The Clown

by Heinrich Böll

  At Kinkel’s someone answered the phone right away. “Alfred Kinkel speaking,” said a self-confident boy’s voice.

  “This is Schnier,” I said, “might I speak to your father?”

  “Schnier the theologian or Schnier the clown?”

  “The clown,” I said.

  “Oh dear,” he said, “I hope you’re not taking it too hard?”

  “Hard?” I said wearily, “what am I not to take too hard?”

  “What?” he said, “haven’t you read the paper?”

  “Which one?” I asked.

  “The Voice of Bonn,” he said.

  “A panning?” I asked.

  “Oh,” he said, “I think it’s more of an obituary. Shall I get it for you and read it out?”

  “No, thank you,” I said. This boy had a nice sadistic undertone to his voice.

  “But you ought to have a look at it,” he said, “so as to learn from it.” My God, he had tutorial ambitions too.

  “Who wrote it?” I said.

  “Someone called Kostert, described as our correspondent in the Ruhr. Extremely well written, but pretty nasty.”

  “Oh well,” I said, “he’s a Christian, after all.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “No,” I said, “I suppose I can’t talk to your father?”

  “He doesn’t want to be disturbed, but for you I’ll be glad to disturb him.” It was the first time sadism had ever been useful to me. “Thanks,” I said.

  I heard him lay the receiver down on the table, go across the room, and again I heard that awful hissing in the background. It sounded as if a whole family of snakes had got into a quarrel: two male snakes and one female. I always find it embarrassing when my eyes or ears witness something not meant for my eyes or ears, and the mystical gift of being able to detect smells through the telephone is far from being a pleasure, it is a burden. In the Kinkels’ apartment it smelled of beef broth, as if they had cooked a whole ox. The hissing in the back-ground sounded ominous, as if the son was about to kill the father or the mother the son. I thought of Laocöon, and the fact that this hissing and abuse—I could even hear sounds of blows and scuffling, Ows and Ohs, cries of “you disgusting beast,” “you big bully”—was going on in the home of the man who had been called the “gray eminence of German Catholicism,” did nothing to cheer me up. I also thought of that bastard Kostert in Bochum, who must have gone to the phone yesterday evening and phoned through his text, and yet this morning he had scratched at my door like a humble dog and pretended to be full of Christian brotherhood.

  Evidently Kinkel was struggling literally hand and foot against having to come to the phone, and his wife—I was gradually able to decipher the sounds and movements in the background—was even more determined that he shouldn’t, while the son refused to tell me he had made a mistake, his father was out. Suddenly there was absolute silence, the silence of someone bleeding to death, really: it was a deathly silence. Then I heard dragging footsteps, heard someone lift the receiver from the table and was expecting the receiver to be replaced. I remember exactly where the phone is in Kinkel’s apartment. Precisely under the one of the three baroque madonnas which Kinkel always says is the least valuable. I would almost have preferred him to put back the receiver. I felt sorry for him, it must be terrible for him to speak to me now, and for myself I expected nothing from this conversation, neither money nor good advice. If he had sounded out of breath, my sympathy would have got the upper hand, but his voice was as booming and vigorous as ever. Someone once compared his voice to a whole body of trumpeters.

  “Hullo, Schnier,” came booming out at me, “how delightful of you to call.”

  “Hullo, Doctor,” I said, “I’m in a fix.”

  The only malicious thing in what I said was the Doctor, for his title, like Father’s, is a brand-new honorary one.

  “Schnier,” he said, “are we on such a footing that you feel you have to address me as Doctor?”

  “I have no idea what footing we’re on,” I said.

  He let out a particularly booming laugh: vigorous, Catholic, frank, filled with “baroque merriment.” “My feelings for you are unchanged.” I found that hard to believe. Probably I had fallen so low in his eyes that it was no longer worth while to let me fall any lower.

  “You have reached a crisis,” he said, “that’s all, you are still young, pull yourself together and everything will be all right.” Pull yourself together, that sounded like Anna’s I.R. 9.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked mildly.

  “What do you think I’m talking about,” he said, “about your art, your career.”

  “But I don’t mean that at all,” I said, “on principle I never talk about art, you know I don’t, and least of all about my career. I mean—I am looking for Marie,” I said.

  He produced a scarcely definable sound, something between a grunt and a belch. I heard the last of the hissing at the other end of the room, heard Kinkel putting down the receiver on the table, picking it up again, his voice was smaller and darker, he had stuck a cigar between his lips.

  “Schnier,” he said, “forget about the past. Your present is your art.”

  “The past?” I asked, “just try and imagine that your wife had suddenly left you for another man.”

  He was silent in a way that seemed to say: If only she would, then he said, chewing around on his cigar: “She wasn’t your wife, and you haven’t had seven children together.”

  “Oh,” I said, “so she wasn’t my wife?”

  “Oh for God’s sake,” he said, “this romantic anarchy. Be a man.”

  “Damn it,” I said, “it’s just because I am a member of that sex that the whole thing is so terrible for me—and the seven children might still come. Marie is only twenty-five.”

  “By a man,” he said, “I mean someone who resigns himself to a situation.”

  “That sounds very Christian,” I said.

  “God, you of all people are trying to tell me, I suppose, what is Christian.”

  “Yes,” I said, “as far as I am aware, according to Catholic belief married people offer each other the sacrament?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “And if they are married ten times over, in church and not in church, and don’t offer each other the sacrament, then the marriage is non-existent.”

  “Hm,” he went.

  “Listen, Doctor,” I said, “would you mind very much taking the cigar out of your mouth? It all sounds as if we were talking about the stock market. Somehow it embarrasses me to have to listen to your chewing.”

  “Now wait a minute,” he said, but he took the cigar out of his mouth, “and you’d better realize that the way you think about it is your affair. Miss Derkum evidently thinks otherwise and is acting according to the dictates of her conscience. Quite right too—is all I can say.”

  “Then why doesn’t one of you lousy Catholics tell me where she is? You’re hiding her from me.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Schnier,” he said, “we’re not living in the Middle Ages.”

  “I wish we were living in the Middle Ages,” I said, “then she would be allowed to be my concubine and wouldn’t be at the mercy of her conscience all the time. Oh well, she’ll come back.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure if I were you, Schnier,” said Kinkel. “It’s too bad you obviously have no sense of metaphysics.”

  “Everything was fine with Marie as long as she was worried about my soul, but you people taught her to worry about her own soul, and now it’s got to the point where I, who have no sense of metaphysics, am worrying about Marie’s soul. When she marries Züpfner, then she will really be sinning. That much I have grasped of your metaphysics: what she is doing is fornication and adultery, and Prelate Sommerwild is acting the pimp.”

  He actually managed a laugh, although not a very booming one. “That all sounds very funny when you stop to think that Heribert is so to speak the temporal eminence and Prelate Sommerwild
the spiritual eminence of German Catholicism.”

  “And you are its conscience,” I said, furious, “and you know perfectly well I’m right.”

  For a while I heard his heavy breathing up there on the Venus Mountain under the least valuable of his three baroque madonnas. “I’m just aghast at how young you are—and yet I envy you for it.”

  “Never mind that, Doctor,” I said, “never mind about being aghast and envying me, if I don’t get Marie back I shall kill your most eminent dignitary, I shall kill him,” I said, “I have nothing more to lose.”

  He was silent and stuck the cigar back in his mouth.

  “I know,” I said, “at this moment your conscience is working overtime. If I killed Züpfner, you’d have no objection: he doesn’t like you and is too far to the Right for you, while Sommerwild is a big help to you in Rome where—quite unjustly by the way, in my modest opinion—you are suspected of being pretty much of a Leftist.”

  “Stop this nonsense, Schnier. What on earth’s the matter with you?”

  “I don’t trust Catholics,” I said, “because they take advantage of you.”

  “And Protestants?” he asked with a laugh.

  “I loathe the way they fumble around with their consciences.”

  “And atheists?” He was still laughing.

  “They bore me because all they ever talk about is God.”

  “Then what are you?”

  “I am a clown,” I said, “at the moment better than my reputation. And there is one Catholic creature I need very badly: Marie—but she’s the very one you have taken away.”

  “Nonsense, Schnier,” he said, “do get these notions of abduction out of your head. We are living in the twentieth century.”

  “That’s just it,” I said, “in the thirteenth century I would have been a nice court jester, and even the cardinals wouldn’t have cared whether I was married to her or not. Now every Catholic layman is jumping around on her wretched conscience and driving her to a life of fornication and adultery all because of a stupid scrap of paper. In the thirteenth century, Doctor, your madonnas would have meant your excommunication and interdict. You know perfectly well they were lifted from churches in Bavaria and the Tyrol—I don’t need to tell you that even today robbing churches is still considered a pretty serious crime.”

  “Just a minute, Schnier,” he said, “are you trying to get personal? I’m surprised at you.”

  “For years you have been interfering in my most personal affairs, and when I pass a trivial remark and confront you with a truth that might be personally inconvenient, you get mad. When I have some money again I shall hire a private detective to find out where your madonnas originally came from.”

  He wasn’t laughing now, he merely cleared his throat, and I realized he still hadn’t grasped the fact that I meant it. “Hang up, Kinkel,” I said, “put down the phone, otherwise I shall start talking about the subsistence level. I wish you and your conscience good evening.” But he still didn’t understand, so I was the one who hung up first.

  10

  I was well aware that Kinkel had been surprisingly nice to me. I think he would have even let me have some money if I had asked him for it. But this talk of metaphysics with his cigar in his mouth and the way he suddenly took offense when I mentioned his madonnas was too disgusting. I didn’t want anything more to do with him. Nor with Mrs. Fredebeul either. To hell with her, and as for Fredebeul, one of these days I would give him a punch in the nose. It’s no use fighting him with “spiritual weapons.” Sometimes I regret that dueling is a thing of the past. The business between Züpfner and me over Marie could only have been settled by a duel. It was horrible for it to have been carried on by abstract principles of order, demands for written guarantees, and secret discussions going on for days in a Hanover hotel. After her second miscarriage Marie was so depressed and jittery, she was forever running to church, and was cross when I didn’t take her to the theater, to a concert or a lecture, on my free evenings. When I suggested we play parchesi the way we used to, drinking tea and lying on our stomachs on the bed, she got crosser than ever. Actually it all began with her playing parchesi with me simply out of kindness, to help me relax or to be nice to me. And she had also stopped going with me to the movies I enjoy seeing so much: the ones small kids are allowed to go to.

  I don’t believe there is anyone in the world who understands a clown, even one clown doesn’t understand another, envy and jealousy always enter into it. Marie came close to understanding me, but she never quite understood me. She always felt that as a “creative person” I must be “deeply interested” in absorbing as much culture as possible. She was wrong. Of course I would get into a taxi at once if I had a free evening and heard Beckett was being played somewhere, and I enjoy going to the movies once in a while, come to think of it I like going often, and always to those films which small kids are allowed to see. Marie could never understand that, a large part of her Catholic up-bringing consisted after all simply of psychological information and of a rationalism decked out with mysticism, of the order of “make them play football so they won’t think about girls.” And I was so fond of thinking about girls, later only about Marie. At times I felt like a monster myself. I like going to movies for children, because there is none of that grown-up nonsense in them about adultery and divorce. In movies about adultery and divorce, somebody’s happiness always plays such a big part. “Make me happy, darling” or “Do you want to stand in the way of my happiness?” Happiness that lasts more than a second, perhaps two or three seconds, is something I can’t imagine. Real whore films, now, those I quite like, but there are so few of them. Most of them are so pretentious that you can’t tell they really are whore films. There is another category of women who are not whores and not wives, women of compassion, but they are neglected in films. Most films which children are allowed to see are full of whores. I have never understood what the boards who grade the films have in mind when they pass this type of film for children. The women in these films are either whores by nature, or they are whores in a sociological sense; they are almost never compassionate. In some Wild West saloon there are these blondes dancing the cancan, while rough cowboys, goldminers, or trappers, who have spent two years in the wilderness chasing skunks, watch these pretty young blondes dancing the cancan, but when these cowboys, goldminers, or trappers then go after the girls and try to go up to their rooms with them, they usually have the door slammed in their face, or some brutal swine cruelly knocks them down. I take it this is meant to express something like virtuousness. Cruelty where compassion would be the only humane thing. No wonder the poor devils start beating each other up and shooting—it’s like football at school, only it is even crueller, since they are grown men. I don’t understand American morals. I suppose over there a compassionate woman would be burned as a witch, a woman who does it not for money and not out of passionate love for the man, but simply out of pity for masculine nature.

  What I find particularly embarrassing are films about artists. Most films about artists must be made by people who would have paid Von Gogh not even an ounce of tobacco for a picture but only half an ounce, and later would have regretted even that because they realized he would have sold it even for a pipeful of tobacco. In films about artists the suffering of the artistic soul, the poverty and the wrestling with the demon, are always put in the past. A living artist who has run out of cigarettes, can’t buy shoes for his wife, is of no interest to film people because three generations of nincompoops haven’t yet confirmed that he is a genius. One generation of nincompoops would not be enough for them. “The turbulent searching of the artistic soul.” Even Marie believes in it. It is embarrassing, such a thing does exist, but it ought to go by a different name. What a clown needs is quiet, the simulating of what other people call leisure. But the point is that these other people don’t understand that for a clown the simulating of leisure consists of forgetting his work, they don’t understand because they—as is absolutely nat
ural—can devote themselves to so-called art during their leisure time. A different problem is the one of artistic people who think of nothing but art but don’t need any time off because they don’t work. So when someone starts calling an artistic person an artist it leads to the worst kind of misunderstanding. Artistic people always start talking about art at the very moment when the artist happens to feel he is enjoying something like time off. Usually they hit the nerve exactly, in these two or three, up to five minutes when the artist forgets art an artistic person starts talking about Van Gogh, Kafka, Chaplin, or Beckett. At such moments I would like to commit suicide—when I begin thinking only about the thing I do with Marie, or about beer, or falling leaves in autumn, about parchesi or some corny, perhaps sentimental thing, some Fredebeul or Sommerwild brings up the subject of art. At the very instant when I have the incredibly exciting feeling of being quite normal, as normal and low-brow as Karl Emonds, Fredebeul or Sommerwild start talking about Claudel or Ionesco. Marie is a bit like that too, she used to be less so, recently more. I realized this when I told her I was going to begin singing songs to the guitar. According to her, this offended her esthetic instincts. The non-artist’s leisure hours are the working hours of a clown. Everyone knows what leisure is, from the highly paid executive to the humblest laborer, whether they drink beer or shoot bears in Alaska, whether they collect stamps, Impressionists or Expressionists (one thing is certain, anyone who collects art is not an artist). Even the way they light up their knocking-off-work cigarettes, putting on a special expression, can absolutely infuriate me for I know this feeling just well enough to envy them because they can enjoy it so much longer. There are leisure moments for a clown—then he may stretch his legs and know for as long as it takes to smoke half a cigarette what leisure means. What is really hell is a so-called vacation: apparently the others go through this for three, four, six weeks! Marie tried a few times to give me this feeling, we went to the sea, we went inland, to resorts, to the mountains, by the second day I was ill, I was covered from head to foot with hives and my soul was full of murderous thoughts. I think I was ill with envy. Then Marie had the appalling idea of going away with me to a place where artists spend their vacations. Needless to say they were all artistic people, and on the very first evening I had a fight with an idiot who is a big noise in the film business and who got me involved in a conversation about Grock and Chaplin and the clowns in Shakespeare’s plays. Not only did I get quite nicely beaten up (these artistic people who manage to make a good living in quasi-artistic jobs never do any work and are bursting with health), I also got a nasty attack of jaundice. As soon as we got out of that terrible place I felt fine right away.