Free The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll by Heinrich Böll Page A

to her. We had money to burn; the Russians were paying seven hundred marks for a coat, and for three months we had seen nothing but mud and blood, a few whores, and money.
    “Come back tomorrow, okay?” I whispered, but she was no longer listening. Quick as a wink she had slipped away, and when I stuck my head sadly through the gap in the wall, she had vanished, and I saw only the silent Russian street, dismal and empty; the snow seemed to be gradually entombing the flat-roofed houses. I stood there for a long time, like a sad-eyed animal looking out through a fence, and it was only when I felt my neck getting stiff that I pulled my head back inside the prison.
    For the first time I noticed the revolting urinal stench from the corner, and all the nice little cakes were covered with a light sugar-icing of snow. With a sigh I picked up the basket and walked toward the building; I did not feel cold, I had that romantic-looking bandage round my head and could have stood for another hour in the snow. I left because I had to go someplace. A fellow has to go someplace, doesn’t he? You can’t stand around and let yourself be buried in snow. You have to go someplace, even when you’re wounded in a strange, black, very dark country …

WHAT A RACKET
    The Half-Woman, the “Woman with No Lower Half,” turned out to be one of the most delightful persons I had ever met. She was wearing a charming sombrero-type straw hat, for, like any other modest housewife, she was sitting in the sun on the little raised porch that had been attached to her trailer home. Below the porch her three children were playing a very original game known to them as “The Neanderthals.” The two youngest, a boy and a girl, were obliged to be the Neanderthal couple, while the oldest, a fair-haired youngster of eight who during performances was the Fat Lady’s son, took the part of the modern explorer who discovers the Neanderthal couple. Right at the moment he was doing his best to wrench his younger siblings’ jawbones out of their sockets so he could take them back to his museum.
    The Half-Woman stamped several times on the porch floor on account of the frenzied screams that were threatening to stifle our budding conversation.
    The oldest boy’s head appeared above the low railing, which was adorned with red geraniums, and he asked crossly, “Yes?”
    “Stop that bullying,” said his mother, a suppressed amusement in her gentle gray eyes. “Why don’t you play Air-Raid Shelter or Bombed Out?”
    The boy grumbled something that sounded like “Nuts!,” disappeared below the railing, and shouted to the others, “Fire! The whole house is on fire!” Unfortunately I was unable to follow the further course of the game known as Bombed Out, for the Half-Woman was now eyeing me somewhat more closely. In the shade of her broad-brimmed hat, with the sun shining warm and red through it, she looked much too young to be the mother of three children and to fulfill the exacting demands, five times a day, of the role of Half-Woman.
    “You are …” she said.
    “Nothing,” I said, “nothing at all. Consider me nothing but a nothing …”
    “You are,” she placidly continued, “a former black-market operator, I suppose.”
    “That’s right,” I said.
    She shrugged her shoulders. “I can’t really offer you anything. In any case, wherever we found a spot for you, you would have to work—work, do you know what I mean?”
    “Ma’am,” I replied, “possibly your idea of a black-market operator’s life is a little on the rosy side. Speaking personally, I was, one might say, at the front.”
    “What?” She stamped her foot again on the porch floor, the children having set up a rather protracted and demented howling. Once again the boy’s head appeared above the railing.
    “Well?” he asked curtly.
    “Play Refugees now,” the woman said quietly. “You must flee from the burning city, understand?”
    The boy’s head vanished again, and the