The Weighing Machine: A Story

by HEINRICH BÖLL

1

IN THE village where my grandfather had his home most of the people earned their living in the flax mills. For five generations they had been inhaling the dust which comes out of the broken stalks and which slowly killed them these patient, cheerful people who ate goats cheese and potatoes and sometimes killed a rabbit for their dinner. In the evening they spun and knitted in their living rooms, sang, drank mint tea, and were happy. All day long they broke up the flax in their old-fashioned machines, defenseless against the dust and the heat that streamed from the drying kilns. In their living room was a large box bed reserved for the parents. The children slept on benches round the room. In the mornings the living room was filled with the smell of hot soup. On Sundays there was oxtail, and the children’s faces flushed with pleasure when on some special feast day their mother smilingly poured milk into the coflee pot and the black acorn coffee grew lighter and lighter until at last it was as blond as one of the girls pigtails.

The parents went early to work and the children took over the household duties. They swept out the living room, cleared up and washed the crockery, and peeled potatoes — costly, yellow roots, whose thin skins they had to produce in order to dispel any suspicion of wastefulness or carelessness.

As soon as the children came out of school they had to go into the woods and gather mushrooms and various plants according to the season of the year _ woodruff and thyme, caraway and mint, foxglove, too, and in summer when they had carried the hay from their meager fields they used to pick the herbs. They received a pfennig for a kilo of herbs which was later sold by the apothecaries in the town for twenty pfennigs to nervous ladies. Mushrooms were remunerative. The children got twenty pfennigs a kilo for them and the greengrocers in the town sold them to their clients for one mark twenty. In autumn when the mushrooms grew quickly in the damp earth, the children penetrated deep into the woods and almost every family had its own private hunting ground, the secret of which was passed on in whispers to succeeding generations.

The woods belonged to the Baleks, as did the flax mills, and in my grandfather’s village they had a castle, in which there was a little room near the dairy, where the mistress of the house used to weigh the mushrooms, plants, and herbs and pay for them. On the table in that little room stood the Baleks’ great weighing machine, an old-fashioned highly ornamented affair with a coating of gold paint, before which the grandparents of my grandfather had stood anxiously watching the baskets full of mushrooms, and the paper bags containing herbs, being weighed and seeing how many weights Frau Balek had to put on the scales before the pendulum rod was steady on the black line that thin line of justice, which had to be drawn afresh every year. Then Frau Balek would take the great leather-backed book, enter the weights, and pay out the money in pfennigs or groschen, and seldom, very seldom, a mark. And when my grandfather was a child there used to be a tall glass with some lollipops in it– the sort that cost a mark for a kilo, and if Frau Balek was in a good humor she picked out a few of them and gave one to each of the children and their faces flushed with pleasure just as they did when their mother poured milk into their acorn coffee on special feast days.

One of the laws which the Balcks had imposed on the village was that no one was allowed to have a weighing machine in his house. This law was so old that no one thought about it or its origin any more, but it was and had to be respected. Anyone who infringed this law was dismissed from the flax mill and no more mushrooms or thyme were bought from this family, and the power of the Baleks reached so far that the delinquent couldn’t even find work in the neighboring villages nor sell his woodland plants there. Ever since the grandparents of my grandfather had gathered mushrooms as small children and handed them in so that they might season the roast meat in the kitchens of the rich in Prague or be baked in little pies — since those days nobody had thought of breaking this law. There were dry measures for flour, eggs were counted, spun flax was measured by the ell; moreover the old-fashioned, ornamented, gold-painted weighing machine of the Baleks looked incapable of inaccuracy and five successive generations had implicitly entrusted to the black pointer the treasures they had collected with childish zeal in the woods.

It is true that among these quiet villagers there were some occasional lawbreakers — poachers, for instance, anxious to make in a single night more than they could earn by a month’s hard work in (he mill but even among these no one seemed to have had the idea of buying or rigging up a weighing machine. My grandfather was the first person who had the courage to put the Baleks’ honesty to the test and it needed courage to challenge the rich people, who lived in the castle, owned two coaches, paid for the education of a village lad as a theological student in the College at Prague, invited the parson to come and play Tarock at the Schloss every Wednesday, were visited at the New Year by the Police Commandant of the district, driving in a carriage bearing the imperial arms, and who, finally, were promoted to the nobility by Kaiser Franz Josef on January 1, 1900.

2

MY GRANDFATHER was a clever, hard-working boy. He ventured farther into the woods than any of his forebears had done when they were children. He even penetrated into a certain thicket, which was supposed to be haunted by the giant Bilgan, the guardian of Baldur’s hoard. But my little grandfather was not at all afraid of Bilgan. He pressed forward right into the heart of the thicket and there collected a harvest of mushrooms. He even found truffles, which Frau Balek priced at thirty pfennigs the kilo. My grandfather entered everything which he delivered to the Baleks on the blank sheet of a calendar. Every kilo of mushrooms, every gram of thyme, and to the right of the entry he wrote in his childish hand what he had received for it. He scribbled down every pfennig which he had received, from his seventh till his twelfth year, and he was twelve in the year 1900, when the Baleks, to celebrate their new title, presented every family in the village with an eighth of a kilo of real Brazilian coffee. There was also free beer and tobacco for the men, and there were great junketings at the castle and scores of carriages were standing in the poplar avenue leading from the great gate to the Schloss.

On the day before the festivities the coffee was distributed in the little room in which the Baleks’ weighing machine had been standing for something like a hundred years. The Baleks were now called Balek von Bilgan because, according to the legend, the giant Bilgan had formerly had a great castle where the Baleks’ castle now stands.

My grandfather has often told me how he went there after class to fetch the coffee for four families, the Cecils, the Beitlers, the Vohlas, and for his own people, the Brüchers — it was the afternoon of St. Sylvester’s Day. The living rooms had to be decorated, cakes must be baked, and the children were wanted to help with the different preparations for the New Year celebration. It would have been a waste to send four boys separately to the castle to collect an eighth of a kilo of coffee each. So Grandfather went for the lot of them.

And there he sat on the narrow wooden bench in the little room, while Gertrude, the maid, counted out the four packets of coffee, weighing an eighth of a kilo each. As she did so, he noticed the half-kilo weight lying on the left-hand tray of the weighing machine. Frau Balek von Bilgan was not there. She was busy with the preparations for her party. Gertrude was just going to pick up the glass bowl to give one of the sour lollipops to my grandfather, when she perceived that it was empty. It was refilled once every year with a kilo of bonbons costing a mark. Gertrude laughed and said, “Wait, I’ll go and fetch the new ones,” and my grandfather remained, with the four eighth-kilo packets, which had been packed and sealed up at the warehouse, standing in front of the weighing machine on which someone had left the half-kilo weight. And then my grandfather took the four packets of coffee and placed them on the empty scale and his heart beat violently as he saw how the black pointer stopped just to the left of the line and, while the half-kilo weight remained firmly in position on the scale, the half kilo of coffee hung in the air at some height above it. Grandfather’s heart was beating faster than when he had crawled into Bilgan’s thicket and was lying behind a thorn bush waiting for the giant to appear. Then he fished out of his pocket, some pebbles which he always carried with him as bullets for his slingshot when he wanted to knock down the sparrows that used to prey on his mother’s cabbages. He had to lay three, four, five pebbles alongside the packets of coffee before the pointer was at last directly on the black line. My grandfather took the packets of coffee from the scales and rolled the pebbles back into the cloth bag in which he kept them. When Gertrude came back with a big paper bag containing a kilo of sour lollipops which had to last for the next year and sent them rattling into the glass bowl, she found the pale-faced boy still standing there and nothing seemed to have changed. But then my grandfather took only three of the packets, and Gertrude looked with astonishment and horror when the whitelaced child threw the sour bonbon on the floor and trod on it, saying, “I want to speak to Frau Balek.”

“Balek von Bilgan, please,” said Gertrude.

“All right, Frau Balek von Bilgan.”

But Gertrude laughed at him and he went back through the darkness to the village and handed in their packets of coffee to the Cecils, the Bottlers, and the Yohlas. Then he announced that he had to go to the parson.

But, in fact, he went off into the dark night carrying his five pebbles in their cloth bag. He had to go far before he could find anyone who had a weighing machine or who ought to have one. He knew that there was no one in Blangau or Be mail who had one, and he strode through the two villages without stopping and finally after marching for two hours he reached the little town of Dielheim where Honig, the apothecary, lived. A good smell of freshly baked pancakes streamed out of Honig’s house when he opened the door to the freezing boy, and there was already a flavor of punch on his breath. He had a wet cigar stub between his narrow lips as he held the boy’s icy hands firmly in his own for a moment and said, “Well . . . are your father’s lungs worse?”

“No,” said the boy, “I haven’t come for medicine, I wanted . . .” and he pulled open the string of his cloth bag, took out the five pebbles, and held them out to Honig, saying, “I want to have these weighed.” He looked nervously into Honig’s face, but when Honig said nothing, was not cross, and asked no questions, my grandfather said, “That’s the difference between what the weighing machine says and the proper weight.” And now, when he came into the warm room, he felt how wet his feet were. The snow had soaked through his leaky shoes and as he came through the wood it had fallen on him from the branches and was now melting. He was tired and hungry and suddenly he began to cry when he thought of the countless mushrooms, plants, and herbs which had been weighed on the Baleks’ scales and been given short weight to the amount of his five pebbles. And when Honig, shaking his head and holding the five pebbles in his hand, called to his wife, my grandfather thought of the generations of his parents and grandparents, whose mushrooms and herbs had been weighed on the same scales, and he felt as if he were drowning in a great wave of injustice, and began to weep more bitterly. He sat down without being invited, in a chair at the table, didn’t notice the pancakes and the cup of hot coffee which kindly, fat Frau Honig set before him, and only ceased to weep when Honig himself came out. of the shop and, rattling the pebbles in his hand, said quietly to his wife, “Exactly fifty-five grams.”

My grandfather got home after tramping through the woods for two hours and received a thrashing for his pains. When they asked him about the coffee, he would not say a word, and spent the whole evening doing sums on the piece of paper on which he had entered all the deliveries he had made to the present Frau Balek. At last midnight struck and a salvo was heard from the little cannon in the castle. The village was full of joyful cries and the clatter of rattles, and when the whole family had kissed and embraced, Grandfather said in the silence that followed the coming of the New Year, “The Baleks owe me eighteen marks and thirty-two pfennigs.” And he thought once more of the scores of children in the village, of his brother Fritz, who had gathered so many mushrooms, and his sister Ludmilla, and of all the hundreds of children in the past who had collected mushrooms, herbs, and plants for the Baleks — and this time he did not weep but told his parents and brothers and sisters about his discovery.

3

ON NEW YEAR’S DAY when the Baleks von Bilgan went to Mass in the village church with their new coat of arms, a giant squatting under a spruce, already emblazoned in blue and gold on their carriage, they found themselves before a multitude of pale, hard, unfriendly faces, all staring at them curiously. They had expected to be received with garlands in the village, serenades at dawn, and cheers and acclamation as they drove through. But the village seemed to be dead, and in the church the eyes of the pale-ficed villagers were fixed on them with dumb and hostile concentration. When the vicar walked to the chancel steps to deliver his New Year’s sermon, he noticed the bleak expression on the faces of his usually peaceful and gentle flock and, after stumbling laboriously through his address, he returned dripping with sweat to the altar. And when the Baleks left the church after Mass they found the aisle lined by silent, pale-faced villagers. young Frau Balek von Bilgan stopped when she came to the children’s pews and looked about her till she caught sight of my grandfather, the little, white-faced Franz Brlicher, and asked him, though it was in church, “Why didn’t you take the coffee for your mother?” And my grandfather stood up and said, “Because you still owe me enough money to buy five kilos of coffee,” And he took the five pebbles from his pocket and held them out to the young woman and said, “Here’s the difference, fifty-five grams on each half kilo, between your weight and the true weight.” And before Frau Balek could say anything, all the men and women in the church started singing:

“Gerechtigkeit der Erden, 0 Herr, hat Dich getötet. . .”¹

While the Baleks were in church, Wilhelm Vohla, the poacher, had gone into the little room and stolen the weighing machine and the great leather ledger in which every kilo of mushrooms, every kilo of herbs, had been entered, as well as everything else which the Baleks had bought from the villagers. The men of the village sat the whole afternoon in my great-grandparents’ room going through the accounts and adding a tenth to everything that had been bought. They made out that many thousands of marks were owed, but they had not finished their calculations when the gendarmes came in from police headquarters, shooting and stabbing, and seized the scales and the account book by force. My grandfather’s sister, little Ludmilla, was killed in the tumult; a few men were wounded and one of the gendarmes was stabbed by Vohla.

The uproar was not confined to our village: it spread to Blangau and Bernau, and for nearly a week the flax mills were idle. But then a lot of gendarmes came and the men and women were threatened with prison and the Baleks compelled the vicar to display the weighing machine in the school and to give a demonstration proving that the weights it showed were exact. The men and women went back to the mills, but no one went to the school to see the parson’s demonstration. Poor man, he stood there, helpless and miserable, with his weights, the scales, and the bags of coffee.

The children began once more to gather mushrooms, thyme, herbs, and foxglove, but every Sunday in church as soon as the Baleks came in, the congregation started singing;

“ Gerechtigkeit der Erden, 0 Herr, hat Dich getötet . . until at last the Police Commandant sent a drummer round the villages to announce that this song was forbidden.

My grandfather’s parents had to leave the village and the fresh grave of their little daughter. They became basket-makers moving from place to place, because it pained them to see how the scales of justice were everywhere loaded against the poor. Behind their caravan, which crawled slowly over the country roads, was tied their skinny goat. Passers-by often heard them singing, “Gerechtigkeit der Erden.”

And they were ready to relate the story of the Baleks von Bilgan, who fell short of righteousness by one tenth, to anyone who wanted to hear them. But almost nobody did.

Translated by Richard Graves