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

sensing something evil behind the dirty windowpanes. Nettlinger laid on.
    In the cell I tried to take my shirt off, but shirt and skin were all chewed up together, so that when I pulled at my collar or sleeve, it felt as if I were pulling my skin over my head.
    There were other bad moments, too. When I stood at the weighhouse railing, at the end of my tether, the pain was greater than the pride I took in my wounds. My head sank to the railing, my mouth pressed to it, and the bitterness of the weather-pitted iron felt good in my mouth. Another minute and I would be at Trischler’s house, and then I would know whether they had got there first and were waiting for me. I got a terrible start. A workman with his lunch box under his arm came up the street and disappeared into the place where building materials were sold. As I went down the steps I held to the handrail so hard that my sliding hand peeled off flakes of rust. The rhythms of the riveting hammers that had sounded so cheerful seven years before were gone, nothing left but a weary echo of them now. One old man with a sledge hammer, working from a raft, breaking up a ferry boat. Nuts and bolts rattled into a box. When the ferry timbers fell, the thud they made told just how badly rotted they were. The old man kept tapping at the boat’s engine and listening to the sound as if he were sounding the heart of someone very dear to him. He bent down deep into the bilge of the boat and fished out all sorts of parts: screws, the engine head, injection nozzles, cylinders. He held them up to have a look at them, sniffed them before throwing them intothe box with the nuts and bolts. At the stern of the boat was an old winch, hanging on it the remains of an old cable, rusty rotten as an old stocking.
    With me memories of people and events have always been linked memories of movement, which stick in my mind as patterns. The way I leaned over the railing, lifting my head, letting it fall, lifting it, letting it fall lower to watch the street—the memory attached to this movement brought words and colors, images and moods back into my consciousness. I didn’t remember how Ferdi had looked, but instead how he’d lit a match, how he’d raised his head a little when he said, yes yes, no no. I remembered how Schrella wrinkled his forehead, the way he moved his shoulders, Father’s walk, Mother’s gestures, the way Grandmother moved her hand when she brushed the hair away from her brow.… And the old man down below, the one I could see from the top of the banking, and who just then was knocking punky wood loose from a big screw—that was Trischler’s father. For the hand was making movements no other hand but his could make. I’d watched the same hand opening boxes, renailing them shut. Stuff smuggled across the frontier in dark ships’ holds. Rum and raisins, chocolate and cigarettes. In the tow-boat house in back of the beer garden I’d seen that hand make movements peculiar to it and none other. The old man looked up, blinked at me, and said, ‘Hey, sonny, that road up there doesn’t go anywhere.’
    ‘It goes to your house,’ I said.
    ‘Anybody who comes to my house comes by water, even the police. Even my son comes by boat, when he comes at all, which isn’t often.’
    ‘Are the police there now?’
    ‘What do you want to know that for, sonny?’
    ‘Because they’re looking for me.’
    ‘Been stealing?’
    ‘No,’ I said, ‘I just refused the
Host of the Beast
.’
    Ships, I was thinking, ships with dark holds, and captainswith a lot of practice fooling customs men. I won’t take up much room, no more than a rolled-up carpet. I would get across the border stowed in a rolled-up sail.
    ‘Come down here,’ said Trischler. ‘They can see you up there from the other side of the river.’
    I turned around and let myself slowly slide down the embankment toward Trischler, grabbing at bunches of grass as I went.
    ‘Oh, it’s you,’ the old man said. ‘I know