The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (23 page)

The amounts he demanded fluctuated between one mark and fifty marks. Fifty was the uppermost limit: over the decades it had become an unwritten law that he was never to ask for more. “Just to tide me over!” he would add. To tide him over—this was his favorite phrase. He would then come in again, replace his hat on the hall stand, unwind his muffler, and launch into an explanation of why he needed the money. He always had plans, infallible plans. He never needed it directly for himself: its sole purpose was to place his livelihood at last on a firm footing. His plans varied from a soft-drink stand, which he was confident would yield a regular steady income, to the founding of a political party which would preserve Europe from its decline and fall.

The words “By the way, I wonder if you could …” were apt, as the years went by, to scare the wits out of our family; there were wives, aunts, great-aunts, even nieces, whom the sound of “just to tide me over” would bring to the verge of fainting.

Uncle Otto—I assume him to have been in the best of humors as he sprinted down the stairs—then took himself off to the nearest bar
to mull over his plans. He would mull over them to the tune of one schnapps or three bottles of wine, depending on the size of the loan he had been able to raise.

I will no longer conceal the fact that he drank. He drank, yet no one had ever seen him drunk. Moreover, he evidently felt a need to drink alone. To offer him alcohol in the hope of dodging the request for a loan was so much wasted effort. An entire barrel of wine would not have deterred him, at the very last minute, when he was on the point of leaving, from thrusting his head once more through the door and asking, “By the way, I wonder if you could—just to tide me over …?”

But his worst trait I have so far kept to myself: sometimes he would repay a loan. Every so often he appeared to earn money in one way or another: as a former law student he occasionally, I believe, dispensed legal advice. At such times he would turn up, take a bill from his pocket, smooth it out with wistful tenderness, and say, “You were kind enough to help me out—here are your five marks!” Whereupon he would leave very quickly and return after a maximum of two days to ask for a sum slightly in excess of the one he had repaid. He alone knew the secret of managing to reach the age of almost sixty without ever having what is commonly called a regular occupation. Nor was his death in any way due to some illness he might have contracted as a result of his drinking. He was as fit as a fiddle, his heart was perfectly sound, and he slept like a healthy innocent babe full of his mother’s milk that sleeps away the hours till the next meal. No, he died very suddenly: he lost his life in an accident, and what happened after his death remains the greatest mystery of all.

Uncle Otto, as I say, was killed in an accident. He was run over by a truck and trailer in heavy downtown traffic, and luckily it was an honest man who picked him up, called the police, and notified the family. In his pockets they found a wallet containing a medallion of the Virgin Mary, a weekly pass good for two more streetcar rides, and twenty-four thousand marks in cash plus the carbon copy of a receipt he had had to sign for the lottery office, and he cannot have been in possession of the money for more than a minute, probably less, because the truck ran over him scarcely fifty yards from the lottery office. What followed was rather humiliating for the family. His room bore the stamp of poverty: table, chair, bed, and closet, a few books, and a large notebook, and in this notebook an accurate list of all those to whom he owed money,
including an entry for a loan that had brought him in four marks the previous evening. Also a very brief will naming me his heir.

As his executor, it was my father’s job to pay the outstanding debts. Indeed, Uncle Otto’s list of creditors filled an entire quarto-sized notebook, his first entry going back to the years when he had suddenly broken off his legal career to devote himself to other plans, the mulling over of which had cost him so much time and so much money. His debts totaled nearly fifteen thousand marks, the number of his creditors over seven hundred, ranging from a streetcar conductor who had advanced him thirty pfennigs for a transfer to my father, who had all together two thousand marks coming to him, probably because Uncle Otto had always found him such a soft touch.

Strangely enough, I happened to come of age on the very day of the funeral and was therefore entitled to enter upon my inheritance of ten thousand marks, so I immediately broke off my university career to devote myself to other plans. In spite of my parents’ tears, I left home to move into Uncle Otto’s room. It held a great attraction for me, and I am still living there, although my hair is now no longer as thick as it used to be. The contents of the room have neither increased nor decreased. Today I know that I made many mistakes in those early years. It was ridiculous to attempt to become a musician, let alone a composer; I have no talents in that direction. Today I know this, but I paid for the knowledge with three years of useless study and the inevitability of acquiring a reputation for loafing, besides which it used up my whole inheritance, but that’s a long time ago.

I have forgotten the sequence of my plans: there were too many of them. Besides, the periods of time needed for me to recognize their futility became shorter and shorter. I finally reached the point where one plan managed to last just three days, a life span that even for a plan is too short. The life span of my plans dwindled so rapidly that they eventually became mere lightning flashes of ideas that I could not explain to anyone because they were not clear even to me. When I think that I devoted myself for three whole months to the science of physiognomy until I finally decided in the course of a single afternoon to become a painter, a gardener, a mechanic, and a sailor, and that I fell asleep thinking I was born to be a teacher and woke up firmly convinced that a career in the customs service was what I was cut out for … !

In short, I had neither Uncle Otto’s charm nor his relatively great endurance. I am not a talker either: I sit silent among other people; I bore them and blurt out my attempts to extract money from them so abruptly into the silence that they sound like extortions. Only with children do I get along well. This is at least one favorable attribute that I seem to have inherited from Uncle Otto. Babies quiet down the minute I take them in my arms, and when they look at me they smile, insofar as they can smile at all, although it is said that my face scares people. Unkind people have advised me to found the profession of male kindergarten teacher as its first exponent and to put an end to my eternal planning by bringing at least this plan to fruition. But I never shall. I think this is what makes us so impossible: the fact that we cannot cash in on our real talents—or, to adopt the modern jargon, exploit them financially.

One thing is certain, though: if I am a black sheep—and personally I am by no means convinced of this—but if I am one, it is of a different kind from Uncle Otto. I lack his light touch, his charm; besides, my debts weigh heavily on me, while obviously his scarcely bothered him at all. And I did a terrible thing: I capitulated—I asked for a job. I implored the family to help me, to find me a job, to pull strings for me, so that for once, just once, I might be assured of tangible compensation in return for the performance of clearly defined duties. And they were successful. After I had sent off my petitions, given written and verbal form to my pleas, my urgent, imploring appeals, I was horrified to find they had been taken seriously and borne fruit, and I did something which no black sheep had ever done before: I did not flinch, did not turn it down, I accepted the position they had managed to find for me. I sacrificed something that I ought never to have sacrificed: my freedom!

Each evening when I came home I could have kicked myself for letting yet another day of my life go by that had brought me nothing but fatigue, rage, and just enough money to enable me to keep on working, if one can call what I was doing work: sorting bills alphabetically, punching holes in them, and fastening them into a brand-new file where they patiently submitted to the fate of never being paid; or writing the kind of circulars that travel ineffectually out into the world and amount to nothing but a superfluous burden for the mailman; and sometimes making out bills that now and then were actually paid in cash. I had to deal with salesmen who strove in vain to palm off the rubbish
manufactured by our boss. Our boss: that bustling blockhead who is forever in a hurry and never does a thing, who persistently chatters away the precious hours of the day—an existence of stultifying stupidity—who never dares admit the extent of his debts, who cheats his way from one bluff to the next, a balloon-artist who starts blowing up one balloon the very moment another one bursts, leaving behind a repulsive rubber rag that a second earlier still had sheen, life, and bounce.

Our office was right alongside the factory, where a staff of a dozen or so manufactured the kind of furniture that, once bought, is an annoyance for the rest of one’s life unless one decides after three days to chop it up into kindling: occasional tables, sewing cabinets, midget chests of drawers, arty little “hand-painted” chairs that collapse under the weight of three-year-old children, little stands for vases or flowerpots, shoddy bric-a-brac that ostensibly owes its existence to the art of the cabinetmaker whereas in fact an inferior workman, using cheap paint purporting to be enamel, produces a semblance of attractiveness intended to justify the prices.

So this was how I spent my days, one after another—nearly two weeks in all—in the office of this unintelligent man who not only took himself seriously but considered himself an artist, for now and again—it happened only once while I was there—he was to be seen standing at the drawing board, shuffling pencils and paper and designing some wobbly object or other, a flower stand or a new portable bar, yet another source of annoyance for future generations.

The appalling futility of his devices never seemed to enter his head. When he had finished designing one of these gadgets—as I say, it happened only once while I was working for him—he would dash off in his car to rest up from his creative labors, a respite that lasted a week after he had worked for only fifteen minutes. The drawing was tossed in front of the foreman, who would spread it out on his bench, study it with furrowed brow, and proceed to check the lumber supplies in order to get production under way. For days I could watch the new creations piling up behind the dusty windows of the workshop—he called it a factory: wall shelves or radio stands that were hardly worth the glue being wasted on them.

The only objects of any use were those turned out by the workmen without the boss’s knowledge, when they could be quite certain of his
absence for a few days: little stools or jewel cases of pleasing sturdiness and simplicity—great-grandchildren will straddle them or hoard their treasures in them; sensible laundry racks on which the shirts of many a future generation will flutter. What was endearing and serviceable was thus produced illegally.

But the really memorable personality I came across during this interlude of business life was the streetcar conductor who invalidated each day for me with his punch. He would take the slip of paper, my weekly pass, push it into the open maw of his punch, and an invisible supply of ink would blot out half an inch of it—one day out of my life, one precious day that had brought me nothing but fatigue, rage, and just enough money to continue in this futile pursuit. A godlike authority was vested in this man wearing the unpretentious uniform of the city transit system, the man who evening after evening wielded sufficient power to declare thousands of human days null and void.

To this day I feel annoyed with myself for not giving notice before I was practically forced to give notice; for not telling the boss where to get off before I was practically forced to tell him. But one day my landlady brought a sinister-looking individual along to my office who introduced himself as a lottery-office operator and announced that I was now the owner of a fortune of fifty thousand marks, provided that I was such and such a person and that I was the holder of a certain lottery ticket. Well, I was such and such a person and I was the holder of the lottery ticket. I quit my job on the spot, without giving notice, taking it upon myself to abandon the bills unpunched, unsorted, and there was nothing left for me to do but go home, collect the cash, and, by way of money orders, acquaint my relatives with the new state of affairs.

It was evidently expected of me to die soon or become the victim of an accident. But for the time being no automobile appears to have been singled out to deprive me of my life, and my heart is as sound as a bell, although I do not spurn the bottle. So after paying my debts, I find myself the possessor of a fortune of nearly thirty thousand marks, tax-free, and a sought-after uncle who has suddenly regained access to his godchild. But then children love me anyway, as I have said, and now I am allowed to play with them, buy them balls, ice cream, sundaes; I am allowed to buy whole gigantic clusters of balloons, and to populate the roundabouts and swings with the merry little throng.

While my sister has promptly bought her son, my godchild, a lottery ticket, I now spend my time wondering, musing for hours, about who among this new generation is going to be my successor; which of these thriving, romping, lovely children begotten by my brothers and sisters will be the black sheep of the next generation? For we are a typical family, and always will be. Who will be a good boy up to that point at which he ceases to be a good boy? Who will suddenly wish to devote himself to other plans, infallible, better plans? I would like to know, I would like to warn him, for we too have learned by experience; our calling also has its rules of the game, which I could pass on to him, my successor, still unknown, still playing with the gang like a wolf in sheep’s clothing …

But I have a foreboding that I shan’t live long enough to recognize him and initiate him into our secrets. He will come forward, reveal his true colors, when I die and it is his turn to take over. With flushed cheeks he will confront his parents and tell them he is fed up; and secretly I can only hope that when that time comes, there will still be some of my money left, because I have changed my will and left the balance of my fortune to the one who shows the first incontrovertible signs of being earmarked as my successor …