The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll by Heinrich Böll Read Free Book Online Page A

ceiling. The ceiling was still in perfect condition, white and smooth, with a narrow antique stucco border; but all schools have antique stucco borders on their art-room ceilings, at least the good old traditional classics high schools. No doubt about that.
    I had to accept the fact that I was in the art room of a classics high school in Bendorf. Bendorf has three of these schools: the Frederick the Great School, the Albertus School, and—perhaps I need hardly add—the last, the third, was the Adolf Hitler School. Hadn’t old Frederick’s picture on the staircase wall at the Frederick the Great School been the biggest, the most colorful and resplendent of all? I had gone to that school for eight years, but why couldn’t the same picture hang in exactly the same place in other schools, so clear and noticeable that it couldn’t fail to catch your eye whenever you went up the first flight of stairs?
    Outside, I could hear the heavy artillery firing now. There was hardly any other sound; just occasionally you could hear flames consuming a house and somewhere in the dark a roof would cave in. The artillery was firing quietly and regularly, and I thought: Good old artillery! I know that’s a terrible thing to think, but I thought it. God, how reassuring the artillery was, how soothing: dark and rugged, a gentle, almost refined organ sound, aristocratic somehow. To me there is something aristocratic about artillery, even when it’s firing. It sounds so dignified, just like war in picture books … Then I thought of how many names there would be on the war memorial when they reconsecrated it and put an even bigger gilded Iron Cross on the top and an even bigger stone laurel wreath, and suddenly I realized that if I really was in my old school, my name would be on it too, engraved in stone, and in the school yearbook my name would be followed by “Went to the front straight from school and fell for …”
    But I didn’t know what for, and I didn’t know yet whether I was in my old school. I felt I absolutely had to make sure. There had been nothing special about the war memorial, nothing unusual, it was like all the rest, a ready-made war memorial—in fact they got them from some central supply house …
    I looked round the art room, but they had removed the pictures, and what can you tell from a few benches stacked up in a corner, and from the high, narrow windows, all close together to let in a lot of light because it was a studio? My heart told me nothing. Wouldn’t it have told me something if I had been in this place before, where for eight solid years I had drawn vases and practiced lettering, slender, delicate, beautiful reproductions of Roman vases that the art teacher set on a pedestal up front, and all kinds of lettering, Round, Antique, Roman, Italic? I had loathed these lessons more than anything else in school; for hours on end I had suffered unutterable boredom, and I had never been any good at drawing vases or lettering. But where were my curses, where was my loathing, in the face of these dun-colored, monotonous walls? No voice spoke within me, and I mutely shook my head.
    Over and over again I had erased, sharpened my pencil, erased … nothing …
    I didn’t know exactly how I had been wounded. I only knew I couldn’t move my arms or my right leg, just the left one a little; I figured they had bandaged my arms so tightly to my body that I couldn’t move them.
    I spat the second cigarette into the aisle between the straw pallets and tried to move my arms, but it was so painful I had to yell; I kept on yelling; each time I tried it, it felt wonderful to yell. Besides, I was mad at not being able to move my arms.
    Suddenly the doctor was standing in front of me. He had taken off his glasses and was peering at me. He said nothing; behind him stood the fireman who had brought me the water. He whispered something into the doctor’s ear, and the doctor put on his glasses: I could distinctly see his