The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (3 page)

“You are very generous.” Her voice was dark-toned and brusque. A few minutes later I heard the conductor in the next compartment, and as if at a signal we instantly threw ourselves back into our corners and pretended to be asleep. But I could see through my half-open lids that she was laughing. I watched the conductor as he shone his glaring flashlight onto the tickets and checked them. And the next moment the light was shining right into my face. I could feel from the way the light wavered that he was hesitating. Then the light fell on her. How pale she was, and how sad the white surface of her forehead.

A stout woman sitting beside me pulled at the conductor’s sleeve and whispered something in his ear. I caught the words “American cigarettes … black market … no ticket …” to which the conductor responded by giving me a spiteful jab in the ribs.

There was silence in the compartment as I asked her quietly where she was going. She named a town. I bought two tickets for the place and paid the fine. The silence of the other passengers, after the conductor had gone, was icy and scornful. But her voice was strange, warm and yet mocking, as she asked, “So you’re going there too?”

“Oh, I might as well get off there. I have friends there. I’ve got no permanent home …”

“I see” was all she said. She leaned back in her corner, and in the close darkness I could only glimpse her face whenever a light outside rushed by.

It was pitch-dark by the time we got out. Dark and warm. And when we emerged from the station, the small town was already fast asleep. The little houses slept safe and sound beneath the gentle trees. “I’ll go with you,” I said hoarsely. “It’s so dark you can’t see a thing.”

But suddenly she stopped. It was under a streetlight. She fixed me with a long, wide-eyed stare and said in a strained voice, “If only I knew where I was going.” Her face moved slightly, like a scarf stirred by a
breeze. No, we did not kiss … We walked slowly out through the town and eventually crawled into a haystack. I had no friends here, of course: I was as much a stranger in this silent town as in any other. When it got chilly toward morning, I crept close beside her, and she covered me with part of her thin, skimpy coat. And so we warmed each other with our breath and our blood.

We have been together ever since—in these hard times.

Jupp held the knife by the tip of the blade, letting it joggle idly up and down; it was a long, tapering bread knife, obviously razor-sharp. With a sudden flick of the wrist he tossed the knife into the air. Up it went, whirring like a propeller; the shining blade glittered like a golden fish in a sheaf of lingering sunbeams, struck the ceiling, lost its spin, and plunged down straight at Jupp’s head. In a flash Jupp had placed a wooden block on his head; the knife scored into the wood and remained embedded there, gently swaying. Jupp removed the block from his head, withdrew the knife, and flung it with a gesture of annoyance at the door, where it stuck, quivering, in the frame until it gradually stopped vibrating and fell to the floor …

“It makes me sick,” said Jupp quietly. “I’ve been working on the logical assumption that people who’ve paid for their tickets really want to see a show where life and limb are at stake—like at the Roman circuses—they want to be convinced of at least the possibility of bloodshed, know what I mean?”

He picked up the knife and tossed it neatly against the top crossbar of the window, with such force that the panes rattled and threatened to fall out of the crumbling putty. This throw—confident and unerring—took me back to those hours of semidarkness in the past when he had thrown his pocketknife against the dugout post, from bottom to top and down again.

“I’ll do anything,” he went on, “to give the customers a thrill. I’ll even cut off my ears, only it’s hard to find anyone to stick them back on again. Here, I want to show you something.”

He opened the door for me, and we went out into the hallway. A few shreds of wallpaper still clung to the walls where the glue was too stubborn for them to be ripped off and used for lighting the stove. After passing through a moldering bathroom, we emerged onto a kind of terrace, its concrete floor cracked and moss-covered.

Jupp pointed upward.

“The higher the knife goes, of course, the greater the effect. But I need some resistance up there for the thing to strike against and lose momentum so that it can come hurtling down straight at my useless skull. Look!” He pointed up to where the iron girders of a ruined balcony stuck out into the air.

“This is where I used to practice. For a whole year. Watch!” He sent the knife soaring upward. It rose with marvelous symmetry and evenness, seeming to climb as smoothly and effortlessly as a bird; then it struck one of the girders, shot down with breathtaking speed, and crashed into the wooden block. The impact itself must have been terrific. Jupp didn’t bat an eyelid. The knife had buried itself a couple of inches in the wood.

“But that’s fantastic!” I cried. “It’s absolutely sensational, they’ll have to like it—what an act!”

Jupp nonchalantly withdrew the knife from the wood, grasped it by the handle, and made a thrust in the air.

“Oh, they like it all right. They pay me twelve marks a night, and between the main acts they let me play around a bit with the knife. But the act’s not elaborate enough. A man, a knife, a block of wood, don’t you see? I ought to have a half-naked girl so I can send the knife spinning a hairsbreadth past her nose. That’d make the crowd go wild. But try and find that kind of a girl!”

He went ahead as we returned to his room. He placed the knife carefully on the table, the wooden block beside it, and rubbed his hands. We sat down on the crate beside the stove and were silent. Taking some bread out of my pocket, I said, “Be my guest.”

“Thanks, I will, but let me make some coffee. Then you can come along and watch my performance.”

He put some more wood in the stove and set the pot over the opening. “It’s infuriating,” he said. “Maybe I look too serious, a bit like a sergeant still, eh?”

“Nonsense, you never were a sergeant. D’you smile when they clap?”

“Of course—and bow too.”

“I couldn’t. I couldn’t smile in a cemetery.”

“That’s a great mistake: a cemetery’s the very place
to
smile.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Because they aren’t dead. They’re none of them dead, see?”

“I see, all right, but I don’t believe it.”

“There’s still a bit of the lieutenant about you after all. Well, in that case it just takes longer, of course. The point is, I’m only too glad if they enjoy it. They’re burned out inside; I give them a bit of a thrill and get paid for it. Perhaps one of them, just one, will go home and not forget me. ‘That man with the knife, for Christ’s sake, he wasn’t scared, and I’m scared all the time, for Christ’s sake,’ maybe that’s what they’ll say because they’re all scared, all the time. They trail their fear behind them like a heavy shadow, and it makes me happy if they can forget about it and laugh a little. Isn’t that reason enough to smile?”

I said nothing, my eyes on the water, waiting for it to boil. Jupp poured the boiling water onto the coffee in the brown enamel pot, and we took turns drinking from the pot and shared my bread. Outside, the mild dusk began to fall, flowing into the room like soft gray milk.

“What are
you
doing these days, by the way?” asked Jupp.

“Nothing … just getting by.”

“A hard way to make a living.”

“Right—for this loaf of bread I had to collect a hundred bricks and clean them. Casual labor.”

“Hm … Want to see another of my tricks?”

In response to my nod he stood up, switched on the light, and went over to the wall, where he pushed aside a kind of rug, disclosing the rough outline of a man drawn in charcoal on the reddish colorwash: a strange lump protruded from what was supposed to be the head, probably signifying a hat. On closer inspection I saw that the man had been drawn on a skillfully camouflaged door. I watched expectantly as Jupp proceeded to pull out a handsome little brown leather suitcase from under the miserable affair that served as his bed and put it on the table. Before opening it, he came over and placed four cigarette butts in front of me. “Roll those into two thin ones,” he said.

I moved my seat so that I could watch him as well as get a bit more of the gentle warmth from the stove. While I was carefully pulling the butts apart on the bread paper spread over my knees, Jupp had snapped open the lock of the suitcase and pulled out an odd-looking object: one of those flannel bags consisting of a series of pockets in which our mothers used to keep their table silver. He deftly untied the ribbon and
let the bundle unroll across the table to reveal a dozen wood-handled knives, the kind that, in the days when our mothers danced the waltz, were known as “hunting cutlery.”

I divided the tobacco shreds scrupulously in half onto the two cigarette papers and rolled them. “Here,” I said.

“Here,” Jupp said too, and “Thanks,” bringing over the flannel bag for me to look at.

“This is all I managed to salvage from my parents’ belongings. Almost everything was burned or lost in the rubble, and the rest stolen. When I got back from POW camp I was really on my beam ends, didn’t own a thing in the world—until one day a dignified old lady, a friend of my mother’s, tracked me down and brought along this nice suitcase. A few days before my mother was killed in an air raid she had left it with the old lady to be looked after, and it had survived. Funny, isn’t it? But of course we know that when people panic they try to save the strangest things. Never the essential ones. So then at least I was the owner of the contents of this suitcase: the brown enamel pot, twelve forks, twelve knives and twelve spoons, and the long bread knife. I sold the spoons and forks, living off the proceeds for a year, and practiced with the knives, thirteen of them. Watch …”

I passed him the spill I had used to light my cigarette. Jupp stuck his cigarette to his lower lip, fastened the ribbon of the flannel bag to a button on the shoulder of his jacket, and let the flannel unroll along his arm like some exotic panoply of war. Then with incredible speed he whisked the knives out of their pockets, and before I could follow his movements he had thrown all twelve like lightning against the dim human outline, which reminded me of those sinister, shambling figures that came lurching at us toward the end of the war from every billboard, every corner, harbingers of defeat and destruction. Two knives were sticking out of the man’s hat, two over each shoulder, and the others, three a side, along the dangling arms …

“Fantastic!” I cried. “Fantastic! But you’ve got your act right there, with a bit of dramatizing.”

“All I need is a man, better still a girl. But I know I’ll never find anyone,” he said with a sigh, plucking the knives out of the door and slipping them carefully back into their pockets. “The girls are too scared and the men want too much money. Can’t blame them, of course; it’s a risky business.”

Once again he flung the knives back at the door in such a way as to split the entire black figure accurately down the middle with dazzling symmetry. The thirteenth knife, the big one, stuck like a deadly arrow just where the man’s heart should have been.

Jupp took a final puff of the thin, tobacco-filled roll of paper and threw the scant remains behind the stove.

“Let’s go,” he said, “it’s time we were off.” He stuck his head out the window, muttered something about “damned rain,” and added: “It’s a few minutes to eight, I’m on at eight-thirty.”

While he was packing the knives away in the suitcase I stood with my face by the open window. Decaying villas seemed to be whimpering softly in the rain, and from behind a wall of swaying poplars came the screech of the streetcar. But nowhere could I see a clock.

“How d’you know what time it is?”

“Instinct—that’s part of my training.”

I gaped at him. First he helped me on with my coat and then put on his windbreaker. My shoulder is slightly paralyzed and I can’t move my arms beyond a certain radius, just far enough to clean bricks. We put on our caps and went out into the dingy corridor, and I was glad to hear at least some voices in the house, laughter, and a subdued murmuring.

“It’s like this,” said Jupp as we went down the stairs. “What I’ve tried to do is trace certain cosmic laws. Watch.” He put the suitcase down on a stair and spread his arms, an Icarus poised for flight in the way the ancient Greeks used to show him. His matter-of-fact expression assumed a strangely cool and dreamlike quality, something between obsession and detachment, something magical, that I found quite spine-chilling. “Like this,” he said softly. “I simply reach out into the atmosphere, I feel my hands getting longer and longer, reaching out into a dimension governed by different laws, they push through a ceiling, and beyond are strange, spell-binding tensions—I just take hold of them, that’s all … and then I seize their laws, snatch them away, part thief, part lover, and carry them off.” He clenched his fists, drawing them close to his body. “Let’s go,” he said, and his expression was its usual matter-of-fact self. I followed him in a daze …

Outside, a chill rain was falling softly and steadily. We turned up our collars and withdrew shivering into ourselves. The mist of twilight was surging through the streets, already tinged with the bluish darkness
of night. In several basements among the bombed-out villas a meager light was burning under the towering black weight of a great ruin. The street gradually became a muddy path where to left and right, in the opaque twilight, shacks loomed up in the scrawny gardens like junks afloat in a shallow backwater. We crossed the streetcar tracks, plunged into the maze of narrow streets on the city’s outskirts, where among piles of rubble and garbage a few houses still stood intact in the dirt, until we emerged suddenly into a busy street. The tide of the crowds carried us along for a bit, until we turned a corner into a dark side street where a garish illuminated sign saying T
HE
S
EVEN
M
ILLS
was reflected in the glistening asphalt.