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

large gray eyes with the faintly quivering pupils behind the thick lenses. He looked at me for a long time, so long that I had to look away, and he said softly, “Hold on, it’ll be your turn in a minute …”
    Then they picked up the man lying next to me and carried him behind the blackboard. My eyes followed them: they had taken the blackboard apart and set it up crossways and hung a sheet over the gap between wall and blackboard; a lamp was glaring behind it …
    There was not a sound until the sheet was pushed aside and the man who had lain next to me was carried out; with tired, impassive faces the stretcher bearers carted him to the door.
    I closed my eyes again and thought, I must find out how I’ve been wounded and whether I’m in my old school.
    It all seemed so cold and remote, as if they had carried me through the museum of a city of the dead, through a world as irrelevant as it was unfamiliar, although my eyes, but only my eyes, recognized it; surely it couldn’t be true that only three months ago I had sat in this room, drawn vases and practiced lettering, gone downstairs during breaks with my jam sandwich, past Nietzsche, Hermes, Togoland, Caesar, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, taking my time as I walked to the lower corridor where
Medea
hung, then to the janitor, to Birgeler, for a glass of milk, milk in that dingy little room where you could risk a smoke although it was against the rules. They must be carrying the man who had lain next to me downstairs now, to where the dead were lying, maybe the dead were lying in Birgeler’s gray little room that smelled of warm milk, dust, and Birgeler’s cheap tobacco …
    At last the stretcher bearers came back, and now they lifted me and carried me behind the blackboard. I was floating again, passing the door now, and as I floated past I could see that was right too: in the old days, when the school had been called St. Thomas’s, a cross had hung over the door, and then they had removed the cross, but a fresh deep-yellow spot in the shape of a cross had stayed behind on the wall, hard and clear, more noticeable in a way than the fragile little old cross itself, the one they had removed; the outline of the cross remained distinct and beautiful on the faded wall. At the time they were so mad they repainted the whole wall, but it hadn’t made any difference. The painter hadn’t got quite the right color: the cross stayed, deep yellow and clear, although the whole wall was pink. They had been furious, but it was no good: the cross stayed, deep yellow and clear on the pink wall; they must have used up their budget for paint so there wasn’t a thing they could do about it. The cross was still there, and if you looked closely you could even make out a slanting line over the right arm of the cross where for years the boxwood sprig had been, the one Birgeler the janitor had stuck behind it, in the days when it was still permitted to hang crosses in schools …
    All this flashed through my mind during the brief second it took for me to be carried past the door to the place behind the blackboard where the glaring lamp shone.
    I lay on the operating table and saw myself quite distinctly, but very small, dwarfed, up there in the clear glass of the lightbulb, tiny and white, a narrow, gauze-colored little bundle looking like an unusually diminutive embryo: so that was me up there.
    The doctor turned away and stood beside a table sorting his instruments; the fireman, stocky and elderly, stood in front of the blackboard and smiled at me. His smile was tired and sad, and his unshaven, dirty face was the face of someone asleep. Beyond his shoulder, on the smudged reverse side of the blackboard, I saw something that, for the first time since being in this house of the dead, made me aware of my heart—somewhere in a secret chamber of my heart I experienced a profound and terrible shock, and my heart began to pound: the handwriting on the blackboard was mine. Up at the top, on the