Read Online Billiards at Half-Past Nine by Heinrich Böll, Patrick Bowles, Jessa Crispin - Free Book Online Page A

known what it is. Not a soul who doesn’t make it clear to me that I disgust him. My mother used to curse me out seven times a day, scream her loathing in my face. My mother was young and pretty, my father young and good-looking, and so were my brothers and sisters. They’d have poisoned me if only they’d had the courage. They said,
a thing like that should never have been born
. We used to live in a yellow villa above the steel works. Thousands of workers left the mill at night, and women and girls, all of them laughing, were waiting for them. They’d all go down those dirty streets together, laughing. I can see, hear, feel and smell like any other human being. I can read, write, count and taste—yet you’re the first human being to stick it out with me more than half an hour, first one, you hear?”
    She left a trail of dread behind her, the breath of disaster, throwing her room key on the desk, shrieking into the face of the boy replacing Jochen, “Hugo, where’s Hugo?” When the boy shrugged his shoulders, she walked on to the revolving door, and the waiter who started it turning for her looked down at the floor. Then, the moment she was outside, she drew down her veil over her face.
    “I don’t wear it inside, boy. Let them see something for their money, and look at me for mine. But the people outside haven’t earned it.”
    “Here’s your cognac, Doctor.”
    “Thanks, Hugo.”
    He liked Faehmel. Faehmel came every morning at half-past nine, gave him a reprieve till eleven, had already endowed him with a sense of eternity. Had it not always been like this? Had he not been standing at this same whitely lacquered door for centuries, hands folded behind his back, watching the quiet game, listening to words that sent him now sixty years back, now twenty ahead, then ten back again, only suddenly to fling him into the calendar-card reality outside the billiard room? White-green, red-green, red-white, always inside billiard cushions enclosing no more than two square meters of green felt. It was all clean, dry, precise. Between half-past nine and eleven. Downstairs to fetch the double cognac twice, maybe three times. Time here ceased to be a dimension making things measurable. Time was blotted out by that green rectangle of blotting paper. In vain hours chimed, hands moved in vain, in vain ran away from each other in senseless haste. When Faehmel showed up it was drop everything—and just at the one time when there was most to do, old guests leaving, new ones arriving. Yet he had to stand there until St. Severin’s struck eleven. But when—when would that be? Airless rooms, timeless clocks, and he submerged here, moving swiftly under oceans, reality not penetrating, its nose pressed against glass outside, as against shop or aquarium window, dimensions lost, except flatness, the flatness of children’s cutouts. Here people’s clothes were provisionally draped upon their bodies, so many paper dolls. Helplessly they kicked against time’s walls, thicker than centuries made of glass. St. Severin’s shadow was far away, farther still the railroad station, the trains not real, through, freight, express, fast and slow, with them carryingtrunks to customs stations. Only the three billiard balls, rolling over green blotting paper, forming ever-new figurations, were real. Infinity in a thousand formulas, all contained within two square meters. He struck them forth, his cue a wand, while his voice lost itself in eons of time.
    “Is there any more to the story, Doctor?”
    “You want to hear it?”
    “I’d like to.”
    Faehmel laughed, sipped at his glass of cognac, lit himself a fresh cigarette, took up the cue and played the red ball. Red-white rolled over the table’s green.
    “A week after that, Hugo.…”
    “After what?”
    Again Faehmel laughed. “After that rounders game, that fourteenth of July in 1935 they scratched into the plaster above the locker—a week after that, I was glad that Schrella had