The Clown

by Heinrich Böll

  “No,” I said. I felt my headache getting better and drew a red circle round the number of the place.

  “You are an unbeliever, aren’t you? Don’t say no: I can tell from your voice that you are an unbeliever. Am I right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “That makes no difference, no difference at all,” he said, “there is a place in Isaiah which St. Paul even quotes in the Epistle to the Romans. Listen carefully: To whom he was not spoken of, they shall see: and they that have not heard shall understand.” He gave a wicked little laugh. “Did you get it?”

  “Yes,” I said, with a sigh.

  He raised his voice: “Good evening, sir, good evening,” and hung up. His last words had sounded horribly servile.

  I went over to the window and looked out at the clock on the corner. It was nearly half-past eight. It seemed to me they ate pretty copiously. I would have liked to talk to Leo, but almost the only thing I was concerned with by this time was the money he would lend me. The seriousness of my position gradually dawned on me. At times I don’t know whether what I have experienced tangibly and realistically is true, or whether my real experience is the true one. I get it all mixed up. I could not have sworn I had seen the boy in Osnabrück, but I would have sworn I had sawed wood with Leo. I also couldn’t have sworn whether or not I walked to Edgar Wieneken’s place in Kalk to turn Grandfather’s check for twenty-two marks into cash. The fact that I remember the details so vividly is no guarantee—the green blouse the woman at the bakery had on, the one who gave me the rolls, or the holes in the sock of the young workman who passed me while I was sitting on the doorstep waiting for Edgar. I was absolutely positive I had seen beads of sweat on Leo’s upper lip when we sawed through the wood. I also recalled every detail of the night Marie had her first miscarriage in Cologne. Heinrich Behlen had managed to get me a few little performances to young audiences for twenty marks an evening. Marie usually went along, but that evening she stayed home as she wasn’t feeling well, and when I got back later with the nineteen marks net profit in my pocket I found the room empty, saw the blood-stained sheet in the turned-back bed and found the message on the chest of drawers: “Am in hospital. Nothing serious. Heinrich knows about it.” I dashed off at once, was told by Heinrich’s surly housekeeper what hospital Marie was in, hurried over there, but they wouldn’t let me in, I first had to locate Heinrich in the hospital, have him called to the phone, before the nun at the gate would let me in. By this time it was half-past eleven at night, and when at last I got to Marie’s room it was all over, she was lying there in bed, very pale, crying, beside her a nun reciting the Rosary. The nun calmly went on praying while I held Marie’s hand, and in a quiet voice Heinrich tried to explain to her what would happen to the soul of the creature she had not been able to give birth to. Marie seemed firmly convinced that the child—that’s what she called it—would never be able to go to Heaven because it had not been baptized. She kept saying it would remain in Purgatory, and that night I learned for the first time the terrible things Catholics are taught in their religious instruction. Heinrich was quite helpless in the face of Marie’s fears, and the very fact that he was so helpless struck me as comforting. He spoke of God’s mercy, which “must be greater than the more legalist thinking of the theologians.” All this time the nun went on telling her beads. Marie—in religious matters she can be very obstinate—asked over and over again where the diagonal runs between law and mercy. I remember the word diagonal. Finally I went outside, I felt like an outcast, completely superfluous. I stood by a window in the corridor, smoked, looked beyond the opposite wall into an automobile graveyard. The wall was covered with election posters. Put Your Trust in the Socialist Party. Vote Christian Democratic Union. Evidently the idea was to depress any patients who might see the wall from their rooms with their indescribable stupidity. Put Your Trust in the SPD was positively inspired, almost literary compared to the fatuousness of simply having VOTE CDU printed on a poster. It was now almost two in the morning, and afterwards I quarrelled with Marie as to whether what I saw then really did happen or not. A stray dog appeared from the left, he sniffed at a lamppost, then at the SPD poster, at the CDU poster, and peed against the CDU poster and trotted on, along the street which over to the right was completely dark. When we discussed that dreary night later on, Marie always denied that I had seen the dog, and if she allowed the dog to be “true,” she denied that he had peed against the CDU poster. She said I had been so much under her father’s influence that, without being aware of lying or distorting the truth, I would claim the dog had done his “mess” against the CDU poster even if it had been the SPD poster. And yet her father had had a much greater contempt for the SPD than for the CDU—and what I saw, I saw.

  It was nearly five when I took Heinrich home and as we walked through Ehrenfeld he kept murmuring to me, pointing to the house doors: “These are my flock, these are my flock.” His nagging housekeeper with the yellowy legs, her angry “what’s the meaning of this?” I went home, secretly washed out the sheet in cold water in the bathroom.

  Ehrenfeld, brown-coal trains, clothes lines, ban on baths, and sometimes at night the bags of garbage whizzing past our window, like dud bombs whose potential danger evaporated as they smacked the ground, or was barely sustained by the sound of an eggshell rolling away.

  Heinrich got into trouble again with his priest on our account because he wanted some money from the Catholic welfare fund. I then went once more to Edgar Wieneken, and Leo sent us his watch to pawn, Edgar managed to scrape up something for us out of a workmen’s welfare fund, and we were able at least to pay for the medicines, the taxi and half the doctor’s fee.

  I thought of Marie, the nun and her Rosary, the word diagonal, the dog, the election posters, the automobile graveyard—and of my cold hands after I had washed out the sheet—and I really couldn’t have sworn to all that. I wouldn’t have liked to swear, either, that the man in Leo’s hostel had told me he called up the weather bureau in Berlin so as to harm the church financially, and yet I had heard it, just as I had heard him smacking his lips and swallowing as he ate the caramel pudding.

  19

  Without giving it much thought or knowing what I wanted to say to her, I dialed Monika Silvs’ number. The first ring was hardly over when she lifted the receiver and said: “Hullo.”

  Just the sound of her voice was enough to give me a lift. It is intelligent and firm. I said: “Hans speaking, I wanted …” but she interrupted me and said: “Oh, it’s you …” It sounded neither unkind nor unpleasant, only it was obvious she had been expecting someone else’s call, not mine. Maybe she was waiting for a call from a friend, from her mother—still, my feelings were hurt.

  “I just wanted to thank you,” I said, “for being so kind.” I could distinctly smell her perfume, Cuir de Russie, or whatever it was, much too sophisticated for her.

  “I am so sorry about everything,” she said, “it must be terrible for you.” I didn’t know what she meant it: the Kostert review, which all Bonn had read apparently, or Marie’s marriage, or both.

  “Is there anything I can do?” she asked in a low voice.

  “Yes,” I said, “you could come over here and take pity on my soul, on my knee too, it’s pretty badly swollen.”

  She was silent. I had expected her to say Yes at once, I dreaded the thought she might really come. But she only said: “Not today, I’m expecting a visitor.” She should have told me who she was expecting, she might at least have said: man or woman. The word “visitor” depressed me. I said: “Oh well, perhaps tomorrow, I shall probably have to stay in bed for at least a week.”

  “Isn’t there anything else I can do for you, I mean something I can do by phone.” She said this in a voice which made me hope her visitor might be a woman after all.

  “Yes,” I said, “you could play me Chopin’s Mazurka in B Flat, Opus 7.”

  She laughed and said: “What an idea!” At the sound of her voice I wavered for the firs
t time in my monogamy. “I don’t care much for Chopin,” she said, “and I play him badly.”

  “Never mind,” I said, “that doesn’t matter. Have you got the music there?”

  “It must be around somewhere,” she said. “Just a moment.” She put down the receiver on the table, and I could hear her walking across the room. It was a few minutes before she came back, and I remembered what Marie had once told me, that sometimes even saints had had girl friends. Only spiritually, of course, but still: whatever the thing had of a spiritual nature, these women had given them. I didn’t even have that.

  Monika picked up the receiver. “Yes,” she said with a sigh, “I have the mazurkas here.”

  “Then please,” I said, “play the B Flat Opus 7 Number 1.”

  “I haven’t played Chopin for years, I would have to practice a bit.”

  “Maybe you don’t want your visitor to hear you playing Chopin?”

  “Oh,” she said with a laugh, “I don’t mind him listening.”

  “Sommerwild?” I asked, almost in a whisper, I heard her exclaim in surprise and I went on: “If it really is him, slam the piano lid down on his head.”

  “He hasn’t deserved that,” she said, “he’s very fond of you.”

  “I know,” I said, “I believe it too, but I wish I had the guts to kill him.”

  “I’ll practice a bit and play you the mazurka,” she said quickly. “I’ll ring you.”

  “Yes,” I said, but neither of us hung up. I could hear her breathing, for how long I don’t know, but I could hear it, then she hung up. I would have gone on holding the receiver for a long time just to hear her breathe. My God, at least a woman’s breathing.

  Although the beans I had eaten still lay heavily on my stomach and I was getting more and more depressed, I went into the kitchen, opened the second can of beans, tipped the contents into the saucepan in which I had heated the first lot, and lit the gas. I threw the filter paper with the coffee grounds into the garbage pail, took a clean filter, put four spoons of coffee into it, put the kettle on, and tried to tidy up the kitchen. I threw the floorcloth over the coffee puddle, the empty cans and eggshells into the pail. I hate untidy rooms, but I am incapable of tidying them up myself. I went into the living room, took the dirty glasses, put them into the sink in the kitchen. Now there was nothing untidy any more in the apartment, yet it didn’t look tidy. Marie had such a clever, swift way of making a room look tidy, without doing anything to it which you could put your finger on. It must be something to do with her hands. The thought of Marie’s hands—just the idea that she might put her hands on Züpfner’s shoulders—heightened my depression to the point of despair. A woman can express or pretend so much with her hands that men’s hands always seem to me like glued-on hunks of wood. Men’s hands are handshaking hands, hitting hands, and of course shooting hands and signing hands. Shake, hit, shoot, sign non-negotiable checks—that’s all men’s hands can do, and, of course, work. Women’s hands have almost ceased to be hands: whether they spread butter on bread or smooth hair away from the forehead. No theologian has ever thought of preaching about women’s hands in the Gospels: Veronica, Mary Magdalene, Mary and Martha—all those women’s hands in the Gospels which treated Christ tenderly. Instead they preach about laws, principles of order, art, state. In his private life, so to speak, Christ dealt almost entirely with women. Of course he needed men, because, like Kalick, they have a relationship to power, a sense of organization and all that crap. He needed men, the way you need packers to move house, for the heavy work, and Peter and John were so kind they could hardly be called men, while Paul was as virile as befitted a Roman. At home we had the Bible read to us on every possible occasion, because our family swarms with pastors, but not one of them ever talked about the women in the Gospels, or about something as intangible as unjust Mammon. It was the same with the Catholics in the “group,” they never wanted to talk about unjust Mammon, Kinkel and Sommerwild always smiled self-consciously when I mentioned it to them—as if they had caught Christ out in an embarrassing lapse, and Fredebeul spoke of the abuse this expression had suffered at the hands of history. What worried him about it was its “irrational aspect,” as he put it. As if money were something rational. In Marie’s hands even money lost its dubious quality, she had a wonderful way of handling it carelessly and yet at the same time very carefully. Since on principle I refused checks and other “means of payment,” I always got my fee in cash, so we never needed to plan ahead for more than two or at most three days. She gave money to almost everyone who asked her for it, sometimes even to people who hadn’t asked her for it at all but who, as it turned out during the conversation, were in need of money. Once she gave some money to a waiter in Göttingen to buy a winter coat for his son who was just starting school, and she was always paying the surcharge for helpless grandmothers who had strayed into first-class compartments on trains on their way to funerals. There is no end to the number of grandmothers who travel by train to the funerals of children, grandchildren, daughters-in-law and sons-in-law, and who—at times, of course, with a certain coy grandmotherly helplessness—stumble laboriously into a first-class compartment, weighed down with heavy suitcases and parcels stuffed with smoked sausage, bacon and cakes. Marie would then make me stash away the heavy suitcases and parcels in the luggage rack, although everyone in the compartment knew that Granma only had a second-class ticket in her purse. She would then go out into the corridor and “arrange” things with the conductor, before Granma’s attention was drawn to her mistake. Marie always began by asking how far she was going and who had died—so she could pay the right surcharge. The grandmothers’ comments usually consisted of some such gracious remark as: “Young people are not nearly as bad as they’re made out to be,” the fee took the form of hefty ham sandwiches. Especially between Dortmund and Hanover—so it always seemed—there are a great many grandmothers traveling every day to funerals. Marie was always ashamed of our traveling first class, and would have thought it intolerable if someone had been thrown out of our compartment because he only had a second-class ticket. She had unlimited patience when it came to listening to long-winded descriptions of family relationships and looking at photos of complete strangers. Once we spent two hours sitting next to an old peasant woman from Bückeburg who had twenty-three grandchildren and a photo of each one of them in her purse, and we listened to twenty-three life stories, looked at twenty-three photos of young men and young women who had all done well: municipal inspector in Münster, or married to a railway official, manager of a sawmill, and another one had “an important job in this party we always vote for—you know the one I mean,” and of another one, who was in the army, she maintained he had “always played safe.” Marie was always completely absorbed by these stories, she found them tremendously thrilling and talked about “real life,” I found the element of repetition tiring. There were so many grandmothers between Dortmund and Hanover whose grandsons were railway officials and whose daughters-in-law died young because they “don’t give birth to all their children, the women nowadays—that’s what it is.” Marie could be very kind and nice to old people who needed help; she was also constantly helping them to telephone. I once told her she ought to have worked at the Catholic Travelers’ Aid, and she said, somewhat nettled: “And why not?” I hadn’t meant it at all unkindly or disapprovingly. Now she really had landed in a kind of Catholic Travelers’ Aid, I believe Züpfner married her to “save” her, and she married him to “save” him, and I was not sure if he would allow her to use his money to pay for express and first-class surcharges for grandmothers. He was certainly not stingy, but in a maddening way, like Leo, his needs were small. Not like St. Francis of Assisi, who could picture the needs of others though his own needs were small too. I found the idea of Marie now having Züpfner’s money in her purse unbearable, like the word honeymoon and the idea that I might fight for Marie. Fight could only be meant in the physical sense. Even a clown out of training like me was better th
an either Züpfner or Sommerwild. Before they had even got into position I would have already done three somersaults, come at them from behind, got them down on their backs, and clamped a half-nelson on them. Or were they perhaps thinking of real brawls? I wouldn’t put even such perverse variations of the Nibelung saga past them. Or did they mean it in a spiritual sense? I was not afraid of them, and why was Marie not allowed to answer my letters, which were after all a kind of spiritual challenge? They used words like wedding trip and honeymoon and dared call me obscene, those hypocrites. They should listen to what waiters and chambermaids tell each other about honeymoon couples. Every scruffy bastard in the train, in the hotel, wherever they show themselves, whispers “honeymoon” as they go by, and everyone knows they do the thing constantly. Who takes the sheets off the bed and washes them? When she puts her hands on Züpfner’s shoulders, surely she must remember how I warmed her icy hands in my armpits.

  Her hands, which she uses to open the front door, to straighten the covers on little Marie’s bed upstairs, plug in the toaster downstairs in the kitchen, put the kettle on, take a cigarette out of the pack. This time she finds the maid’s message on the refrigerator instead of the kitchen table. “Gone to movies. Back at ten.” in the living room on the TV set, Züpfner’s message. “Urgent call from F. Love and kisses, Heribert.” Refrigerator instead of kitchen table, love and kisses instead of love. In the kitchen, while you are spreading lots of butter, lots of liver sausage on slices of toast, and putting three spoons of cocoa in the cup instead of two, you are aware for the first time of what a slimming diet does to your nerves, do you remember the way Mrs. Blothert exclaimed, when you took the second piece of cake: “But that’s a total of over fifteen hundred calories, can you afford it?” The way the butcher looks at your waistline, a look that silently says: “No, you can’t afford it.” O Holy of Holies, Ca-ca-ca-, Thou -binet and -tholon! “Oh yes, you’re beginning to put on weight.” They are whispering it in the city, the city of whispers. Why this restlessness, this desire to be alone in the dark, in movies and churches, now in the dark living room with cocoa and toast. How did you reply to the young chap at the dance who shot out the question: “Tell me quickly what it is you love, Madam, quickly!” You will have told him the truth: “Children, confessionals, movies, Gregorian chant and clowns.” “And not men, Madam?” “Oh, yes, one” you will have said. “Not men as such, they’re stupid.” “May I print that?” “Oh no, for goodness’ sake, don’t.” If she could say one, why didn’t she say which one? If you love one man, surely you can only mean your own, the one you are married to.