The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (113 page)

“Please,” she said gently, “don’t kiss me. All morning I’ve been listening to dirty stories about various kinds of love. If you want to be nice, rub my feet.” He threw down his briefcase and the parcel, knelt down by the bed, and took her feet in his hands. “How sweet you are,” she said. “I only hope you don’t get a male-nurse complex—with your kind one has to be so careful—and please,” she said, lowering her voice, “let’s stay here, I’m too tired to go out to eat. Anyway, our social worker, who looks after employee relations, always regards my absence at lunchtime as antisocial.”

“For God’s sake,” he said, “why don’t you quit the whole ghastly business? Those swine.”

“Which ones do you mean? My bosses or the other girls?”

“Your bosses,” he said, “what you call dirty stories are the outward expression of the only pleasures those girls have; your bourgeois ears …”

“I have feudal ears, in case my ears require a sociological epithet.”

“Feudalism succumbed to the bourgeoisie: it married into industry, thereby becoming bourgeois. You are confusing what is accidental in you with what is typical; to attach so much importance to a name by regarding it as valueless as you regard yours is a form of late-bourgeois idealism. Isn’t it enough for you that soon—before God and man, as your kind would put it—your name will be Marie Müller?”

“Your hands do feel nice,” she said. “When will you be in a position to support a wife and children with them?”

“As soon as you take the trouble to work out how much we’ll have to live on when we’re married and you go on working.”

She sat up and recited in a schoolgirl singsong: “You get two hundred forty-three a month, that’s the highest category; as an assistant lecturer you earn two hundred, of which one hundred twenty-five is available because it’s earned in conjunction with your university training. That makes three hundred sixty-eight—but your father earns seven hundred ten net, i.e., two hundred sixty more than the free limit, which means that you, since you’re an only child, have your income reduced by one hundred thirty. In other words, you’re working as an assistant lecturer for nothing—net balance: two hundred thirty-eight. As soon as we get married, half of what I earn above three hundred—i.e., exactly two marks and fifteen pfennigs—will be deducted, so that your total net income will amount to two hundred thirty-five marks and eighty-five pfennigs.”

“Congratulations,” he said. “So you really got down to it?”

“Yes,” she said, “and the most important thing I worked out is that you’re working for precisely nothing for this Schmeck-bastard …”

He took his hands off her legs. “Schmeck-bastard—what makes you say that?”

She looked at him, swung her legs round, sat up on the edge of the bed; he pushed his slippers toward her. “What’s Schmeck been up to? Something new? Tell me—never mind my feet now—go on, tell me, what’s he been up to?”

“Can you wait a moment?” he said; he picked up his briefcase and the parcel from the floor, took the two remaining cigarettes from his breast pocket, lit them both, gave one to Marie, threw briefcase and parcel down beside Marie on the bed, went over to the bookshelf, and pulled out his diary, a fat exercise book standing between Kierkegaard and Kotzebue, sat down at Marie’s feet beside the bed.

“Listen,” he said. “Here. ‘December 13. During a walk with Marie through the park, suddenly struck by the idea of a “Sociology of the Mackintosh.” ’”

“That’s right,” said Marie, “you told me about it at the time. Remember my objections?”

“Sure.” He turned some more pages. “Here. ‘January 2. Began work on it. Outlines, ideas—also viewed material. Went to Meier’s Menswear and tried to get a look at their customer list, but no luck …’ It goes on—January, February, daily entries about the progress of the work.”

“Yes, of course,” said Marie, “and at the end of February you dictated the first thirty pages to me.”

“Yes, and here, this is what I was looking for: ‘March 1. Went to see Schmeck, showed him the first pages of my draft, read parts of it aloud to him. Schmeck asked me to leave the manuscript with him so he could look through it …’”

“That’s right, and the next day you went home to your parents.”

“And then to England. Came back yesterday—and today was Schmeck’s first lecture, and the audience was more interested, more enthralled, more ecstatic than ever, because the subject was so new, so thrilling—at least for the audience. I’ll let you guess what Schmeck’s lecture was about. Try and guess, my dear baroness.”

“If you call me ‘baroness’ once more, I’ll call you—no”—she smiled—“don’t worry, I won’t call you that, even if you do call me ‘baroness.’ Would it hurt your feelings if I called you that?”

“If you called me that, no,” he said gently. “You can call me what you like. But you have no idea how wonderful it is when they call out after you, whisper as you go by, when they write it after your name on the bulletin board—‘Rudolf, Son of the Working Class.’ I’m a freak, you see, I’m the great phenomenon, I’m one of those of whom there are only five in every hundred, only fifty in every thousand, and—the higher you go, the more fantastic the ratio—I’m one of those of
whom there are only five thousand in every hundred thousand. I am really and truly the son of a working man who is studying at a West German university.”

“At the East German universities I guess it’s the other way round; ninety-five percent are from working-class families.”

“Over there I’d be something absurdly ordinary; here I’m the famous example in discussions, arguments, counterarguments, a real live unadulterated Son of the Working Class—and talented too, very talented. But you still haven’t tried to guess what Schmeck was paying homage to today.”

“Television, perhaps.”

Müller laughed. “No, the big snobs are now in
favor
of television.”

“Not”—Marie stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray Müller was holding—“not the sociology of the mackintosh?”

“What else,” said Rudolf in a low voice, “what else?”

“No,” said Marie, “he
can’t
do that.”

“But he has done it, and there were sentences in his lecture that I recognized and remembered how much fun I had had formulating …”

“Too much fun, it seems …”

“Yes, I know—he quoted whole paragraphs.”

He got up off the floor and began pacing up and down in the room. “You know how it is when you try to figure out whether you’re quoting yourself or someone else—when you hear something you think you’ve heard or said before, and you try to figure out whether you said it before yourself or whether you only thought it, whether you recognize it or read it—and you go crazy because your memory’s not functioning properly?”

“Yes,” said Marie, “I always used to worry about whether or not I’d had anything to drink before holy communion. You think you’ve had a drink of water because so often, so many thousands of times, you have had a drink of water on an empty stomach—but actually you haven’t had anything to drink …”

“And yet you can’t come up with any convincing proof—that’s where a diary is so important.”

“You needn’t have worried about this particular question: it’s obvious that Schmeck’s robbed you.”

“And done me out of my thesis.”

“Oh, my God,” said Marie—she stood up next to the bed, put her hand on Rudolf’s shoulder, kissed his neck—“oh, my God, you’re right, that’s true. He’s cut the ground from under your feet. Can’t you sue him?”

Müller laughed. “Every university on the face of the earth, from Massachusetts to Göttingen to Lima, from Oxford to Nagasaki, will burst out in one united, crazy laugh when a person by the name of Rudolf Müller, Son of the Working Class, gets up and claims to have been robbed by Schmeck. Even the Warraus will join in the derisive laughter, for they know too that the wise white man Schmeck is omniscient in the ways of mankind. But—and this is what would happen if I sued him—if Schmeck got up and said he had been robbed by a person by the name of Müller, they would all nod their heads, even the Hottentots.”

“He ought to be exterminated,” said Marie.

“At last you’re beginning to think in nonbourgeois terms.”

“I don’t understand how you can still laugh,” said Marie.

“There’s a very good reason for the fact that I can still laugh,” said Müller. He went over to the bed, picked up the parcel, took it over to the table, and began to undo the string. He patiently untied all the knots, so slowly that Marie jerked open the drawer, took out a penknife, and silently held it out to him.

“Exterminated, yes,” said Müller, “that might be an idea, but not for anything in the world would I cut this string: that would be cutting right into my mother’s heart. When she opens a parcel she carefully unties the string, rolls it up, and puts it aside for future use—the next time she comes here she’ll ask me about the string, and if I can’t produce it she will predict the imminent end of the world.”

Marie snapped the knife shut again, put it back in the drawer, leaned against Müller while he unwrapped the paper from his parcel and carefully folded it up. “You haven’t told me yet why you can still laugh,” she said. “After all, that was the vilest, filthiest, most disgusting trick that Schmeck could play on you—when you think how he wanted to make you his chief assistant and how he’s prophesied a brilliant future for you.”

“Well,” said Müller, “do you really want to know why?”

She nodded. “Tell me,” she said.

He put down the parcel, kissed her. “Damn it all,” he murmured, “if it weren’t for you I would have done something desperate.”

“Do it anyway,” she said quietly.

“What?”

“Do something desperate to him,” said Marie, “I’ll help you.”

“What do you want me to do, really kill him?”

“Do something physical to him, not mental—half kill him.”

“How?”

“Maybe beat him up—but let’s have something to eat first. I’m hungry and I have to go off again in thirty-five minutes.”

“I’m not so sure you will go off again.”

He carefully folded up a second layer of paper, undid a piece of thinner string tied round the core of the parcel, a shoebox, removed the sheet of notepaper stuck between string and box lid (“Every parcel should contain the address inside as well as out”), and at last, as Marie sighed, he took off the lid of the shoebox: salami, ham, cake, cigarettes, and a package of glutamate. Marie picked up the notepaper from the table and read in a low voice, “My dear boy, I am glad you could make the long journey to England so cheaply. It is wonderful what they are doing these days at the universities. Tell us about London when you come home. Remember how proud we are of you. Now you are really working on your Ph.D. thesis—I just can’t believe it. Your loving Mother.”

“They really are proud of me,” said Müller.

“And they have every reason to be,” said Marie. She put away the contents of the parcel in a little cupboard below the bookshelves, took out an opened package of tea. “I’ll run down and make us some tea.”

“It’s funny,” said Marie, “but when I propped my bike up against the railing today at noon, I knew that I wouldn’t be going back after lunch to that plastics nightmare. One does have premonitions like that. Once when I came home from school I threw my bike against the hedge just like I used to every day; it always sank halfway in, tipped over, the handlebars would get caught in a branch and the front wheel would stick up in the air—and as I threw my bike in there, I knew I wouldn’t be going back to school next day, that I would never be going back to any
school. It wasn’t just that I was fed up with it—there was much more to it than that. I simply knew that it would be wicked for me to go to school for even one more day. Father couldn’t get over it; you see, it was exactly four weeks before my graduation, but I said to him: ‘Have you ever heard of the sin of gluttony?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I have, but you haven’t been guilty of gluttony as far as school’s concerned.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s just an example—but when you swallow one more mouthful of coffee or one more piece of cake than at a given point you ought to drink or eat, isn’t that gluttony?’ ‘It is,’ he said, ‘and I can imagine such a thing as spiritual gluttony, only—’ but I interrupted him and said, ‘There’s not room for another thing in me, I already feel like a stuffed goose.’ ‘It’s a pity,’ said Father, ‘that this has to happen to you four weeks before your graduation. It’s such a useful thing to have.’ ‘Useful for what?’ I asked. ‘You mean university?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, and I said, ‘No, if I’m going to work in a factory, then it’s going to be a real one’—and that’s what I did. Does it hurt you when I tell you things like this?”

“Yes,” said Müller, “it hurts very much to see someone throwing away something that for countless people is the object of all their dreams and aspirations. It’s also possible to laugh about clothes, or to despise them, when one has them hanging in the closet or is in a position to buy them any time—it’s possible to laugh about anything one has always taken for granted.”

“But I didn’t laugh about it, and I didn’t despise it, and it’s true that I preferred to work in a real factory rather than in a university.”

“Oh, I believe you,” he said. “I do, just as I believe you’re really a Catholic.”

“By the way, I got a parcel from home yesterday too,” said Marie. “Guess what was in it.”

“Salami, ham, cake, cigarettes,” said Müller, “and no glutamate—and, needless to say, you cut the string with scissors, screwed the paper up into a ball and …”

“Exactly,” said Marie, “exactly, only you’ve forgotten something …”

“No, I haven’t,” said Müller. “I haven’t forgotten anything, you interrupted me, that’s all. Then you immediately bit into the salami, then the cake, and right after that you lit a cigarette.”

“Come on, let’s go to the movies, and then we’ll half kill Schmeck this evening.”

“Today?” said Müller.

“Of course today,” said Marie. “Whenever you think something is right, you should do it at once—and a woman should fight at her man’s side.”

It was dark by the time they came out of the movie, and they found the bicycle-parking attendant in a state of sullen resentment; Marie’s ramshackle bicycle was the sole remaining one in his charge. An old man, his coat almost trailing on the ground, rubbing his hands to warm them, walking up and down muttering curses under his breath.