The Clown

by Heinrich Böll

  17

  I stepped back from the window, gave up hope for my mark down there in the dirt, went into the kitchen to fix myself another slice of bread and butter. There was not much left to eat: a can of beans, a can of plums (I don’t like plums, but Monika couldn’t know that), half a loaf, half a bottle of milk, about a quarter of a pound of coffee, five eggs, three slices of bacon, and a tube of mustard. In the box on the living-room table there were four cigarettes left. I felt so miserable that I gave up hope of ever being able to practice again. My knee was so swollen that my trouser leg was beginning to feel tight, my headache was so bad that it was almost unearthly: a steady piercing pain, in my soul it was blacker than ever, then the “desires of the flesh”—and Marie was in Rome. I needed her, her skin, her hands on my chest. I have, as Sommerwild once put it, “a lively and genuine relationship to physical beauty,” and I like having pretty women around, like my neighbor, Mrs. Grebsel, but I don’t feel any “desires of the flesh” toward these women, and most women are hurt by this, although, if I did feel any and attempted to satsify it, they would call for the police. It is a complicated and grim business, this carnal desire, for men who are not monogamous it is probably a never-ending torture, for the monogamous ones like me it means a constant compulsion to latent discourtesy, most women are somehow hurt if they do not sense what they know as Eros. Even Mrs. Blothert, respectable, devout, was always slightly offended. Sometimes I can even understand the sex-fiends the newspapers talk about so much, and the thought that there is something called “marital duty” makes me break out in a cold sweat. There must be something monstrous about these marriages if a woman is contractually obligated by state and church to do this thing. One can’t dictate compassion, after all. I wanted to try and talk to the Pope about this too. I am sure he is misinformed. I buttered another slice of bread, went into the hall and from my coat pocket took the evening paper I had bought on the platform in Cologne. Sometimes the evening paper is a help: it makes me feel as empty as television. I turned over the pages, glanced at the headlines, till I discovered an item which made me laugh. Federal Cross of Merit for Dr. Herbert Kalick. Kalick was the boy who had denounced me for being a defeatist and who during the trial had insisted on being ruthless, ruthless. In those days he had had the brilliant idea of mobilizing the orphanage for the final battle. I knew he had meanwhile become a big shot. It said in the paper that he had been awarded the Federal Cross of Merit for “his services in spreading democratic ideas among the young.” Two years ago he had invited me over for a reconciliation. Was I supposed to forgive him for the fact that Georg, the orphan, had been killed while practicing with a bazooka—or that he had denounced me, age ten, for being a defeatist, and had insisted on being ruthless, ruthless? Marie felt you couldn’t turn down an invitation to bury the hatchet, and we bought some flowers and went. He had an attractive house, amost in the Eifel Mountains, an attractive wife and one child whom they both proudly called their “offspring.” His wife has that kind of attractiveness that makes you wonder whether she is alive or merely wound up. The whole time I sat next to her I was tempted to grasp her by her arms or by her shoulders, or by her legs, to make sure she wasn’t a doll. Her entire contribution to the conversation consisted of two expressions: “Oh, how sweet” and “Oh, how awful.” I found her boring at first, but then became fascinated and told her all sorts of things, the way one throws coins into an automat—just to see how she would react. When I told her my grandmother had just died—which wasn’t true because my grandmother had died twelve years ago—she said: “Oh, how awful,” and I feel that, when someone dies, you can say a lot of silly things, but “Oh, how awful” is not one of them. Then I told her someone called Humeloh (who didn’t exist, whom I quickly invented so as to throw something positive into the automat) had just been awarded an honorary degree, she said: “Oh, how sweet.” When I then told her that my brother Leo had converted, she hesitated a moment—and this hesitation seemed almost like a sign of life; she looked at me with her great big vacant doll’s eyes to see which category this event belonged to as far as I was concerned, then said: “Awful, isn’t it?”; I had at least succeeded in squeezing a variation out of her. I suggested she might as well just leave off the two Ohs, and simply say sweet and awful; she giggled, helped me to some more asparagus and then said: “Oh, how sweet.” Finally during that evening we met the “offspring,” a boy of five, who could have appeared on a TV commercial just as he was. This silly toothbrushing business, goodnight Daddy, goodnight Mummy, one hand-shake for Marie, one for me. I was surprised that commercial television had not discovered him yet. Later, when we were having coffee and cognac by the fire, Herbert spoke of the great times we were living in. Then he brought out some champagne and became emotional. He asked my forgiveness, even knelt down to ask me for what he called a “secularized absolution”—and I was on the point of kicking his behind, but instead I took a cheese knife from the table and solemnly dubbed him a democrat. His wife exclaimed: “Oh, how sweet,” and when Herbert, much touched, had sat down again, I gave a lecture on the Jewish Yankees. I said that at one time it had been believed that the name Schnier, my name, had something to do with the snitch, but that it had been proved it was derived from Schneider, Schnieder, not from snitch, and that I was neither a Jew nor a Yankee, although—and then suddenly I punched Herbert in the nose, because I remembered that he had forced one of our classmates, Götz Buchel, to produce proof of his Aryan descent, and Götz had got into trouble because his mother was Italian, from a village in southern Italy—and to find out anything about her mother down there which would have any resemblance whatever to a proof of Aryan descent turned out to be impossible, especially as the village where Götz’s mother was born had by then already been occupied by the Jewish Yankees. Those were trying, dangerous weeks for Mrs. Buchel and Götz, till Götz’s teacher had the idea of getting an opinion from one of those ridiculous race experts at Bonn University. He established that Götz was “pure, hundred per cent pure Mediterranean,” but then Herbert Kalick started some nonsense about all Italians being traitors, and till the end of the war Götz never knew a moment’s peace. This all came back to me while I was trying to give the lecture about the Jewish Yankees—and I simply hit Herbert Kalick right in the face, threw my champagne glass into the fire, and the cheese knife after it, and pulled Marie after me by the arm, out. We couldn’t get a taxi out there and had to walk, quite a way, till we got to the bus station. Marie was crying and kept saying it had been un-Christian and inhuman of me, but I said I wasn’t a Christian and my confessional wasn’t open yet. She also asked me if I had doubts about his, Herbert’s, turning into a democrat, and I said, “No, no, no doubts at all—on the contrary—but I just don’t like him and never will.”

  I opened the phone book and looked up Kalick’s number. I was in the right mood to talk to him over the phone. I recalled having met him once afterwards at one of my parents’ At Homes, he had looked at me beseechingly and shaken his head, while he was talking to a rabbi about “Jewish spirituality.” I felt sorry for the rabbi. He was a very old man, with a white beard and very kind, and innocent in a way that worried me. Of course Herbert told everyone he met that he had been a Nazi and an anti-Semite, but that “history had opened his eyes.” And yet the very day before the Americans marched into Bonn he had been practicing with the boys in our grounds and had told them: “The first Jewish swine you see, let him have it.” What upset me about these At Homes of my mother’s was the innocence of the returned emigrants. They were so moved by all the remorse and loud protestations of democracy that they were forever embracing and radiating good fellowship. They failed to grasp that the secret of the terror lay in the little things. To regret big things is child’s play: political errors, adultery, murder, anti-Semitism—but who forgives, who understands, the little things? The way Brühl and Herbert Kalick had looked at my father when he put his hand on my shoulder, and the way Herbert Kalick, beside himself with rage, banged
with his fist on our table, looked at me with his stony eyes and said: “We’ve got to be ruthless, ruthless,” or the way he grabbed Götz Buchel by the collar, stood him in front of the class, although the teacher protested mildly, and said: “Look at him—if that isn’t a Jew!” I remember too many moments, too many details, tiny little things—and Herbert’s eyes haven’t changed. I was afraid, when I saw him standing there with the old, rather foolish rabbi, who was so full of the spirit of reconciliation, allowed Herbert to bring him a cocktail and listened to his drivel about Jewish spirituality. Another thing the emigrants don’t know is that not many Nazis were sent to the front, most of those who fell were the others, Hubert Knieps, who lived next door to the Wienekens, and Günther Cremer, the baker’s son, although they were Hitler Youth leaders they were sent to the front because they “didn’t toe the line” and would have nothing to do with all that disgusting snooping. Kalick would never have been sent to the front, he toed the line then the way he toes the line today, a born conformist. The whole thing was quite different from the way the emigrants see it. Of course they can only think in terms of guilty, not guilty—Nazis, non-Nazis. The district leader Kierenhahn sometimes came to the shop of Marie’s father, simply took a packet of cigarettes from the shelf without putting down either coupons or money, lit a cigarette, sat down on the counter opposite Marie’s father and said: “Well, Martin, how about our putting you in a nice little concentration camp, one that’s not too grim?” Then Marie’s father would say: “Once a swine always a swine, and you always were one.” They had known each other since they were six years old. Kierenhahn would get mad and say: “Don’t go too far, Martin, don’t overdo it.” Marie’s father would say: “I’ll go even further: get out of here.” Kierenhahn would say: “I’ll see to it that you’re sent to one of the bad concentration camps, not one of the nice ones.” That’s how it went, back and forth, and Marie’s father would have been taken away if the Gauleiter had not held his “protecting hand” over him, for some reason we never discovered. Needless to say he didn’t hold his protecting hand over everyone, not over Marx the leather merchant and Krupe the Communist. They were murdered. And the Gauleiter is doing all right today, he has his construction business. When Marie ran into him one day he said he “couldn’t complain.” Marie’s father used to say to me: “The only way you can gauge how terrible that Nazi business was is by realizing that I actually owe my life to a swine like that Gauleiter, and not only that, I have to confirm in writing that I owe it to him.”

  By now I had found Kalick’s number, but hesitated to dial it. I remembered that tomorrow was Mother’s At Home day. I could go over there and, at my parents’ expense, at least fill my pockets with cigarettes and salted almonds, take along a bag for olives, another for cheese biscuits, then go round with a hat and collect for “a needy member of the family.” I had done that once when I was fifteen, collected “for a special purpose” and got nearly a hundred marks. My conscience didn’t bother me when I used the money for myself, and if I collected tomorrow “for a needy member of the family” I wouldn’t even be lying: I was a needy member of the family—and afterwards I could also go out into the kitchen, weep on Anna’s bosom and pick up a few ends of sausage. All those idiots gathered together at my mother’s would say my performance was a glorious joke, my mother herself would have to let it pass as a joke with a sour smile—and no one would know it was in deadly earnest. These people understand nothing. They all know, of course, that a clown has to be melancholy in order to be a good clown, but the fact that melancholy is for him a deadly serious business, that they don’t grasp. At Mother’s At Home I would meet them all: Sommerwild and Kalick, liberals and social democrats, six different varieties of president, even ban-the-bomb people (my mother had once been a ban-the-bomb campaigner for three days, but then when a president of something or other explained to her that a consistent ban-the-bomb policy would lead to a drastic fall in the stock market, she dashed at once—literally that minute—to the phone, called up the committee, and “dissociated” herself.) I would—but not till the end, when I had already gone round with my hat, publicly punch Kalick in the nose, call Sommerwild a popish hypocrite and accuse the other members of the executive committee of German Catholicism of inciting to lechery and adultery. I took my finger off the dial and did not call Kalick. I had only wanted to ask him whether he had lived down his past by now, whether his relationship to power was still all right, and whether he could enlighten me about Jewish spirituality. Kalick had once given a talk at a Hitler Youth meeting entitled “Machiavelli, or the Attempt to Achieve a Relationship to Power.” It didn’t make much sense to me, all I understood was Kalick’s “frank affirmation of power, which we see clearly expressed here,” but from the faces of the other Hitler Youth leaders present I could tell that even for them this speech went too far. As it was, Kalick hardly spoke about Machiavelli, only about Kalick, and the expression of the other leaders showed that they regarded this talk as a public scandal. There are fellows like that, you read a lot about them in the papers: scandalizers. Kalick was nothing but a political scandalizer, and wherever he appeared he left scandalized people behind him.

  I was looking forward to the At Home. At last I would benefit from my parents’ money: olives and salted almonds, cigarettes—I would pocket cigars by the bundle and sell them at a discount, I would rip the decoration off Kalick’s chest and hit him in the face. Compared with him, even my mother seemed human. The last time I ran across him, in the cloakroom at my parents’ house, he had looked at me sadly and said: “For every man there is a chance, Christians call it grace.” I didn’t answer. After all, I wasn’t a Christian. I recalled that during that lecture he had spoken of the “Eros of cruelty” and of the Machiavellian aspect of sex. When I thought of his sexual Machiavellianism I felt sorry for the whores he went to, the way I felt sorry for the wives who were contractually obligated to some fiend. I thought of the countless pretty girls whose fate it was to do the thing without wanting to, either for money with types like Kalick or with a husband without getting paid for it.

  18

  Instead of Kalick’s number I dialed the number of the place where Leo lives. It was about time they finished dinner and their sex-tranquillizing salads. I was glad when the same voice came to the phone again. He was smoking a cigar now, and the smell of cabbage was less pronounced. “Schnier speaking,” I said, “remember?”

  He laughed. “Of course,” he said, “I hope you didn’t take me literally and really burn your St. Augustine.”

  “Certainly I did,” I said. “Tore the thing up and fed the pages into the stove.”

  He was silent a moment. “You’re joking,” he said hoarsely.

  “No,” I said, “in matters like that I am consistent.”

  “For heaven’s sake,” he said, “didn’t you grasp the dialectic in what I said?”

  “No,” I said, “I’m just a straightforward, honest, simple guy. How about my brother,” I said, “when will they be good enough to have finished dinner?”

  “The dessert has just been brought in,” he said, “it won’t be long now.”

  “What is there?” I asked.

  “For dessert?”

  “Yes.”

  “Actually I’m not supposed to say, but I’ll tell you. Stewed plums with a dollop of cream. Looks quite nice. Do you like plums?”

  “No,” I said, “my dislike of plums is as inexplicable as it is insurmountable.”

  “You ought to read Hoberer’s treatise on idiosyncrasy. All tied up with very, very early experiences—mostly prenatal ones. Interesting. Hoberer has made a detailed study of eight hundred cases. Do you suffer from melancholia?”

  “How did you know?”

  “I can tell by your voice. You should pray and take a bath.”

  “I’ve just had a bath, and I can’t pray,” I said.

  “I’m sorry about that,” he said, “I’ll make you a present of a new St. Augustine. Or Kierkegaard.”


  “I’ve got him,” I said, “tell me, could you give my brother another message?”

  “Certainly,” he said.

  “Tell him to bring me some money. As much as he can lay hands on.”

  He muttered something, then said out loud: “I’m just writing it down. Bring as much money as possible. By the way, you really ought to read Bonaventura. Magnificent—and don’t be so contemptuous of my nineteenth century. Your voice sounds as if you don’t think much of the nineteenth century.”

  “Right,” I said, “I detest it.”

  “You’re wrong,” he said, “nonsense. Even the architecture wasn’t as bad as it’s made out to be.” He laughed. “Wait till the end of the twentieth century before you detest the nineteenth. Do you mind if I have my dessert while I’m talking.”

  “Plums?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, he laughed thinly: “I am in disgrace and don’t get the masters’ food, only the servants’; today it’s caramel pudding. By the way,” he evidently already had a spoonful of pudding in his mouth, he swallowed, then went on with a titter, “by the way, I’m having my revenge. I phone long distance for hours with one of the brothers in Munich who used to be here. He used to be a pupil of Scheler’s too. Sometimes I call Hamburg, the movie information service, or Berlin, the weather bureau, for revenge. You can’t tell, you see, with direct dialing.” He took another mouthful, tittered, then whispered: “The church is rich, stinking rich. It really does stink of money—like the corpse of a rich man. Poor corpses smell all right—did you know that?”