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

your face, but I’ve forgotten your name.’
    ‘Faehmel,’ I said.
    ‘Of course. They’re after you, it came over on the early morning news. I might have known it when they described you. Red scar on the bridge of the nose. That was when we rowed across at high tide and ran into the bridge piles when I misfigured the current. You banged your head on the iron gunwale.’
    ‘Yes, and I wasn’t allowed to come over here again.’
    ‘But you did come again.’
    ‘Not for long—until I got on the outs with Alois.’
    ‘Come on. And duck when we go under the swing bridge or you’ll get a dent in your head—and they won’t be letting you come here again. How did you get away from them?’
    ‘Nettlinger came into my cell at sun-up. He took me out the back way, where the underground passages lead to the railroad cut, by Williams’ Pit. He said, “Get lost, start running. All I can give you is an hour’s lead; after that I’ll have to report it to the police. As it is I’ve had to go right around the city to make it here.” ’
    ‘So that’s it,’ the old man said. ‘That’s what you get when you start throwing bombs! You would go and take an oath and—anyway, yesterday I packed up one of your boys and shipped him across the frontier.’
    ‘Yesterday?’ I asked. ‘Who was it?’
    ‘Schrella,’ he said. ‘He holed up here and I had to make him leave on the
Anna Katharina.
’
    ‘Alois always wanted to be mate and steer the
Anna Katharina!
’
    ‘He is mate on the
Katharina
. Come on, now.’
    I began to stagger as we went toward Trischler’s house along the slant-topped wall at the foot of the embankment. I got to my feet, fell again, again got up, and doing this jerked skin and shirt apart, stuck them together, pulled them apart, over and over, and the pain, like thorns being stuck in my back again and again, made me half lose consciousness. Movements, colors, smells from a thousand memories became all mixed up, piled one on top of the other. All sorts of numbers floated through my mind, changing color, taking on different angles and directions, generated out of me by the pain.
    High tide, I thought, high tide, as again a desire came over me to throw myself in and be carried away to the gray horizon.
    In my dreamlike state I was troubled by the question whether a barbed-wire whip could be hidden in a lunch box. Movements remembered changed into lines, which joined into figures, green, black and red ones, representing, like a cardiogram, a particular person’s rhythms. The way Alois Trischler jerked his line to set the hook when we were fishing in the Old Harbor, the way he cast his lure out into the water, the way his arm traveled as he held his rod against the pull of the current, thus indicating its speed. Also, the way Nettlinger raised his arm to throw the ball into Schrella’s face, the trembling of his lips, the twitching of his nostrils, these changed into a gray design like a dead spider. Like so much information coming over a teletype from somewhere I couldn’t place, people unfolded out of my memory, so many stigmata. Edith, the Edith of that evening after the rounders game when I went home with Schrella. Edith’s face out in the park at Blessenfeld, when she lay under me on the grass, all wet from the summer rain. Raindrops glistened on her blond hair, rolled along her eyebrows, a garland of silver drops on Edith’s face which rose and fell with her breathing. This garland was fixed in mymemory in a form suggesting the skeleton of some sea creature found on a rust-colored beach, its constituent drops multiplied into countless little clouds of the same size. Then there was the line of her mouth as she said to me, ‘They’ll kill you.’ That was Edith.
    I was tormented in the dream by having lost my school bag—I had always been meticulous about everything—and I found myself tearing my gray-green copy of Ovid from a scrawny chicken’s beak. I haggled with the usherette in the