The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (122 page)

Margret’s mouth was surprisingly small and still not hard under her austere nose; she was slimmer, only her wrists revealed traces of plumpness. There she stood, dignified, erect, shaking hands, nodding, yet she had kept that swift, ephemeral, springy quality. The gray around her head reminded me of the whitish-gray dust in her hair when we staggered out of the burning house and lay down in the garden on the grass, came together on that June night after saying goodbye to Josef, when so many values and so much that was valuable had been destroyed; and I thought of the dust in her kisses, in her tears, of our irresponsible laughter when Father also came staggering out of the house and saw us lying there, and how our dust-powdered faces screwed up with laughter when he twisted the key to his safe in the air as if it, the air, contained his securities and all that notarized stuff; and of course he didn’t know, none of us knew, that in this so charmingly conventional war degrees of heat would build up that venerable safes could not withstand. And in the end, when later they were poking through the debris, he had found nothing but ashes in his molten safe, and it had been Margret,
not I (who was of course familiar with such sayings), who told him, “
Memento, quia pulvis es et …
,” but she did not complete the sentence. For a time we were inseparable, but we never came together again, not even with a kiss, not even with a handclasp.

Margret turned toward me and, in a kind of bitter joy, her woman’s face changed to the face of that girl who, with me, had scorned accepted values on that June night—or had I then embraced the Margret of today, had I at last caught up with her, she with me? Had Josef’s curse at last truly united us? I thought of him, of the whiplash with which he had changed the course of my life, and I realized here, at last, that that was what he had wanted: to change the course of my life, away from gold brocade, male choirs, family graves, real and potential knights of Catholic orders. Perhaps that was the only thing he had learned in that gloriously conventional war, and today, here, facing Margret, I had no reason to bear a grudge against him on that score. I bore no grudge against anyone, not even against my father, who later became very silent, almost humble, and who always looked so expectantly at me when Margret came over from next door. We used to go to the movies, to the theater, for walks, we had long discussions—but we never got as far as even a handclasp, even a flicker of memory. I carried on as an acolyte, regarding it as a job (tips and free meals); I got into the black market, finished high school, left home, and, via the black market, ended up in the devotional-supplies business when I was asked to get hold of a Leonardo da Vinci print for a Moselle vintner’s first communion in exchange for butter, and did so. I had a few affairs, and I imagine Margret did, too.

I was standing close enough to be able to read the word “Blackbird,” from Margret’s lips. I nodded, withdrew, and headed for the “Blackbird,” where funeral receptions have been held since time immemorial. I only had to go back to the exit, cross the street, and walk for five minutes through Douglas firs. At the “Blackbird” they were already busy cutting up limp rolls, spreading them with butter, adding slices of sausage or cheese, and decorating them with mayonnaise. I wondered whether Aunt Marga was still alive, she had always insisted on having blood sausage with onion rings, as greedily as if she were starving, although everyone knew that not even she had any idea of the extent of her fortune. The coffee machine was steaming, brandy snifters were
being placed on trays, freshly opened bottles beside them (Margret was sure to have firmly insisted on a price “by the bottle”), bottles of mineral water were being snapped open, flowers stuck in little vases. Still the same old, old-fashioned routine.

I recognized the priest, who had arrived without the acolytes and was sitting in a corner smoking a cigar with a contented, off-duty expression. He nodded at me. Not because he recognized me, we had never met. He looked like a nice fellow, I sat down at his table and asked him about the special carrying case for the collapsible cross: in my days as an acolyte we used to have to lug the whole cross around, and it had always been a problem getting it into a car without smashing a window or knocking top hats off heads. And I knew of a few rural communities where the old processional cross was still in use. He told me the name of the company, I jotted it down on my return ticket, then we both speculated as to why people continued to put up with those limp rolls. I told him that even as children we had called those sandwiches “Blackbird pasteboard with mayonnaise,” whether we were present as mourners or acolytes or—as frequently happened—as mourning acolytes. They were behind the times, there should be “Hawaiian Toast” or something, and sherry, not brandy, and not Persian lamb coats but mink, and instead of the lousy coffee—why did it always have to be so lousy everywhere?—they should have ordered mocha, which did sometimes turn out like reasonably good coffee.

I glanced at my return ticket, where I had noted the trains: 14:22, 15:17, then none till 17:03; it was now just on eleven, and if I wanted to take Margret along, if I wanted, after thirty-four years, to touch her hair that evening, I supposed I would have to stay on a while and run the risk of encountering a former schoolmate or two among the red-and-white sashes, maybe even among the Catholic knights: one of them was sure to shout the opening lines of
The Odyssey
—in Greek, of course—into my ear, to prove that his classical education had not failed to leave its mark on him. Another, although we had graduated from high school more than thirty years ago and not seen each other since, taking it for granted that I would fully agree, would start moaning about modern times, about his spoiled brats, the Socialists, the general moral decline, and how he was working himself to death in his practice while his third or fourth apartment building was costing him more and more due to
this damned inflation. I was prepared to endure this; I knew this kind of talk from funerals I had attended not as a mourner but professionally: I also have an agency for gravestones, and my top hat counts as professional clothing and is tax-deductible. It couldn’t take all that long: if we missed the 14:22 we would certainly catch the 15:17.

I was in luck, it was Bertholdi who sat down beside me. I recalled that in eight years of school I hadn’t exchanged so much as forty words with him. There had been simply no occasion to do so, and I had reason to regret this now. He was a very nice fellow, without that bitter-sour expression that seems inevitable with successful as well as unsuccessful men at the start of the last third of their lives. Bertholdi asked how my business was going, and when I told him that I had been selling devotional supplies for some years now, he remarked that it must be hard going in this post-Vatican Council era. I agreed that business had taken a beating, but I could also report a certain upswing, and when he mentioned “Lefebvre?” I nodded but also shook my head. His shrewd question could be answered only partially in the affirmative: there was also, I said, independently of the person he had named, a return to the traditional that expressed itself in top hats, bridal trains, elaborate celebrations of first communions, confirmations, and weddings, and in its wake helped the sale of modern devotional supplies, well-crafted icon copies, for instance, in fact anything smacking of the Eastern Churches.

Because he spoke so nicely about his wife and children, I volunteered the information that, together with some business associates, I was engaged in opening up a new market for good icon reproductions: the Soviet Union, which we were supplying—illegally, of course—with excellent reproductions that were mounted over there on old wood panels, preferably worm-eaten, and painted over by skilled craftsmen, and for which there was a good demand. Since artists, craftsmen, and dealers naturally preferred foreign currency, quite a few of these reproductions were finding their way back via the tourist black market. Not exactly sharing in the profits, but doing its best to help, was an organization calling itself “Pictures for the Eastern Churches”; too many Soviet citizens in all the republics had sold off their family icons and now, caught up in the religious wave, found themselves without images.
And, inwardly uneasy because Margret was still moving around and had not yet sat down, I went on to tell Bertholdi the trade’s classic story of that long-dead colleague who, putting his trust in the religious currents prevalent during World War I, found himself stuck with some 10,000 portraits of Pope Benedict XV and lacked the financial and mental resources to save his business by profiting from the long reigns of the two Piuses. When asked by Bertholdi whether I would still invest much in Paul VI, I said, “As a contemporary, perhaps; as a dealer in devotional supplies, no,” adding that the only pope who had remained in demand after his death was John XXIII.

Bertholdi thanked me for this insight into the “subtleties” of my business and returned the compliment with an autobiographical sketch: he was a senior official in the educational system, complained neither of his children nor of the youth of today, spoke affectionately of his wife, laughingly discussed his pension with all its probable progressions and deductions; he hoped, he was confident, that he would be able to take early retirement so that he would finally have time to read Proust and Henry James. At last Margret came and sat down beside me, beckoned to a waitress to bring me a little pot of mocha, placed her hand on my arm, and said, “I remember how you hate bad coffee, and”—she didn’t take away her hand—“just now, when I saw you standing there, it occurred to me, after all these years it occurred to me, that he didn’t curse God at all.”

“No,” I said, “it was only those cursed by God whom he cursed. And that curse was the blessing that he gave us.”

Willi Offermann, seated across from us next to the priest, tried to bait me by speaking of Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulcher, and of people who had no religion yet lived very well off it. Did he mean me, or the dealers in devotional supplies in Jerusalem? Do I have no religion and live very well off it? Both questions filled me with doubts. True, I did live off it, but not as well as he seemed to believe, not even my gravestone agency brought in as much, although I can offer the latest designs and good African stones; and sometimes when I was checking a new shipment of rosaries (for which there was no longer much demand, at least not at the moment, in spite of Lefebvre), I would grasp one and recite the entire rosary. So as not to be looking constantly at Margret, who had got up again to tell a waiter carrying a plate of onion rings
and slices of blood sausage to take it over to where Aunt Marga was indeed sitting, I looked at Offermann’s wife: she was next to the priest and leaning across him in an effort to calm down her husband on the other side when Offermann suddenly raised his voice and started abusing the “Red scum!”—which was nonsense, because he hadn’t seen me for thirty-one years and could have no idea whether I was red or green; besides, a minimum of logic should have told him that no sensible dealer in devotional supplies—and that’s what I was—would ever vote for any party without the prefix “Christian.” This was so obvious that he could have saved himself his uninformed provocation; I behaved as if he certainly couldn’t mean me and smiled at his wife, who looked so nice that he couldn’t possibly have deserved her.

Then Margret was beside me again, pouring mocha and remembering that I took whipped cream with it; she had brought over a little dish of it. She smelled of soap, toilet water, and perspiration, a smell that I perceived as familiar—yet it couldn’t possibly be familiar to me. It was as if we had spent these thirty-four years together, her years becoming mine, a common tally of the years: some things neglected but nothing missed. I found her much more beautiful than on that June night; actually she had never been a beauty, she had always seemed like a girl who had been bicycling too fast and broken into a sweat, yet she had never been on a bicycle. As I looked at her she became younger and younger, until I could see her playing ball on the path between our two houses, flushed, eager, yet quiet, and she was, after all, the first and only woman from whose lips I had heard the word “desertion.”

She kept her hand on my arm, and Offermann grew even angrier, prophesying doom, and seeming to hold me, me personally, responsible for the simultaneous decline in morals and faith; and not even when he spoke of my brother Josef (“Of course, if your brother Josef were still alive, but then the best always get killed!”) did I allow myself to be provoked into saying something like You didn’t get killed either, nor did Margret—who turned pale and whose hand on my arm was trembling. Finally Offermann attacked the priest, whom he accused of being too passive, and it was I who, in order to calm him down, whispered the opening lines of
The Odyssey
to him across the table. That actually
had an effect: his face relaxed, and his wife smiled at me gratefully; the priest was relieved. I had looked at the time and found it was only twelve o’clock and that we would be able to catch the 14:22, and during my Homer recitation I thought of coffee and cakes on the train, thought of the crowded dining car, which was now moving beside the Rhine toward the Lorelei rock, and that probably they still served nothing but that seed cake that was enough to choke a person. But it was a long time since I had last ridden in the dining car in the afternoon, I merely remembered that Margret liked that damn cake. Once, on the train to Sinzig, she had told me it reminded her of a deceased aunt of whom she had been very fond. I beckoned to the waitress and asked her to order me a taxi for a quarter to two.

The night before Erica’s wedding I changed my mind and did drive to the hotel to have another talk with Walter. I had known both him and Erica, his fiancée, for a long time; after all, I had lived with Erica for four years, in Mainz, while working on a construction job and at the same time going to night school. Walter had been working on the same construction site and also going to night school. It wasn’t a pleasant period. I recall it without nostalgia: the arrogance of our teachers, who were more critical of our accents than of our performance, was so insidious that it was more painful than wordy abuse would have been. Apparently most of them couldn’t bear the idea that, with our unabashed dialect, we might eventually acquire a university degree, and they forced us to speak in a way that we used to call “night-school German.”