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

Anger was plainly audible in Old Wobbly’s final shrill on the whistle. The final score was announced: 37–34, Ludwig College. The ‘ah’ swelled into a great ‘hoo-ray,’ surged on over the field, while he was taking his bat, digging the handle into the ground, raising the handle a little, lowering it again until he seemed to have hit on the right angle. Then he brought his foot down on the bat’s weakest point, where the handle tapered. Schoolchildren gathered round him, wondering, dumbstruck. Something big was happening, they sensed. Faehmel’s famous bat was being smashed. Where the wood split the splinters were dead white. Already the kids were scrambling for souvenirs, fighting like little fiends for bits of wood, snatching scraps of adhesive tape from each others’ fingers. Shocked, he stared into the heated, foolish faces, into wondering eyes shining with excitement, and felt the cheap bitterness of fame, on a summer evening on July 14, 1935, at the edge of the suburbs, on the trampled playing field across which Old Wobbly, that moment, was chasing out the sixth form of Ludwig’s to collect the little out-of-boundsmarkers. Far beyond the street, by the brewery wall, blue and yellow jerseys were still visible. Ottonians were still looking for the ball. Presently they came straggling back across the street, drew up in a double row in the middle of the diamond, and waited for him, the team captain, to lead the game-ending cheer. Slowly he walked over to the two lines. Schrella and Nettlinger were in the same row, next to each other. Nothing seemed to have happened between them, nothing at all. Behind him the younger school kids were still wrestling over the souvenirs. He walked to his place, the spectators’ admiration physically nauseating to him, and three times called out ‘Hip, hip, hurrah!’ Like beaten dogs the Ottonians slunk back to search for the missing ball. Not to find it would be an irredeemable disgrace.
    “And yet I knew, Hugo, how much Nettlinger had his mind set on winning. Win no matter what it costs, he said, yet that’s what he did, risked our losing the game just so somebody on the other side could peg Schrella again and again with the ball. And Old Wobbly must have been in cahoots with him. I was the only one who saw through it. The only one.”
    He had been afraid, going to the dressing room, afraid of Schrella and of what Schrella would say to him. The air had suddenly grown cool. Evening mist was rising from the fields, coming from the river and flowing, like layered wadding, around the building where the dressing room was located. Why, why had they done that to Schrella, and why did they trip him up on the steps during recess? He had struck his head on the steel edge of the steps, driving the steel bow of his spectacles into an ear lobe. Old Wobbly had come out of the classroom with the first-aid kit far too leisurely. Nettlinger, scorn on his face, had held the adhesive plaster taut so Wobbly could snip a piece off. On the way home they ganged up on Schrella, dragged him from one doorway to the next, beat him up among ash cans and parked baby carriages, and finally pushed him down some steps leading to a dark cellar, wherehe had lain a long while with his arm broken, amid the smell of cabbages and sprouting potatoes, staring at dusty preserving jars, until a boy sent down to get apples had discovered him and alerted the occupants of the house. Only a few hadn’t joined in—Enders, Drischka, Schweugel and Holten.
    He had once been friends with Schrella, years before this. They’d always gone to visit Trischler together, who lived down at the Lower Harbor. Trischler’s father ran a bar and Schrella’s father worked for him as a waiter. They played on the old barges and abandoned pontoons, and fished off the boats.
    Now he stopped in front of the dressing room, listening to the medley of voices within, hoarse with the excitement of youthful myth-making as they talked about his