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

better than my classmates, or even “untainted,” merely—oh, tiny “merely”!—alien, everything going on outside of me seemed alien and became more and more alien. Only my bike and my truancy saved me from shutting myself away in my room, yet now I was spending more time there, translating Latin or Greek texts for my own pleasure, and, long before I reached eighteen, I must have been well on the way to turning from an outsider into an eccentric. My bike wasn’t my only salvation; there were also a few girls.
    However, my progress was far from reassuring. My family, our friends, were justifiably worried, and more and more often the question was asked: “What’s to become of the boy?” My brothers and sisters all either had a profession or were clearly on the road to one: schoolteacher, bookkeeper, cabinetmaker, theology student. Theology? Not so farfetched, and it would have offered an escape, but within minutes I had decided and declared that theology was not for me. As a study it had its attractions, but in those days theology and the priesthood were synonymous, and to that there was an obstacle that I would like to define as discreetly as possible: the beauties and other charms—profound and less profound—of the female sex were no secret to me, and I was of no mind to renounce them. Celibacy—what a horrifying word that was! To start out by contemplating double moral standards was beyond all consideration, and in those days such a thing as laicization (but then why become a priest if you are already speculating about laicization?) was as unimaginable as a trip to the moon. And finally: vestigia terrebant . The traces were frightening. I knew of cases of entanglements with family and friends, of those who had “tripped,” “stumbled,” “slipped,” “fallen”; and many a one essaying a trip to the moon had landed flat on his face.
    My father had done a lot of work for churches and monasteries, and his knowledge of that world, which he did not withhold from us, was more than adequate; probably it explained why he had strictly forbidden us to act as altar boys (an activity, by the way, that had never even remotely appealed to me). And then, of course, therewas—an option that was vigorously discussed, there being plenty of theology students around—the path of “sublimation,” but I hadn’t the slightest desire to sublimate that .

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    The view is occasionally expressed that, after January 30, 1933, the day of Hitler’s seizure of power, some kind of economic miracle took place. However, as far as our family is concerned, I cannot affirm this. The fact of my brother’s having joined the Storm Troopers availed us nothing (variation of the Rosary line: “Thou who hast joined the Storm Troopers for our sakes in vain”). We were worse off than before 1933, and that can’t have been due entirely to “political unreliability.” My father had many well-disposed, old friends in government positions. Nevertheless, our most time-consuming and laborious occupation continued to be: opening up new credit for groceries or paying off old accounts so we could buy on credit again, and then the never-ending burden of: the rent.
    To this day I don’t know what we lived on. How? To say we lived “from hand to mouth” would be euphemistic. There is no doubt—and I suggest the political economists cudgel their brains before they shake their heads—that we lived beyond and below our means. One thing is verifiable: we survived, so those years were a kind of survival training. If there were any films, data, or bookkeeping relative to that time, I would gladly study them in order to discover how , but there are no records: there weremerely repeated family councils where lists were drawn up, budgets decided upon, and pocket money—according to age and sex (“But the girls need stockings!”)—was entered in my father’s little black notebooks. All that might be called quite “literary.” But as for being an