The Clown by Heinrich Böll Read Free Book Online

“No,” she said, “don’t go to Cologne.” I looked at her and was scarcely afraid any more. I was no longer a child, and she was a woman, I looked at the place where she held her dressing gown together, I looked over to her table by the window and was glad none of her school books were lying around there: just sewing things and a dress pattern. I ran down into the shop, locked the door and put the key in the place where it has been put for the last fifty years: between the gumdrops and the writing pads. When I got upstairs again she was sitting on her bed, crying. I sat down on the bed too, on the other corner, lit a cigarette, gave it to her, and she smoked her first cigarette, unskillfully; we had to laugh, she blew the smoke so funnily out of her pursed mouth that it looked almost flirtatious and when once it happened to come out of her nose I laughed: it looked so depraved. Finally we started to talk, and we talked a good deal. She said she was thinking of the women in Cologne who did “this thing” for money and evidently believed it could be paid for with money, but it was not to be paid for with money, and so all the women whose husbands went there were in their debt, and she didn’t want to be in the debt of these women. I talked a lot too, I said I thought everything I had read about so-called physical love and about the other kind of love was nonsense. I couldn’t separate one from the other, and she asked me if I thought she was pretty and loved her, and I said she was the only girl I wanted to do “this thing” with, and I had always thought only of her when I thought of this thing, even at school; only of her. Finally Marie stood up and went into the bathroom while I stayed sitting on her bed, went on smoking and thought of the awful tablets I had let roll into the gutter. I began to get scared again, went over to the bathroom, knocked, Marie hesitated a moment before she said Yes, then I went in and as soon as I saw her my fear left me again. The tears were running downher face as she rubbed hair lotion into her hair, then powdered her face, and I said, “Whatever are you doing?” and she said: “I’m making myself beautiful.” The tears had made little furrows in the powder, which she had put on much too thick, and she said: “Won’t you really go away?” And I said “No.” She dabbed on some Eau de Cologne while I sat on the edge of the bath and wondered if two hours would be long enough; we had already wasted more than half an hour talking. At school there had been specialists in these things: how difficult it was, for instance, to make a woman of a girl, and I kept thinking of Gunther who had to send Siegfried on ahead, and I thought of the frightful Nibelung carnage which resulted from this thing, and how at school, when we were doing the Nibelung saga, I had stood up and said to Father Wunibald, “Surely Brunhild was really Siegfried’s wife,” and he had smiled and said: “But he was actually married to Krimhild, my boy,” and I had got mad and maintained that was a typical priest’s interpretation. Father Wunibald was furious, struck the desk with his finger, invoked his authority, and said he would not put up with being “insulted.”
    I stood up and said to Marie: “Please don’t cry,” and she stopped crying and smoothed out the tear furrows with the powderpuff. Before we went to her room we stood for a moment at the landing window and looked down onto the street: it was January, the street was wet, the lights over the asphalt were yellow, the sign over the grocery opposite green: Emil Schmitz. I knew Schmitz, but I didn’t know his first name was Emil, and it seemed to me that Emil did not go well as a first name with Schmitz as a second name. Before we went into Marie’s room I opened the door a little and switched off the light inside.
    When her father came home we were not yet asleep; it was nearly eleven, we heard him go into the shop downstairs and get some