Iron Gustav

by Hans Fallada

  Berlin was in chaos. So many obvious, quite blatant crimes were committed. Officials were overworked and exhausted, and they were also frustrated because they were so often hindered from taking action against an obvious crime – for political or personal reasons, or connections. There were other banks than the tiny local Hoppe & Co.; there were big firms like Barmat, like Kutisker, as a result of which many an official had already been forced to leave banking.

  No, they were not very willing to intervene merely on the hearsay of a dismissed employee. All right, they would look into the matter, make enquiries … They had his address.

  ‘It’ll be too late then,’ said the young man. ‘Is there anyone else I can see here?’

  ‘You’re in a terrible hurry,’ they laughed. ‘All right, come along.’ And they put him into the waiting room of one of the big beasts, a much-feared bully boy. They gave the register clerk his file and then they left him. ‘He’ll soon get bored,’ they said.

  There Heinz Hackendahl sat and waited, thinking about his brother Erich, which made him so determined. And all of a sudden he knew that he hated him as he hated no other person on earth. His father, the old man whose children had not given him much happiness, wished to shield his son and that was understandable. But the son here in the police station was not understandable – indeed he did not understand himself. He was sitting there because of his brother, but once he had attained his object and they wished to proceed against Erich, then he intended to run to the telephone and warn him. (He had the telephone number in his pocket on a slip of paper.) He wanted to warn him, not because he thought his brother would mend his ways, but out of a frail pity, himself persuaded at heart that Erich would continue to do evil.

  He had to make a decision. The issue was whether one had the courage to do damage to oneself, to act entirely after one’s own heart. No one was asking him, no one would help him. It was entirely up to him. Oh, if only it had been someone unimportant, like Hoppe, for instance, and not precisely his own brother! And he recalled how quick and bright Erich had once been – how very much he had once admired and loved him.

  Perhaps, he thought, only what has been extremely loved can be extremely hated. And he would once more have liked to evade a decision, and sneak away. There were excuses enough – Irma would be wondering where he had got to and … But then all hope of this was over; a door opened and Heinz was ushered into an office. (But he would keep quiet about Erich and telephone him afterwards.)

  ‘Ah,’ said the stout man, having read over the brief statement already on his desk. ‘And now tell me about it again, in your own words.’

  Heinz did so, repeating what had already been taken down, and no more.

  ‘Is that all?’

  Heinz nodded vigorously.

  ‘Something’s missing,’ said the red-faced man. ‘And you know very well that something’s missing.’

  Heinz behaved as if he did not understand.

  ‘You’re screening someone,’ said the bully boy in a friendly way. ‘You want to protect someone.’ He smiled. ‘You see, when you’ve sat here as long as I have you can sniff things out. There’s no magic about it. And in your case the missing link is how you came to pick on racing bets.’

  ‘I just thought it likely,’ said Heinz, embarrassed.

  ‘Naturally, you just thought so!’ said the stout man getting up. ‘Good morning, my dear young man, and don’t come here again. We haven’t yet found out how to make omelettes without breaking eggs and you won’t find out either. The world stinks like a big dung heap and if everybody tries to segregate his own little stench then we’ll never get rid of the smell … We’ll catch this Hoppe all right; I know who he is. A clerk who ran away with what was in the till. But what interests me is your own private pile of stench. However, as I said, we’ve enough on hand without you, and if you’re satisfied with being a coward and not a man, good luck to you. After all it’s your own affair.’

  Each hard word stabbed Heinz to the heart. The red-faced man had sat down again and was reading his files, and seemed to be under the impression that his battered visitor was long departed.

  ‘Detective Inspector!’ said Heinz in a low voice.

  ‘What is it? Haven’t you gone?’

  ‘Detective Inspector!’

  The man so addressed looked in his files, read, and heard nothing.

  ‘Detective Inspector!’ said Heinz louder.

  ‘What do you want? Haven’t you gone yet? You’re asking for trouble, my lad!’

  ‘Detective Inspector!’

  ‘All right. Fire away. But on target, otherwise it’s not worth listening to you.’

  And Heinz fired away …

  ‘That’s still no good!’ said the Detective Inspector, when Heinz finished. ‘A top hat, an attaché case and binoculars are not sufficient. All respect for your brotherly love, but that’s no proof either.’

  He grumbled and muttered to himself, then asked: ‘You wanted to ring him up, didn’t you? Wanted to warn him? Let me have his number!’

  Heinz did so.

  ‘Good!’ said the Detective Inspector. ‘Now you shall see what charming people we are here. You can use my telephone and ring up your brother, and you can tell him – well, tell him that in, say, half an hour the CID will be calling on his friend Hoppe, and if you like you can give him a hint about the bets – just as if you were standing in a nice quiet telephone booth.’

  There is something odd about the human heart. Now it was offered him, and the police were allowing him to do so, Heinz wanted on no account to ring his brother. Indeed, he shrank back from the proffered telephone, afraid of hearing Erich’s voice.

  ‘Well, what’s the matter, young man? Squeamish again? Or do you think I’m trying to take you in? Not at all. I’ll be quite frank with you. My men are already at Hoppe’s; and should there be a warning from your brother now – of course too late – then we’d have some evidence.’

  Yes, things never changed – having taken one decision you were urged to another unavoidably; it looked as if he had, against his father’s wish, hopelessly betrayed his brother. But that he himself should act as decoy, that his voice should bait the trap – no, a thousand times no. ‘It seems a pretty dirty thing to do,’ he said desperately.

  ‘Dirty! I should say so,’ growled the bully boy. ‘So are all half-measures, you’re right there. What’s bad is bad and half-measures won’t cure it. The best thing you can do now is to go home and get something to eat – you’re looking quite green. No, you needn’t phone – d’you think I needed you for that sort of joke? I only wanted to see what kind of chap you were. Well, goodbye. There’s still hope of your becoming a man one of these days. Goodbye, I’m busy, I’m not a teacher!’

  But perhaps he was after all – this bulldog.

  § XI

  Yes, young Heinz Hackendahl had much on his plate at this time. But whatever he did, the growling voice of the fat man with the red face echoed in his ears. Not only could he not forget it, but it made him stronger.

  And very soon the hour came when Heinz had to tell his young wife that all was up with the job at Hoppe & Co. – had to, for the newspaper headlines would have given it away in any case, announcing as they did that hundreds of small depositors had been cheated out of their savings. Petroleum and Totalisator. Clergymen Who Seek Exorbitant Interest. Hoppe’s Evil Star. And so on. Therefore he had to tell her. And although he did not have to tell her about his part in the breakdown, he did so, because that voice was still ringing in his ear.

  ‘I had to do it, Irma. Immediately I saw Erich, I had to.’

  And, as is nearly always the case with women, she took the news quite differently from what he had expected. ‘It will be all right somehow,’ she said. ‘Others were able to do it.’

  No – no blame.

  Father also took it differently than expected. Heinz visited him that evening, still sitting in the stable by his horse.

  ‘Sophie wants to buy me another o
ld nag. Mine doesn’t look good enough for her,’ said the old man. ‘But, I don’t know. I’m so used to him … So your business has really collapsed, has it?’

  At this point, Heinz could have once again remained silent, saying nothing, because there had been nothing yet about Erich Hackendahl in the newspapers. So if Heinz did tell his father everything after all, he did so because he still heard that voice; what it had said about half-measures still seemed right.

  ‘I see,’ said the old man. ‘So that’s what you say. Well, I kind of half thought so myself. But you can’t jump from your own skin into someone else’s, even if we’re all the same underneath.’ But, as Heinz was still standing by the stable door, the old man added, shouting, ‘You, Heinz, so you know nothing of Erich?’

  ‘No, Father.’

  ‘Well then, go away! But tell me immediately if you do hear something. Just no half-measures to save me from what I said back then. Half-measures are rubbish!’

  Heinz went away thoughtfully and considered how curious it was that such different people as a detective inspector and an old cab driver could have the same opinion about half-measures.

  But he had to go on. He had no time to stay still for long. There were visits to be made – to Irma and the baby, who was his own son, named in memory of a distant, half-forgotten brother called Otto, to the delight of his sister-in-law. But these hospital visits were soon over; after the statutory eight days, Irma returned to their little flat.

  There the three of them lived, and began to set themselves up as three, and to settle down as three. It was sometimes not so easy. It was quite different from living as two. But you got used to it.

  What you didn’t get used to were the daily visits to the unemployment office, from which he always came away sad and tired, and often angry as well. In principle it was a very simple matter – millions of people had to do it every day. (Later it was twice a week.) You went to an office and showed your card. This card was then stamped as evidence that you had shown it, and you could leave. And once a week there was money. Really a very simple matter.

  But it made you sad, tired and frequently angry …

  Take the unemployment office itself. It was housed in a former villa, in a small street of villas – nothing distinguished, God forbid – a street inhabited by pensioners, retired teachers, confidential clerks – people who, perhaps just before the inflation, had been lucky enough to invest their life savings in a respectable villa with two hundred square metres of garden. So that those who lived near the unemployment office were clearly people of quite small means. And yet Heinz Hackendahl was told by the other unemployed that these residents had made application after application for the office to be removed; in their opinion the street was spoiled by it and the value of their property impaired – even the coffee tasted sour when they saw unemployed pass by. For all these reasons they felt the unemployment office might well honour some road inhabited by people with smaller means than theirs.

  Naturally one never heard what the unemployment office itself thought about this but somehow there were always policemen to supervise the behaviour of the unemployed in this street. No shouting or singing! We’ve an eye on you …

  The unemployed, of course, talked about it constantly. And they had plenty of time to do so, as they queued up and waited for their cards to be stamped. They talked about it more and more, with passion and bitterness. Passing those wretched front gardens which no one thought of profaning – so why the policemen? – they looked with real hatred at the plaster of Paris dwarfs, the glass balls, the pitiable gardening; if the residents disliked the unemployed, that dislike was reciprocated tenfold.

  Another thing was the treatment at the unemployment office. Since it was obvious that those behind the counters there were employed only because others were unemployed – they lived off unemployment, the unemployed were their employers – they ought to have been a little politer, or so their true employers, the unemployed, thought; yes, they should treat their employers with consideration and respect.

  But of such respect and consideration there was not a trace. On the contrary these people did everything to make life difficult for those who in truth employed them – they were always demanding new documents or poking into antecedents, all the time pretending to ameliorate what they called the lot of the unemployed. They pried into every unpleasantness. If someone had had a row with his foreman he was called insubordinate, and if another had gone sick and the consultant to the Health Insurance reported him as fit again, then he was a work-shy.

  That was the sort of thing they gave you to understand, the smart gentlemen behind the counters, before they slammed the enquiry window and let the unemployed wait while they did themselves well on the lunch they had brought in greaseproof paper and Thermos flask. Those were the people who talked about ‘work-shy’! They behaved as if the miserable sums they paid out were their own money. What airs they gave themselves! It was time they heard a thing or two.

  And this they did. There was a row every day. But they were such a mean lot that if a chap told them the truth for once they had him thrown out by the porter or even sent for a policeman, which meant that the man was punished by getting no dole for two, maybe five, days – just because they didn’t want to hear the truth.

  Yes, the circumstances in which you stood and waited for your stamp, sometimes for hours on end, were enough to make you heart-sick and desperate. You felt utterly wretched when some man, foaming at the mouth, shouted that these bloodsuckers were stopping his dole, and at home his wife and children were dying of starvation. ‘Yes, you behind the counter there, I mean you, pop-eyes, you’ve never heard your kids crying from hunger at night, you greedy-guts, and not a crumb to give them, not a penny to buy anything with!’ And it was useless for your neighbour to whisper that as a matter of fact the chap had boozed his unemployment money on the day he was paid – sometimes it was true, sometimes it wasn’t. But it was bad that people revealed themselves so blatantly and shamelessly to one another.

  It was bad, too, if a neighbour pointed out when someone in front of them in the queue not only had his card stamped for today, but for yesterday and the day before. ‘The person behind the counter has a party member’s book, and in this case the person this side of the counter has one too, and if you want things to be different for you, you better get one of those little party books too. Then you’ll see how the place lights up!’

  Heinz had already heard such talk at his bank. But he didn’t take any notice of it. In the unemployment office waiting room there was a big notice: ‘Political talk strictly forbidden!’ But the notice was completely useless, because everyone waiting there talked about politics. If they didn’t talk about their own lives, they talked about politics.

  God, how Heinz Hackendahl came to hate this dole queue place! His unhappy neighbours could not hate it more. This dreary grey, these figures who seemed to grow ever more dreary – always the same figures, the angry and bitter ones, the skat players, and the envious, resentful ones. (To be envious of that! ‘He’s all right! He’s only got one leg. He still gets a pension. I should be so lucky!’) And colleagues who maintained a pathetic elegance and told new stories about the smart women they went out with the previous night … and other colleagues who suddenly gave up, whose suits look soiled more or less from one day to the next. Suddenly they used string instead of shoelaces and had holes in the sleeves of their jackets.

  Spring gave way to summer. Sometimes the sky was radiantly blue and the sun shone. In the gardens of the little villas the lilac was fresh. The people, however, were old and grey. Their lives were spent on the dole. There was no summer for them. For them there was only one thing: the dole. It was like a sickness that had them in its grip – a sickness which killed every pleasure, deadened every desire, and which slowly, gradually took people over completely.

  Very soon Heinz was coming home miserable, tired and hopeless, and was even envious of Irma, who was running the household, and for who
m there was not only no unemployment, but who was busier than before because of little Otto.

  Heinz sat down and watched Irma, knowing that he had nothing else to do all day.

  After a while, she turned round to him two or three times and said: ‘You give me the creeps staring at me, Heinz. Come, see if you can do the baby’s washing.’ And sometimes he did stand at the scrubbing board and began to rub. But even if he succeeded, it didn’t bring him any pleasure, because to give pleasure work has to have meaning. To work merely to work – in a sense, to pass the time – is stupid.

  For that reason he soon gave up doing it, or she took it out of his hands and said: ‘Leave it, Heinz. I don’t want to annoy you. Only, it can make you mad seeing you do something. It always looks as though you want to go to sleep. I know you, I know you, and I’m sorry for you too. But can’t you do something? Can’t you go and see your old friends? Or visit your old schoolteacher? You always wanted to do that.’

  ‘Oh, did I?’ asked Heinz. ‘I don’t now. It looks like rain. But perhaps I’ll go …’

  For a while he stayed at home, undecided. Then, after Irma gave him a little push, he left after all.

  § XII

  By now he had not seen Professor Degener for a good many years. In fact, he should have been ashamed not to have had anything to do with his beloved teacher for so long. A long time ago, when he began his apprenticeship, he had still gone once or twice. But then he stopped. It was strange how two people who liked each other had suddenly so little to say. How all of a sudden it became clear how one was a philologist and the other a bank apprentice – two ridiculously different spheres, apparently with no connection.

  However, now he was going to him. It was good to retrace his steps, see the old street name, and press the old doorbell. When times had been very bad, when he didn’t know what to do, he had gone there many times. And now it was a bad time again.