Billiards at Half-Past Nine

  HEINRICH BÖLL

  In 1972, Heinrich Böll became the first German to win the Nobel Prize for literature since Thomas Mann in 1929. Born in Cologne, in 1917, Böll was reared in a liberal Catholic, pacifist family. Drafted into the Wehrmacht, he served on the Russian and French fronts and was wounded four times before he found himself in an American prison camp. After the war he enrolled at the University of Cologne, but dropped out to write about his shattering experiences as a soldier. His first novel, The Train Was on Time, was published in 1949, and he went on to become one of the most prolific and important of post-war German writers. His best-known novels include Billiards at Half-Past Nine (1959), The Clown (1963), Group Portrait with Lady (1971), and The Safety Net (1979). In 1981 he published a memoir, What’s to Become of the Boy? or: Something to Do with Books. Böll served for several years as the president of International P.E.N. and was a leading defender of the intellectual freedom of writers throughout the world. He died in June 1985.

  Jessa Crispin is the editor and founder of Bookslut.com. She is also a reviewer for NPR’s “Books We Like,” and her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Guardian, and The Toronto Globe and Mail, among other publications. She lives in Berlin.

  The Essential

  HEINRICH BÖLL

  The Clown

  The Safety Net

  Billiards at Half-Past Nine

  The Train Was on Time

  Irish Journal

  Group Portrait with Lady

  What’s to Become of the Boy? Or:

  Something to Do with Books—A Memoir

  The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll

  Billiards at Half-Past Nine

  Originally published in German as Billard um halb zehn by Heinrich Böll

  © 1959, 1995, 2007 by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG, Cologne, Germany

  Translated by Patrick Bowles

  Afterword © Jessa Crispin, 2010

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  www.mhpbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the paperback edition as follows:

  Böll, Heinrich, 1917-1985.

  [Billard um Halbzehn. English]

  Billiards at half-past nine / Heinrich Böll ; translated from the German by Patrick Bowles.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-935554-84-4

  I. Bowles, Patrick. II. Title.

  PT2603.O394B513 2010

  833′.914–dc22

  2010043887

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  AFTERWORD

  by Jessa Crispin

  1

  This morning, for the first time ever, Faehmel was curt with her, almost rude. He called about half-past eleven and the very sound of his voice over the phone spelt trouble. The tone was new to her, and frightening, precisely because everything he said was, in fact, as irreproachable as always. But in this new voice all courtesy had been reduced to mere formula, as if he were suddenly offering her a glass of H2O instead of water.

  “If you please,” he said, “look in your desk and get that little red card I gave you four years ago.” She pulled out the drawer, pushed aside a chocolate bar, some cleaning cloths, the metal polish and took out the red card. “Now, be so kind as to read what it says on the card.”

  Voice trembling, she read: “Available at any time to my mother, my father, my daughter, my son or Mr. Schrella. Otherwise to no one.”

  “Repeat the last sentence, please.” She did—“Otherwise to no one.” “And by the way, how did you find out that phone number I gave you was the Prince Heinrich Hotel?” She said not a word. “I want to stress the fact you’re to follow my instructions even when they date back four years … if you please.”

  Not a peep out of her.

  “Stupid thing …!” The inevitable “if you please,” had he forgotten it?

  She heard muttering, then a voice calling, “Taxi, taxi,” after which the connection was cut off. She laid down the receiver, shoved the little red card into the center of the desk and felt a kind of relief. His rudeness, the first in four years, was almost like a caress.

  When she was at sixes and sevens, or fed up with the extremely routine nature of her work, she would go out of doors and polish the brass nameplate: “Dr. Robert Faehmel. Architectural Estimates. Closed Afternoons.” Train smoke, street dust, smog gave her a daily excuse to use the cloths and metal polish, and she liked to stretch out the chore to a quarter, a half-hour. Now, across the way, she could see the printing presses stamping away, tirelessly impressing edification on white paper. She felt their vibration, imagined herself on a ship about to get under way, or already out at sea. Trucks, apprentices, nuns. Life in the streets, crates in front of the grocer’s, oranges, tomatoes, cabbages. Next door, in front of Gretz’ shop, two butcherboys were hanging up the wild boar, as they did every day. Dark boar’s blood was dripping onto the asphalt. Defiance welled up in her. She thought what it would be like to give notice and go to work in some grimy, backyard hole-in-the-wall where electric cable or spices or onions were sold, where sloppily suspendered middle-aged foremen had ideas, thus providing the satisfaction of giving them the brush-off. Places where you had to put up a battle to get that extra hour to spend waiting at the dentist’s. Where a collection was taken up when one of the girls got engaged, or had a stork shower. Or to buy a book on love. Where your fellow-workers’ dirty jokes kept you alive to the fact that you, yourself, were a virgin. Life. Quite different from this perfect order, this flawlessly dressed and unfailingly polite employer who gave you the creeps. There was contempt, you could sense, behind the politeness he handed out to everyone he came in contact with. Yet who, actually, who outside herself did he have anything to do with? As far back as she could remember, she’d never seen him talking to anyone, except his father, son or daughter. His mother she’d never laid eyes on. She was off in a mental hospital somewhere. Nor had that Mr. Schrella, also on the red card, ever set foot in the office. Faehmel meanwhile held no office consultations. Clients who phoned for an appointment were asked to state their business in writing.

  When he caught her making a mistake, he merely passed it off with a wave of his hand, and said, “All right, now do it over, please.” As a matter of fact this seldom happened; the few errors that crept in she usually discovered first herself. In all events, that “please” of his he never forgot. When she asked him for time off, he gave it to her, hours, days. The time her mother died, he said, “We’ll close the office for four days. Or would you rather have a week?” But she hadn’t wanted a week, not even four days. Only three, and even that was too long in the empty apartment. Needless to say, he showed up for the funeral and graveside services, and his father, his son and daughter also put in an appearance, all of them bringing enormous wreaths which they laid on the grave themselves. They listened closely to the liturgy, and the old father, whom she liked, whispered to her, “We Faehmels know death very well. We’re on a solid footing with that fellow, my dear child.”

  Every favor she wanted was granted without demur and as a result she found it harder and harder, as the years slipped by, to make any requests at a
ll. He had progressively cut down her working hours. During the first year she had worked from eight till four. But for the past two years her work had become so organized she could easily get it done between eight and one. Even so she had time to be bored, to drag out the cleaning chore to a half-hour. And now not as much as a single cloudy spot left on the brass sign! She screwed the cap of the metal polish back on, folded the rags and heaved a sigh. The printing presses were still pounding away, tirelessly impressing edification on white paper, the boar carcass was still dripping blood. Apprentices, trucks, nuns. Life in the streets.

  There it lay on the desk, the red card with “Otherwise to no one” in the flawless architect’s writing. There, too, was the phone number which, having time on her hands, blushing at her own curiosity, she had identified as the Prince Heinrich Hotel’s. The name had provided fresh scent for her nose to follow. What did he do in the Prince Heinrich Hotel every morning between half-past nine and eleven? That icy voice on the phone, saying, “Stupid thing.” And without any “please” after it! The departure from style cheered her up, reconciled her with a job any automaton could manage.

  Among the carbon copies left behind by her predecessor she had found two form letters, both of which had continued in use unchanged during the years of her regime. One was for clients who had placed a commission: “Thank you for your confidence, which we shall try to justify by speedy and accurate fulfillment of your assignment. Respectfully yours.…” The other was used when stress and strain data and the like were delivered to clients: “Herewith the desired information concerning construction project X. Kindly credit the fee, in the amount of Y, to our bank account. Respectfully yours.…” Certain variations, of course, were left to her. For X she might insert “Publisher’s house at the edge of the forest,” “Teacher’s house on riverbank,” “Holleben Street railway bridge.” The fee entered at Y, too, she figured out herself, according to a simple scale.

  Beyond this there was the correspondence with his three associates, Kanders, Schrit and Hochbret, to whom she had to forward the commissions in turn as they came in. “This way,” Faehmel had said, “justice automatically runs its course and the odds are even for a lucky break.” When the data came back, Schrit had to go over Kanders’ figures, Kanders over Hochbret’s, Hochbret over Schrit’s. There were also card indexes to be kept, bills for expenses to be entered in a ledger, drawings to photocopy and double postcard-size extra photocopies to be made for his private records. But mostly her work consisted of getting letters ready to mail, again and again drawing the sticky side of green, red or blue stamps with President Heuss’ picture on them across the little sponge and pasting them on neatly at the upper right-hand corner of the yellow envelopes. From time to time the Heusses needed were brown, violet or yellow, and even that much was a welcome change.

  Faehmel had made it a rule never to spend more than an hour a day in the office. He wrote his name under “Respectfully yours,” under itemized billings. If more commissions came in than he could handle in an hour a day, he turned them down. For such cases there was a mimeographed form letter, the text of which read: “We regret to inform you that owing to the pressure of work we must forego the privilege of handling your esteemed commission. Signed, F.”

  Not once, while sitting opposite him mornings between half-past eight and half-past nine, had she ever seen him doing anything that was human and intimate, such as eating or drinking. She’d never even seen him have a head cold. She blushed, thinking of things more intimate than these. The fact that he smoked didn’t make up for all the other things she missed. The snow-white cigarette was too perfect, only ashes and butt in the ash tray for consolation. Still, that much at least was waste, evidence that something had been used up. She had worked for mighty bosses before, men whose desks were like a captain’s bridge, whose physiognomy inspired dread. Yet even these big shots had drunk a cup of tea or coffee now and then, or eaten a sandwich, and the sight of tycoons eating and drinking had always been a source of excitement. Bread crumbled, sausage skins and fatty ham rind were left over. Hands had to be washed, handkerchiefs taken out. Mouths were wiped on granite visages that, one day, would be cast in bronze, from pedestaled monuments to give notice of their greatness to future generations. But Faehmel, when he arrived from the rear premises at half-past eight, brought no whiff of breakfast with him. Nor, as you might expect of a boss, was he ever either nervous or carefully poised for action. Even when he had to write his name forty times under “Respectfully yours,” his signature stayed fine and readable. He smoked, he signed, once in a great while gave a drawing a glance, at half-past nine took his hat and coat, said, “See you tomorrow,” and vanished. From half-past nine till eleven he was at the Prince Heinrich Hotel, from eleven to noon in the Cafe Zons, all this while available only to his “mother, father, daughter, son and Mr. Schrella.” At noon he went out for a walk, then at one o’clock met his daughter for lunch at The Lion. How he spent his afternoons and evenings she had no idea. She only knew that he went to Mass every morning at seven, was with his daughter from half-past seven till eight, from eight till half-past eight breakfasted alone.

  She never got over being surprised by the pleasure he showed when his son came to pay him a visit. Again and again, at the office, he would open the window and look down the street as far as the Modest Gate. He had flowers sent to the house, engaged a housekeeper for the length of the visit. The little scar on the bridge of his nose turned red with excitement, the gloomy back part of the house teemed with cleaning women as daily they brought out empty wine bottles and left them in the hall for the rubbish man. More and more bottles accumulated, first in rows of five, then of ten, until the whole length of the back entry was taken up by a stiff, dark green forest stockade of bottles, the tips of which she counted, blushing at her nosiness. Two hundred and ten bottles emptied between the beginning of May and the last of August. More than one bottle a day.

  Yet he never smelled of alcohol, his hands never shook. The stiff, dark green forest became unreal. Had she actually seen it? Or was it only a dream? Schrit, Hochbret or Kanders certainly she had never seen, each being buried as he was in his own little hideout far away from the others.

  Only twice had any one of them caught another making a mistake. Once was when Schrit had miscalculated the foundation for the municipal swimming pool—this detected by Hochbret. It had been all very upsetting, but Faehmel had merely asked her to identify the notes penciled in red on the margin of the drawing as belonging respectively to Schrit and Hochbret. For the first time it dawned on her that Faehmel really knew his business. Half an hour he sat at his desk with slide rule, reference tables and sharpened pencils, then said, “Hochbret is right. The swimming pool would have caved in after three months.” Meanwhile not a word of blame for Schrit, of praise for Hochbret. Just this once—as he signed the revised estimate—he laughed, and his laugh was as eerie as his politeness.

  The second mistake had been made by Hochbret, when he worked out a statics analysis for the Wilhelmskuhle railway overpass. That time the error was discovered by Kanders. Once again she watched Faehmel—for the second time in four years—sit down at his desk and calculate. Once again she had to identify Hochbret’s and Kanders’ red-penciled notes. It was this incident that gave him the idea of prescribing different colored pencils for his different associates: Kanders red, Hochbret green, Schrit yellow.

  Slowly, a piece of chocolate melting in her mouth, she wrote, “Weekend house for film actress,” then, “Annex for Co-operative Welfare Society” as a second piece dissolved. At least clients did have names and addresses to tell them apart by, and the enclosed drawings likewise made her feel she was involved in something real. Building stone and sheets of plastic, iron girders, glass bricks and bags of cement, all of these could be visualized, whereas Kanders, Schrit and Hochbret, though she wrote their addresses every day, could not. They sent in their totals and estimates without comment. “Why letters?” Faehmel had said. “We’re not i
n the business here of collecting confessions, are we?”

  Sometimes she took down the encyclopedia from the bookshelf and looked up the places to which her daily envelopes were addressed. “Schilgenauel, pop. 87, of which 83 Rom. Cath., famous 12th cent. parish church w. Schilgenauel altar.” Kanders lived there. And his insurance card revealed the following information: “Age 37, bachelor, Rom. Cath.” Schrit lived way up north, in “Gludum, pop. 1988, of which 1812 Prot., 176 Rom. Cath., pickle factories, mission school.” Schrit was “48, married, Prot., 2 children, of which 1 over 18.” She didn’t need to look up Hochbret’s home town. He lived in Blessenfeld, out in the suburbs, only a thirty-five-minute bus ride away. The crazy idea often popped into her head of looking up Hochbret, of making sure he was real by hearing his voice, seeing him in the flesh, feeling his handshake. But his youth—he was just thirty-two—and the fact he was a bachelor held her back. Although the encyclopedia described Kanders’ and Schrit’s home towns with the exactness of an identification card, and although she knew Blessenfeld very well, still all three of them remained beyond her power to visualize, even when she made out their monthly insurance premiums, filled in postal orders for them, sent them schedules and periodicals. They remained as unreal as that Mr. Schrella, named on the red card, to whom Faehmel was always available, though in four years not once had Schrella ever asked to see him.

  She let the red card, cause of his first rudeness to her, lie on the desk. What was the name of that gentleman, the one who had come into the office about ten and urgently, urgently, very urgently asked to speak with Faehmel? A big, gray-haired man with a rather ruddy face, he smelled of exquisite expense-account meals and wore a suit reeking of class. He had combined power, dignity and masterful charm in an utterly irresistible way. His title, vaguely, smilingly murmured, had something to do with minister—ministerial councillor, director, manager—something like that. When she’d said she hadn’t any idea where Faehmel was at the moment, suddenly, shooting out a hand, laying it on her shoulder, he said, “Come on now, sweetie, out with it. Where can I find him?” And she had given in to him, not knowing just how it happened. She gave away the deep-down secret, the scent of which had so keenly led her on: “Prince Heinrich Hotel.” Whereupon he had murmured something about being an old school friend, about an urgent, a very pressing matter, something about defense, weapons. Behind him he left the aroma of a cigar which, when he smelled it an hour later, set Faehmel’s father excitedly sniffing.