The Clown

by Heinrich Böll

  Edgar never quite forgave me for taking that taxi. Afterwards we saw him quite often, and he even helped us out again with money when Marie had the miscarriage. Nor did he ever mention the taxi, but a feeling of suspicion remained with him which has never been erased.

  “For God’s sake,” said my father loudly and at a new pitch which I had never heard him use before, “speak up clearly and open your eyes. You’re not going to fool me with that trick again.”

  I opened my eyes and looked at him. He was angry.

  “Have I been talking?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said, “you’ve been mumbling to yourself, but the only word I understood was now and again stinking millions.”

  “That’s all you can understand and all you’re meant to understand.”

  “And crossed check I understood,” he said.

  “Yes, yes,” I said, “come on, sit down again and tell me what you have had in mind—as monthly support for a year.”

  I went over to him, took him gently by the shoulder and pressed him down into his chair. He got up at once and we stood face to face.

  “I have been thinking the matter over very carefully,” he said quietly, “if you will not agree to my terms of a sound, supervised training but want to work here.… I would say—well, I thought two hundred marks a month would do.” I was certain he had meant to say two hundred and fifty or three hundred but at the last moment had said two hundred. He seemed shocked at the look on my face, he said more rapidly than was appropriate to his well-groomed exterior: “Genneholm was saying that asceticism was the basis of pantomime.” I still said nothing. I just looked at him, with “empty eyes,” like one of Kleist’s marionettes. I was not even furious, only amazed, in a way which made what I had taken such pains to learn, to have empty eyes, my natural expression. He was upset, there were tiny beads of sweat on his upper lip. My first reaction was still neither rage nor bitterness nor even hatred; my empty eyes slowly filled with pity.

  “Dad,” I said gently, “two hundred marks is not nearly as little as you seem to believe. It’s quite a nice sum, I won’t argue with you about that, but I wonder if you know that ascetcism is a luxury, anyway the asceticism Genneholm has in mind; what he means is diet and not asceticism, plenty of lean meat and salad—the cheapest form of asceticism is starvation, but a starving clown—oh well, it’s better than a drunk one.” I stepped back, it embarrassed me to stand so close to him that I could watch the beads of sweat on his lips getting bigger.

  “Listen,” I said, “let’s stop discussing money and talk about something else, as befits gentlemen.”

  “But I really want to help you,” he said desperately, “I’ll be glad to let you have three hundred.”

  “I don’t want to hear any more about money now,” I said, “I just wanted to tell you what was the most extraordinary experience of our childhood.”

  “What was it then?” he asked and looked at me as if he were expecting a death sentence. He was probably thinking I would bring up the subject of his mistress, for whom he had built a villa in Godesberg.

  “Don’t get excited,” I said, “you’ll be surprised; the most extraordinary experience of our childhood was when we realized we never got enough grub at home.”

  He winced at the word grub, swallowed, then, with a bitter little laugh, asked: “You mean you never really had enough to eat?” “Exactly,” I said quietly, “we never really had enough to eat, not at home anyway. To this day I don’t know whether it was a matter of stinginess or principle, I would prefer to believe it was stinginess—but I wonder if you know what a child feels when he has spent the whole afternoon riding a bike, playing football, swimming in the Rhine?”

  “I imagine he has an appetite,” he said coolly.

  “No,” I said, “he is hungry. Damn it, all we knew as children was that we were rich, very rich—but of all this money we had nothing—not even enough to eat.”

  “Did you children ever lack for anything?”

  “Yes,” I said, “that’s what I’m telling you: food—and pocket money too. Do you know what I was always hungry for as a child?”

  “For heaven’s sake,” he said uneasily, “what?”

  “Potatoes,” I said. “But in those days Mother was already crazy about keeping slim—you know how she was always ahead of the times—and our place was always crawling with silly fools who all had different diet theories, unfortunately the potato didn’t feature in a single one of those diet theories. Sometimes the maids in the kitchen would cook themselves some, when you and Mother were out: potatoes in their jackets with butter, salt and onions, and sometimes they would wake us up and let us come down in our pajamas and eat as many potatoes as we liked on condition we never said a single word about it. Generally we went to Wienekens on Fridays, they always had potato salad then, and Mrs. Wieneken piled our plates up extra high. And then at home there was always too little bread in the bread basket, a measly piddling affair our bread was, that damned crisp-bread, or a few slices which “for health reasons” were stale—when I went to Wienekens and Edgar had just been to get some bread, his mother would hold the loaf firmly against her chest with her left hand and with her right hand cut off fresh slices which we caught in our hands and spread with jam.”

  My father nodded wearily, I held out the cigarettes to him, he took one, I lit it for him. I felt sorry for him. It must be terrible for a father to have his first real talk with a son who is almost twenty-eight. “There were hundreds of other things too,” I said, “liquorice, for instance, and balloons, Mother regarded balloons as pure extravagance. She was right. They are pure extravagance—but we couldn’t possibly have been extravagant enough to blow all your stinking millions skyhigh in the form of balloons. And those cheap candies Mother had such clever and intimidating theories about, proving that they were absolute poison. But then, instead of giving us non-poisonous ones, she didn’t give us any at all. At school they all wondered,” I said softly, “why I was the only one who never grumbled about the food, ate it all up and found the meals wonderful.”

  “Well, then,” he said feebly, “it had its good side after all.” It did not sound very convincing and certainly not very happy, his remark.

  “Oh,” I said, “I have no doubts whatever as to the theoretical and educational value of an upbringing like that—but that’s the point, it was all theory, education, psychology, chemistry—and a deadly grimness. At Wienekens I always knew when they had money, on Fridays, at Schniewinds and Holleraths, too, you could tell when there was money on the first or fifteenth of the month—there was always something extra, everyone got an extrathick slice of sausage, or some cake, and on Friday mornings Mrs. Wieneken always went to the hairdresser because in the late afternoon—well, you might say a sacrifice was offered up to Venus.”

  “What,” exclaimed my father, “you don’t mean.…” His color rose and he shook his head as he looked at me.

  “Yes,” I said, “I do mean that. Every Friday afternoon the kids were sent to the movies. Before that they were allowed to go and eat ice creams so that they would be out of the house for at least three and a half hours, when their mother got back from the hairdresser and their father came home with the pay envelope. You know, working class homes aren’t all that big.” “You mean to say,” said my father, “you mean to tell me that you all knew why the children were sent to the cinema?”

  “Of course we didn’t know exactly,” I said, “and most of it occurred to me later on when I thought about it—and it wasn’t till much later that it dawned on me why Mrs. Wieneken always blushed so touchingly when we got back from the movies and had potato salad. Later on, when he took over the job at the stadium, it all changed—I suppose he was home more often. As a boy I merely noticed she was somehow embarrassed—and it wasn’t till afterwards that I understood why. But in a flat consisting of one big room and a kitchen, and with three children—I don’t suppose they had any alternative.”

  My father was so shocked tha
t I was afraid he would think it in poor taste to bring up the subject of money again. For him our meeting had an element of high tragedy, but he was beginning to rather enjoy this tragedy, to find it attractive in a way, on a level of noble suffering, and then it would be hard to get him back to the three hundred marks a month he had offered me. With money it was like with “desires of the flesh.” Nobody really talked about it, really thought about it, it was either—as Marie had said about the carnal desires of priests—“sublimated” or considered vulgar, never as the thing it was at the moment: food or a taxi, a packet of cigarettes or a room with bath.

  My father was suffering, it was painful to watch. He turned toward the window, pulled out his handkerchief and dried a few tears. I had never seen that before: my father crying and actually using his handkerchief. Every morning two clean handkerchiefs were laid out for him, and every evening he would throw them into the laundry hamper in the bathroom, slightly crumpled but not noticeably soiled. There had been times when my mother, trying to be economical because soap was scarce, had long arguments with him as to whether he couldn’t carry around the handkerchiefs for at least two or three days. “All you do is carry them around with you anyway, and they are never really dirty—and there is such a thing as an obligation toward the nation.” This was an allusion to the “war on waste.” But Father—the only occasion I can recall—had put his foot down and insisted on getting his two clean handkerchiefs every morning. I had never seen a droplet or a speck of dust, anything, on him which would require him to wipe his nose. Now he was standing at the window and not only drying his tears but even wiping something as vulgar as sweat from his upper lip. I went out into the kitchen because he was still crying, and I even heard a sob or two. There are not many people you want to have around when you are crying, and it seemed to me that your own son, who you hardly know, would be the last person you would choose for company. As for me, I only knew one person who I could be with when I cried, Marie, and I didn’t know whether Father’s mistress was the kind of person he could have around when he was crying. I had only seen her once, she seemed sweet and pretty, and stupid in a nice way, but I had heard a lot about her. Our relatives had described her to us as grasping, but in our family everyone was considered grasping who was shameless enough to point out that now and again you have to eat, drink, and buy shoes. Anyone who maintains that cigarettes, hot baths, flowers, and schnapps are necessities has every chance of going down in history as being “recklessly extravagant.” I imagine a mistress is quite expensive: she has to buy stockings, dresses, pay the rent and be constantly cheerful, which is only possible in a “stable financial situation,” as Father would have put it. After all, when he went to her after those deathly boring board meetings, she had to be cheerful, smell nice, have been to the hairdresser. I couldn’t imagine that she was grasping. Probably she was just expensive, and in our family that was the same as grasping. When Henkels the gardener, who sometimes helped out old Fuhrmann, suddenly pointed out with remarkable modesty that the minimum rate for casual labor had, “for the last three years, as a matter of fact,” been higher than the wages he was getting from us, my mother gave a two-hour lecture in her shrill voice on the “grasping attitude of certain people.” Once she gave our postman a thirty-five cent tip at New Year’s and was indignant when next morning she found the thirty-five cents in the letterbox in an envelope on which the postman had written: “Madam, I haven’t the heart to rob you.” Of course she knew the right man in the Postmaster General’s office and she complained to him at once about that “grasping, impertinent man.”

  In the kitchen I walked quickly around the coffee puddle, across the hall into the bathroom, pulled the stopper out of the bathtub, and it struck me that for the first time in years I had had a bath without singing at least the Litany of Loreto. I began quietly humming the Tantum Ergo while I rinsed off the remains of soapsuds from the sides of the emptying bathtub. I also tried it with the Litany of Loreto, I have always been fond of that Jewish girl Miriam and sometimes almost believed in her. But the Litany of Loreto was no help either, I suppose it really was too Catholic, and I was furious with Catholicism and the Catholics. I made up my mind to call up Heinrich Behlen and Karl Emonds. Since the terrible row Karl Emonds and I had had two years before, I hadn’t spoken to him at all—and we had never written. He had treated me very badly for a stupid reason: when I had had to look after his youngest son, Gregor, who was a year old, while Karl and Sabina went to the movies and Marie was spending the evening with the “group,” I had beaten up a raw egg in Gregor’s milk. Sabina had told me I was to warm up the milk at ten, put it in the bottle and give it to Gregor, and because the child seemed so pale and fretful (he didn’t even cry, he just whimpered pitifully), I thought a raw egg beaten up in the milk would do him good. While the milk was warming I carried him in my arms up and down in the kitchen and talked to him “There now! What’s our little man going to have now, what are we going to give him then—a nice little egg” and so on, then broke the egg, beat it up in the mixer and poured it into Gregor’s milk. Karl’s other children were sound asleep, I was all alone in the kitchen with Gregor, and when I gave him the bottle it seemed to me he was thoroughly enjoying the egg in the milk. He smiled and fell asleep at once afterwards, without whimpering. When Karl came home from the movies he saw the egg shell in the kitchen, came into the living room where I was sitting with Sabina and said: “What a good idea, to make yourself an egg.” I said I hadn’t eaten the egg myself but had given it to Gregor—and a storm of abuse immediately broke loose. Sabina got positively hysterical and called me a “murderer,” Karl shouted at me: “You tramp—you lecher,” and that infuriated me so much that I called him a “frustrated pedagogue,” picked up my coat and left in a rage. He called out after me onto the landing: “You irresponsible bum,” and I shouted up to the landing: “You hysterical philistine, you miserable ass-whacker.” I am really fond of children, I can handle them quite well too, especially babies, I can’t imagine that an egg can be bad for a one-year-old child, but Karl calling me a “lecher” hurt me more than Sabina’s “murderer.” After all, one can make allowances and excuses for an overwrought mother, but Karl knew perfectly well I was not a lecher. Our relationship was strained in an idiotic kind of way because in his heart of hearts my “free mode of life” seemed “marvelous” to him, and in my heart of hearts I found his bourgeois existence attractive. I could never make him understand the almost deadly monotony of my life, the pedantic regularity of train journey, hotel, practice, performance, parchesi, and beer-drinking—and how the life he led, just because it was so bourgeois, appealed to me. And of course he, like everyone else, thought we had no children on purpose, Marie’s miscarriages looked “suspicious” to him; he didn’t know how badly we wanted children. In spite of all this I had sent him a telegram asking him to call me, but I wasn’t going to ask him for a loan. By this time he had four children and had a hard time making ends meet.

  I gave the bathtub one more rinse, went quietly out into the hall and glanced through the open living-room door. My father was standing by the table again and had stopped crying. With his red nose, his moist, furrowed cheeks, he looked like any old man, shivering, surprisingly vacant and almost stupid. I poured him a small cognac, took the glass over to him. He took it and drank. The surprisingly stupid expression on his face was still there, the way he emptied his glass, held it out to me mutely, with a helpless imploring look in his eyes, had something almost inane about it that I had never seen in him before. He looked like someone who has lost interest in everything, everything, except thrillers, one particular wine, and stupid jokes. The crumpled damp handkerchief he had simply laid on the table, and this faux pas—for him a terrible one—seemed deliberately disobedient—like a naughty child who has been told a thousand times one doesn’t put handkerchiefs on the table. I poured a little more cognac, he drank it and made a gesture which I could only interpret as “Please get me my coat.” I did not respond.
Somehow or other I had to get him back on the subject of money. All I could think of was to take my mark out of my pocket and juggle a bit with the coin: I let it roll down my outstretched right arm—then back the same way. His amusement at this trick appeared somewhat forced. I threw the mark into the air, almost up to the ceiling, caught it again—but he merely repeated his gesture: “My coat, please.” I tossed the mark up again, caught it on the big toe of my right foot and held it high up, almost under his nose, but he only made a slight gesture of annoyance and emitted a growling “That’s enough now.” With a shrug I went into the hall, got his coat and hat from the closet. He was already standing beside me, I helped him, picked up his gloves, which had fallen out of his hat, and handed them to him. He was close to tears again, made some funny little movements with his nose and lips and whispered: “Have you nothing nice to say to me?”