A Small Circus

by Hans Fallada

  VIII

  At eight o’clock, then, the mayor lets himself into his office.

  Of course the place is dark, at this time of day there’s no one in the town hall.

  But he wants to see if there was anything in the mail. And maybe Piekbusch will have left a note on his desk that he was wanted in court. Then he’ll go along to the judge, tonight, to the house of the industrialist Thilse, and apologize to him.

  On the great oaken slab of his desk there is one single, solitary letter. One letter.

  As Gareis rips the envelope open, his nerves start to tingle. He was standing, now he sits down.

  It’s an official communication:

  Stolpe, 25th July.

  To the Police Commissioner of Altholm, Mayor Gareis.

  Private and confidential.

  As of 9 a.m. tomorrow, two hundred State policemen under the command of Lieutenant Wrede will be placed at your disposal, with the stipulation that . . .

  The secret orders! The lost orders.

  Mayor Gareis reads no further. He crumples the letter on his desk, storms over to the door, roars like a wild man into the dark outer office, into the corridor: ‘Piekbusch! Piekbusch!’

  Then he stops to think.

  He tramps back to his desk, slumps into his chair, shattered.

  The secret orders . . .

  His testimony today, in the soup up to his head and ears, and here it is: the vital document.

  Gareis tries to light a cigar, but his hands are shaking, the matches snap, the thing chars but won’t burn.

  With jaw grinding, he chomps about on it, reaches for the orders again with his shaking hand, reads them.

  Secret orders—it’s a laugh. What a wildly deluded fool he was, not to have guessed that this was nothing but a piece of administrative bumf, an idiotic military bureaucracy as usual giving itself airs.

  ‘. . . and attention is hereby drawn to the circumstance that in the event of firearms being used, approval from high command here must be sought . . .’

  So there you are! In the event of blah, approval from blech . . . And I thought it was something important. Special measures! Why did it never occur to me that they will have their special measures, but not give them to me in writing?

  After a pause, grinding his jaw with rage:

  And I stood in front of them like an idiot, and told them just what an idiot I was! I made a monkey of myself. I was pathetic. I was embarrassed as a thirteen-year-old with a man staring at her breasts—Oh Gareis, Gareis, Gareis, doesn’t it make you sick!

  He gets up again, paces up and down, glowers at the walls in his rage. Then hunger for a human being to tell it all to drives him out into the corridor, he yanks open Political Adviser Stein’s door and yells: ‘Stein! Adviser! God!’

  Silence. No sound.

  He turns back. And, standing in the corridor, sees a light go on in the staircase, and hears voices approaching.

  With one bound, he is back in his office, squinting through a crack in the door.

  Three figures are approaching.

  He carefully shuts the door. Jumps on to his chair in two or three strides. Stuffs the orders, plus envelope, into his pocket. Picks up his outsize pencil, has paper in front of him. Three or four open books grouped around him.

  When they knock, he says, ‘Enter!’ calm as you like.

  Even the cigar lights now.

  IX

  The three visitors are dear old comrades of his: there is Town Councillor Geier, Party Secretary Nothmann and finally the local bigwig from Stettin, Reichstag Member Koffka.

  They walk in very quietly, and the expressions on their faces are less victorious than they might have been expected to be.

  ‘Nice of you to come all this way,’ remarks Gareis appreciatively, ‘just to put an old donkey out to grass. Fine by me. Shall we have a beer at Tucher’s?’

  He sees them shudder at the suggestion of being seen with him in a bar, and grins.

  ‘No, Comrade Gareis,’ says Member Koffka, ‘we don’t feel like beer, and we don’t feel like sitting in a bar with you either. But you can offer us a cigar if you like.’

  The mayor does so, and says casually: ‘You look in the pink, Koffka. All that talking shop in Berlin must agree with you.’

  ‘Oh, Comrade Gareis,’ says the MP dismally, ‘you soon put paid to that occasional bit of health. I sat in your pretty gym hall this morning, and saw you in front of the bench, you cut some figure, I must say, Gareis!’

  ‘Do you think?’ says the mayor, indifferently. ‘Of course you’ve never mislaid a letter in your life, Koffka, and then stood there and pretended you’d answered it long ago?’

  ‘This isn’t about me and what I’ve done and not done,’ says an irked Koffka. ‘This is about what you’ve done. And you’ve made a royal balls-up, Gareis, that would be true to say, and you’ve brought disgrace upon the entire Party.’

  ‘I reckon,’ says the mayor, looking pensively at the tip of his cigar, ‘that this is my office. Which gives me the right to turf anyone out on their ear, and bodily, if they come here and make a nuisance of themselves.’

  ‘That you may, Gareis,’ says the other as calmly. ‘You’re physically and mentally completely up to it. The only question is whether that would help anything along. After all, you came within a hair’s breadth of perjuring yourself today, and it’s up to the three of us whether we want to pursue a charge of perjury against you, when we see the corner of those secret orders peeking out of your pocket.’

  Gareis has himself under control, but not so much that he doesn’t make an angry grab for his jacket pocket. He stuffs the letter back down, thinks again, pulls it out, and lays it on the table. He looks at the three men provocatively.

  ‘Of course,’ says Koffka, ‘you can bang on the table and knock our heads together all you like, but you can’t kill the three of us. I’m not even certain that a charge is forthcoming. But you would have to tell the court a mighty odd and implausible story if they have you back and all of a sudden you know the mystery orders.

  ‘It seems to me that would be trying their patience too far. Public prosecutors don’t like fairy tales, and your story would sound very like one.’

  ‘So what do you want?’ the mayor asks grimly.

  ‘We want you to step down, Comrade Gareis. No noise and no fuss. Right now in our presence you write out your tender of resignation to the Town Council. That’s what we want, Comrade Gareis.’

  ‘I’m not going to resign, you can charge me if you want, but I won’t resign. I’m not leaving Altholm! Not like that.’

  ‘So how do you propose to go? In handcuffs?!’

  The mayor laughs furiously. ‘You think you’re so clever. You think you’ve got me cornered. But I’ve got witnesses for what I said in court. Piekbusch can be summoned, Stein can be summoned. I’m in the clear.’

  ‘It’s not my sense that Piekbusch will be a favourable witness for you.’

  The mayor cuts up nasty. ‘I’ve known Piekbusch for years. Piekbusch is loyal.’

  The three of them laugh, discordantly, each in his own way, it’s not a good sound.

  ‘Let’s not pursue that theme any more,’ says Koffka. ‘In fact, let’s not argue at all. Be sensible, Gareis, think about your situation for five minutes calmly, and then tell us we’re right. Then we’ll listen to you.’

  The mayor looks at the three of them. There is something rather hopeless in his expression. Then he gets up and starts walking to and fro.

  The visitors sit and smoke.

  Suddenly the mayor stops. ‘Koffka,’ he says, ‘old comrade, listen to me. I’ve done something stupid. I always thought it would somehow pan out. It didn’t. But there are thousands of things that don’t work out, and just for that you can’t send someone out into the desert.

  ‘You won’t get someone like me again. Think about everything I’ve done in the past six years for the town and the Party. What was Altholm when I got here? A pigsty. Today, ask
around the province, people come from the length and breadth of the Reich, because Altholm is a social model.

  ‘Think of our old people’s home with the big farm attached, and the school for re-educating unemployed industrial workers for agriculture. Think of our infant nursery. The children’s home. The hostel for unmarried men. The trainee home. Think of the fact that there is no borstal in Altholm, that we keep the children and make human beings of them.

  ‘Think of the swimming baths, the football stadium, the brand-new fire station. Think of the fact that, with all these things, the town’s debts have hardly grown, that I’ve managed to scrape together the money, mark by mark, hundreds of thousands.

  ‘Who else can do that? It’ll all come to an end if you take me down. Suddenly all those institutions will cost money, they’ll be closed, downsized, I know how it goes. Then the children will be farmed out to orphanages across the province, or fostered with drunken fathers and slovenly mothers, where they only care about the extra money they bring in. Can you answer for that, Koffka?’

  ‘To hear you talking, Comrade Gareis, is to remember why we went on supporting you as long as we did, and covered your back. But it’s no good, Gareis. It’s over. We can’t do it any more.

  ‘The local elections are coming up. If you stay in office, the Party will see its share of the vote down by half.’

  ‘More. Two-thirds,’ grunts Geier.

  ‘Quite possibly. You have no idea, Gareis, how unpopular you are among the comrades. You’re big and strong, you talk to people on a one-to-one basis, and you talk their heads off. And because an individual says yes to you, you think he actually means it.

  ‘Then they walk away, and behind your back they scream no no no, and they call you Mussolini.

  ‘Which is fine as long as you’re successful. But it fails the instant they see you weakened. Have you seen the papers today?’

  ‘No. Not yet. I’m not interested really.’

  ‘Well, there was really no need for us to come and take the trouble of seeing you. You’re toast. You’re dead meat. You took yourself off. All we want is for you to go without a fuss and a scandal. So be a sensible fellow, and write a letter of resignation.’

  ‘Let me tell you something, Koffka,’ says the mayor. ‘You’re a bit down just now. You’re not feeling on top of things. I understand, I didn’t feel on top of things this morning either. Then I went for a long walk in the countryside, to clear my head. I got talking to some farmers.

  ‘They’re going to talk to me, Koffka. I am the only man who can get the town out of this wretched boycott. They offered me talks. What’s going to happen to Altholm if the boycott carries on through the winter?

  ‘Give me another six months. Then I’ll show you what I’ve done. Then we can sit down together again, and if you still want me to go, I’ll clear off without a word.’

  ‘You see,’ says the MP, nodding to his cohorts, ‘that’s Gareis for you. One moment the farmers’ lawyer clocks him one in court, gets him in trouble, and here he is now, cheerfully thinking about starting talks with those self-same farmers.

  ‘Spontaneous individualists. Don’t you love them? Probably doesn’t even occur to Gareis to consult the Party.

  ‘But I tell you, we don’t give a shit about the farmers. What do we care about their boycott. No skin off the workers’ noses! Or do workers own the businesses where the farmers have stopped buying?! You’re doing the bidding of the middle class, of the farmers, next thing you know you’ll be organizing night marches for the Stahlhelm and swastika processions for Hitler. And you wonder that the Party is unhappy with you!’

  ‘You’re an arsehole,’ Gareis says crudely, but not unhappily. ‘Even your thick Party skull must have hoisted in that when the bourgeoisie are having a bad time, the workers’ life isn’t a bed of roses either.’

  ‘What do you say we wind this up now, Gareis? There’s no point. You write your resignation letter. I hereby ask to be released from my duties. Right now.’

  ‘No,’ says Gareis firmly.

  Koffka tenses. ‘Then tomorrow morning your exclusion from the Party will be made known in every Party organ.

  ‘We will take steps to see that the business with the secret orders is followed up.

  ‘The SPD caucus in the council will demand your release from the municipal service.

  ‘Then the government will institute disciplinary proceedings against you.

  ‘Then you’re completely washed up.

  ‘Then you’ll never get a decent job again as long as you live.’

  The many percussive ‘then’s sound in Gareis’s ears like hammer blows destroying his life’s work.

  He jumps to his feet and cries out in despair: ‘But there’s nothing else I want to do anyway! I’m completely useless! What else am I supposed to do!’

  ‘I have been asked,’ says the MP Koffka, ‘as soon as you have signed your resignation letter, to present you with your appointment as mayor of Breda.’

  ‘What’s Breda?’ says the mayor suspiciously. ‘Never heard of it.’

  ‘Breda is a town on the Ruhr. Twenty-one thousand inhabitants. All coal-miners. Work. Work. Work. Nothing has ever been done for them.’

  ‘And who is the Oberbürgermeister?’ asks Gareis.

  ‘You fall upstairs. You’re number one and number two and number three. All you. The council is SPD and KPD and a few Centrists who don’t matter. You’ll be able to get to work there.’

  The mayor looks worried. ‘Show me it in writing, will you?’

  ‘After you’ve signed.’

  Gareis paces up and down. Then he sighs deeply, sits down at his desk, and starts writing. He carefully blots the page and passes it to Koffka.

  ‘Address the envelope, Gareis. I’ll take care of it myself tomorrow, so you don’t have to trouble yourself.’

  ‘There you are. And now the appointment.’

  ‘Here. Tomorrow or the day after it will appear in the Party newspapers. Of course we’re all backing you. In the course of the next few days, you’ll be given a torchlight parade by the Party. As a farewell. Everything will be done properly.’

  ‘Fine, great,’ says the mayor. ‘But now I’d be glad if you’d get the fuck out of here. I’ve looked at your mugs for long enough.’

  ‘Evening, Comrade,’ they say.

  ‘Oh, crap,’ he replies.

  X

  When they’re gone, Gareis remains motionless in his chair. He’s thinking, picturing the town where he’s put in six years of work. Buildings he’s put up pass in review. He sees the dormitory in the infant nursery, with the sixty children in their sleepsuits, and their faces that look so human but at the same time so alarmingly alien.

  He remembers how a doctor once told him: ‘You know this is all a waste of time, Mayor. Inferior genetic material. Children of alcoholics, syphilitics, cripples, lunatics. In Sparta they would all have been brained, or put out on a hillside.’

  He remembers being stuck with those words for months: ‘all a waste of time, Mayor’.

  He thinks of the five hundred faces in this town that he drove on to work of one kind or another, chased them up off their sofas, off their dream pillows.

  He knows that if he leaves here, he will never be able to work like this again. Wherever he starts, he’ll have left the work of his youth behind, and his illusions, and his energy. He won’t be a young man any more, he’ll be a man like any other.

  The door creaks, he raises his head, and blinks out in tiredness.

  His disciple is there, Political Adviser Stein. Black, pale, nervous.

  ‘I wanted to say goodnight, Your Worship.’

  Gareis ponders glumly. What does he want? Say goodnight? Why does he want to say goodnight?

  And he remembers that this is Stein, who kept his head down in the courtroom and avoided his eye.

  At the same time, he remembers that Comrade Koffka didn’t mention Stein’s name when he was talking about unreliable witnesses.
r />   He darts a look at the other’s shoes: they’re covered in mud.

  ‘Have you been out walking as well, Adviser?’ he slowly asks.

  ‘Yes. I came after you. But you were already gone.’

  The mayor walks up to his late visitor. With one hand he bends the other’s head back, so that his eyes are full in the light.

  ‘Will you go with me, Stein, when I go?’

  ‘You’re not going to go!’

  ‘Will you go with me?’

  ‘Always.’

  ‘Then goodnight, Stein,’ says the mayor. ‘Goodnight, Adviser.’

  5

  Witnesses and Expert Witnesses

  I

  Next to the sports hall is a small, cramped room: normally a cloakroom, study or marking room for teachers. Now it is the waiting room for witnesses. A dozen chairs have been packed in, and there they sit, townspeople and countryfolk, policemen and peasants, and wait, often for hours.

  Because now, on the eighth day of the trial, the orderly progress of the whole has rather gone to pot. The defence counsel keeps making new applications, the prosecution lawyer has turned waspish and is fighting the feeling in the hall, the farmer-friendly feeling, with irony and sarcasm.

  No session begins punctually, the court often sits for hours before opening, talking about this or that motion. The first day, the gentlemen of the press arrived at nine o’clock, the second day it was nine fifteen, now they go home to Stettin at night and only arrive on the ten o’clock train, and even then they’re often early.

  Stuff doesn’t come from Stettin, he comes in from Stolpe. And now he’s dawdling into court. He knows there’s no rush, on the other side of the road is Chief Adviser Meier, deep in conversation with the chief prosecutor. And a little way ahead of him is Councillor Streiter with his client Henning.

  Sometimes people stop and stare at them. Half the town seems to have visited the trial by now and knows them by sight, which means they have to stop and stare at them now.

  ‘Lookee, there’s Henning.’

  ‘I ken. I ken. I was there the whole of the first day.’

  Outside the school, Stuff runs into Sergeant Hart, and even though he’s no longer interested in local news from Altholm, he still likes to stop and chew the fat with policemen. ‘Well, Hart, my old soul, what are you still doing? Haven’t you hung up your truncheon yet?’