The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll Read Free Page A

the conductor had gone, was icy and scornful. But her voice was strange, warm and yet mocking, as she asked, “So you’re going there too?”
    “Oh, I might as well get off there. I have friends there. I’ve got no permanent home …”
    “I see” was all she said. She leaned back in her corner, and in the close darkness I could only glimpse her face whenever a light outside rushed by.
    It was pitch-dark by the time we got out. Dark and warm. And when we emerged from the station, the small town was already fast asleep. The little houses slept safe and sound beneath the gentle trees. “I’ll go with you,” I said hoarsely. “It’s so dark you can’t see a thing.”
    But suddenly she stopped. It was under a streetlight. She fixed me with a long, wide-eyed stare and said in a strained voice, “If only I knew where I was going.” Her face moved slightly, like a scarf stirred by abreeze. No, we did not kiss … We walked slowly out through the town and eventually crawled into a haystack. I had no friends here, of course: I was as much a stranger in this silent town as in any other. When it got chilly toward morning, I crept close beside her, and she covered me with part of her thin, skimpy coat. And so we warmed each other with our breath and our blood.
    We have been together ever since—in these hard times.

THE MAN WITH THE KNIVES
    Jupp held the knife by the tip of the blade, letting it joggle idly up and down; it was a long, tapering bread knife, obviously razor-sharp. With a sudden flick of the wrist he tossed the knife into the air. Up it went, whirring like a propeller; the shining blade glittered like a golden fish in a sheaf of lingering sunbeams, struck the ceiling, lost its spin, and plunged down straight at Jupp’s head. In a flash Jupp had placed a wooden block on his head; the knife scored into the wood and remained embedded there, gently swaying. Jupp removed the block from his head, withdrew the knife, and flung it with a gesture of annoyance at the door, where it stuck, quivering, in the frame until it gradually stopped vibrating and fell to the floor …
    “It makes me sick,” said Jupp quietly. “I’ve been working on the logical assumption that people who’ve paid for their tickets really want to see a show where life and limb are at stake—like at the Roman circuses—they want to be convinced of at least the possibility of bloodshed, know what I mean?”
    He picked up the knife and tossed it neatly against the top crossbar of the window, with such force that the panes rattled and threatened to fall out of the crumbling putty. This throw—confident and unerring—took me back to those hours of semidarkness in the past when he had thrown his pocketknife against the dugout post, from bottom to top and down again.
    “I’ll do anything,” he went on, “to give the customers a thrill. I’ll even cut off my ears, only it’s hard to find anyone to stick them back on again. Here, I want to show you something.”
    He opened the door for me, and we went out into the hallway. A few shreds of wallpaper still clung to the walls where the glue was too stubborn for them to be ripped off and used for lighting the stove. After passing through a moldering bathroom, we emerged onto a kind of terrace, its concrete floor cracked and moss-covered.
    Jupp pointed upward.
    “The higher the knife goes, of course, the greater the effect. But I need some resistance up there for the thing to strike against and lose momentum so that it can come hurtling down straight at my useless skull. Look!” He pointed up to where the iron girders of a ruined balcony stuck out into the air.
    “This is where I used to practice. For a whole year. Watch!” He sent the knife soaring upward. It rose with marvelous symmetry and evenness, seeming to climb as smoothly and effortlessly as a bird; then it struck one of the girders, shot down with breathtaking speed, and crashed into the wooden block. The impact itself must have