Billiards at Half-Past Nine by Heinrich Böll, Patrick Bowles, Jessa Crispin Read Free Book Online

pictures, only on movement. Father was Father’s gait, the spritely curve described, each step, by his right trouser leg, for a brief instant exposing the dark blue inner lining of the cuff, this while Father was on his way mornings past Gretz’ shop to the Cafe Kroner to eat breakfast. Mother, she was the complicated humble gesture described by her hands when she folded them over her breast, the sign she was about to say some foolishness. How bad the world was, how few the pure in heart. Her handswrote it in the air before she put it into words. Otto, he was marching legs, when he went out through the hall in jackboots, and off down the street. Hostility, -tility, -tility went the ring of his heels on the flags, heels which before had marched to a different beat of brother, brother, brother. Grandmother: a gesture she had made for seventy years, mimicked many times daily by his daughter as he watched. A movement centuries old, a heritage running in the family that never failed to startle him. His daughter, Ruth, had never seen her great-grandmother. Where, then, had she got that gesture? Unaware, she brushed her hair back from her brow as her great-grandmother had done.
    And he saw himself, playing rounders, bending over the bats to pick out his own, saw how he rolled the ball back and forth in his left hand, back and forth until he had the heft of it just right to toss in the air at the critical moment exactly where he wanted it, just high enough to give him time to get both hands set on the bat handle and lash at the ball with all his might, sending it flying to the farthest outfield.
    He saw himself in riverside fields, in the park, in the garden, bending down, straightening up, hitting the ball. All was timing. The others were fools who did not know you could figure how long it took for the ball to fall when you tossed it up to knock out a fly, or that with the same stopwatch you could also find out how long it took to get your grip set on the bat. And that everything else was only a question of coordination and practice, whole afternoons spent practicing in the fields, the park, the garden. They did not know there were formulas you could use, scales on which to weigh the balls. Just a little physics, a little mathematics and practice. But they turned their backs on both these subjects, on which the whole business hinged. They had no use for training, cheated their way through, at school for weeks at a time learned boneless maxims by rote, foundered in nebulous nonsense, even misconceived the poet Hölderlin. Even a word like ‘plummet,’ when they said it, became pulpy nonsense. Something as clearas ‘plummet.’ A line, a piece of lead, you threw it into the water, felt when the line hit bottom, drew out the line, by it measured the water’s depth. Yet when they said ‘plummet’ it sounded like bad organ music. They could neither play rounders nor read Hölderlin.
Firm in compassion the eternal heart
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    They were talking it up in the field, to distract him at the plate, hollering, ‘Come on, Faehmel, let’s get going!’ The outfielders were roaming the outfield, two of them playing very deep where he usually hit the ball, long flies much dreaded by the opposition. Mostly they landed right out in the street, where, on this Saturday in the summer of 1935, steaming chest-nut horses were coming out the brewery gate. Beyond, the railway embankment, where a shunting engine was puffing up silly white clouds into the afternoon sky. From the right, near the bridge, came the hissing of shipyard arc-welders, as sweating workmen, toiling overtime, welded together a Strength-through-Joy river steamer. Bluish, silvery sparks hissed and riveting hammers—tak, tak, tak—kept time. In nearby municipal garden plots newly erected scarecrows in vain were trying to scare off invading sparrows, and pale old fellows on Old Age, no tobacco for their pipes, waited longingly for the first of the month. And it was only the memory of