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

figurations emerged like so many signals. Then were swiftly scattered. Leaving naught behind. Music with no melody, painting without likeness, quadrilaterals, rectangles, rhombs, endlessly multiplied. Clicking billiard balls caroming from green cushions.
    “And later I tried another way. I locked the door at home, piled furniture in front of it, whatever I could find, boxes, mattresses, odds and ends. Until they told the police, who came to get the boy who was playing hookey. They surrounded the house and hollered, ‘Come out of there, you devil.’ But I wouldn’t come out and so they broke the door down, shoved the furniture to one side and then they had me. They took me off to school, to be thrashed again, pushed into the gutter again and again made fun of with that
God’s little lamb. Feed my lambs
—but I was one lamb they didn’t feed, if I ever was His to begin with. No use, Doctor. The wind blows, the snow falls, the trees turn green, the leaves fall—they go right on eating potatoes and gravy, ham and cabbage.
    Then, of course, sometimes my mother was at home, drunk and dirty, smelling of death, giving off the stink of decay, screaming, ‘
whywhywhy!
’ She yelled it more times than all the
Lord have mercy on us’es
in all the priest’s prayers put together. Used to drive me crazy when she hollered ‘
whywhywhy
’ like that for hours at a time. I ran away in the rain, a God’s little lamb soaked to the skin, hungry, mud sticking to my shoes, all over me. I got plastered with wet mud from head to toe, hiding down there in the beetfields. But I’d rather be down in themucky beet rows, letting the rain pour on me, than listen to that awful
whywhywhy
. Then, sooner or later, someone or other would take pity on me and bring me back home, or back to school, back to that hole called Denklingen. So then they walloped me again and called me
God’s little lamb
, and my mother kept on with her
whywhywhy
rosary, so I ran away again, and again someone took pity on me, and this time they took me to a child-welfare center. No one knew me there, none of the kids and none of the grown-ups, but I hadn’t been two days in the center before they were calling me
God’s little lamb
the same as before, and I was afraid, even though they didn’t beat me. They laughed at me, because there were so many words I didn’t know. The word ‘breakfast,’ for instance. All I knew was ‘eat’—whenever anything was there, whenever I found anything. But when I looked at the bulletin board and saw ‘Breakfast: butter, 30 grams; bread, 200 grams; marmalade, 50 grams; coffee and milk,’ I asked someone ‘What’s breakfast?’ They all surrounded me, the grown-ups, too, laughing and saying, ‘Don’t you know what breakfast is? You’ve never had breakfast?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘How about the Bible,’ one of the grown-ups said, ‘haven’t you ever read the word breakfast there?’ And then the other grown-up said to him, ‘Are you sure the word breakfast’s in the Bible?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘but somewhere, in some reading or other, or at home, he must have heard the word breakfast at least once. After all, pretty soon he’ll be thirteen, and savages aren’t that bad, it just goes to show how poorly people speak today.’ I didn’t know, either, there’d been a war a little while before, and they asked me if I’d ever been in a cemetery where it said ‘Fallen’ on the gravestones, the way we Germans say it when we mean ‘Killed in Battle.’ I told them, yes, I’d seen ‘Fallen.’ Then what did I think ‘Fallen’ meant? I said I imagined that the people buried there had died from falling down. That made them laugh louder than they had at ‘breakfast.’ Then they gave us history lessons, from the earliest times on down, but soon I was fourteen, Doctor, and the hotel manager cameto the center and we—all of the fourteen-year-olds—had to line up in the hall outside the rector’s office, and the rector