Every Man Dies Alone

by Hans Fallada

  Frau Gesch doesn’t reply, just slams the door back in her face. She hasn’t forgotten how she was treated earlier. She’s not at all sure she would send the man round, in the event that he does show up again. A woman shouldn’t hem and haw, because it can easily become too late.

  Frau Kluge returns to her kitchen. It’s a strange thing: even though the conversation with Frau Gesch didn’t achieve anything, she feels relieved. Things will take their course. She’s done what she could to stay clean. She has cut herself off from husband and son, and now she will cut them out of her heart. She has declared her desire to leave the Party. Now whatever happens will happen. She can’t change it, and even the worst shouldn’t terrify her after what she’s already been through.

  It didn’t terrify her, either, when the two men in suits went from asking her pointless questions to making threats. She did realize, didn’t she, that leaving the Party would cost her her job at the post office? And more: if she now left the Party without declaring the reason, that would make her politically unreliable, and for such people there were concentration camps! She must have heard of them? There, politically unreliable individuals could be made reliable in very quick time, reliable for the rest of their days. She surely understood?

  Frau Kluge hadn’t been afraid. She insisted on her privacy, and refused to discuss private matters. In the end, they let her go. No, her leaving the Party has not yet been accepted; she will hear a decision in due course. But she has been suspended from the postal service. She is required to remain available in her flat should further questioning…

  As Eva Kluge finally remembers to move the forgotten soup pot over the gas, she suddenly decides not to obey in this point either. She’s not going to sit there helplessly in her flat and wait for her tormentors. No, she will take the early morning train to her sister in Ruppin. She can stay there for two or three weeks without registering. They can feed her somehow. They have a cow and pigs and acres of potatoes. She will work with the animals and in the fields. It will do her good, better than delivering letters day in, day out.

  Now that she has decided to go to the country, she finds herself moving around more nimbly. She gets out a small suitcase and begins to pack. For a moment, she wonders whether to tell Frau Gesch that she’s going away—she doesn’t have to say where she’s going. But then she decides it’s best not to say anything. Whatever she does, she will do alone. She doesn’t want to involve any other person in it. She won’t tell her sister and brother-in-law anything either. She will live alone, as never before. So far there has always been someone for her to look after: parents, husband, children. Now she’s alone. At this moment it strikes her as very likely that she will enjoy the condition. Perhaps when she’s all alone she will amount to more: she’ll have some time to herself, and won’t need to put herself last, after all the others.

  The night that Frau Rosenthal is so afraid to be alone, the postie Eva Kluge smiles in her sleep for the first time in a long time. In her dreams she sees herself standing in a vast field of potatoes with a hoe in her hands. As far as she can see, only potatoes and herself, all alone: she needs to hoe the potatoes. She smiles, picks up her hoe, there’s the clink of a pebble, a weed falls, she hoes her own row.

  Chapter 12

  ENNO AND EMIL AFTER THE SHOCK

  Little Enno Kluge had a much worse time of it than his “chum” Emil Borkhausen, whose wife, be she as she might, at least bundled him off to bed following the experiences of that night, even if she did then promptly rob him. The little gambler also got much more knocked about than that long, bony snitch. No, Enno had an especially bad time of it.

  While Enno is trotting around the streets, timidly looking for his Tutti, Borkhausen has got up from his bed, gone to the kitchen, and savagely and broodingly eats his fill. Then Borkhausen finds a pack of cigarettes in the wardrobe, slips it in his pocket, and sits down at the table again, pondering gloomily, head in hand.

  Which is how Otti finds him when she returns from the shops. Of course she sees right away that he’s helped himself to some food, and she knows he didn’t have any smokes on him and traces the theft to her wardrobe. Apprehensive as she is, she starts an argument right away. “Yes, that’s my darling, a man who eats my food and snitches my cigarettes! Give them back, I want them back right now. Or pay me for them. Give me some money, Emil!”

  She waits to hear what he will say, but she’s pretty sure of her ground. The forty-eight marks are almost all spent, and there’s not much he can do about it.

  And she can tell from his answer, nasty though it is, that he really doesn’t know anything about the money. She feels far superior to this man: she’s robbed him and the silly jerk hasn’t even noticed.

  “Shut your face!” grunts Borkhausen, not even lifting his head out of his hands. “And get out of the room while you’re about it, or I’ll break every bone in your body!”

  She calls back from the kitchen doorway, simply because she always has to have the last word, and because she feels so superior to him (although he does frighten her), “You should try to keep the SS from breaking all the bones in yours, jackass!”

  Then she goes into the kitchen and takes her banishment out on the kids.

  The man meanwhile sits in the parlor and thinks. He doesn’t remember much about what happened in the night, but the little he recalls will do for him. And he thinks that up there is the Rosenthal flat, which the Persickes have probably picked clean, and it was all there for him, for nights and nights. And it’s his own stupid fault it was fouled up.

  No, it was Enno’s fault, Enno got started on the drink, Enno was drunk from the get-go. If it hadn’t been for Enno, he would have got a whole heap of stuff, clothes and linen; and dimly he remembers a radio. If he had Enno in front of him now, he would pulverize him, that wretched cowardly twerp who screwed up the whole thing!

  A moment later, Borkhausen shrugs his shoulders again. Who is Enno, anyhow? A cowardly parasite who scrounges off women! No, the real one to blame is Baldur Persicke! That rat, that schoolkid of a Hitler Youth leader always intended to betray him. The job was rigged to produce a guilty party, so that they could help themselves to the booty at their leisure. That was a fine scheme on the part of that bespectacled cobra! How could he let himself be beaten by a snotnosed kid like that!

  Borkhausen isn’t quite sure why he’s sitting in his room at home rather than in a detention cell in the Alex.* Something must have interfered with their plan. Dimly he remembers a couple of mysterious figures, but he was too stupefied then to register who they were and what their role was, and he has even less idea now.

  But one thing he does know: he’s never going to pardon Baldur Persicke for this. He can creep as high as he likes up the ladder of Party favor, but Borkhausen is going to stay alert. Borkhausen has time. Borkhausen won’t forget. The louse—one day he’ll catch up with him, and then it’ll be his turn to grovel! And he’ll be groveling more abjectly than Borkhausen, and he’ll never get up out of it either. Betray a partner? No, that will never be forgiven or forgotten! All those fine items in the Rosenthal place, the suitcases and boxes and radio, they could all have been his!

  Borkhausen goes on bitterly ruminating, always along the same lines, and in between times he sneaks out Otti’s silver hand mirror, a keepsake from a generous john, and examines and gingerly touches his face.

  By this time little Enno Kluge, too, has discovered what his face looks like, in a mirror in the window of a dress shop. That has only served to frighten him even more, in fact it throws him into a blind panic. He doesn’t dare look anyone in the face, but he has the feeling everyone is staring at him. He pounds the back streets, his search for Tutti is getting more and more hopeless—it’s not just that he can’t remember where she lives, he has lost his own bearings. Still, he turns in at every entryway and looks up at the windows in the back buildings. Tutti… Tutti…

  Darkness is falling fast, and he has to have found somewhere by nightfall, otherwise th
e police will take him in, and when they see the state of him, they’ll make mincemeat of him till he’s confessed everything. And if he confesses the bit about the Persickes (and in his fear he’s bound to), then the Persickes will simply beat him to death.

  He runs around aimlessly, on and on…

  Finally, he can’t go any farther. He comes to a bench and hunkers down there, unable to walk on. He goes through his pockets looking for something to smoke—a cigarette would settle him.

  He doesn’t find any cigarettes, but he does find something he certainly wasn’t expecting, namely, money. Forty-six marks. Frau Gesch could have told him hours ago that he had money in his pockets, to make the timid little man a bit more confident of finding somewhere for the night. But of course Frau Gesch didn’t want to admit to having gone through his pockets while he was asleep. She is a respectable woman, and as such—after a little inner struggle—she put the money back in his pocket. If it had been her Gustav, well, she would have confiscated it right away, but she draws the line at robbing a man off the street! Of course, she did take three out of the forty-nine marks she found, but that wasn’t theft, that was just payment for the food she gave Kluge. She would have given him the food without the money, but feeding a man for free when he’s got money in his pockets? She’s not so prodigal as that either.

  At any rate, the possession of forty-six marks cheers up the fearful Enno Kluge to no end, now he knows he can always rent a room for the night. His memory starts to function better, too. He still can’t remember where Tutti used to live, but he suddenly recalls the small cafe where they met and where she was often to be found. Perhaps they will have an address for her there.

  He gets up and trots off again. He sees where he actually is, and when a tram goes by, heading his way, he actually dares get up on the back platform of the first car. It’s so dark and crowded there that no one will pay much attention to his battered face. Then he walks into the café. He’s not there to eat or drink. He walks right up to the bar and asks the girl there if she knows Tutti, and if Tutti still comes here.

  In a shrill loud voice that can be heard all over the bar, the girl asks him what Tutti he means. There was a fair few Tuttis in Berlin!

  The shy little man answers awkwardly, “Oh, the Tutti that always used to come here. A dark-haired lady, a bit on the heavy side…”

  Oh, that Tutti! No, and they didn’t want to see any more of that Tutti, thank you very much. If she dared to show her face here again! In fact, they didn’t care if they never heard from her again!

  And with that the indignant girl turns away from Enno, who mumbles a few words of apology and scurries out of the cafe. He is still standing on the pavement outside, not knowing what to do, when another man comes out of the café, an older man, down and out, as it seems to Enno. He goes up to Enno, pulls himself together, tips his hat to him and asks if he wasn’t the gentleman who asked a moment ago after a certain Tutti.

  “I might be,” replies Enno Kluge cautiously. “What’s it to you?”

  “Oh, just this. I might be able to tell you where she lives. I could even walk you to her flat, but you’d have to do me a little favor!”

  “What favor?” asks Enno, even more cautiously. “I don’t know of any favors I could do for you. I don’t even know you.”

  “Oh, let’s just walk a bit!” exclaims the old gentleman. “No, it’s not out of your way if we walk down here. The thing is that Tutti still has in her possession a suitcase full of my belongings. Perhaps you could get the suitcase out to me tomorrow morning, while Tutti’s asleep or gone out?”

  The elderly gent seems to take it for granted that Enno will be spending the night with Tutti.

  “No,” says Enno. “I won’t do that. I don’t get involved in business like that. I’m sorry.”

  “But I can tell you exactly what’s in the suitcase. It really is my suitcase, you know!”

  “Why don’t you ask Tutti yourself, then?”

  “Hah! To hear you talk,” says the man, a little offended, “it seems you can’t know her very well. She’s some woman, I thought you knew. Not just hair on her chest, but, my God, hedgehog bristles! She bites and spits like a gorilla—that’s why they call her the Gorilla!”

  And while the elderly man is painting this glowing portrait of her, Enno Kluge remembers with a start that Tutti really is like that, and that the last time he left her, he left with her purse and her ration cards. She really does bite and spit like a gorilla when she’s in a temper, and presumably she will vent her temper on Enno the moment she sees him. His whole idea of being able to spend the night with her was a fantasy, a mirage…

  And suddenly, from one moment to the next, Enno Kluge decides that from now on his life is going to be different: no more women, no more petty thieving, no more betting. He has forty-six marks in his pocket, enough to tide him over till next payday. Battered as he is, he’s going to give himself tomorrow off, but the day after he’ll start working again properly. They’ll soon see his worth, and not send him away to the Front again. After all he’s been through in the past twenty-four hours, a gorilla tantrum of Tutti’s is the last thing he can risk.

  “Yes,” says Enno Kluge pensively to the man. “You’re right: that’s Tutti, all right. And because that’s the way she is, I’ve decided not to go and see her after all. I’m going to spend the night in the little hotel over the way. Good night, sir… I’m sorry, but it can’t be helped…”

  And with that he hobbles across the road, and in spite of his battered appearance and lack of luggage, he manages to wheedle a bed out of the impoverished-looking clerk for three marks. In the tiny, stinking hole of a room he crawls into bed, whose sheets have already served many before him. He stretches out and says to himself, I’m going to turn over a new leaf. I’ve been a mean sonofabitch, especially to Eva, but from this minute I’m going to be a changed man. I deserved the beating I got, and now I’m going to be different…

  He lies perfectly still in the narrow bed, his hands pressed against his trouser seams, at attention, as it were, staring at the ceiling. He is trembling with cold, with exhaustion, with pain. But he doesn’t feel any of it. He thinks about what a respected and well-liked worker he used to be, and now he’s just a nasty little creep, the sort that people spit in front of in the street. No, his beating has straightened him out: from now on, everything’s going to be different. And as he pictures the difference to himself, he falls asleep.

  At this time, all the Persickes are also asleep, Frau Gesch and Frau Kluge are asleep, the Borkhausens are asleep—Emil silently allowed Otti to slip in beside him.

  Frau Rosenthal is asleep, frightened and breathing hard. Little Trudel Baumann is asleep. This afternoon, she was able to whisper to one of her coconspirators that she had an urgent message for them, and they’ve all arranged to meet discreetly tomorrow at the Elysium. She is a little worried, because she will have to admit to her gabbiness, but for the moment she is asleep.

  Frau Anna Quangel is lying in bed in the dark, and her husband, as always at this time of night, is standing in his workshop directing everyone’s tasks. They hadn’t called him up to the boardroom after all, to hear his suggestions for technical improvements. So much the better!

  Anna Quangel, in bed but not yet asleep, still thinks of her husband as cold and heartless. The way he reacted to the news of Ottochen’s death, the way he threw poor Trudel and Frau Rosenthal out: cold, heartless, only concerned for himself. She will never be able to love him as before, when she thought he at least had something to spare for her. Clearly, he hasn’t. Only offended by her blurted “You and your Führer,” only offended. Well, she won’t hurt his feelings again for a while, if only because she won’t be speaking to him. Today they didn’t exchange a single word, not even hello.

  The retired Judge Fromm is still up, because he’s always up at night. In his neat hand, he is writing a letter that begins, “Dear Attorney…”

  Open under the reading lamp, his Plutar
ch lies waiting for him.

  *Commonly used abbreviation for the Alexanderplatz, a square in central Berlin that was the site of one of the city’s major train stations, as well as Berlin’s imposing, seven-story police headquarters.

  Chapter 13

  VICTORY DANCE AT THE ELYSIUM

  The floor of the Elysium, the great dance hall in the north of Berlin, that Friday night presented the kind of spectacle that must gladden the heart of any true German: it was jam-packed with uniforms.

  While the Wehrmacht with its grays and greens supplied the background to this colorful composition, what made the scene so vibrant were the uniforms of the Party and its various bodies, going from tan, golden brown, brown, and dark brown to black. There, next to the brown shirts of the SA* you saw the much lighter brown of the Hitler Youth; the Organization Todt was as well represented as the Reichsarbeitsdienst; you saw the yellow uniforms of Sonderführer, dubbed golden pheasants; political leaders stood next to air raid wardens. And it wasn’t just the men who were so delightfully accoutred; there were also many girls in uniform; the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the Arbeitsdienst, the Organization Todt—all seemed to have sent their leaders and deputies and rank and file to this placed.†

  The few civilians present were lost in this swarm. They were insignificant and boring among so many uniforms, just as the civilian population out in the streets and factories never amounted to anything compared to the Party. The Party was everything, and the people nothing.

  Thus, the table at the edge of the dance floor occupied by a girl and three young men received very little attention. None of the four wore a uniform; there wasn’t so much as a party badge on display.

  A couple, the girl and a young man, had been the first to arrive. Then another young man had asked for permission to join them, and later on a fourth civilian had come forward with a similar request. The couple had made one attempt to dance in the seething mass. While they were away, the other two men had started a conversation in which the returning couple, looking hot and crushed, participated from time to time.