Billiards at Half-Past Nine by Heinrich Boll & Patrick Bowles & Jessa Crispin

Author:Heinrich Boll & Patrick Bowles & Jessa Crispin [Boll, Heinrich & Bowles, Patrick & Crispin, Jessa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary
ISBN: 9781935554189
Google: cVgEAQAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1935554182
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2010-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

He climbed bolt upright up the ladder, treading into the gray infinity between the rungs, while David climbed down to him from above. A slight man. All his life long he could have worn the same suits he’d bought for himself when he was young. Watch out! Why do you two have to stop up there half-way up, why can’t you at least sit down on the rungs, if you have to talk to each other, instead of standing up straight like that. Were they really putting their arms around each other, did the son really have his arm around his father’s shoulders, the father’s around his son’s?

Coffee, Huperts, strong and hot with a lot of sugar; he likes it strong and sweet in the afternoon, my lord and master, and weak in the mornings. He’s coming out of that gray infinity into which the upright and unbending one is disappearing, with his long strides. My husband and my son are brave, coming here to see me in this dungeon of the damned. My son twice a week, my husband only once. He brings Saturday with him, he carries a diary in his eyes. With him I cannot hope to say it’s the barber makes him look like that. He’s eighty; it’s his birthday today, and it will be solemnly celebrated in the Café Kroner. Without champagne. He always did hate it and I never knew why.

Once upon a time you dreamt of having a tremendous party on your birthday. Seven times seven grandchildren, great-grandchildren, too, and daughters-in-law and great-nephews and great-nieces by marriage. You’ve always felt a little like Abraham, founder of a mighty clan; you used to picture yourself with your twenty-ninth great-grandchild in your arms when you were dreaming of the future.

Increase and multiply. It will be a sad feast. Only one son, then the blond grandson and the dark-haired granddaughter Edith gave you; and the mother of the clan in dungeon with a curse on it, accessible only by infinitely long ladders with giant rungs.

“Come in, and welcome, old David, still with your young man’s waistline. But spare me the diary in your eyes. I’m sailing along on the little diary page, marked May 31, 1942. Have pity on me, beloved, don’t burn my little paper boat made of that folded diary page, don’t spill me into the sea of sixteen years forever gone. Do you still remember? Victory is won, not given. Woe to all those who don’t take the Host of the Beast. And of course you know that sacraments have the terrible quality of not being subject to the finite. And so they hungered, and the bread was not multiplied for them, nor the fish, and the Host of the Lamb did not still their hunger, while that of the Beast offered nourishment in plenty. They’d never learned how to reckon: a billion marks for a piece of candy, a horse for an apple, and then not even three pfennigs for a roll. And everything always in order, everything always respectable, honorable, loyal.

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