The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (115 page)

The fisherman, finally wide awake, now thaws and gives the tourist a reassuring pat on the back. The latter’s worried expression strikes him as a sign of touching although unwarranted concern.

“I even have enough for tomorrow and the day after,” he says, to put the stranger’s mind at rest. “Will you have one of my cigarettes?”

“Thanks, I will.”

Cigarettes are placed between lips—a fifth click—the stranger sits down on the edge of the boat, shaking his head, and puts down his camera, for he now needs both hands to give emphasis to his words.

“I don’t wish to interfere in your personal affairs,” he says, “but just imagine if you were to go out a second, a third, maybe even a fourth time today, and you were to catch three, four, five, maybe even ten dozen mackerel … just imagine that!”

The fisherman nods.

“You would,” the tourist continues, “go out not only today but tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, indeed on every favorable day, two, three, maybe four times. Do you know what would happen?”

The fisherman shakes his head.

“In less than a year you would be able to buy a motor, in two years a second boat, in three or four years you might have a small cutter, and with two boats or the cutter you would obviously catch much more. One day you would have two cutters, you would”—from sheer enthusiasm his voice cracks for a few seconds—“you would build a small cold-storage plant, maybe a smokehouse, later a pickling factory, you would fly around in your own helicopter, spot schools of fish, and direct your cutters by radio. You could acquire the salmon rights, open up a fish restaurant, export lobster direct to Paris without a middleman—and then …” Once again words fail the stranger in his enthusiasm. Shaking his head, grieved to the very core of his being, and having lost almost
all pleasure in his vacation, he looks out onto the peacefully advancing tide where the uncaught fish are happily leaping around.

“And then …” he says, but again he is speechless in his agitation. The fisherman pats him on the back as if he were a child with a fit of choking. “Then what?” he asks softly.

“Then,” says the stranger with restrained enthusiasm, “then, without a care in the world, you could sit here in the harbor, doze in the sun—and look at the glorious sea.”

“But I’m already doing that,” says the fisherman. “I sit here in the harbor without a care in the world and doze—it was only your clicking that disturbed me.”

And so the thus enlightened tourist walked pensively away, for at one time he had believed that he too was working so as someday not to have to work anymore, and no trace of pity for the shabbily dressed fisherman remained in him, only a little envy.

What he liked best were the slender wine bottles; they fitted so neatly into his coat pocket. He never carried around more than would fit into his coat pockets: a bottle of wine and a piece of cheese in one; bread, tobacco, cigarette papers, matches in the other. No handkerchief, no toothbrush. What soap he needed he found in the toilets on the trains, where he also blew his nose with his fingers and washed his shirts and socks, letting them dry on his warm body. The maximum he would carry in his hands was a paper bag containing some fried chicken, bread, and fruit: after a meal he could toss the remains out the train window.

Whenever he entered a first-class compartment he was aware of that brief hesitation, as if one of the passengers were about to say: Excuse me, but this is first class. He killed this brief hesitation with a laugh. Then, whenever the conductor came along and tickets had to be produced, there was that slight tension followed by two things: surprise and relief when he produced the green-and-white piece of cardboard from his pocket. They didn’t even dare look up when he belched. The women either moved away from him or too close to him, neither of which he liked.

What surprised him most was the lipsticks. Whenever a woman took one out of her handbag and put it to her lips, he laughed aloud: he hadn’t imagined that this cult had penetrated so far north and become so widespread. This lack of embarrassment on the part of the women and innocence of the men, who failed to recognize their own symbol, amused him. In the course of his long journey he realized that the women made equally innocent use of this obvious symbol, and he laughed even louder. No feeling for signs and wonders. Only the waiters seemed aware of something: they served him without venomous
servility and, without his having to ask, brought him only food he could eat with his fingers—chicken, bread, fruit—and they weren’t even surprised at the generosity of his tips.

Twice, in Vienna and Munich, there had been a lengthy stop during which he had walked to the nearest tavern, sat down at the bar, ordered a beer, kissed the palm of the woman who served him, and stroked her forearms, and each woman had ruffled his hair with her free hand, murmuring, “What are you looking for here?,” and each time he had replied, “Europa.” One of them—he couldn’t remember whether in Vienna or Munich—had murmured, “Europa? Not here!”; the other, “Europa? But surely not here?” And one of them had said when he kissed her palm, “God!,” and the other, “Bull!”

He tried out the strange place names as if tasting wine: Munich unpleasant, Ulm pleasant; Stuttgart and Frankfurt unpleasant; Mainz—he nodded. The Rhine was good, very good; he stood at the window while the train traveled beside it; good, he nodded to himself as he smoked. At Koblenz (unpleasant) darkness fell, so he went back into the compartment and slept until he was awakened by a shout that sounded like a shot: Bonn! He laughed and took a long swig from his bottle of wine.

Cologne tasted unpleasant; he had to change trains there. On the train to Ostend he sat across from a white-haired gentleman who smiled at him over newspaper, spectacles, and a purple ascot, put aside the newspaper, and removed his spectacles; then he heard in his own language, “Tell me, where are you from?”

“Don’t you know?” he said, and his mouth was filled with a wonderful taste when he could speak his own language.

The old gentleman nodded, no longer smiling. “What are you looking for here?”

“Europa.”

“And where are you going?”

“To London.”

The old gentleman laughed and shook his head. “But Europa isn’t in London.”

“Where, then—where is she?”

“Not too far from Aachen.”

“And where is Aachen?”

“Next stop but one.”

The old gentleman was the first person to accept the proffered bottle of wine and drink from it. “God!” he said, as he lowered it from his lips. “That’s some wine.” And as he handed back the bottle he asked quietly, “Why are you sad? You’ll find her all right.”

“It’s not sadness you see in my eyes, it’s envy.”

“Envy? Of what?”

“Of you, because you’re all mortal.”

“You’re mortal, too,” said the old gentleman as he tucked his newspaper under his arm, stood up, and lifted a bag down from the rack. The train came to a halt. “Don’t forget—the next stop’s Aachen.”

He stayed out in the corridor, smoking and musing: Had the old gentleman been Death? Purple and white, and spoke his language so beautifully. A young woman with a twitching face hobbled toward him with a cane, tried to pass him; he took her twitching face in his hands like a fruit, it became smooth and soft; passed his hands two or three times along her crooked spine as if it were a musical instrument. He took away her cane and tossed it into the corridor; she groaned, “God, oh God!,” tried to kiss his hands. He disengaged himself, ran into the next car, pulled the emergency brake, and jumped off the train before it jerked to a halt.

He lay smiling on his back among beanstalks, heard shouting, saw lanterns swinging; a voice called out, “It was that Greek, that foreign worker!” He tore off a few bean pods, ate the young beans out of their downy shells, drank some wine, waited until the train moved off after much swinging of lanterns. He stood up and, without waiting to brush the earth off his coat and trousers, walked across to the road, toward the next village. What he read on the signpost pleased him greatly: “L
ANGERWEHE
=L
ONGBORN
.” At the next tavern he saw behind the glass door the shadow of the landlady, who was about to lock up; he gently pushed open the door, looked into her broad, tired face, and said, “Give me a quick beer, will you?” She locked the door behind him, went to the bar, took a glass from the shelf, and held it under the beer tap.

“You don’t happen to be able to drive a car, do you?” she asked.

“Of course I can,” he said.

“How about a truck?”

“Sure.”

“D’you have a license?”

He fished it out of his pocket, handed it to her, and she studied it carefully.

“Tauros?” she said. “Doesn’t that mean ‘bull’?”

“My, my!” he said. “Such erudition!”

“I went to a convent school,” she said, “you learn a lot there. Okay. You’re hired. Let’s give it a try.”

And that’s how he became a beer-truck driver.

Not only was her first name unusual; even more so was the fact that she moved in with that fellow Schmitz, an electrician at a paper mill who had inherited a cottage with stable and barn, plus a few acres of land; a bit of a dreamer who to some people seemed morose and somewhat straitlaced because he maintained a stubborn silence in the taverns while others—salesmen, house painters, mailmen—talked about women and sex. He was thought to be a “queer” because he never had anything to do with women or girls, never went to dances—except for that one time with a cousin from Langerwehe who simply dragged him off in her car because she had no escort for the evening. That night at the dance he met her school friend with the unusual name. Suddenly he could actually dance; he danced many times with her, later drew her by the hand through the gaily lit beer garden to the edge of the field, tried to embrace her among the parked cars. “Not here,” she said softly.

“Where, then?” he asked.

“In the forest,” she said, “far, far away from all these cars. Not where there are cars around.”

She drew him away by the hand, deep into the forest.

She gave up her study of engineering and moved in with him in the hamlet of Frauenbroich.

The nuns at the school had expected more of her. “Europa,” so her final report had read, “combines intuition and intellectuality in a manner that warrants the expectation of great things from her.” The nuns had expected not piety from her but boldness: “The new architectural dimension of a renewed Christian spirit,” was how the principal had
expressed it. Their annoyance with her was forgotten: that she had usually hidden in the garden to get out of church and prayers, preferring to weed or help with the fruit harvest, and then that affair with the elderly gardener, confessed to not by her but by him. He claimed that she—she was fifteen—had seduced him. She answered all reproaches with the single sentence, “I am a woman, I am a woman, I am a woman.” Later with a truck driver who was delivering cement for the new gymnasium, and again the single sentence from her, “I am a woman.” Both men were married, scandals just barely avoided. The comment of her home-room teacher, “It is her lack of conscience that makes her so beautiful.” High point of her school fame: her meditation on the word “vanish” with its associations of evanescence, thin air, evaporation. The school inspector’s comment, “Really worthy of publication.” At the same time her astonishing insight into mathematical problems. She did everything “effortlessly”: picking fruit, athletics, physics.

Now she was living with that electrician Schmitz, looking after his house, the cow, the chickens, spending days wandering about in the forests collecting berries and mushrooms; putting up preserves, mowing the hay. In Frauenbroich and the surrounding hamlets, people said she also carried on with men in the forest, but no man was ever found who boasted of having carried on with her.

Schmitz was good to her, she was good to him; her origins remained as obscure to him as they had always been to the nuns. Foundling, orphan. Whenever Schmitz asked her about it, she would murmur, “I don’t know where I come from.” When Schmitz came home and asked her how she was feeling, she would answer as she had answered the nuns when they had asked her the same question, “Like a stranger, but fine.”

At night she would often place her right arm under his neck, draw his left arm under her own neck, hum to herself, and say things that to Schmitz’s ears sounded odd.

“The loveliest word in your language—vanish.”

“Why do you say ‘your language’—isn’t it yours too?”

He could feel on his arm that she shook her head.

“You know, don’t you,” she said one night, “that I’m not going to stay with you?”

She could feel in the dark on her arm that he nodded his head.

Schmitz was never afraid, yet he was apprehensive. It seemed to him that she had been with him forever, as if she had always been with him. “Eternity”—the word became for him as long and as broad as it was; time lost its meaning for him: one July morning they had emerged from the forest together, and she had stayed with him; he had taken his vacation, plus some unpaid weeks, and it was early September before he took on the sales depot for bottled beer. He felt as if eternity lay behind him and time lay ahead of him. Even words dropped away, became unfamiliar. “Marry”—he felt as if he had never heard the word; cars—he saw them, yet knew they didn’t exist. Europa’s presence extinguished words and realities.

“When I have vanished from you,” she told him early in September, “take Trude Weihrauch. She is a woman.”

Next morning at breakfast the landlady scolded him for his manners—for refusing to use a knife, simply tearing the bread into pieces and dipping them into the butter, then into the salt. With a scornful laugh he deigned to use a spoon to scrape the eggs out of their shells. Bread, butter, eggs, salt, and coffee: he enjoyed them all. He studied his route on the map, had her explain the list of agencies to him, where they were located in the hamlets; problems of bottle deposits, and the main principle of the business: “Cash only. After all, they’ve sold the beer, made their profit, and can pay cash for their new supplies. Only that new fellow, Schmitz in Frauenbroich, you can give him credit for a while.” Luckily the truck had already been loaded by his predecessor. “You’ll be late getting back,” she said as he sat down behind the wheel, “and don’t get lost, Bull!”