Read Online Irish Journal by Heinrich Böll - Free Book Online

those coming from evening service, streets in which the houses seem to get smaller and smaller; prison walls, convent walls, church walls, barrack walls; a lieutenant coming off duty props his bicycle by the door of his tiny house and stumbles over his children on the threshold.
    Incense again, candle warmth, silence, people at prayer who cannot bear to part from the crimson Sacred Heart being gently reminded by the sacristan please to go home.Head-shaking. “But—,” whispered arguments on the part of the sacristan. Head-shaking. Firmly glued to the kneeling bench. Who is going to count the prayers, the curses, and who has the Geiger counter that could register the hopes concentrated this evening on Crimson Cloud? Four slim fetlocks, there is a mortgage on these that nobody is going to be able to redeem. And when Crimson Cloud does not win, the grief must be quenched with as much dark beer as was needed to nourish the hope. Marbles are still clicking against the worn steps of the pub, against the worn steps of churches and bookies’ offices.
    It was much later that I discovered the last innocent milk bottle, as virginal as it had been in the morning; it was standing in the doorway of a tiny house whose shutters were closed. In the next doorway an elderly woman, gray-haired, slatternly, only the cigarette in her face was white. I stopped.
    “Where is he?” I asked softly.
    “Who?”
    “The one the milk belongs to. Is he still asleep?”
    “No,” she said quietly, “he emigrated today.”
    “And left the milk?”
    “Yes.”
    “And the light on?”
    “Is it still on?”
    “Can’t you see?”
    I leaned forward, close to the yellow chink in the door, and looked in, where in a tiny hall a towel was still hanging on a doorknob and a hat on the peg, where a dirty plate with the remains of some potatoes lay on the floor.
    “So he has, he’s left the light on, but what’s the difference: they won’t be sending him the bill to Australia.”
    “To Australia?”
    “Yes.”
    “And the milk bill?”
    “Hasn’t paid that either.”
    The white of the cigarette was already dwindling toward her dark lips, and she shuffled back to her doorway. “Oh well,” she said, “he could have turned out the light.”
    Limerick slept, under a thousand rosaries, under curses, floated on dark beer; watched over by a single snow-white milk bottle, it was dreaming of Crimson Cloud and the crimson Sacred Heart.

8
WHEN GOD MADE TIME …
    That a church service can only begin when the priest arrives is obvious; but that a movie can only begin when all the priests, the local ones as well as those on vacation, are assembled in full strength is somewhat surprising to the foreigner used to Continental customs. He can only hope that the priest and his friends will soon finish their supper and their postprandial chat; that they do not overindulge in reminiscences: the range of do-you-remember conversations is inexhaustible; that Latin teacher, that math teacher, not to mention that history teacher!
    The movie is supposed to start at 9 P.M. , but if there is one thing subject to change it is this hour. Even the vaguest formula for an appointment, as when one says “around nine,” is by comparison a term of utmost precision, for “around nine” is over by half-past nine, when “around ten” begins; this “9 P.M .,” the unadorned precision with which it appears on the poster, is a snare and a delusion.
    The strange thing is that no one is in the least annoyed at the delay. “When God made time,” the Irish say, “He made plenty of it.” There is no doubt that this saying is as much to the point as it is worth meditating on: if we imagine time to be asubstance that has been given to us in order that we may settle our affairs here on earth, we have certainly been given enough, for there is always “plenty of time.” The man who has no time is a monster, a fiend: he steals time from somewhere, secretes it. (How much time must have