The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll Read Online Free PDF

cardboard lid that must now be lying on her breast, caving in beneath the wet piles of cold, greedy earth that were forcing their way past it into the coffin.
    I bent down to remove the bedraggled flowers and ribbons from the sticky clay, and all at once I was aware of a shadow springing out of the ground behind me, with a sudden leap, as a flame sometimes flares up out of a banked fire.
    I hastily crossed myself, threw down the flowers, and hurried to the exit. The opaque dusk was welling out of the narrow, shrub-bordered paths, and as I reached the main avenue I heard the sound of the bell summoning visitors from the cemetery. But I heard no footsteps approaching, saw no figure behind me, I just sensed that impalpable yet undeniable shadow at my heels.…
    I quickened my pace, clanged the rusty gate behind me, crossed the grassy roundabout at the intersection where an overturned streetcar lay exposing its bloated belly to the rain, the accursed gentleness of the rain drumming on the great metal box.…
    The rain had soaked through my shoes, but I was aware of neither cold nor damp, a hectic fever was driving the blood into the furthest extremities of my limbs, and through the fear that was breathing down my neck I was conscious of that strange gratification that comes from illness and grief.…
    Between rows of shacks, their chimneys emitting wisps of smoke, between ingeniously patched-up fences surrounding gray-black fields, past rotting telegraph poles that appeared to sway in the dusk, my route took me through what seemed to be infinite suburban regions of despair; stepping heedlessly into puddles, I walked faster and faster toward the city’s distant, jagged silhouette looming up on the horizon, among the murky twilight clouds, like a labyrinth of misery.
    Enormous black ruins sprang up left and right, strangely oppressive sounds assailed me from feebly lighted windows; more fields of black earth, more houses, ruined villas—and horror, as well as my fever, was eating its way deeper and deeper into my very bones as I experienced a nightmarish sensation: behind me it was almost dark, while ahead of me dusk was deepening in the familiar way; behind me night was falling, I was dragging the night after me, trailing it across the distant edge of the horizon, and wherever my foot touched the ground, darkness fell. Not that I saw any of this, but I knew: from the grave of my love, where I had invoked the shadow, I was dragging the relentlessly drooping sail of the night behind me.
    The world seemed devoid of human life: a vast, muddy suburban plain, a low mountain range formed by the ruins of the city that had seemed so far away and was now, with unaccountable speed, suddenly so much closer. From time to time I halted, and I could sense the dark presence behind me, waiting, reining itself in, mocking me as it hesitated, and then driving me on with gentle, irresistible pressure.
    And now I realized that the sweat was pouring down my whole body; it was an effort to walk, the weight I was dragging, the weight of the world, was heavy. Invisible ropes bound me to it, it to me, and now it was straining and tugging at me as a slipping load forces the exhausted mule inescapably into the abyss. I summoned all my strength to resist those invisible cords, my steps became short and unsteady, like a desperate animal I hurled myself into the strangling harness: my legs seemed to sink into the ground but I still had strength enough to keep my body upright, until I suddenly felt I could hold out no longer, that I was compelled to stop where I was, that the weight had the power to root me to the spot; and the next moment I felt I was losing my footing. I screamed and threw myself once more into the impalpable reins—I toppled forward onto my face, the bond was sundered, an unutterablyexquisite freedom was behind me, and ahead was a shining expanse, and she was standing there, she who had been lying in that sordid grave under bedraggled