The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (68 page)

Scream across the carpet pattern, broken game on the floor: models of houses his father had been the sales agent for twenty years ago, little houses such as had not been built for twenty years; old pneumatic mail tubes from the bank, samples of rope which the other boy—that’s right, Griff was his name—had contributed; corks of various sizes,
various shapes; Griff had not been there that afternoon. All broken by that scream, which was to hang over her in future like a curse: she was the girl who had done what one must never do.

As she sighed, her glance lingered on the rust-red carpet, watching the sparkling threshold for his brown shoes to reappear.

Languidly she swung the binoculars back to the table: under the garden umbrella on the terrace, a basket of fruit, dark brown wicker-work full of orange peel, the wine bottle with the label “Zischbrunner Mönchsgarten”; one still life after another, with an undercurrent of noise from the regatta; dirty plates with remains of ice cream; the folded evening paper on which she could make out the second word in the headline, “Khrushchev,” and in the second line, “open grave”; some cigarettes with brown filter tips, others white, stubbed out in the ashtray, a brochure from a refrigerator firm—but they had had one for ages!—a box of matches; russet mahogany, like fire in old paintings; the samovar gleaming on the buffet, silver and bright, unused for years, shining like some strange trophy. Teawagon with salt cellar and mustard pot, the big family photograph: the children sitting at table with their parents at a restaurant out in the country, in the background the pond with swans, then the waitress bringing the tray with two mugs of beer and three bottles of lemonade; in the foreground, the family seated at the table: on the right, in profile, their father, holding a fork level with his chest, a piece of meat skewered on it, noodles festooned round the meat; on the left their mother, a crumpled serviette in her left hand, a spoon in her right; in the middle the children, their heads below the edge of the waitress’s tray: ice-cream dishes reached to their chins, patches of light, filtered through the leaves, lay on their cheeks; in the middle, framed by the curly heads of his sisters, the one who had stood for such a long time by the tennis balls and had then run upstairs: his brown shoes had still not returned across the brass strip.

The tennis balls again, on their right the clothes closet, straw hats, an umbrella, a linen bag with the handle of a shoebrush sticking out of it; in the mirror the large picture that hung in the hall on the left, of a woman picking grapes, with eyes like grapes, a mouth like a grape.

Tired of looking, she put down the binoculars. Her eyes plunged across the lost distance, smarted; she closed them. Red and black circles danced behind her closed lids, she opened them again, was startled to
see Paul coming through the door. He was carrying something which sparkled in the sun, and this time he did not pause when he came to the tennis balls. Now that she saw his face without the binoculars—detached from her collection of miniatures—now she was certain he was going to do something desperate. Once more the samovar chimed, once more the glasses inside the buffet passed along the vibration, twittering like women exchanging secrets; Paul knelt down on the carpet in the corner by the window. All she could see of him was his right elbow, moving back and forth like a piston, regularly disappearing in a forward drilling movement—she ransacked her memory for a clue as to where she had seen this movement, she imitated the drilling pumping movement and then she knew: he was holding a screwdriver. The red-and-yellow-checked shirt came, went, was still—Paul jerked back a little; she saw his profile, raised the binoculars to her eyes, was startled at the sudden nearness, and looked into the open drawer. It contained bundles of blue checkbooks, neatly tied with white string, and some ledger sheets, bound through the holes with blue string. Paul hastily stacked up the bundles beside him on the carpet, clutched something to his chest, something wrapped in a blue cloth, put it down on the floor, replaced the checkbooks and ledger sheets in the drawer, and again all she could see, while the bundle in the blue cloth lay beside him, was the pumping, drilling movement of his elbow.

She cried out when he unwrapped the cloth: black, smooth, glistening with oil, the pistol lay in the hand that was much too small for it. It was as if the girl had shot her cry through the binoculars at him; he turned, she lowered the binoculars, screwed up her smarting eyes, and called out, “Paul! Paul!”

He held the pistol close to his chest as he climbed slowly out of the window onto the terrace.

“Paul,” she called, “come over here, through the garden.”

He put the pistol in his pocket, shaded his eyes with his hand, walked slowly down the steps, across the lawn, scuffed across the gravel by the fountain, dropped his hand when he suddenly found himself in the shadow of the summerhouse.

“Oh,” he said, “it’s you.”

“Didn’t you recognize my voice?”

“No—what d’you want?”

“I’m going away,” she said.

“I’m going away too,” he said. “So what? Everyone’s going away, almost. I’m leaving tomorrow for Zalligkofen.”

“No,” she said, “I’m leaving for good, I’m going to my father’s in Vienna …” and she thought: Vienna, that has something to do with wine too, in songs anyway.

“Vienna,” he said, “down there … and you’re staying there?”

“Yes.”

The look in his eyes, raised almost vertically to her, motionless, trancelike, frightened her: I am not your Jerusalem, she thought, no, I’m not, and yet your eyes have the look the eyes of pilgrims must have when they see the towers of their Holy City.

“I—” she said softly. “I saw everything.”

He smiled. “Come on down,” he said, “come on.”

“I can’t,” she said, “my mother’s locked me in. I’m not allowed out till the train leaves, but …” She suddenly stopped, her breathing was labored, shallow, excitement was choking her, and she said what she had not meant to say, “But why don’t you come up here?”

I am not your Jerusalem, she thought. No, no. He did not lower his eyes as he asked, “How can I get up there?”

“If you climb up onto the roof of the summerhouse, I’ll give you a hand and help you up onto the veranda.”

“I—there’s someone waiting for me.” But he was already testing the trellis to see if it would hold; it had been recently nailed and painted, dense dark vine leaves were growing up the trellis, which formed a kind of ladder. The pistol swung heavily against his thighs; as he pulled himself up by the weathervane, he remembered Griff, lying in his room back there, flies buzzing round him, with pale chest and red cheeks, and Paul thought of the little flat nickel pistol: I must ask Griff whether nickel oxidizes. If it does, he’ll have to stop them eating out of the jar.

The girl’s hands were larger and firmer than Griff’s hands, larger and firmer than his own too: he felt this and was ashamed when she helped him climb from the ridge of the summerhouse roof onto the veranda balustrade.

He brushed the dirt off his hands and said, without looking at the girl, “It’s funny that I’m really up here.”

“I’m glad you’re here. I’ve been locked in since three.” He looked warily over to her, at her hand, which was holding her coat together over her chest.

“Why’ve you got your coat on?”

“You know why.”

“Because of that?”

“Yes.”

He took a step toward her. “I expect you’re glad to be going away?”

“Yes, I am.”

“There was a boy in school this morning,” he said in a low voice, “selling pieces of paper with things about you written on them, and a picture of you.”

“I know,” she said, “and he said I get part of the money he gets for the pieces of paper, and that he has seen me the way he drew me. None of it’s true.”

“I know it isn’t,” he said. “He’s called Kuffang; he’s stupid and tells lies, everyone knows that.”

“But they believe him when he tells them
that
.”

“Yes,” he said, “it’s strange, they do believe that.”

She pulled her coat tighter around her chest. “That’s why I have to leave so suddenly, quickly, before they all get back from the regatta—for a long time now they’ve given me no peace. You make a show of your body, they say; they say it when I wear a dress with a low neck, and they say it when I wear a dress with a high neck—and a sweater. They go crazy then—but I have to wear something, don’t I?”

He watched her without emotion as she went on talking. He was thinking: Funny that I never thought of her, not once. Her hair was blond, her eyes seemed blond too, they were the color of freshly planed beechwood—blond and slightly moist.

“I don’t make a show of my body at all,” she said, “I just have it.”

He nodded, pushed the pistol up a bit with his right hand, as it was lying heavy against his thigh. “Yes,” he said, and she was afraid: he had that dream face again. You would have thought he was blind, that other time, those empty, dark eyes had seemed to fall upon her and yet past her in an unpredictable refraction, and now again he looked as if he were blind.

“The man,” she went on hurriedly, “who sometimes comes to have discussions with my mother, the old man with white hair, do you know him?” There was silence, the noise from the river was too far off to disturb this silence—“Do you know him?” she asked impatiently.

“Of course I know him,” he said; “that’s old Dulges.”

“Yes, that’s the one—he’s looked at me like that sometimes and said: Three hundred years ago they would have burned you as a witch. A woman’s hair crackling, and the cry from a thousand unfeeling souls unable to tolerate beauty.”

“Why did you make me come up?” he asked. “To tell me that?”

“Yes,” she said, “and because I saw what you were doing.”

He pulled the pistol out of his pocket, held it up, and waited with a smile for her to scream, but she did not scream.

“What are you going to do with it?”

“I don’t know, shoot at something.”

“At what?”

“Maybe at me.”

“Why?”

“Why?” he said. “Why? Sins, death. Mortal sin. Do you understand that?” Slowly, without touching her, he made his way past her, in through the open kitchen door, and leaned with a sigh against the cupboard; the picture was still there on the wall, the one he had not seen for so long, the one he thought about sometimes: factory chimneys, with red smoke rising up from them, smoke pouring out and joining together in the sky to form a blood-red cloud. The girl was standing in the doorway, turned toward him. There were shadows across her face, and she looked like a woman. “Come inside,” he said, “they might see us; that would be bad for you, you know.”

“In an hour,” she said, “I shall be sitting in the train. Here—here’s my ticket—it’s not a return.” She held up the buff ticket, he nodded, and she put the ticket back in her coat pocket. “I shall take off my coat and be wearing a sweater, a sweater, d’you understand?”

He nodded again. “An hour’s a long time. Do you know what sin is? Death. Mortal sin?”

“Once,” she said, “the pharmacist wanted to—and the teacher too, your history teacher.”

“Drönsch?”

“Yes, him. I know what they want, but I don’t know what their words mean. I know what sin is too, but I don’t understand it any more than I understand what the boys sometimes call out after me when I come home alone, in the dark; they call out after me from doorways, from windows, from cars sometimes, they called out things after me which I knew the meaning of but which I didn’t understand. Do you know?”

“Yes.”

“What is it?” she said. “Does it bother you terribly?”

“Yes,” he said, “terribly.”

“Even now?”

“Yes,” he said, “doesn’t it bother you?”

“No,” she said, “it doesn’t bother me. It just makes me unhappy that it’s there and that other people want something—that they call out after me. Please tell me, why are you thinking of shooting yourself? Because of that?”

“Yes,” he said, “simply because of that. Do you know what it means when it says in the Bible: Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven?”

“Yes, I know what that means; sometimes I stayed behind in class when they had religion.”

“Well, then,” he said, “maybe you also know what sin is. Death.”

“I do,” she said. “Do you really believe all that?”

“Yes.”

“Everything?”

“Everything.”

“You know I don’t believe it. But I do know that the worst sin of all is to shoot yourself—at least, that’s what I heard,” she said, raising her voice, “with my own ears,” she pulled her ear with her left hand, with her right she was still clutching her coat, “with my own ears I heard the priest say: We must not throw away the gift of life and toss it at God’s feet.”

“Gift of life,” he said bitterly, “and God has no feet.”

“Hasn’t He?” she said quietly. “Hasn’t He any feet, didn’t they pierce them?”

He was silent, then flushed and said in a low voice, “I know.”

“Yes,” she said, “if you really believe everything, the way you say you do, then you have to believe that too. Do you believe that?”

“What?”

“That we mustn’t throw away the gift of life?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, and held the pistol straight up in the air.

“Come on,” she said softly, “put it away. It looks so silly. Please put it away.”

He placed the pistol in his right pocket, put his hand into his left pocket, and took out the three cartridge clips. The metal clips lay without luster on the palm of his hand. “That should do,” he said.

“Shoot at something else,” she said, “for instance, at”—she turned round and looked back at his own home, through the open window—“at the tennis balls,” she said.

A deep flush enveloped him like darkness, his hands went limp, the clips fell from his hand. “How did you know …?” he whispered.

“Know what?”

He bent down, picked up the clips from the floor, pushed one cartridge, which had dropped out, carefully back into the clip; he looked through the window at the house standing in full view in the sunshine: the tennis balls were lying back there white and hard in their carton.