What's to Become of the Boy? by Heinrich Böll Read Free Book Online

“voluntary” labor service happened to be “merely” a requirement for entering university.) Those dim, dank casemates built in the 1880s, from which—contrary to expectations since my brother wasn’t yet eligible to leave camp—we asked for him to be summoned! He would emerge looking to me like a convict, thoroughly cowed. As a high school graduate he was automatically an “intellectual” and, as such, had to take a lot of abuse and do the heaviest work. At the camp entrance stood two—always the same two—young yet already worn-out whores, pathetic creatures who for a pittance would lie down in the bushes with anyone who managed to bribe or persuade the sentry. That conglomeration of underground, damp, dismal Wilhelminian fortifications, the smell, the depressing atmosphere, the two whores who weren’t even minimally “dolled up” (they were the only ones available for miles around)—all of that was anything but uplifting. We would take along a few cigarettes, chat dejectedly for a while, conscious of the barbarity of visits in or outside any barracks. (Oh, Lili Marleen, don’t you know we never stood “by the lantern?” Who would ever choose to stand with a girl, let alone his girl, by the lantern outside “the heavy door?” In the darkest corner along the wall, that’s where we stood—and itwasn’t sweet either: out of your arms back into that stale, sweaty male atmosphere!) Depressed, we would wend our way home, along the railway embankment, the dust of summer on our lips, the smell of the wheat fields—I had it in my heart, my brain, my consciousness, that foretaste , which, only a few years later, turned out to be correct: I knew that I would be caught up in it, that I lacked the strength and the courage to elude the two uniforms in store for me.
    We walked home, summer evening, water tower, railway embankment, wheat fields, the Rhine. Had they already started building the barracks in Poll-Porz that year? That rumor led to many an interrogation and arrest of those who were already claiming something that soon turned out to be true: barracks were being built there, although the Rhineland was still a demilitarized zone. Were the foundations already being laid at that time for the Cologne–Rodenkirchen autobahn bridge, that strategic opening toward the West?
    Once again, and again: school, too , yes. With the two real Nazis among the teachers (both the loudmouth, roughneck type), we had nothing to do, so I had no problems with my teachers, though they may have had some with me. Whenever a student tried to offset his miserable Greek or Latin with his uniform (which didn’t happen very often), Mr. Bauer, whom I had as a teacher from the fourth to the twelfth grades, would catch my eye. There was no need for words between us; he was a democrat, a humanist, not even remotely obsessed with war. He pointed out how relevant to our own time wasthe element of parody in Greek comedy; sometimes he would talk about smoking cigars and drinking sherry; he overlooked impudence; and later he read Juvenal with us. Juvenal and Tacitus were his Latin favorites. (I saw Bauer one last time, in the late fall of 1944, from a moving hospital train: he was in a wheelchair on the station platform in Ahrweiler or Remagen.)
    Problems with teachers? No. Even my problem with our teacher of religion subsided. I didn’t even have one with our gym teacher: although I was “exempt from gym” (hence, in the eyes of a gym teacher, almost asocial), he would sometimes invite me to his home or ask me to take part illicitly in a rounders match against another school. I wasn’t a bad batter—it ran in the family, my two older brothers being practically rounders stars, and we had played a lot on the meadows of the Vorgebirg Park. So there I would be, illicitly hitting the ball beside Aachen Pond or in Blücher Park in a game against one of the Cologne high schools.
    One thing I must make clear: I never thought of myself as being