, more so than the man with the glasses, who finally after a last despairing shake of his head pushed up his glasses again and turned his attention to Strauss’ determination. The woman swore silently under her breath, making restless movements with her head so as to inform the other passengers of what her lips would not reveal. I still don’t know what Jews look like, otherwise I could tell whether she took me for one, I am more inclined to believe it had nothing to do with my appearance but with the expression in my eyes when I looked out of the bus onto the street and thought of Marie. This silent hostility got on my nerves, I got out one stop too soon, and walked the last bit of the Kölnerstrasse before turning off toward the Rhine.

  The trunks of the trees in our grounds were black, still damp, the tennis court freshly rolled, red, from the Rhine I could hear the hooting of the barges, and as I entered the hall I heard Anna muttering softly to herself in the kitchen. All I could make out was “… a bad end—a bad end.” I called through the open kitchen door: “No breakfast for me, Anna,” quickly went on and came to a halt in the living room. The oak paneling, the wooden shelf with its tankards and hunting trophies, had never seemed so dark to me. Next door in the music room Leo was playing a Chopin mazurka. In those days he was planning to study music, he got up every morning at half-past five to practice before school. What he was playing transported me to a later time of the day, and I forgot that Leo was playing. Leo and Chopin do not go well together, but he played so well that I forgot him. Of all the older composers, Chopin and Schubert are my favorites. I know our music teacher was right when he called Mozart divine, Beethoven magnificent, Gluck unique, and Bach mighty; I know. Bach always seems to me like a three-volume work on dogma which fills me with awe. But Schubert and Chopin are as earthly as I myself probably am. I would rather listen to them than anyone else. In the garden, down toward the Rhine, I saw the targets in Grandfather’s rifle range moving in front of the weeping willows. Fuhrmann had evidently been told to oil them. Sometimes my grandfather drums up a few “old boys,” and there are fifteen enormous cars drawn up in the circular driveway in front of the house, and fifteen chauffeurs stand shivering among the hedges and trees or play cribbage in groups on the stone benches, and when one of the “old boys” has scored a bull’s eye you can very soon hear a champagne cork popping. Sometimes Grandfather used to send for me, and I would do a few tricks for the old boys, imitations of Adenauer, or Erhard—a depressingly easy thing to do, or I acted out little scenes for them: executive in a restaurant car. And no matter how malicious I tried to make it, they laughed themselves sick, said it was “capital fun,” and when I went round at the end with an empty shell carton or a tray they usually put in some folding money. I got along quite well with these cynical old codgers, I had nothing in common with them, I would have got along just as well with Chinese mandarins. A few of them went so far as to say my performances were “tremendous”—“magnificent.” Some even announced: “The boy has talent” or “That boy’s got something.”

  While I was listening to Chopin I considered for the first time going after bookings so I could earn some money. I could ask Grandfather to recommend me as solo entertainer at capitalist gatherings or for the enlivenment of board meetings. I had even rehearsed a number called “Board of Directors.”

  The moment Leo entered the room, Chopin vanished; Leo is very tall, fair, and with his rimless glasses he looks the way a deacon should look, or a Swedish Jesuit. The sharp creases in his dark trousers removed the last traces of Chopin, the white pullover above the sharply creased trousers didn’t seem right, nor did the collar of his red shirt, above the white pullover. A sight like that—when I see how someone has tried so hard to look relaxed—always depresses me deeply, like pretentious names such as Ethelbert or Gerentrud. I also saw once again how Leo resembled Henrietta without really looking like her: the snub nose, the blue eyes, the hair line—but not her mouth, and everything about Henrietta which seemed pretty and lively is in Leo touching and awkward. He doesn’t look as if he were the best athlete in the class; he looks like a boy who is excused from sports, but over his bed hang half a dozen athletic awards.

  He came quickly toward me, suddenly stopped a few steps away, his awkward hands spread slightly sideways, and said: “Hans, what’s the matter?” He looked into my eyes, a little below them, like someone who wants to draw your attention to a spot, and I realized I had been crying. When I listen to Chopin or Schubert I always cry. I wiped away the two tears with my right fore-finger and said: “I didn’t know you could play Chopin so well. Please play the mazurka again.”