Later on (when we had stopped laughing) he said that the French writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus came looking for German writers after World War II, saying in effect, "You must tell us what it was like for you." (Boll, like Sartre and Camus, would win a Nobel Prize for Literature.) In 1984, a year before Boll's death at the age of sixty-seven (one year short of my age now, and I smoke as much as he did), he invited me to take part in a dialogue about Germanness to be taped and edited for television by the BBC. I was honored. I loved the man and his work. I accepted. The program was a flop, fogbound and melancholy and mainly pointless, although it is still aired again and again on cable in this country when there is nothing else to show. (We are sort of packing material to keep a big box of junk jewelry from rattling.) I ask him what the dangerous flaw is in the German character and he replies, "Obedience."
Here are the last words he would ever say to me in this life (and he was on two canes and still smoking like a chimney, and about to board a taxicab to the airport in a cold London drizzle): "Oh, Koort, it is so hard, so hard." He was one of the last shreds of native German sorrow and shame about his country's part in World War II and its prelude. He told me off camera that he was despised by his neighbors for remembering when it was time to forget.
Time to forget.
A preface is commonly the last part of a book to be written, although it is the first thing a reader is expected to see. Six months have passed since the completion of the body of this book. Only now am I stitching this coverlet, as my editor, Faith Sale, and I prepare to put the creature to beddy-bye.
My daughter Lily has turned eight during the interval. The Russian Empire has collapsed. All the weapons we thought we might have to use on the USSR we are now applying without stint and unopposed to Iraq, a nation one-sixteenth that populous. A speech our President delivered yesterday on the subject of why we had no choice but to attack Iraq won him the highest rating in television history, a record held many years ago, I remember, by Mary Martin in Peter Pan. Yes, and I provided answers that same yesterday to questions put to me by a British publication, Weekly Guardian, whith these results:
Q: What is your idea of perfect happiness?
A: Imagining that something somewhere wants us to like it here.
Q: What living person do you most admire?
A: Nancy Reagan.
Q: What is the trait you most deplore in others?
A: Social Darwinism.
Q: What vehicle do you own?
A: 1988 Honda Accord.
Q: What is your favorite smell?
A: What comes out of the back door of a bakery.
Q: What is your favorite word?
A: Amen.
Q: What is your favorite building?
A: The Chrysler Building in Manhattan.
Q: What words or phrases do you most overuse?
A: "Excuse me."
Q: When and where were you happiest?
A: About ten years ago my Finnish publisher took me to a little inn on the
edge of the permafrost in his country. We took a walk and found frozen
ripe blueberries on bushes. We thawed them in our mouths. It was as
though something somewhere wanted us to like it here.
Q: How would you like to die?
A: In an airplane crash on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro.
Q: What talent would you most like to have?
A: Cello.
Q: What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
A: Teeth.
- K.V. January 17, 1991