The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (4 page)

The foyer of the vaudeville theater was empty. The performance had already begun, and the buzzing of the audience penetrated the shabby red drapes.

With a laugh Jupp pointed to a photograph in a display case, where he was shown in cowboy costume between two coyly smiling dancers whose breasts were hung with sparkling tinsel. Beneath was the caption: T
HE
M
AN WITH THE
K
NIVES
.

“Come on,” said Jupp, and before I grasped what was happening I found myself being dragged through a half-hidden door. We climbed a poorly lit staircase, narrow and winding, the smell of sweat and greasepaint indicating the nearness of the stage. Jupp was ahead—suddenly he halted in a turn of the stairs, put down the suitcase, and, gripping me by the shoulders, asked in a hushed voice, “Are you game?”

I had been expecting this question for so long that when it came its suddenness startled me. I must have looked nonplussed, for after a pause he said, “Well?”

I still hesitated, and suddenly we heard a great roar of laughter that seemed to come pouring out of the narrow passage and engulf us like a tidal wave; it was so overwhelming that I jumped and involuntarily shuddered.

“I’m scared,” I whispered.

“So am I. Don’t you trust me?”

“Sure I do … but … Let’s go,” I said hoarsely, pushing past him and adding, with the courage born of despair, “I’ve nothing to lose.”

We emerged onto a narrow corridor with a number of rough plywood cubicles right and left. A few oddly garbed figures were scurrying
about, and through an opening in the flimsy wings I could see a clown on the stage, his enormous mouth wide open; once again the roar of the crowd’s laughter engulfed us, but Jupp pulled me through a door and shut it behind us. I looked around. The cubicle was tiny, practically bare. On the wall was a mirror, Jupp’s cowboy costume hung on the single nail, and on a rickety chair lay an old deck of cards. Jupp moved with nervous haste; he took my wet coat from me, flung the cowboy suit onto the chair, hung up my coat, then his windbreaker. Over the top of the partition I could see an electric clock on a fake red Doric column, showing twenty-five after eight.

“Five minutes,” muttered Jupp, slipping into his costume. “Shall we rehearse it?”

Just then someone knocked on the cubicle door and called, “You’re on!”

Jupp buttoned up his shirt and stuck a ten-gallon hat on his head. With a forced laugh I cried, “D’you expect a condemned man to rehearse his own hanging?”

Jupp snatched up the suitcase and dragged me through the door. Outside stood a bald-headed man watching the clown going through his final motions on the stage. Jupp whispered something to the man that I didn’t catch, the man glanced up with a start, looked at me, looked at Jupp, and shook his head vehemently. And again Jupp whispered something to him.

I couldn’t have cared less. Let them impale me alive. I had a crippled shoulder, I had just finished a thin cigarette, tomorrow I would get three-quarters of a loaf for seventy-five bricks. But tomorrow … The applause almost blew down the wings. The clown, his face tired and contorted, staggered toward us through the opening in the wings, stood there for a few seconds looking morose, and then went back onto the stage, where he smiled graciously and bowed. The orchestra played a fanfare. Jupp was still whispering to the bald-headed man. Three times the clown came back into the wings and three times he went out onto the stage and bowed, smiling.

Then the orchestra struck up a march and, suitcase in hand, Jupp strode smartly out onto the stage. His appearance was greeted with subdued clapping. Weary-eyed I watched Jupp fasten the playing cards onto nails that were already in place and then impale each card with
a knife, one by one, precisely in the center. The applause became more animated, but not enthusiastic. Then, to a muffled roll of drums, he performed his trick with the bread knife and the block of wood, and underneath all my indifference I was aware that the act really was a bit thin. Across from me, on the other side of the stage, a few scantily dressed girls stood watching … And suddenly the bald-headed man seized me by the shoulder, dragged me onto the stage, greeted Jupp with a grandiose sweep of the arm and, in the spurious voice of a policeman, said, “Good evening, Herr Borgalevsky.”

“Good evening, Herr Erdmenger,” replied Jupp, likewise in ceremonious tones.

“I’ve brought you a horsethief, a proper scoundrel, Herr Borgalevsky, for you to tickle a bit with your shiny knives before we hang him … a real scoundrel …” I found his voice totally ridiculous, pathetically artificial, like paper flowers or the cheapest kind of greasepaint. I glanced at the audience, and from that moment on, faced by that glimmering, slavering, hydra-headed monster crouching there in the dark ready to spring, I simply switched off.

I didn’t give a damn, I was dazzled by the glare of the spotlight, and in my threadbare suit and shabby shoes I probably made a pretty convincing horsethief.

“Oh, leave him here with me, Herr Erdmenger. I know how to deal with him.”

“Splendid, let him have it, and don’t spare the knives.”

Jupp took hold of me by the collar while the grinning Erdmenger swaggered off the stage. Someone threw a rope onto the stage, and Jupp proceeded to tie me by the feet to a cardboard column that had a fake door, painted blue, propped up behind it. I was aware of something like an ecstasy of insensibility. To my right I heard the eerie stirring of the tense audience, and I realized Jupp had been right in speaking of its bloodlust. Its thirst quivered on the sickly, stale air, and the orchestra, with its facile drum roll, its muffled lasciviousness, heightened the effect of grisly tragicomedy in which real blood would flow, stage blood that had been paid for … I stared straight ahead, letting my body sag, the rope being so firmly tied that it held me upright. The drum roll became softer and softer as Jupp calmly pulled his knives out of the playing cards and slipped them back into their pockets, from time to
time casting melodramatic glances my way as if to size me up. Then, having packed away all his knives, he turned to the audience and in the same odiously stagy voice announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, I am now about to outline this young man with knives, but I wish to demonstrate to you that I do not throw blunt knives.” He produced a piece of string, and with perfect sangfroid removed one knife after another from its pocket, touched the string with each, cutting it into twelve pieces, and then replaced the knives one by one in their pockets.

While all this was going on I looked far beyond him, far beyond the wings, far beyond the half-naked girls, into another life, it seemed …

The tension in the audience was electrifying. Jupp came over to me, pretended to adjust the rope, and said softly into my ear, “Don’t move a muscle, and trust me …”

This added delay nearly broke the tension, it was threatening to peter out, but he suddenly stretched out his arms, letting his hands flutter like hovering birds, and his face assumed that look of magical concentration that I had marveled at on the stairs. He appeared to be casting a spell over the audience too with this sorcerer’s pose. I seemed to hear a strange, unearthly groan and realized that this was a warning signal for me.

Withdrawing my gaze from limitless horizons, I looked at Jupp, now standing opposite me so that our eyes were on a level; he raised his hand, moving it slowly toward a pocket, and again I realized that this was a signal for me. I stood completely still and closed my eyes …

It was a glorious feeling, lasting maybe two seconds, I’m not sure. Listening to the swish of the knives and the short sharp hiss of air as they plunged into the fake blue door, I felt as if I were walking along a very narrow plank over a bottomless abyss. I walked with perfect confidence, yet felt all the thrill of danger. I was afraid, yet absolutely certain that I would not fall; I was not counting, yet I opened my eyes at the very moment when the last knife pierced the door beside my right hand …

A storm of applause jerked me bolt upright. I opened my eyes properly to find myself looking into Jupp’s white face: he had rushed over to me and was untying the rope with trembling hands. Then he pulled me into the center of the stage, right up to the very edge. He bowed, and I bowed; as the applause swelled he pointed to me and I to him; then he smiled at me, I smiled at him, and we both bowed smiling to the audience.

Back in the cubicle, not a word was said. Jupp threw the perforated playing cards onto the chair, took my coat off the nail and helped me on with it. Then he hung his cowboy costume back on the nail, pulled on his windbreaker, and we put on our caps. As I opened the door the little bald-headed man rushed up to us shouting, “I’m raising you to forty marks!” He handed Jupp some cash. I realized then that Jupp was my boss, and I smiled; he looked at me too and smiled.

Jupp took my arm, and side by side we walked down the narrow, poorly lit stairs that smelled of stale greasepaint. When we reached the foyer Jupp said with a laugh, “Now let’s go and buy some cigarettes and bread …”

But it was not till an hour later that I realized I now had a proper profession, a profession where all I needed to do was stand still and dream a little. For twelve or twenty seconds. I was the man who has knives thrown at him …

Her name on the rough-hewn cross was no longer legible; the cardboard coffin lid had already collapsed, and where a few weeks ago there had been a mound there was now a hollow in which soiled, rotting flowers and faded ribbons, mixed with fir needles and bare twigs, formed a nauseating pulp. Someone must have stolen the candle ends.…

“Rise, my love,” I whispered, “rise,” and my tears mingled with the rain, the monotonous murmuring rain that had been falling for weeks.

I closed my eyes: I was afraid my wish might come true. In my mind’s eye I distinctly saw the sagging cardboard lid that must now be lying on her breast, caving in beneath the wet piles of cold, greedy earth that were forcing their way past it into the coffin.

I bent down to remove the bedraggled flowers and ribbons from the sticky clay, and all at once I was aware of a shadow springing out of the ground behind me, with a sudden leap, as a flame sometimes flares up out of a banked fire.

I hastily crossed myself, threw down the flowers, and hurried to the exit. The opaque dusk was welling out of the narrow, shrub-bordered paths, and as I reached the main avenue I heard the sound of the bell summoning visitors from the cemetery. But I heard no footsteps approaching, saw no figure behind me, I just sensed that impalpable yet undeniable shadow at my heels.…

I quickened my pace, clanged the rusty gate behind me, crossed the grassy roundabout at the intersection where an overturned streetcar lay exposing its bloated belly to the rain, the accursed gentleness of the rain drumming on the great metal box.…

The rain had soaked through my shoes, but I was aware of neither cold nor damp, a hectic fever was driving the blood into the furthest extremities of my limbs, and through the fear that was breathing down my neck I was conscious of that strange gratification that comes from illness and grief.…

Between rows of shacks, their chimneys emitting wisps of smoke, between ingeniously patched-up fences surrounding gray-black fields, past rotting telegraph poles that appeared to sway in the dusk, my route took me through what seemed to be infinite suburban regions of despair; stepping heedlessly into puddles, I walked faster and faster toward the city’s distant, jagged silhouette looming up on the horizon, among the murky twilight clouds, like a labyrinth of misery.

Enormous black ruins sprang up left and right, strangely oppressive sounds assailed me from feebly lighted windows; more fields of black earth, more houses, ruined villas—and horror, as well as my fever, was eating its way deeper and deeper into my very bones as I experienced a nightmarish sensation: behind me it was almost dark, while ahead of me dusk was deepening in the familiar way; behind me night was falling, I was dragging the night after me, trailing it across the distant edge of the horizon, and wherever my foot touched the ground, darkness fell. Not that I saw any of this, but I knew: from the grave of my love, where I had invoked the shadow, I was dragging the relentlessly drooping sail of the night behind me.

The world seemed devoid of human life: a vast, muddy suburban plain, a low mountain range formed by the ruins of the city that had seemed so far away and was now, with unaccountable speed, suddenly so much closer. From time to time I halted, and I could sense the dark presence behind me, waiting, reining itself in, mocking me as it hesitated, and then driving me on with gentle, irresistible pressure.

And now I realized that the sweat was pouring down my whole body; it was an effort to walk, the weight I was dragging, the weight of the world, was heavy. Invisible ropes bound me to it, it to me, and now it was straining and tugging at me as a slipping load forces the exhausted mule inescapably into the abyss. I summoned all my strength to resist those invisible cords, my steps became short and unsteady, like a desperate animal I hurled myself into the strangling harness: my legs seemed to sink into the ground but I still had strength enough to keep my body upright, until I suddenly felt I could hold out no longer, that I was compelled to stop where I was, that the weight had the power to root me to the spot; and the next moment I felt I was losing my footing. I screamed and threw myself once more into the impalpable reins—I toppled forward onto my face, the bond was sundered, an unutterably
exquisite freedom was behind me, and ahead was a shining expanse, and she was standing there, she who had been lying in that sordid grave under bedraggled flowers, and this time it was she who said to me, with a smile on her face: “Rise, my love, rise …” but I had already risen and was walking toward her.…

That time we were in Odessa it was very cold. Every morning we drove in great rattling trucks along cobbled streets to the airfield, where we waited, shivering, for the great gray birds that came lumbering across the tarmac; but the first two days, just as we were boarding, an order came through canceling the flight due to bad weather—the fog over the Black Sea was too thick or the clouds were too low—and we climbed onto the great rattling trucks again and drove along cobbled streets back to barracks.