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

were having breakfast served, while the birds were twittering, milkmaids stealing in and out of quiet doorways on rubber-soled shoes leaving bottles of milk on clean coco mats. Meanwhile men from newspaper promotion departments were racing around the city plastering billboards with red-bordered bulletins, saying: ‘Execution! The Apprentice, Ferdinand Progulske …!’ So all early risers could read them, the streetcar motormen, the school kids, the teachers and everyone else hurrying to catch the morning trolley, sandwiches in their pockets, and carrying the local paper, as yet unfolded, with a headline announcing ‘An Example Set.’ And for me to read, too, Hugo, as I was getting into No. 7, right out in front of here at the corner.
    Ferdi’s voice on the phone—had I heard it yesterday or the day before? ‘You’ll be at the Cafe Zons as we agreed?’ A pause. ‘Are you coming, or aren’t you?’ ‘I’ll be there.’ Enders even tried to catch hold of my sleeve and pull me into the streetcar that morning when the news broke, but I pulled loose and waited until the streetcar had disappeared around the corner. Then I went to the trolley stop on the other side of the street, where you still catch No. 16, and rode through peaceful suburbs to the Rhine, then away from the Rhine again until the car finally swung into the loop at the end of the line between gravel pitsand army barracks. By rights, I thought at the time, it should be winter. Winter, cold, rainy, sky overcast—that would make it more bearable. But it was not. For hours I wandered around among prosy allotment gardens, looking at peas and apricots, tomatoes and cabbages, listening to the clink of beer bottles and the ice cream man’s bell. There he stood at a crossing, dipping ice cream into crumbly cones. How can they do it, I thought, how can they eat ice cream, drink beer, sample apricots while Ferdi.… Around noontime I fed my sandwiches to some morose chickens scratching out geometric figures in the muck of a junkyard. Out of a window came a woman’s voice, saying, ‘Did you read about that kid, the one they.…’ And a man’s voice answered, ‘Shut up, goddamn it, I know all about it.…’ I threw my sandwiches to the chickens, continued on and got lost down among railroad cuts and culverts. Finally I reached another terminus somewhere and rode through a series of strange suburbs. I got off and turned my pockets inside out. Black gunpowder trickled onto the gray pavement. I started to run, past more railroad embankments, storage dumps, garden plots, houses. Finally, a movie theater, where the woman in the box office was just pushing up her window. Three o’clock? Three exactly. Fifty pfennigs. I was the only one in the audience. Heat hung over the corrugated iron roof. Love, blood, a betrayed lover drew his dagger. I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until the movie-goers for the six o’clock show came barging into the theater. I staggered outside. Where was my school bag? Back inside the movie? By the gravel pit, where I’d sat for a long while watching the trucks being piled full, so high the load spilled over? Or was it back at that other place, where I had thrown my bread to the sullen fowl? Ferdi’s voice on the phone, was it yesterday or the day before? ‘You’ll be at the Cafe Zons as we agreed?’ Pause. ‘Will you be there or won’t you?’ ‘I’ll be there.’
    A rendezvous with a headless boy. A piece of folly already precious to me, the price of it having been so high. MeanwhileI had had my turn with Nettlinger. He’d lain in wait for me in front of the Cafe Zons. They took me to Williams’ Pit and beat me with the barbed-wire whip. The barbs tore up my back. Through the rusty window bars I could see the banking where I had played as a child. Time and again our ball had rolled downhill on us, and time and again I had climbed down helter-skelter to bring it back, always having a quick, scared look at the rusty bars,