The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (109 page)

But the other day I came upon actual proof of my former royal life.

We were performing in Madrid, and one morning I was strolling with Jadwiga through the city when a big gray building with the inscription “National Museum” caught our eye. “Let’s go in,” said Jadwiga, so in we went, into one of the large, more remote rooms over whose door hung a sign saying H
OLOGRAPHS
.

All unsuspecting, we proceeded to look at the handwritings of various heads of state and kings until we came to a glass case discreetly labeled K
INGDOM OF
C
APOTA—NOW A REPUBLIC
. I saw the handwriting of my grandfather Wuck the Fortieth; I saw an excerpt from the famous Capotian Manifesto written in his own hand; I found a sheet from my father’s hunting diaries—and finally a scrap from one of my copybooks, a piece of soiled paper on which I read “Helth is Welth.” Embarrassed, I turned toward Jadwiga, but she merely smiled and said, “That’s all behind you now, forever.”

We quickly left the museum, for it was now one o’clock, the performance began at three, and at two I had to open the box office.

Special circumstances require me to reveal a secret that I had wanted to preserve to the end of my life: I belong to a club or, rather, a secret society, although I had sworn never to join such an institution. It is most embarrassing, but the problems of the younger generation, as well as the deadly seriousness with which my neighbor guards his peaches, prompt me to make this confession, which I do blushingly. I am a Ribbeckian—and, obedient to the rules of our club, I take pen, ink, and paper, open my old school copybook, and begin to write: “Herr Ribbeck of the Havel lands, / A pear tree in his garden stands …” It feels good to write by hand for a change, it encourages patience, compels me to read the poem slowly and with care, and this in turn compels me to smile, and it certainly does no harm to smile once in a while.

So I slowly copy out the ballad and press down onto the paper the rubber stamp which we—the members of the Society of Ribbeckians—are obliged to keep on hand: “Join our club! Your sole obligation is to copy out the enclosed poem ten times and send it to the owners of fruit trees. You may then call yourself a Ribbeckian, a distinction we trust you will appreciate.”

I write my neighbor’s address on an envelope, stick on a stamp, and betake myself to the mailbox. It so happens, however, that the mailbox is attached to the garden fence of this very neighbor, and as I lift up the yellow flap of the mailbox I can see him—my neighbor—standing there on a ladder, with outstretched forefinger, lightly touching his peaches one by one. No doubt about it, he is counting them!

Next morning we are standing side by side, my neighbor and I, waiting for the mailman, that grossly underpaid cherub whom not even his obviously flat feet can rob of charm.

My neighbor’s face seems even yellower than usual, his lips tremble, and his slightly bloodshot eyes seem to point to a sleepless night.

“It is indescribable,” he said to me, “how moral standards are declining. Today’s young people: nothing but thieves and robbers. Where is it all going to end?”

“In disaster.”

“Precisely. I see you agree.”

“Of course, it’s inevitable. We are drifting inexorably toward the abyss. All this depravity, this dissipation!”

“No respect for the property of others! One should … but the police refuse to intervene. Just imagine. Yesterday evening I still had a hundred and thirty-five peaches on my tree—and this morning—care to guess?”

“A hundred and thirty-two?”

“Optimist! A hundred and thirty. Five ripe peaches! Just imagine. I shudder to think of it.”

“Sackcloth and ashes—we’ll have no alternative. Morality is a thing of the past. I can see there are times ahead of us …”

But the approaching mailman relieves me of having to complete my sentence. The letter that I threw in the mailbox yesterday has gone full circle and now, via the collector, the sorter, and the mailman, has landed in the hands of my neighbor.

There was no mail for me. Who would write to me anyway, since I am not even an active Ribbeckian but merely a passive one? I own no fruit trees, not even a currant bush, and the only person who knows my name is the corner grocer who grudgingly grants me credit and with a sorrowful eye sees gray bread, margarine, and fine-cut tobacco disappear into my shopping bag and stubbornly refuses me any credit for regular cigarettes and red wine. But it is time to observe my neighbor’s expression: he has opened the letter, put on his glasses and, with a frown, started to read: he reads, reads, and I am surprised at the length of that ballad. In vain I wait for a smile on his face: nothing, there is nothing. Obviously a person who is not responsive to literature as well as devoid of humor. He takes off his glasses as if he had been reading some trivial bit of printed matter, folds up the letter, opens it again, and hands it to me across the fence, saying, “Listen, aren’t you … er … what was it again?”

“A writer,” I said.

“Of course. Take a look at this, what d’you make of it?”

The sudden sight of my handwriting gives me a bit of a shock. Perhaps, I think, he is a person who can only be reached acoustically, impervious to the charms of the visual. And I begin to read aloud: “Herr Ribbeck of the Havel lands, / A pear tree in his garden stands …”

“Oh, I know what it says!”

“Did you see the stamp at the bottom? There is a stamp there: ‘Join our club! …’”

“I know, I know,” he says impatiently, and his sallow face turns a shade darker, “but it makes no sense to send me something like that since I only have a peach tree. It’s something about pears, isn’t it? The way people waste their time!”

Without so much as a nod, he shuffles off to his observation post at the back, where he can keep an eye on his peaches.

I see, I thought, as I folded up my sheet of paper, and now I am wondering whether I should apply for a change in the statutes of our club. Of course the ballad would lose its melody, for there are not that many one-syllable fruits.

I didn’t get home from the war till the spring of 1950, and there was nobody left in town whom I knew. Luckily for me, my parents had left me some money. I rented a room in town, and there I lay on the bed, smoking and waiting and not knowing what I was waiting for. The idea of a job didn’t appeal to me. I gave my landlady money, and she bought what I needed and cooked my meals. Whenever she brought coffee or a meal to my room, she stayed longer than I liked. Her son had been killed at a place called Kalinovka, and after coming into the room she would set the tray down on the table and come over to the darkish corner where my bed was. That’s where I dozed away my time, stubbing out my cigarettes against the wall so that the wallpaper around my bed was covered with black smudges. My landlady was pale and skinny, and when her face hung there in the shadows over my bed, I was scared of her. At first I thought she was queer in the head, for her eyes were very bright and large, and she kept on asking me about her son.

“Are you sure you didn’t know him? The place was called Kalinovka—weren’t you there?”

But I had never heard of a place called Kalinovka, and I would always turn toward the wall saying, “No, really, I can’t remember him at all.”

My landlady was not queer in the head, she was a very good soul, and I found her questioning painful. She questioned me very often, several times a day, and whenever I went into her kitchen I had to look at the photo of her son, a colored photo hanging over the bench. He had been a laughing, fair-haired boy, and in the photo he was wearing an infantry dress uniform.

“That was taken in the garrison town,” said my landlady, “before they were sent to the front.”

It was a half-length portrait: he was wearing his steel helmet, and behind him you could see some dummy castle ruins entwined with artificial creepers.

“He was a conductor,” my landlady said, “a streetcar conductor. A good worker, my boy was.” And then she would reach for the cardboard box of photographs that stood on her sewing table between the scraps of cloth for patching and the skeins of thread. And I had to go through piles of photos of her son: group pictures from his school days, each showing a boy seated in the middle with a slate between his knees, and on the slate a “VI,” a “VII,” and finally an “VIII.” In a separate packet, held together by a red rubber band, were the pictures of his first communion: a smiling little boy in a formal black suit, holding an enormous candle and standing in front of a transparency painted with a golden chalice. Then came pictures of him as a mechanic’s apprentice standing by a lathe, grimy-faced, his hands grasping a file.

“That wasn’t the right kind of job for him,” my landlady would say; “the work was too difficult.” And she would show me the last photo taken before he was called up: he was wearing a streetcar conductor’s uniform and standing beside a Number 9 streetcar at the terminus, where the tracks curve around in a loop, and I recognized the soda-pop stand where I had so often bought cigarettes, in the days before the war; I recognized the poplars, which are still there now, saw the villa, its gateway flanked by golden lions, which aren’t there now, and I would remember the girl I used to think about so often during the war. She had been pretty, with a pale face and almond-shaped eyes, and she had always boarded the streetcar at the Number 9 terminus.

I would stare for a long time at the photo of my landlady’s son at the Number 9 terminus and think of many things: of the girl, and the soap factory where I was working in those days; I could hear the screeching of the streetcar, see the pink soda pop I used to drink at the stand in summer, and the green cigarette ads, and again the girl.

“Maybe,” the landlady would say, “you did know him after all.” I would shake my head and put the picture back in the box: it was a shiny photo and looked like new, although by now it was eight years old.

“No, no,” I would say, “and I was never in Kalinovka—really I wasn’t.”

I often had to go to the kitchen, and she often came to my room, and all day I would think of the thing I wanted to forget—the war—and I would toss my cigarette ash behind the bed and stub the glowing tip out against the wall.

Sometimes, as I lay there in the evening, I could hear a girl’s footsteps in the next room, or the Yugoslav who had the room next to the kitchen; I could hear him swearing as he groped for the light switch before going into his room.

It wasn’t till I had been living there for three weeks and was holding Karl’s picture for what must have been the fiftieth time that I noticed that the streetcar he was standing beside, laughing, with his leather pouch, wasn’t empty. For the first time I looked closely at the photo and saw that a girl sitting inside the streetcar, smiling, had got into the snapshot. It was the pretty girl I used to think about so often during the war. The landlady came up to me, studied the look on my face, and said, “Now you recognize him, eh?” Then she stepped behind me and looked over my shoulder at the photo, and from close behind me rose the smell of the fresh peas she was holding in the folds of her apron.

“No,” I said quietly, “but the girl.”

“The girl?” she said. “That was his fiancée, but maybe it’s just as well he never saw her again …”

“Why?” I asked.

She didn’t answer but walked away, sat down on her chair by the window, and went on shelling peas. Without looking at me, she said, “Did you know the girl?”

I kept a tight grip on the photo, looked at my landlady, and told her about the soap factory, about the Number 9 terminus, and the pretty girl who always got on there.

“Is that all?”

“Yes,” I said. She tipped the peas into a sieve, turned on the faucet, and I could see her thin back.

“When you see her, you’ll understand why it’s a good thing he never saw her again …”

“See her?” I asked.

She dried her hands on her apron, came over to me, and carefully took away the photo. Her face seemed thinner than ever, her eyes looked past me, but she gently laid her hand on my left arm. “She lives in the room next to yours, Anna does. We always call her our pale Anna because she’s got such a white face. You really mean you haven’t seen her yet?”

“No,” I said, “I haven’t, though I guess I’ve heard her a few times. What’s wrong with her, then?”

“I hate to tell you, but it’s better for you to know. Her face has been completely destroyed, it’s full of scars. She was thrown into a plate-glass window by a bomb blast. You won’t recognize her.”

That evening I waited a long while before hearing steps in the hall, but the first time I was wrong: it was the tall Yugoslav, who looked at me in astonishment when I dashed out into the hall. Embarrassed, I said “Good evening” and went back into my room.

I tried to imagine her face with scars, but I couldn’t, and whenever I saw her face, it was beautiful even with the scars. I thought about the soap factory, about my parents, and about another girl I used to go out with often at that time. Her name was Elizabeth, but she was known as Puss; when I kissed her, she always laughed, and I felt like an idiot. I had written her postcards from the front, and she used to send me little parcels of homemade cookies that were always in crumbs by the time they arrived; she sent me cigarettes and newspapers, and in one of her letters she wrote, “Our boys will win the war all right, and I’m so proud you’re one of them.”

But I wasn’t at all proud to be one of them, and when I was due for leave I didn’t write and tell her; I went out with the daughter of a tobacconist who lived in our apartment house. I gave the tobacconist’s daughter soap sent me by my firm, and she gave me cigarettes, and we went to the movies together, and we went dancing, and once, when her parents were away, she took me up to her room and I pressed her down onto the couch in the dark; but when I bent over her, she switched on the light and smiled slyly up at me, and in the glare I saw Hitler on the wall, a colored photo, and all around Hitler’s picture, arranged in the shape of a heart on the pink wallpaper, was a series of men wearing heroic expressions, postcards thumbtacked to the wall, and men in steel helmets cut out of illustrated weeklies. I left the girl lying there on the couch, lit a cigarette, and went away. Later on, both girls wrote postcards to me at the front telling me I had behaved badly, but I didn’t answer …