by Hans Fallada
She has written a couple of sentences when the man leans across the table and asks, “Who’s that you’re writing to, Evie?”
In spite of herself, she gives him an answer, even though she’d intended not to speak to him. “It’s to Karlemann…”
“I see,” he says, and puts his sports papers away. “I see. So you write to him, and for all I know you send him food parcels, but for his father you don’t even have a potato and a scrap of meat to spare, hungry as he is!”
His voice has lost a little of its indifference; it sounds as though the man is seriously offended because she has something for the son that she refuses to the father.
“Forget it, Enno,” she says calmly. “It’s my business. Karlemann’s not a bad lad…”
“I see!” he says. “I see! Then you’ve obviously forgotten the way he was to his parents when he became a pack leader. How everything you did was wrong in his eyes, and he laughed at us as a stupid old bourgeois couple—you’ve forgotten all that, have you, Evie? A good lad is he, Karlemann!”
“He never laughed at me!” she feebly protests.
“No, no, of course not!” he jeers. “And you’ve forgotten the time he didn’t recognize his own mother as she was lugging her heavy mailbag down Prenzlauer Allee. Him and his girlfriend just looked the other way, what a charming piece of work!”
“You can’t hold something like that against a boy,” she says. “They all want to look good in front of their girls, that’s the way they are. In time, he’ll change, and he’ll be back for his mother who nursed him from a baby.”
For an instant he looks at her hesitantly, as if he had something he wasn’t sure whether to tell her or not. He’s not a vindictive man usually, but this time she’s offended him too badly, first by not giving him anything to eat, and secondly by carting all the valuables into the other room. Finally he says, “Well, if it was me that was his mother, I wouldn’t ever want to take my son in my arms again, not after he’s turned into such a thoroughgoing bastard!” He sees her eyes grow wide with fear, and he says pitilessly right into her waxen face, “On his last furlough he showed me a photograph that a comrade took of him. He was proud of it. There’s your Karlemann, and he’s holding a little Jewish boy of about three, holding him by the leg, and he’s about to smash his head against the bumper of a car.”
“No!” she screams, “No! You’re lying, you’re making it up! It’s your revenge because you didn’t get anything to eat. Karlemann wouldn’t do anything like that!”
“How could I have made it up?” he asks, calm again after dropping his bombshell. “I don’t have the imagination to make up something like that. And if you don’t believe me, you can go to Senftenberg’s pub, which is where he showed the photo round to anyone who cared to see it. Senftenberg and his old woman, they saw the picture themselves…”
He stops talking. He’s wasting his breath talking to this woman. She sits there with her head slumped on the table, crying. That’s what she gets, and her a postwoman and therefore a member of the Party, who’s taken an oath to support the Führer and his deeds. She can’t be too surprised at the way Karlemann’s turned out.
For a moment, Enno Kluge stands eyeing the sofa doubtfully—no cushions, no blanket. This isn’t going to be a comfortable night! But perhaps it’s the moment to take a chance? He hesitates, looks at the locked bedroom door, and then he acts. He reaches into the woman’s apron pocket as she sits there crying hysterically, and pulls out the key. He unlocks the door and starts rummaging about in the room, not even quietly…
And Eva Kluge, the exhausted, downtrodden postwoman, hears it all too; she knows he’s robbing her, but she doesn’t care. What’s the point of her life, why has she had children, taken pleasure in their smiling and playing, when in the end they just become monsters? Oh, Karlemann, what a sweet blond boy he was! She remembers how she took him to the Busch Circus, and the horses were made to lie down in the sand, and he felt so sorry for the poor hossies—were they ill? She had to comfort him, promise him the hossies were only sleeping.
And now he is going around doing things like that to the children of other mothers! Eva Kluge doesn’t doubt for a second that the story about the photograph is true: Enno really isn’t capable of inventing such things. No, it seems she has now lost her son as well. It’s much worse than if he had merely died, because then at least she could mourn him. Now she can’t take him in her arms again, and she must keep her doors closed against him too.
The man rummaging around in the bedroom has found the thing he has long suspected was in his wife’s possession: a post office savings book. Six hundred and thirty-two marks in it, thrifty woman, but why so thrifty? One day she’ll get her pension, and with her other savings… He’ll start tomorrow by putting twenty on Adebar, and maybe another ten on Hamilcar… He flicks through the book: not just a thrifty woman, an admirably tidy one. Everything in its place—at the back of the book is the card, and there are the credit slips…
He is about to put the savings book in his pocket when the woman shows up. She takes it out of his hand and drops it on the bed. “Out!” she says. “Get out!”
And he, who a moment ago thought he had victory in his sights, now leaves the room under her furious glare. Silently and with hands shaking, he gets his cap and coat out of the wardrobe, and without a word he slips past her into the unlit stairwell. The door is drawn shut, and he switches on the stair lights and climbs down the stairs. Thank God someone has left the street door unlocked. He will go to his local; if push comes to shove, the landlord will let him bed down on the settee. He trudges off, reconciled to his fate, used to receiving blows. Already he’s half forgotten the woman upstairs.
She, meanwhile, is standing by the window staring out into the night. Fine. Awful. Karlemann gone, too. She’ll make one last attempt with her younger son, with Max. Max was always the colorless one, more like his father than his dazzling brother. Perhaps she can win Max over. And if not, then never mind, she’ll live by and for herself. But she will keep her self-respect. Then that will have been her attainment in life, keeping her self-respect. Tomorrow morning she will try to find out how to go about leaving the Party without getting stuck in a concentration camp. It will be difficult, but maybe she’ll manage it. And if there’s no other way of doing it, then she’ll go to the concentration camp. That would be a bit of atonement for what Karlemann has done.
She crumples up the tear-stained beginning of the letter to her older boy. She spreads out a fresh sheet of paper, and writes:
“Max, my dear son, it’s time I wrote you a little letter again. I’m still doing all right, as I hope you are, too. Father was here a moment ago, but I showed him the door—all he wanted was to rob me. I am also breaking off relations with your brother Karl, because of atrocities he has committed. Now you are my only son. I beg you, please keep your self-respect. I will do all I can for you. Please drop me a line or two yourself, if you have a chance. Kisses, from your loving Mother.”
Chapter 6
OTTO QUANGEL GIVES UP HIS OFFICIAL FUNCTION
The part of the furniture factory where Otto Quangel was foreman once employed eighty male and female workers and turned out single pieces to order; all the other sections of the factory made only mass-produced articles. At the beginning of the war, the business was put on a war footing, and Quangel’s workshop was assigned to make large, heavy crates that it was thought were used to transport bombs.
As far as Otto Quangel was concerned, he didn’t have the least interest in the destination and function of the crates; to him, this new, mindless labor was simply ridiculous. He was a craftsman, whom the grain of a piece of wood or the finish on a nicely carved wardrobe could fill with a deep satisfaction. He had found in such work as much happiness as a person of his cool temperament was capable of finding. Now, he had sunk to being an overseer and a taskmaster who only had to make sure that his workshop fulfilled, and if possible overfulfilled, its quota. In accordance with his na
ture, he had never spoken to anyone about such feelings as he might have, and his sharp, birdlike face had never betrayed anything of the contempt he felt for this wretched matchwood carpentry. If someone had observed him, he might have noticed that the laconic Quangel had stopped speaking altogether and that in his role as overseer he tended simply to wave things through.
But then who was there to attend to such a dry and flinty character as Otto Quangel? All his life he had seemed to be no more than a drudge, with no other interest except the work in front of him. He had never had a friend at the plant, never spoken a kindly word to anyone there. Work, nothing but work, never mind if it was men or machines, so long as they worked!
For all that, he wasn’t disliked, even though his job was to supervise the workshop, and to exhort the men to greater effort. He never swore, and he never went running to the management. If production wasn’t proceeding properly somewhere, he would go to the trouble spot and with a few deft movements silently fix the problem. Or he would go and stand beside a couple of chatterboxes and stay there, his dark eyes fixed on the speakers, until they no longer felt like talking. He seemed to spread an aura of chill. During their short breaks, the workers tried to sit as far away from him as they could, and in that way he enjoyed a sort of automatic respect, which another man could not have won for himself with any amount of shouting and ordering about.
The factory management was perfectly well aware of what an asset they had in Otto Quangel. His workshop achieved the best scores, there were never any personnel issues, and Quangel always did whatever he was told. He would have been promoted long since if he had only consented to join the Party. But he never did. “I’ve no money to spare for that,” he said. “I need every single mark. I have my family to feed.”
They might very well smirk at what they termed his money-grubbing attitude. Quangel really seemed to feel every ten pfennigpiece he was forced to contribute at collection time. It cut no ice with him that joining the Party would earn him much more in terms of an increased wage than it would cost in contributions. But this hardworking foreman was politically a hopeless case, and so people didn’t mind leaving him where he was, holding a moderately responsible job, even though he wasn’t in the Party.
In reality, it wasn’t Otto Quangel’s miserliness that kept him out of the Party. It was true, he was dreadfully persnickety about money matters and would be annoyed for weeks by the tiniest needless expense. But just as he kept scrupulous account of his own affairs, so he did also with the affairs of others, too, and this Party seemed to him to be anything but precise in the way it enacted its so-called principles. The things he had learned from his son’s years at school and in the Hitler Youth, the things he heard from Anna and those he directly experienced himself—for instance, that all the best-paid jobs in the factory were held by Party members, who exercise authority over the most able non-Party members—all reinforced in him the conviction that the Party was not scrupulous, was not just, and that therefore he wanted none of it.
That was another reason why he was so hurt by Anna’s accusation this morning, about “You and your Führer.” It was true, thus far he had been a believer in the Führer’s honest intentions. One just had to strip away the corrupt hangers-on and the parasites, who were just out for themselves, and everything would get better. But until such time, he wasn’t taking part in it, not him, and Anna, who was the only person he really talked to, knew that. All right, she had said it in the heat of the moment, he would forget it in time, and he wasn’t the sort to bear grudges.
Now, standing in the din of the workshop, head slightly raised as he scanned the room from the planing machine to the band saw to the nailers, drills, and conveyor belts, he can feel the news of Otto’s death, and in particular Anna’s and Trudel’s reactions to it, continuing to affect him. He doesn’t really think about it, but he knows instinctively that that layabout of a carpenter, Dollfuss, has already been gone from the workshop for seven minutes, and that the work on his part of the line is grinding to a halt, because he’s popped out either for a smoke or a political harangue. Quangel will give him another three minutes, and if he’s not back then, he’ll go looking for him in person!
And as he glances up at the hand on the wall clock and sees that in another three minutes Dollfuss will have skipped all of ten minutes, he thinks of the hateful poster over Trudel’s head, and what treason means, and how he might learn more about it, but he also thinks about the fact that he has in his jacket pocket a curt note given him by the porter, summoning Foreman Quangel to report to the office canteen at five o’clock precisely.
Not that the note unduly bothers him. Earlier, when the factory still made furniture, he was often summoned to the boardroom to discuss the production of some item or other. The office canteen is an unfamiliar venue, but that doesn’t bother him so much as the fact that it’s only six minutes till five and he’d like to have Dollfuss back at his saw before he has to go. So he sets off to find Dollfuss a minute earlier than he’d intended.
But he finds him neither in the toilets nor in the corridor nor in the adjacent workshop, and by the time he’s back in his own work shop, the clock is showing one minute to five and it’s high time to go to the meeting, if he’s not to be late. Quickly, he brushes the worst of the sawdust off his jacket, and then he heads for the administration building, the ground floor of which houses the office canteen.
It’s clearly been made ready for a lecture. A speaking platform has been set up, and a long table for committee members, and the whole room is full of rows of chairs. The layout is familiar to him from the meetings of the Arbeitsfront that he’s had to attend, only these are always held in the works canteen. The only other difference is that they sit on rough wooden benches, not cane chairs, and that most of those present wear workman’s blue, like him, whereas here the majority are in uniforms, brown or gray, with a few people in civilian suits sprinkled among them.
Quangel takes a chair right by the exit, so he can get back to work as soon as possible after the end of the talk. The room is already pretty full, and some of the audience are already sitting down; others are standing in the aisles or along the walls of the hall, talking together in little groups.
But all of those who are gathered here are wearing the swastika. Quangel seems to be the only one present without the Party badge on his lapel, except for the people in Wehrmacht uniforms, and they have army insignia. He’s probably been invited here by mistake. Quangel turns his head alertly from side to side. He knows a few of the faces. The pale fat fellow already sitting at the committee table is Director Schröder, whom he knows by sight. The little one with the pinched nose and the pince nez is the cashier who hands him his paycheck every Saturday evening, and with whom he’s had a couple of arguments about deductions. Funny, thinks Quangel, he never wears his Party badge when he’s standing by the till!
But most of the faces are completely unfamiliar to him. They’re probably all managerial or white-collar. Suddenly, Quangel stares hard: in one group he has spotted the man he was just looking for in the toilets and corridors, the carpenter Dollfuss! But Carpenter Dollfuss is not wearing his work clothes, he’s wearing a dark suit and is talking to a couple of men in Party uniforms as though among equals. And Carpenter Dollfuss, the fellow whose incessant chitchat already has drawn Quangel’s attention in the workshop, is also wearing a swastika. So that’s it! thinks Quangel. The man’s a spy. Perhaps he’s not a carpenter at all and his name isn’t Dollfuss, either. Wasn’t Dollfuss the name of the Austrian chancellor, the man they murdered? It’s all rigged—and I didn’t even notice!
And he starts to wonder whether Dollfuss was already in the workshop at the time that Ladendorff and Tritsch were suspended and there were rumblings about them having been put in a concentration camp.
Quangel tenses. Careful! he feels his instinct warning him. And: I’m sitting among murderers here. Later on, he thinks: I won’t let them get me. I’m just an old foolish foreman, I don’t kno
w anything about anything. But I’m not going to join them, for all that. I saw the dread that came over Anna this morning, and Trudel; I’m not going to participate in something like that. I don’t want a mother or bride to be put to death on my account. I want no part of this business…
So Quangel tells himself. In the meantime, the room has filled to the very last chair. The table is occupied by brown jackets and black uniforms, and on the podium is a major or colonel (Quangel has never learned to distinguish different uniforms and badges of rank), speaking about the state of the war.
Of course it’s going splendidly, victory over France is duly proclaimed, and it can only be a matter of weeks before England is crushed. Then the speaker gradually gets to the point he wants to make: with the front making such great strides, it is all the more urgent that the home front do its duty. What now follows sounds as though the major (or captain or colonel or whatever he is) has come directly from HQ on behalf of the Führer to tell the workforce of Krause & Co. that they will have to up their productivity. The Führer expects them to increase it by 50 percent within three months, and to have doubled it within six. Suggestions from the floor as to how the target could be reached are welcome. Anyone not participating will be viewed as a saboteur and treated accordingly.
While the speaker pronounces one final Sieg Heil to the Führer, Otto Quangel is thinking, So England will be defeated within a few weeks, the war is done and dusted, and we’re going to double our productivity inside six months. Who comes up with this nonsense?
But he sits down again and looks at the next speaker, a man in a brown uniform whose chest is thickly bespattered with medals, orders, and decorations. This Party speaker is a completely different sort from his army predecessor. From the get-go, he speaks in a sharp and aggressive way of the poor attitude that still prevails in some industries, in spite of the tremendous victories won by the Führer and the Wehrmacht. He speaks so sharply and aggressively that he seems to scream, and he doesn’t spare the moaners and the pessimists. The very last of them are to be eradicated. They will be ridden over, they’ll get smacked so hard they’ll be looking for their teeth. Suum cuique, it said on the belt buckles in the First War, and To each his own over the gates of the labor camp. There they’ll be reeducated, and anyone who helps get a defeatist man or woman put away will have done something for the German nation, and will be a man after the Führer’s heart.
