by Hans Fallada
“But people are different nowadays,” Frau Rosenthal objected.
“And if I tell you that those earlier threats were issued by criminals and their accomplices? Where’s the difference!” He smiled. “They are not different people. There are a few more of them, and the others are a little more circumspect, a little cowardly even, but Justice has remained the same, and I hope that we both live to witness her victory.” For an instant he stood there, rather erect. Then he began his pacing again. Quietly he said, “The triumph of Justice will not be the same thing as the triumph of the German nation!”
He stopped for a moment, then went on in a lighter tone of voice: “No, you can’t go back to your flat. The Persickes were there last night, you know, that Nazi family that lives over me. They have your keys in their possession, and they will keep your flat under constant observation. You really would be putting yourself in unnecessary danger.”
“But I must be there when my husband comes back!” begged Frau Rosenthal.
“Your husband,” Judge Fromm said in a kindly tone, “your husband will not be able to visit you anytime soon. He is currently in Moabit Prison, accused of having secretly passed property abroad. He is safe, therefore, at least as long as he is able to keep the state prosecutors and the tax authorities interested in his case.”
The old judge smiled subtly, looked encouragingly at Frau Rosenthal, and then went back to his pacing.
“But how can you know that?” exclaimed Frau Rosenthal.
He made a dismissive gesture, and said, “Oh, even if he’s retired, an old judge gets to hear this and that. You will be interested to learn that your husband has a capable lawyer and is being reasonably well fed. Of course I can’t tell you the name of the lawyer, he wouldn’t welcome visits from you…”
“But perhaps I can visit my husband in Moabit!” Frau Rosenthal cried. “I could bring him clean clothes—who’s looking after his laundry? And some toiletries, and perhaps something to eat…”
“My dear Frau Rosenthal,” said the retired judge, laying his veined, liver-spotted hand firmly on her shoulder, “you can as little visit your husband as he can you. Such a visit would not be useful to him, you would never get in far enough to see him, and it would only harm you.”
He looked at her.
Suddenly his eyes were no longer smiling, and his voice sounded strict. She saw that this small, gentle, kindly man was following some implacable law, probably the law of that Justice he had referred to earlier.
“Frau Rosenthal,” he said quietly, “you are my guest—as long as you obey the conditions of my hospitality, which I will go on to explain to you. The first law of my hospitality: as soon as you do anything without consulting me, as soon as the door of this apartment has closed behind you a single time, one single time, you will never be readmitted here, and the names of you and your husband will be wiped from my mind. Do you understand?”
He touched his brow with his fingertips, and looked at her piercingly.
“Yes,” she breathed.
Only then did he take his hand off her shoulder. His expression lightened again, and he slowly resumed his pacing. “I would ask you,” he continued, a little more easily, “during the daylight hours not to leave the room I am about to show you, and not to stand by the window. My cleaning woman is reliable, but…” He broke off a little irritably, and looked across at his book under the reading light. He continued, “Try to do as I do, and make your nights into days. I will give you a sleeping pill every day. I will supply you with food at night. Now would you kindly follow me?”
She followed him into the corridor. She was feeling a little bewildered and frightened, her host seemed so changed toward her. But she told herself perfectly correctly that the old gentleman loved his quiet life and was no longer accustomed to the presence of strangers. He was tired of them, and longed to be back with his Plutarch, whoever or whatever that was.
The judge opened a door for her and switched on the light. “The blinds are down,” he said, “and I keep it dark. Please leave it that way, otherwise someone from the back building might be able to see you. I hope you will find everything you need.”
He allowed her to take in the bright, cheerful room with its birch-wood furniture, a side table well stocked with toiletries, and a four poster bed upholstered in flowered chintz. He looked at the room as at something he hadn’t seen for a long time and was now revisiting. Then he said, with deep seriousness, “This was my daughter’s room. She died in 1933—no, not here, not in this room. Don’t be alarmed!”
Quickly he took her hand. “I’m not going to lock the door, Frau Rosenthal,” he said, “but I would ask that you bolt it immediately from the inside. Do you have a watch? Good. I will knock on your door at ten o’clock this evening. Good night!”
He left. In the doorway he stopped and turned to her once more. “Over the next few days, you will be very much alone with yourself and your thoughts, Frau Rosenthal. Try to accustom yourself to it. Solitude can be a very good thing. And don’t forget: every single survivor is important, including you, you most of all! Now—bolt the door!”
He went out so softly, shutting the door so gently, that she only realized later that she had neither thanked him nor said good night. She walked quickly to the door, but stopped and reconsidered. Then she turned the bolt and dropped onto the nearest chair. Her legs were trembling. In the mirror of the dressing table, she saw a pallid face, swollen with crying and sleepless nights. Slowly, sadly, she nodded at her face in the mirror.
That’s you, Sara, she said to herself. Lore, now called Sara.* You were a good businesswoman, always working hard. You brought five children into the world, and one of them is in Denmark, one in England, two in the U.S.A., and one is lying in the Jewish cemetery on Schönhauser Allee. It doesn’t make me angry when they call you Sara; it’s not what they meant to do, but they made me a daughter of my nation. He is a good and kind old gentleman, but so distant… I could never talk to him properly, the way I talked to Siegfried. I think he is cold. For all his goodness, he is cold. His goodness itself is cold. That’s on account of the law he serves, the law of justice. I have followed only one law, which is to love my husband and children and help them in their lives. And now I’m sitting here with this old man, and everything I am has fallen from me. That’s the solitude he mentioned. It’s not quite half past six in the morning, and I won’t see him again until ten at night. Fifteen and a half hours by myself—what will I discover about myself that I never knew? I’m afraid, I’m so afraid! I think I’m going to scream, I’m going to scream in my sleep! Fifteen and a half hours. He could have spent at least the half hour sitting with me. But he wanted to get on with his old book. For all his goodness, human beings don’t mean anything to him, the only thing that has meaning for him is his justice. He does it for that, not for me. It would only matter to me if he did it for my sake!
Slowly she nods at the suffering face of Sara in the mirror. She looks round at the bed. My daughter’s room. She died in 1933. Not here! Not here, she thinks. She shudders. The way he said it. Surely the daughter also died because of—them, but he’ll never talk to me about it, and I’ll never dare to ask him, either. No, I can’t sleep in this room, it’s awful, inhuman. Why doesn’t he leave me his servant’s room, a bed still warm from the body of a real person sleeping in it? I can’t sleep here, I can only scream…
She picks up the tubes and boxes on the dressing-table. Dried-out creams, lumpy powder, verdigrised lipsticks—dead since 1933. Seven years. I have to do something. The way it runs through me—the fear. Now that I’ve landed on this island of peace, my fear comes out. I have to do something. I can’t remain so alone in my thoughts.
She looked through her handbag, found paper and pencil. I will write to the children, Gerda in Copenhagen, Eva in Ilford, Bernhard and Stefan in Brooklyn. But there’s no point, the foreign post no longer goes, it’s wartime. I will write to Siegfried; somehow I can smuggle the letter to him in Moabit. So l
ong as the servant is indeed reliable. The judge doesn’t need to know, I can bribe her with money or jewels. I still have enough left…
She took these out of her handbag as well, and spread them out in front of her, the money in little bundles, the jewels. She picked up a bracelet. Siegfried gave that to me, when I had Eva. It was my first birth, it was hard. How he laughed when he saw the baby! His belly shook he was laughing so hard. Everyone had to laugh when they saw her with her tight black curls and her thick lips. A white Negro baby, they said. In my eyes Eva was beautiful. That’s when he gave me the bracelet. It was very expensive; he spent a whole week’s earnings on it. I was so proud to be a mother. The bracelet didn’t mean anything to me. Now Eva has three girls herself; Harriet is nine already. I wonder how often she thinks of me, over in Ilford. But whatever she does think, she won’t imagine her mother sitting here, in some dead girl’s room at Judge Fromm’s, who only obeys Justice. And all alone…
She laid down the bracelet and picked up a ring. She sat the whole day over her things, muttering to herself, clinging to her past. She didn’t want to think of herself as she was today.
In between came outbursts of wild panic. Once, she got as far as the door, and said to herself, If I could only be sure they wouldn’t torture me, that it would be swift and painless, then I would give myself up to them. I can’t stand this waiting any more, and in all probability it is futile. Sooner or later, they’ll catch me. Why does each individual survivor matter so much, myself most of all? The children will think about me less and less, the grandchildren not at all, Siegfried will die soon in Moabit. I don’t understand what the judge meant, so I had better ask him about it tonight. Probably he will just smile and say something I won’t understand, because I am just a woman of flesh and blood, a Sara grown old.
She propped herself on her elbow on the dressing table, and gloomily studied her face with its network of creases. Creases drawn by anxiety, fear, hatred, love. Then she went back to the table, to her jewels. Just to pass the time, she counted through her money again and again. Later on, she tried ordering the notes by serial numbers. From time to time she wrote down a sentence in the letter to her husband. But it wasn’t really a letter, just a series of questions. What was the accommodation like, what did they give him to eat, couldn’t she help with the laundry? Small, banal questions. And: She was fine. She was safe.
No, it wasn’t a letter, it was silly, useless chatter, and not even true at that. She wasn’t safe at all. Never in the last ghastly months had she felt herself in such danger as in this quiet room. She knew she would have to change here, she wouldn’t be able to escape herself. And she was afraid of who she might turn into. Perhaps she would have to endure even more terrible things to come, she, who had already changed from a Lore to a Sara.
Later on, she did lie down on the bed after all, and when her host knocked on the door at ten, she was so fast asleep that she didn’t hear him. He opened the door quietly with a key that turned back the bolt, and when he saw her asleep, he nodded and smiled. He brought in a tray with food and set it down on the table, and when he moved aside her jewelry and money, he nodded and smiled again. He tiptoed out of the room, turned the bolt once more, and let her sleep…
So it came about that Frau Rosenthal saw no human being during the first three days of her protective custody. She slept through the nights, and woke to anguished, fear-tormented days. On the fourth day, half-crazed, she did try something…
*Jewish women were forced to change their names to Sara by the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 (also known as the Nuremberg Racial Purity Laws); Jewish men were forced to call themselves Israel.
Chapter 11
IT IS STILL WEDNESDAY
In the end Frau Gesch wasn’t so hard-hearted as to wake the little man after an hour on the sofa. He looked so pitiable lying there in his exhausted sleep, the purple bruises slowly coming up on his face.
He had his lower lip pushed out like a sad child, and sometimes his eyelids trembled, and a deep sigh shook his chest, as though he were about to begin crying in his sleep.
When she had got her dinner ready, she woke him and gave him some food. He muttered his thanks to her. He ate like a wolf, looking at her from time to time, but not saying a word about what had happened to him.
In the end she said: “All right, that’s all I can give you, otherwise I won’t have enough left for my Gustav. Why don’t you lie back down on the sofa, and have some more sleep. I’ll talk to your wife…”
He muttered inaudibly; whether in agreement or disagreement was unclear. But he went back to the sofa willingly enough, and a minute later he was asleep again.
When Frau Gesch heard her neighbor’s door open in the late afternoon, she crept over quietly and knocked. Eva Kluge opened right away, but stood squarely in the doorway. “Well?” she asked defensively.
“Excuse me for bothering you again, Frau Kluge,” began Frau Gesch, “but I’ve got your husband lying next door. An SS man brought him in early this morning. You must have just left.”
Eva Kluge persisted in her defensive silence, and Frau Gesch continued, “He’s in quite a state, I think there’s no part of him that’s not bruised. I don’t know the ins and outs between you and your husband, but you can’t put him on the street as he is. Why don’t you have a look at him, Frau Kluge!”
Frau Kluge was unyielding: “I don’t have a husband anymore, Frau Gesch. I told you, I don’t want to hear any more.”
And she started to go back inside her flat. Frau Gesch said quickly, “Now don’t you be in so much of a hurry, Frau Kluge. After all, he’s your husband. You had children together…”
“Now that’s something I’m especially proud of, Frau Gesch!”
“There is such a thing as inhumanity, Frau Kluge, and what you’re proposing to do is inhuman. You can’t put him out in his condition.”
“And what about the way he treated me over all those years, was that human? He tormented me, he ruined my entire life, and in the end he took away my beloved son from me—and I’m supposed to be human to someone like that, just because the SS has given him a beating? I wouldn’t dream of it! All the beatings in the world won’t change that man!”
After these angry and vehement words, Frau Kluge slammed the door shut in Frau Gesch’s face. She couldn’t stand to hear any more. Perhaps to avoid more talk, she might have taken the man into her flat, and then have regretted it ever after!
She sat down in her kitchen chair, stared at the blue gas flame, and thought back over her day. Once she’d told the official that she wanted to leave the Party, effective immediately, there had been no end of talk. He’d begun by taking her off mail delivery duties. And then she had been questioned. At midday, a couple of civilians with briefcases had arrived and interrogated her. She was to tell them her whole life story, her parents, her siblings, her marriage…
At first she had been compliant, glad to change the subject after the endless questions about why she wanted to leave the Party. But then, when she was supposed to tell them about her marriage, she had gotten mulish. After the husband, it would be the turn of her children, and she wouldn’t be able to talk about Karlemann without those wily foxes noticing there was something the matter.
No, she’d refused to discuss it. Her marriage and her children were no one’s business.
But these men were tough. They had lots of methods. One of them had reached into his briefcase and started reading a file. She would have loved to know what file it was: surely the police wouldn’t keep a file like that on her, because she had by now noticed that these civilians had the air of policemen about them.
Then they went back to asking questions. The files must have contained something about Enno, because now she was asked about his illnesses, his shirking, his passion for horses, and his women. It all began harmlessly enough, as before, and then suddenly she saw the danger, and shut her mouth and refused to answer. No, that, too, was something private. That didn’t concern anyone. Her
dealings with her husband were her affair. Incidentally, she lived alone.
And with that she was trapped again. How long had she been living alone? When was the last time she had seen him? Did her desire to leave the Party have anything to do with him?
She had merely shaken her head. But she shuddered to think that they would probably now question Enno and they would squeeze everything out of that weakling within half an hour. Then she, who had previously kept her shame to herself, would stand exposed for all to see.
“Private! All private!”
Lost in thought, staring at the flickering gas flame, she suddenly jumped. She had made a serious mistake. She should have given Enno money to tide him over for a couple of weeks and told him to go and hide at one of his girlfriends’ places.
She rings Frau Gesch’s bell. “Listen, Frau Gesch, I’ve had another think, I’d like at least to talk to my husband briefly.”
Now that the other woman is doing what she asked of her, Frau Gesch gets upset. “You should have thought about that earlier. Your husband’s been gone for twenty minutes at least. You’re too late!”
“Where has he gone, Frau Gesch?”
“How should I know? You’re the one who threw him out. I expect to one of his women!”
“And you don’t know which one? Please, if you know, Frau Gesch, tell me! It could be very important…”
“You have changed your tune!” Reluctantly, Frau Gesch adds, “He said something about some woman called Tutti…”
“Tutti?” she says. “That must be short for Trudel or Gertrude…
You wouldn’t know her surname, would you, Frau Gesch?”
“He didn’t know it himself! He didn’t even know where she lived, he just thought he could manage to find her. But in the state the man’s in…”
“Maybe he will come back,” says Frau Kluge reflectively. “If he does, send him to me. Anyway, thank you for your help, Frau Gesch, and good evening!”
