One of my favorite short story writ­ers, Hein­rich Böll was a Ger­man writer awarded the 1972 Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture. The fol­low­ing story is from The Sto­ries of Hein­rich Böll and was trans­lated by Leila Vennewitz:

The Man With the Knives

Jupp held the knife by the tip of the blade, let­ting it jog­gle idly up and down; it was a long, taper­ing bread knife, obvi­ously razor-sharp. With a sud­den flick of the wrist he tossed the knife into the air. Up it went, whirring like a pro­peller; the shin­ing blade glit­tered like a golden fish in a sheaf of lin­ger­ing sun­beams, struck the ceil­ing, lost its spin, and plunged down straight at Jupp’s head. In a flash Jupp had placed a wooden block on his head; the knife scored into the wood and remained embed­ded there, gen­tly sway­ing. Jupp removed the block from his head, with­drew the knife, and flung it with a ges­ture of annoy­ance at the door, where it stuck, quiv­er­ing, in the frame until it grad­u­ally stopped vibrat­ing and fell to the floor….

“It makes me sick,” said Jupp qui­etly. “I’ve been work­ing on the log­i­cal assump­tion that peo­ple who’ve paid for their tick­ets really want to see a show where life and limb are at stake—like at the Roman circuses—they want to be con­vinced of at least the pos­si­bil­ity of blood­shed, know what I mean?”

He picked up the knife and tossed it neatly against the top cross­bar of the win­dow, with such force that the panes rat­tled and threat­ened to fall out of the crum­bling putty. This throw—confident and unerring—took me back to those hours of semi­dark­ness in the past when he had thrown his pock­etknife against the dugout post, from bot­tom to top and down again.

“I’ll do any­thing,” he went on, “to give the cus­tomers a thrill. I’ll even cut off my ears, only it’s hard to find any­one to stick them back on again. Here, I want to show you something.”

He opened the door for me, and we went out into the hall­way. A few shreds of wall­pa­per still clung to the walls where the glue was too stub­born for them to be ripped off and used for light­ing the stove. After pass­ing through a molder­ing bath­room, we emerged onto a kind of ter­race, its con­crete floor cracked and moss-covered.
Jupp pointed upward.

“The higher the knife goes, of course, the greater the effect. But I need some resis­tance up there for the thing to strike against and lose momen­tum so that it can come hurtling down straight at my use­less skull. Look!” He pointed up to where the iron gird­ers of a ruined bal­cony stuck out into the air.

“This is where I used to prac­tice. For a whole year. Watch!” He sent the knife soar­ing upward. It rose with mar­velous sym­me­try and even­ness, seem­ing to climb as smoothly and effort­lessly as a bird; then it struck one of the gird­ers, shot down with breath­tak­ing speed, and crashed into the wooden block. The impact itself must have been ter­rific. Jupp didn’t bat an eye­lid. The knife had buried itself a cou­ple of inches in the wood.

“But that’s fan­tas­tic!” I cried. “It’s absolutely sen­sa­tional, they’ll have to like it—what an act!” Jupp non­cha­lantly with­drew the knife from the wood, grasped it by the han­dle, and made a thrust in the air.

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“Oh, they like it all right. They pay me twelve marks a night, and between the main acts they let me play around a bit with the knife. But the act’s not elab­o­rate enough. A man, a knife, a block of wood, don’t you see? I ought to have a half-naked girl so I can send the knife spin­ning a hair’s breadth past her nose. That’d make the crowd go wild. But try and find that kind of a girl!”

He went ahead as we returned to his room. He placed the knife care­fully on the table, the wooden block beside it, and rubbed his hands. We sat down on the crate beside the stove and were silent. Tak­ing some bread out of my pocket, I said, “Be my guest.”

“Thanks, I will, but let me make some cof­fee. Then you can come along and watch my performance.”

He put some more wood in the stove and set the pot over the open­ing. “It’s infu­ri­at­ing,” he said. “Maybe I look too seri­ous, a bit like a sergeant still, eh?”

“Non­sense, you never were a sergeant. D’you smile when they clap?”

“Of course—and bow too.”

“I couldn’t. I couldn’t smile in a cemetery.”

“That’s a great mis­take: a cemetery’s the very place to smile.”

“I don’t get it.”   “Because they aren’t dead. They’re none of them dead, see?”

“I see, all right, but I don’t believe it.”

“There’s still  a bit of the lieu­tenant about you after all. Well, in that case it just takes longer, of course. The point is, I’m only too glad if they enjoy it. They’re burned out inside; I give them a bit of a thrill and get paid for it. Per­haps one of them, just one, will go home and not for­get me. ‘That man with the knife, for Christ’s sake,’ maybe that’s what he’ll say because they’re all scared, all the time. They trail their fear behind them like a heavy shadow, and it makes me happy if they can for­get abut it and laugh a lit­tle. Isn’t that rea­son enough to smile?”

I said noth­ing, my eyes on the water, wait­ing for it to boil. Jupp poured the boil­ing water onto the cof­fee in the brown enamel pot, and we took turns drink­ing from the pot and shared my bread. Out­side, the mild dusk began to fall, flow­ing into the room like soft gray milk.

“What are you doing these days, by the way?” asked Jupp.

“Nothing…just get­ting by.”

“A hard way to make a living.”

“Right—for this loaf of bread I had to col­lect a hun­dred bricks and clean them. Casual labor.”

“Hm…Want to see another of my tricks?”

In response to my nod he stood up, switched on the light, and went over to the wall, where he pushed aside a kind of rug, dis­clos­ing the rough out­line of a man drawn in char­coal on the red­dish color-wash: a strange lump pro­truded from what was sup­posed to be the head, prob­a­bly sig­ni­fy­ing a hat. On closer inspec­tion I saw that the man had been drawn on a skill­fully cam­ou­flaged door. I watched expec­tantly as Jupp pro­ceeded to pull out a hand­some lit­tle brown leather suit­case from under the mis­er­able affair that served as his bed and put it on the table. Before open­ing it, he came over and placed four cig­a­rette butts in front of me. “Roll those into two thin ones,” he said.

I moved my seat so that I could watch him as well as get a bit more of the gen­tle warmth from the stove. While I was care­fully pulling the butts apart on the bread paper spread over my knees, Jupp had snapped open the lock of the suit­case and pulled out an odd-looking object: one of those flan­nel bags con­sist­ing of a series of pock­ets in which our moth­ers used to keep their table sil­ver. He deftly untied the rib­bon and let the bun­dle unroll across the table to reveal a dozen wood-handled knives, the kind that, in the days when our moth­ers danced the waltz, were known as “hunt­ing cutlery.”   I divided the tobacco shreds scrupu­lously in half onto the two cig­a­rette papers and rolled them. “Here,” I said.

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“Here,” Jupp said too, and “Thanks,” bring­ing over the flan­nel bag for me to look at.

“This is all I man­aged to sal­vage from my parent’s belong­ings. Almost every­thing was burned or lost in the rub­ble, and the rest stolen. When I got back from POW camp I was really on my beam ends, didn’t own a thing in the world—until one day a dig­ni­fied old lady, a friend of my mother’s, tracked me down and brought along this nice suit­case. A few days before my mother was killed in an air raid she had left it with the old lady to be looked after, and it had sur­vived. Funny, isn’t it? But of course we know that when peo­ple panic they try to save the strangest things. Never the essen­tial ones. So then at least I was the owner of the con­tents of this suit­case: the brown enamel pot, twelve forks, twelve knifes and twelve spoons, and the long bread knife. I sold the spoons and forks, liv­ing off the pro­ceeds for a year, and prac­ticed with the knifes, thir­teen of them. Watch….”

I passed him the spill I had used to light my cig­a­rette. Jupp stuck his cig­a­rette to his lower lip, fas­tened the rib­bon of the flan­nel bag to a but­ton on the shoul­der of his jacket, and let the flan­nel unroll along his arm like some exotic panoply of war. Then with incred­i­ble speed he whisked the knives out of their pock­ets, and before I could fol­low his move­ments he had thrown all twelve like light­ning against the dim human out­line, which reminded me of those sin­is­ter, sham­bling fig­ures that came lurch­ing at us toward the end of the war from every bill­board, every cor­ner, har­bin­gers of defeat and destruc­tion. Two knives were stick­ing out of the man’s hat, two over each shoul­der, and the oth­ers, three a side, along the dan­gling arms….

“Fan­tas­tic!” I cried. “Fan­tas­tic! But you’ve got your act right there, with a bit of dramatizing.”

“All I need is a man, bet­ter still a girl. But I know I’ll never find any­one,” he said with a sigh, pluck­ing the knives out of the door and slip­ping them care­fully back into their pock­ets. “The girls are too scared and the men want too much money. Can’t blame them, of course; it’s a risky business.”

Once again he flung the knives back at the door in such a way as to split the entire black fig­ure accu­rately down the mid­dle with daz­zling sym­me­try. The thir­teenth knife, the big one, stuck like a deadly arrow just where the man’s heart should have been.
Jupp took a final puff of the thin, tobacco-filled roll of paper and threw the scant remains behind the stove.

“Let’s go,” he said, “it’s time we were off.” He stuck his head out the win­dow, mut­tered some­thing about “damned rain,” and added: “It’s a few min­utes to eight, I’m on at eight-thirty.”   While he was pack­ing the knives away in the suit­case I stood with my face by the open win­dow. Decay­ing vil­las seemed to be whim­per­ing softly in the rain, and from behind a wall of sway­ing poplars came the screech of the street­car. But nowhere could I see a clock.

“How d’you know what time it is?”

“Instinct—that’s part of my training.”

I gaped at him. First he helped me on with my coat and then put on his wind­breaker. My shoul­der is slightly par­a­lyzed and I can’t move my arms beyond a cer­tain radius, just far enough to clean bricks. We put on our caps and went out into the dingy cor­ri­dor, and I was glad to hear at least some voices in the house, laugh­ter, and a sub­dued murmuring.

“It’s like this,” said Jupp as we went down the stairs. “What I’ve tried to do is trace cer­tain cos­mic laws. Watch.” He put the suit­case down on a stair and spread his arms, an Icarus poised for flight in the way the ancient Greeks used to show him. His matter-of-fact expres­sion assumed a strangely cool and dream­like qual­ity, some­thing between obses­sion and detach­ment, some­thing mag­i­cal, that I found quite spine-chilling. “Like this,” he said softly. “I sim­ply reach out into the atmos­phere, I feel my hands get­ting longer and longer, reach­ing out into a dimen­sion gov­erned by dif­fer­ent laws, snatch them away, part thief, part lover, and carry them off.” He clenched his fists, draw­ing them close to his body. “Let’s go,” he said, and his expres­sion was its usual matter-of-fact self. I fol­lowed him in a daze…

Out­side, a chill rain was falling softly and steadily. We turned up our col­lars and with­drew shiv­er­ing into our­selves. The mist of twi­light was surg­ing through the streets, already tinged with the bluish dark­ness of night. In sev­eral base­ments among the bombed-out vil­las a mea­ger light was burn­ing under the tow­er­ing black weight of a great ruin. The street grad­u­ally became a muddy path where to left and right, in the opaque twi­light, shacks loomed up in the scrawny gar­dens like junks afloat in a shal­low back­wa­ter. We crossed the street­car tracks, plunged into the maze of nar­row streets on the city’s out­skirts, where among piles of rub­ble and garbage a few houses still stand intact in the dirt, until we emerged sud­denly into a busy street. The tide of the crowds car­ried us along for a bit, until we turned a cor­ner into a dark side street where a gar­ish illu­mi­nated sign say­ing “The Seven Mills” was reflected in the glis­ten­ing asphalt.

The foyer of the vaude­ville the­ater was empty. The per­for­mance had already begun, and the buzzing of the audi­ence pen­e­trated the shabby red drapes. With a laugh Jupp pointed to a pho­to­graph in a dis­play case, where he was shown in cow­boy cos­tume between two coyly smil­ing dancers whose breasts were hung with sparkling tin­sel. Beneath was the cap­tion: “The Man with the Knives.”
“Come on,” said Jupp, and before I grasped what was hap­pen­ing I found myself being dragged through a half-hidden door. We climbed a poorly lit stair­case, nar­row and wind­ing, the smell of sweat and grease­paint indi­cat­ing the near­ness of the stage. Jupp was ahead—suddenly he halted in a turn of the stairs, put down the suit­case, and, grip­ping me by the shoul­ders, asked in a hushed voice, “Are you game?”

I had been expect­ing this ques­tion for so long that when it came its sud­den­ness star­tled me. I must have looked non­plussed, for after a pause he said, “Well?”

I still hes­i­tated, and sud­denly we heard a great roar of laugh­ter that seemed to come pour­ing out of the nar­row pas­sage and engulf us like a tidal wave; it was so over­whelm­ing that I jumped and invol­un­tar­ily shuddered.

“I’m scared,” I whispered.

“So am I. Don’t you trust me?”

“Sure I do…but…let’s go,” I said hoarsely, push­ing past him and adding, with the courage born of despair, “I’ve noth­ing to lose.”

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We emerged onto a nar­row cor­ri­dor with a num­ber of rough ply­wood cubi­cles right and left. A few oddly garbed fig­ures were scur­ry­ing about, and through an open­ing in the flimsy wings I could see a clown on the stage, his enor­mous mouth wide open; once again the roar of the crowd’s laugh­ter engulfed us, but Jupp pulled me through a door and shut it behind us. I looked around. The cubi­cle was tiny, prac­ti­cally bare. On the wall was a mir­ror, Jupp’s cow­boy cos­tume hung on the sin­gle nail, and on a rick­ety chair lay an old deck of cards. Jupp moved with ner­vous haste; he took my wet coat from me, flung the cow­boy suit onto the chair, hung up my coat, then his wind­breaker. Over the top of the par­ti­tion I could see an elec­tric clock on a fake red Doric col­umn, show­ing twenty-five after eight.

“Five min­utes,” mut­tered Jupp, slip­ping into his cos­tume. “Shall we rehearse it?”

Just then some­one knocked on the cubi­cle door and called, “You’re on!”

Jupp but­toned up his shirt and stuck a ten-gallon hat on his head. With a forced laugh I cried, “D’you expect a con­demned man to rehearse his own hanging?”   Jupp snatched up the suit­case and dragged me through the door. Out­side stood a bald-headed man watch­ing the clown going through his final motions on the stage. Jupp whis­pered some­thing to the man that I didn’t catch, the man glanced up with a start, looked at me, looked at Jupp, and shook his head vehe­mently. And again Jupp whis­pered some­thing to him.

I couldn’t have cared less. Let them impale me alive. I had a crip­pled shoul­der, I had just fin­ished a thin cig­a­rette, tomor­row I would get three-quarters of a loaf for seventy-five bricks. But tomorrow….The applause almost blew down the wings. The clown, his face tired and con­torted, stag­gered toward us through the open­ing in the wings, stood there for a few sec­onds look­ing morose, and then went back onto the stage, where he smiled gra­ciously and bowed. The orches­tra played a fan­fare. Jupp was still whis­per­ing to the bald-headed man. Three times the clown came back into the wings and three times he went out onto the stage and bowed, smiling.

Then the orches­tra struck up a march and, suit­case in hand, Jupp strode smartly out onto the stage. His appear­ance was greeted with sub­dued clap­ping. Weary-eyed I watched Jupp fas­ten the play­ing cards onto nails that were already in place and then impale each card with a knife, one by one, pre­cisely in the cen­ter. The applause became more ani­mated, but not enthu­si­as­tic. Then, to a muf­fled roll of drums, he per­formed his trick with the bread knife and the block of wood, and under­neath all my indif­fer­ence I was aware that the act really was a bit thin. Across from me, on the other side of the stage, a few scant­ily dressed girls stood watching….And sud­denly the bald-headed man seized me by the shoul­der, dragged me onto the stage, greeted Jupp with a grandiose sweep of the arm and, in the spu­ri­ous voice of a police­man, said, “Good evening, Herr Borgalevsky.”

“Good evening, Herr Erd­menger,” replied Jupp, like­wise in cer­e­mo­ni­ous tones.

“I’ve brought you a horsethief, a proper scoundrel, Herr Bor­galevsky, for you to tickle a bit with your shiny knives before we hang him…a real scoundrel…” I found his voice totally ridicu­lous, pathet­i­cally arti­fi­cial, like paper flow­ers or the cheap­est kind of grease­paint. I glanced at the audi­ence, and fro that moment on, faced by that glim­mer­ing, slaver­ing, hydra-headed mon­ster crouch­ing there in the dark ready to spring, I sim­ply switched off.

I didn’t give a damn, I was daz­zled by the glare of the spot­light, and in my thread­bare suit and shabby shoes I prob­a­bly made a pretty con­vinc­ing horsethief.

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“Oh, leave him here with me, Herr Erd­menger. I know how to deal with him.”

“Splen­did, let him have it, and don’t spare the knives.”

Jupp took hold of me by the col­lar while the grin­ning Erd­menger swag­gered off the stage. Some­one threw a rope onto the stage, and Jupp pro­ceeded to tie me by the feet to a card­board col­umn that had a fake door, painted blue, propped up behind it. I was aware of some­thing like an ecstasy of insen­si­bil­ity. To my right I heard the eerie stir­ring of the tense audi­ence, and I real­ized Jupp had been right in speak­ing of its blood­lust. Its thirst quiv­ered on the sickly, stale air, and the orches­tra, with its facile drum roll, its muf­fled las­civ­i­ous­ness, height­ened the effect of grisly tragi-comedy in which real blood would flow, stage blood that had been paid for….I stared straight ahead, let­ting my body sag, the rope being so firmly tied that it held me upright. The drum roll became softer and softer as Jupp calmly pulled his knives out of the play­ing cards and slipped them back into their pock­ets, from time to time cast­ing melo­dra­matic glances my way as if to size me up. Then, hav­ing packed away all his knives, he turned to the audi­ence and in the same odi­ously stagy voice announced, “Ladies and gen­tle­men, I am now about to out­line this young man with knives, but I wish to demon­strate to you that I do not throw blunt knives.” He pro­duced a piece of string, and with per­fect sangfroid removed one knife after another fro its pocket, touched the string with each, cut­ting it into twelve pieces, and then replaced the knives one by one in their pockets.

While all this was going on I looked far beyond him, far beyond the wings, far beyond the half-naked girls, into another life, it seemed….

The ten­sion in the audi­ence was elec­tri­fy­ing. Jupp came over to me, pre­tended to adjust the rope, and said softly into my ear, “Don’t move a mus­cle, and trust me….”

This added delay nearly broke the ten­sion, it was threat­en­ing to peter out, but he sud­denly stretched out his arms, let­ting his hands flut­ter like hov­er­ing birds, and his face assumed that look of mag­i­cal con­cen­tra­tion that I had mar­veled at on the stairs. He appeared to be cast­ing a spell over the audi­ence too with this sorcerer’s pose. I seemed to hear a strange, unearthly groan and real­ized that this was a warn­ing sig­nal for me.

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With­draw­ing my gaze from lim­it­less hori­zons, I looked at Jupp, now stand­ing oppo­site me so that our eyes were on a level; he raised his hand, mov­ing it slowly toward a pocket, and again I real­ized that this was a sig­nal for me. I stood com­pletely still and closed my eyes….

It was a glo­ri­ous feel­ing, last­ing maybe two sec­onds, I’m not sure.

Lis­ten­ing to the swish of the knives and the short sharp hiss of air as they plunged into the fake blue door, I felt as if I were walk­ing along a very nar­row plank over a bot­tom­less abyss. I walked with per­fect con­fi­dence, yet felt all the thrill of dan­ger. I was afraid, yet absolutely cer­tain that I would not fall; I was not count­ing, yet I opened my eyes at the very moment when the last knife pierced the door beside my right hand….

A storm of applause jerked me bolt upright. I opened my eyes prop­erly to find myself look­ing into Jupp’s white face: he had rushed over to me and was unty­ing the rope with trem­bling hands. Then he pulled me into the cen­ter of the stage, right up to the very edge. He bowed, and I bowed; as the applause swelled he pointed to me and I to him; then he smiled at me, I smiled at him, and we both bowed smil­ing to the audience.

Back in the cubi­cle, not a word was said. Jupp threw the per­fo­rated play­ing cards onto the chair, took my coat off the nail and helped me on with it. Then he hung his cow­boy cos­tume back on the nail, pulled on his wind­breaker, and we put on our caps. As I opened the door the lit­tle bald-headed man rushed up to us shout­ing, “I’m rais­ing you to forty marks!” He handed Jupp some cash. I real­ized then that Jupp was my boss, and I smiled; he looked at me too and smiled.

Jupp took my arm, and side by side we walked down the nar­row, poorly lit stairs that smelled of stale grease­paint. When we reached the foyer Jupp said with a laugh, “Now let’s go and buy some cig­a­rettes and bread….”

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But it was not till an hour later that I real­ized I now had a proper pro­fes­sion, a pro­fes­sion where all I needed to do was stand still and dream a lit­tle. For twelve or twenty sec­onds. I was the man who has knives thrown at him.…

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Tags: depression, fiction, Heinrich Boll, literature, Post-War Germany, short stories, The Man with the Knives, veterans