Billiards at Half-Past Nine by Heinrich Böll, Patrick Bowles, Jessa Crispin

movie house over the Hölderlin poem she had ripped out of my anthology because she found it so beautiful:
Firm in compassion the eternal heart
.
    When I came to it was suppertime, with Frau Trischler bringing in the meal, milk, an egg, bread, an apple. Her hands became young when she bathed my flayed back in wine. Pain flamed through me when she squeezed wine from the sponge and let it flow into the furrows on my back. Afterwards she poured oil over me, and I asked her where she had learned to do it like that.
    ‘It tells you how in the Bible,’ she said. ‘And I’ve done it once before, on your friend Schrella! Alois will be here the day after tomorrow and leave Ruhrort Sunday for Rotterdam. You needn’t be afraid,’ she said. ‘They’ll get you through. On the river people know each other, as if they lived on the same street. More milk, young man?’
    ‘No, thanks.’
    ‘Don’t worry. Monday or Tuesday you’ll be in Rotterdam. Now what is it? What’s the matter?’
    Nothing. Nothing. The all-points bulletin was still out: red scar on bridge of nose. The father, the mother, Edith—I felt no desire to calculate the differential of their kindnesses, to count off the rosary of my pain. The river was bright and cheerful, with white excursion boats flying gaily colored pennants, freight carriers painted red, green and blue, carrying coal and wood back and forth, from here to there. On theother side of the river ran the green boulevard, the terrace outside the Cafe Bellevue was snow-white. Beyond, the tower of St. Severin’s, the sharp red light running up the corner of the Prince Heinrich Hotel, and my parents’ house only a hundred steps more. They would be sitting down to dinner now, a full-dress meal with my father presiding over it like a patriarch. Saturday, celebrated with sabbatical formality. Was the red wine too cool? The white cool enough?
    ‘More milk, young man?’
    ‘No thanks, Frau Trischler, really.…’
    … The men on motorcycles went racing through the city from billboard to billboard with their red-bordered bulletins: ‘Execution! The Student, Robert Faehmel.…’ Father would be saying a prayer at the supper table:
He who has been scourged for us
. Mother’s hand would describe a pattern of humility at her breast, before saying: ‘It’s a wicked world, not many are pure in heart.’ And Otto’s resonant heels would be beating out brother, brother, on the floor of our house, on the flagstones outside, on down the street to the Modest Gate.…
    That hooting outside was the
Stilte
, the clear notes cutting into the evening sky, white lightning furrows in dark blue. Now I was stretched out on a tarpaulin, like someone being prepared for burial at sea. Alois lifted up one side of the canvas to wrap me in, and, woven white on gray, I could clearly read: ‘Morrien. Ijmuiden.’ Frau Trischler bent over me, weeping, and kissed me, and Alois slowly rolled me in as if I were a particularly valuable corpse, and took me up in his arms.
    ‘Boy!’ the old man called after me, ‘don’t forget us, boy!’
    Evening breeze, the
Stilte
giving another hoot of friendly warning. The sheep were bleating in their pen, the ice cream man was shouting ‘Ice cream, ice cream!’ then stopped, which no doubt meant he was filling crumbly cones with vanilla ice cream. The plank swayed when Alois carried me aboard. A low voice asked, ‘Is that him?’ and Alois answered, in the samelow way, ‘It’s him.’ Leaving, he murmured to me, ‘Remember, by Tuesday night you’ll be in the harbor of Rotterdam.’ Other arms carried me below decks down a companionway. It smelled below first of oil, then of coal, and finally of wood, the hooting now seemed far away, the
Stilte
shuddered, a deep rumbling sound grew stronger. I could feel we were moving, on down the Rhine, always farther away from St. Severin’s.”
    St. Severin’s shadow had drawn nearer. Already it filled the left-hand billiard room window, and was