The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (111 page)

I’ll catch it again, he thought, because the door hasn’t been fixed.

The children stood by the roadside, waving their flowers at the soldiers. So the soldiers rode into Bethlehem between two lanes of white lilies, and the man who had come for Joseph thought: I believe the shepherds were right in everything they told us …

At the entrance to the basement he was met by stifling, sour-smelling air. He walked slowly down the slimy steps, groping his way into a yellowish darkness: from somewhere water was dripping, there must be a leak in the roof or a pipe must have burst. The water mingled with dust and rubble, making the steps as slippery as the bottom of a fish tank. He walked on. From a door at the back came some light; in the semidarkness he could make out a sign on his right saying “X
-RAY
R
OOM
. D
O
N
OT
E
NTER
.” He walked toward the light; it was yellow and soft, and the way it flickered told him that it must be a candle. As he walked on, he looked into dark rooms where he could discern a jumble of chairs, leather sofas, and collapsed cupboards.

The door from which the light came was wide open. Beside the big altar candle stood a nun in a blue habit, tossing some salad in an enamel bowl; the heap of little green leaves had a whitish coating, and he could hear the dressing gently swishing around at the bottom of the bowl. The nun’s broad pink hand made the leaves go round and round, and when sometimes a few fell out over the edge, she would calmly pick them up and throw them back in again. Beside the candlestick stood a large saucepan giving off an insipid smell of soup—of hot water, onions, and some kind of bouillon cubes.

In a loud voice he said, “Good evening!”

The nun turned around, alarm on her broad, rosy face, and said softly, “Oh, my goodness—what do you want?” Her hands were dripping with the milky dressing, and a few bits of lettuce leaf were clinging to her soft, childlike arms. “Oh, my goodness,” she said, “you did scare me! Do you want something?”

“I’m hungry,” he said in a low voice.

But he was no longer looking at the nun. His gaze had shifted to the right, into an open cupboard whose door had been ripped out by air pressure; the jagged remains of the plywood door still hung in
the hinges, and the floor was covered with crumbling flakes of paint. The cupboard contained loaves of bread, many loaves. They lay in a careless pile, more than a dozen wrinkled loaves. Instantly his mouth started watering, and, gulping down the surge of saliva, he thought: I’ll be eating bread, whatever happens I’ll be eating bread … He looked at the nun: her childlike eyes showed compassion and fear. “Hungry?” she said. “You’re hungry?” and looked with raised eyebrows at the bowl of salad, the pot of soup, and the pile of bread.

“Bread,” he said, “some bread, please.”

She went over to the cupboard, took out a loaf, put it on the table, and started looking in a drawer for a knife.

“Thanks,” he said softly. “Don’t bother, bread can be broken too …”

The nun tucked the bowl of salad under one arm, picked up the pot of soup, and walked out past him.

He hastily broke off a hunk of bread: his chin was trembling, and he could feel the muscles of his mouth and jaws twitching. Then he dug his teeth into the soft, uneven surface of the bread where he had broken it apart. He was eating bread. The bread was stale, must have been a week old, dry rye bread with a red label from some bakery or other. He continued to dig in with his teeth, finishing off even the brown, leathery crust; then he grasped the loaf in both hands and broke off another piece. Eating with his right hand, he clasped the loaf with his left; he went on eating, sat down on the edge of a wooden crate, and, each time he broke off a piece, bit first into the soft center, feeling all around his mouth the touch of the bread like a dry caress, while his teeth went on digging.

I don’t know how it could have happened; after all, I’m no longer a child, I’m almost fifty and should have known what I was doing. Yet I did it, and, to top it all, when I was already off duty and actually nothing more should have happened to me. But it did happen, and so on Christmas Eve I was given notice.

Everything had gone off without a hitch: I had served the guests at dinner without knocking over a glass, without tipping over a gravy boat, without spilling any red wine, had pocketed my tips and withdrawn to my room, thrown jacket and tie onto the bed, slipped my suspenders off my shoulders, opened my bottle of beer, and I was just lifting the lid of the tureen and sniffing—pea soup. That’s what I had ordered from the chef, with bacon, without onions, but thickened, well thickened. I’m sure you don’t know what “well thickened” means: it would take too long to try and explain this to you—it took my mother three hours to explain what she meant by “well thickened.” Well, the soup smelled glorious, and I dipped in the ladle, filled my plate, could feel and see that the soup was thoroughly well thickened—and at that moment my door opened and in came the young rascal I’d noticed at dinner. Small, pale, certainly no older than eight, he had allowed his plate to be piled high and then, without touching any of it, had it all taken away again—turkey and chestnuts, truffles and veal, and not even the dessert, which after all no child ever passes up, he had not so much as touched with a spoon; he’d allowed five pear halves and half a bucket of chocolate sauce to be tipped onto his plate, and he hadn’t touched a thing, not a thing, yet all the time not looking as if he were fussy but like someone with a definite plan in mind.

He closed the door quietly behind him, looked at my plate, then at me. “What’s that?” he asked.

“That’s pea soup,” I said.

“There’s no such thing,” he said with a smile. “That only exists in the fairy tale about the king who lost his way in the forest.”

“Well,” I said, “one thing’s for sure: that’s pea soup.”

“May I have a taste?”

“Sure, go ahead,” I said, “come and sit down.”

Well, he ate three plates of pea soup while I sat beside him on my bed, drinking beer and smoking, and I could actually see his little stomach becoming rounder. While I sat on the bed, I thought about a lot of things that I have meanwhile forgotten again—ten minutes, fifteen, quite a long time, time enough to think about many things, about fairy tales, about grown-ups, parents, and suchlike. Finally the little fellow gave up. I took his place and finished off the soup, a plate and a half, while he sat on the bed beside me. Maybe I shouldn’t have looked into the empty tureen, for he said, “Oh, dear, I’ve eaten up all your soup!”

“Never mind,” I said, “that was plenty for me. Did you come here to eat pea soup?”

“No, I was just looking for someone to help me find a pit. I thought you might know of one.”

Pit, pit … then it dawned on me—you need one for playing marbles, and I said, “Well, you know, it’ll be difficult to find a pit here in this building.”

“Can’t we make one?” he asked. “Just scoop one on the floor of the room?”

I don’t know how it could have happened, but I did it, and when the boss asked me, “How could you do such a thing?” I was at a loss for an answer. Maybe I should have said: Haven’t we promised to fulfill our guests’ every wish in order to make sure they have a happy and harmonious Christmas? But I didn’t, I said nothing. After all, I couldn’t have foreseen that the child’s mother would trip over the hole in the floor and break her ankle, at night, when she came back drunk from the bar. How could I know that? And that the insurance people would demand an explanation, and so on and so forth? Third-party liability, labor tribunal, and over and over again: incredible, incredible. Should I have explained to them that for three hours, three whole hours, I played marbles with the boy, that he always won, that he even drank some of my beer—until finally, dead tired, he fell into bed? I said nothing; but when they asked me if it was I who had scooped out the hole in the
hardwood floor, I couldn’t deny it. The pea soup was the only thing they never found out about: that will remain our secret.

Thirty-five years in my profession, always conducted myself impeccably. I don’t know how it could have happened; I should have known what I was doing, yet I did it. I took the elevator down to the janitor, borrowed a hammer and chisel, took the elevator up again, chipped a hole in the hardwood floor. After all, I couldn’t have foreseen that his mother would trip over it when she came home drunk at four in the morning from the bar. To be quite frank, I’m not all that upset, not even at being fired. Good waiters are always in demand.

I am prepared to believe almost anything of the Rhine, but I have never been able to believe in its carefree summer mood; I have looked for this carefree mood but never found it. Perhaps it is a flaw in my vision or in my character that prevents me from discovering this aspect.

My Rhine is dark and brooding, it is too much a river of merchant cunning for me to be able to believe in its youthful summertime face.

I have traveled on its white ships, have walked over its bordering hills, cycled from Mainz to Cologne, from Rüdesheim to Deutz, from Cologne to Xanten, in fall, spring, and summer; in winter I have stayed at small riverside hotels, and my Rhine was never a summer Rhine.

My Rhine is the one I remember from earliest childhood: a dark, brooding river that I have always feared and loved. I was born three minutes’ walk away from it. Before I could talk, when I could barely walk, I was already playing on its banks: we would wade knee-deep in the fallen leaves along the avenue, looking for the paper pinwheels we had entrusted to the east wind, the wind that, too fast for our childish legs, drove the pinwheels westward toward the old moats.

It was fall, the weather was stormy, heavy clouds and the acrid smoke from ships’ funnels hung in the air; in the evenings the wind would subside, fog would lie over the Rhine valley, foghorns toot somberly, red and green signal lights at the mastheads float past as if on phantom ships, and we would lean over the bridge railings listening to the strained, high-pitched signal horns of the raftsmen as they traveled downriver.

Winter came: ice floes as big as football fields, white, covered with a thick layer of snow; on such clear days the Rhine was very quiet, the only passengers were the crows being carried by the ice floes toward Holland, calmly riding along on their huge, fantastically elegant taxis.

For many weeks the Rhine remained quiet: only a few narrow, gray channels between the big white floes. Seagulls sailed through the arches of the bridges, ice floes splintered against the piers, and in
February or March we waited breathlessly for the great drifts coming down from the Upper Rhine. Ice masses evoking the Arctic came from upriver, and it was impossible to believe that this was a river on whose banks wine grew, good wine. Layer upon layer of cracking, splintering ice drifted past villages and towns, uprooting trees, crushing houses, less compacted, already less menacing, by the time it reached Cologne.

There is no doubt at all about there being two Rhines: the Upper, the wine drinker’s Rhine, and the Lower, the schnapps drinker’s Rhine—less well known and on whose behalf I would put in my plea: a Rhine that to this day has never really come to terms with its east bank. Where in bygone times smoke used to rise from the sacrificial fires of Teutonic tribes, now smoke rises from chimney stacks—from Cologne downriver to well north of Duisburg: red, yellow, and green flames, the ghostly silhouette of great industries, while the western, left bank, is more reminiscent of a pastoral riverbank: cows, willows, reeds, and the traces of the Romans’ winter encampments. Here they stood, those Roman soldiers, staring at the unreconciled east bank; sacrificing to Venus, to Dionysus, celebrating the birth of Agrippina: a Rhenish girl was the daughter of Germanicus, the granddaughter of Caligula, the mother of Nero, the wife and murderess of Claudius, later murdered by her son, Nero. Rhenish blood in the veins of Nero! She was born in an area of barracks—even in those days, horsemen’s barracks, sailors’ barracks, legionaries’ barracks—and, at the western end of Cologne, the villas of merchants, administrators, officers; bathhouses, swimming baths. Modern times have still not quite caught up with that luxury lying buried beneath the rubble of the centuries, thirty feet below our children’s playgrounds.

This river, the old, green Rhine, has seen too many armies—Romans, Teutons, Huns, Cossacks, robber barons, victors and vanquished, and, representing history’s most recent heralds, those who came from farthest away: the boys from Wisconsin, Cleveland, or Manila, who carried on the trade started by the Roman mercenaries in the year o. This broad, green-gray, flowing Rhine has seen too much trade, too much history, for me to be able to believe in its youthful summer face. It is easier to believe in its brooding nature, its darkness; the grim ruins of the robber-baron castles on its hills are not the relics of a very joyful interregnum. Here Roman frippery was bartered in the year
o for Teutonic feminine favors, and in the year 1947 Zeiss binoculars were bartered for coffee and cigarettes, those little white incense offerings to the transitory nature of life. Not even the Nibelungs, who lived where the wine grows, were a very joyful race; blood was their coin, one side of which was loyalty, the other treachery.

The wine drinker’s Rhine ends roughly at Bonn, then passes through a sort of quarantine that reaches as far as Cologne, where the schnapps drinker’s Rhine begins. To many this may mean that the Rhine stops here. My Rhine starts here, switches to tranquillity and brooding without forgetting what it had learned and witnessed farther up. It becomes more and more serious toward its mouth until it dies in the North Sea, its waters mingling with those of the open sea. The Rhine of the lovely Middle Rhine madonnas flows toward Rembrandt and is swallowed up by the mists of the North Sea.

My Rhine is the winter Rhine, the Rhine of the crows traveling northwest on their ice floes toward the Lowlands, a Breughel Rhine whose colors are green-gray, black, and white, much gray, and the brown façades of the buildings that wait for the approach of summer before sprucing up again; the quiet Rhine that is still sufficiently elemental to ward off the bustling of the worshipers of Mercury for at least a few weeks, maintaining its own sovereignty, abandoning its old bed to birds, fish, and ice floes. And I am still scared of the Rhine that in spring can become vicious, when household goods come drifting down the river, drowned cattle, uprooted trees, when posters saying W
ARNING
! in red are fixed to the trees along its banks, when the muddy tides rise, when the chains mooring the huge, floating boathouses threaten to snap—scared of the Rhine that murmurs so eerily and so gently through the dreams of children, a dark god bent on showing that it still demands sacrifices. Heathen, pristine Nature, in no way beautiful, it widens out like a sea, thrusts itself, into dwellings, rises greenly in cellars, surges out of canals, roars its way along under bridges: Undine’s mighty father.