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

life in living rooms where fruit never intended to be eaten grew old in green glass bowls.
    Always more drawing. When I came back from night school I calculated and drew from half-past nine till midnight. Angels and trees, cloud shapes, churches and chapels, Gothic ones, Roman ones, Romanesque, Rococo and Early Victorian—and modern ones besides, if you please. I drew long-haired maidens with soulful faces hovering above doorways, their long hair sweeping down either side the door like a curtain, with the part in the hair drawn sharp, precisely in the middle above the doorway. And the landlords’ daughters, during these laborious evening hours, brought me weak tea or weak lemonade, inviting me to intimacies which they thought of as daring. Meanwhile I drew on, especially detail, since I knew that this was what they—who were they, anyway, the ‘they’?—would be most likely to go for: door handles, ornamental gratings,
Agni Dei
, pelicans, anchors and crosses entwined with hissing snakes rising up to strike but all in vain.
    I always remembered the trick my last boss, Domgreve, had pulled, pulled only too often. His gimmick was to drop his rosary beads at the critical moment after we’d looked over the site. The pious peasants had proudly shown us the field intended for the new church, and afterwards the deacons, upright and bashful, in the back room of some village pub had announced their intention of going along with the project. It was at this juncture the rosary would somehow be drawn out with cigarettes, coin or watch, providentially dropped andpicked up with an air of simulated confusion. That, at least, was something I could never laugh at.
    “No, Leonore, that A on the folders and drawings and estimates doesn’t mean Assignment, it means St. Anthony. St. Anthony’s Abbey.”
    With a deft touch and a soft step she imposed order, the kind of organization he had always loved and had never been able to maintain. It had been too much, too many jobs, too much money.
    I’m a little crazy now, and I was crazy then, in the railroad station square, fingering the loose coins in my coat pocket to see how much I had, checking on my drawing pad, the green box with my pencils in it, testing the set of my flowing velvet four-in-hand, feeling around the rim of my black artist’s hat, and letting my hands move farther down, over the tails of my suit, the only good one to my name, left me by Uncle Marsil who’d died of consumption as a young teacher. By then Uncle Marsil’s gravestone was already covered with moss, out there in Mees, where, when he was twenty years old, he beat time with his baton in the choir loft, drummed the rule of three into farm kids’ heads and, in the dusk of evening, went out walking on the moors, dreaming of young girls’ lips, of bread and wine and the fame he hoped to win with his neatly turned verses. Dreams dreamed on moorland paths, two years of dreaming, until blood gushed from his mouth and carried him off to the far shore, leaving behind a copybook filled with verses, a black suit for his godson, two gold coins. And, on the greenish curtain of the schoolroom, a bloodstain which his successor’s wife could not take out. Also, a song, sung at their hungry teacher’s grave by children’s voices: ‘Watchman, whither has the swallow flown?’
    I took another look back at the station, at the ad by the turnstile gate to the trains, put there so recruits reporting for duty couldn’t help but see it. It said ‘I recommend to militarypersonnel my genuine, long-established Standard Underwear, designed by Professor Gustav Jaeger. Also, my genuine Pallas Underwear, patented in all civilized countries, and my genuine Reform Underwear, designed by Dr. Lahmann.’
    It was time to start the dance.
    I walked across the streetcar tracks, past the Prince Heinrich Hotel, across Modest Street, hesitated a second in front of the Cafe Kroner. In the door glass, backed with taut green silk, I saw my own