The Clown by Heinrich Boll

Author:Heinrich Boll [Boll, Heinrich]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-935554-85-1
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2010-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

14

I imagined her coming home in the dark. The sharply swept lawn looked almost blue in the moonlight. Next to the garage, cut twigs, stacked up by the gardener. Between the forsythia and the hawthorn, the garbage can, ready to be carried away. Friday evening. By now she would know what the kitchen was smelling of, fish, she would also know what messages she would find, one from Züpfner on the TV set: “Urgent call to go to F. Love. Heribert,” the other from the maid on the icebox—“Gone to movies, back at ten. Greta (Luise, Birgit).”

Open garage door, switch on light: on the whitewashed wall the shadow of a scooter and a discarded sewing machine. The Mercedes in Züpfner’s stall was a sign that Züpfner had walked. “Get some fresh air, get a bit of fresh air, air.” Mud on the tires and fenders indicated drives into the Eifel Mountains, afternoon speeches to the Youth Union (“keep together, stand together, suffer together”).

A glance upward: everything dark in the nursery too. The houses next door separated by double driveways and wide borders. Sickly reflection of the television sets. There the homecoming husband and father is considered a nuisance, the return of the prodigal son would also have been considered a nuisance; no calf would have been slaughtered, not even a chicken would have been broiled—he would have been told to go to the refrigerator for the remains of some liver sausage.

Saturday afternoons there was fraternization, when shuttlecocks flew over hedges, kittens or puppies ran away, shuttlecocks were thrown back, kittens—“oh, how sweet”—or puppies—“oh, how sweet”—handed back at garden gates or through hedge gaps. The irritation in voices was subdued, never personal; only sometimes it strayed from the smooth curve and scratched notches in the neighbors’ sky, always from trivial causes, never from the true ones: when a saucer shattered, a rolling ball broke off flowers, gravel from a child’s hand was tossed onto car paint, newly washed, newly ironed laundry wetted by garden hoses—then voices become shrill which are not permitted to become shrill when it’s a matter of betrayal, adultery, abortion. “Oh, your ears are just too sensitive, you’d better take something for it.”

Don’t take anything, Marie.

Open the front door: quiet and pleasantly warm. Little Marie asleep upstairs. It doesn’t take long: wedding in Bonn, honeymoon in Rome, pregnancy, confinement—brown curls on snow-white baby pillow. Do you remember how he showed us the house and virilely announced: There’s room for twelve children here—and how he sizes you up now in the morning at breakfast, the unspoken Well? on his lips, and how simple-minded church and party friends shout after the third glass of brandy: “From one to twelve, leaves eleven to go!”

They are whispering in town. You were at the movies again, on this beautiful sunny afternoon at the movies. And again at the movies—and again.

All evening alone in the group, at Blothert’s, hearing nothing but Ca Ca Ca, and this time it wasn’t even finished off with—binet but with—tholon.

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