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

reminded me of the road leading to Trischler’s house. I was standing at the railing of the old weighhouse in the Lower Harbor. From there I had a good view of the road. It went past woodyards, coalyards, ran down to a place where building materials were sold, from there went to the basin, closed off by a rusty iron fence and now used only as a ship-breaking yard for condemned vessels. The last time I’d been there was seven years before, with Schrella, when we went to visit Trischler. But it could have been fifty. I was thirteen when I first went there. In the evening long trains of barges lay moored at the embankment. Barge-women with their market baskets walked ashore up swaying gangplanks. The women had red faces and a steady eye. Men came after the women, out to get beer or a newspaper. Trischler’s mother, all in a flutter, looked over her wares—tomatoes and cabbages and bunches of silvery onions hanging on the wall. Outside a drover was giving his dog short, sharp commands, getting them to drive the sheep into a pen. Across the river—on the side where we are now, Hugo—the gaslamps were being turned on, yellowish light filling the whiteglobes. A great line of them ran north, propagating infinity. Trischler’s father snapped on the lights in his beer garden, and Schrella’s father, a napkin over his arm, came down to the two-boat house out back, where we—Trischler, young Schrella and I—were chipping ice and throwing it over the beer cases.
    But now, seven years later, Hugo, on this twenty-first of July in 1935, the paint had peeled off all the fences, and the only new thing in sight was the door at Michaelis’ coalyard. On the other side of the fence a big pile of briquettes lay crumbling apart. At every turn in the road I looked back to make sure I wasn’t being followed. I was exhausted, I could feel the wounds on my back. The pain began to throb like a pulse. For ten minutes there hadn’t been a soul on the road. I looked along the narrow stretch of clear, ruffled water joining the Lower to the Upper Harbor. Not a boat in sight. I looked up at the sky. Not a plane, either, and I thought, you must take yourself pretty seriously if you think they’ll send planes out looking for you.
    You see, I’d done it, Hugo, I’d gone with Schrella to the little Cafe Zons on Boisserée Street, where the Lambs had their meetings. I’d mumbled the password to the proprietor: ‘Feed my lambs.’ And I had sworn to a young girl called Edith, and I looked right into her eyes as I did it, that I would never make oblation to the
Host of the Beast
. In that same dark back room I had made a speech, in it using unlamblike words smacking of blood and rioting and revenge, revenge for Ferdi Progulske whom they’d executed only that morning. The ones sitting around the table listening themselves looked as if they had just had their heads chopped off. They were frightened, they realized that a boy’s seriousness is as serious as an adult’s. Fear lay on them, and the knowledge that Ferdi was really dead. He was seventeen years old, a hundred-meter runner, a carpenter’s apprentice. I’d only seen him four times all told, twice in the Cafe Zons and twice in my own house, yet I’d never forget him as long as I lived. Ferdi had sneaked into Old Wobbly’sapartment and thrown a bomb at Wobbly’s feet as he came out of the bedroom. Old Wobbly got out of it with burns on his feet, a shattered bureau mirror and a smell of cordite in the place. Madness, Hugo, adolescent high-mindedness. You hear? Are you really listening?”
    “I hear, all right.”
    “I’d read Hölderlin:
Firm in compassion the eternal heart
. But Ferdi only read Karl May, who seemed to preach the same high-mindedness. All foolishness, paid for under the executioner’s ax in the gray of the morning, while church bells were tolling for matins and baker boys counted warm rolls into their string bags, and here in the Prince Heinrich Hotel the first guests