by Hans Fallada
But before she had made up her mind, he had walked past her and out of the flat. Once more no coffee, once again she had to take it back to the kitchen to warm it up. She sobbed gently. Oh, that man! Was she going to be left with no one? After the son, was she going to lose the father?
In the meantime, Quangel was walking briskly in the direction of Prenzlauer Allee. It had occurred to him that it was a good idea to look at a building like that properly, to see if his impression of it was at all accurate. Otherwise, he would have to think of something else entirely.
On Prenzlauer Allee, he slowed down; his eye scanned the nameplates on the housefronts as though looking for something specific. On a corner house he saw signs for two lawyers and a doctor, in addition to many other business plates.
He pushed against the door. It was open. Right: no porters in houses with so many visitors. Slowly, his hand on the banister, he climbed the steps, once a grand staircase with oak flooring, which through heavy use and years of war had lost all trace of grandeur. Now it looked merely dingy and worn, and the carpets were long since gone, probably taken in at the beginning of the war.
Otto Quangel passed a lawyer’s sign on the first floor, nodded, and slowly walked on up. It wasn’t as though he was all alone on the stairway, not at all. People kept passing him—either from behind, or coming down the other way. He kept hearing bells going off, doors slamming, phones ringing, typewriters clattering, people talking.
But in between there was a moment when Otto Quangel was all alone on the stairs, or at least had his part of the stairs all to himself, when all of life seemed to have withdrawn into the offices. That was the moment to do it. In fact, everything was exactly the way he had imagined it. People in a hurry, not looking each other in the face, dirty windowpanes letting in only a murky gray light, no porter, no one anywhere to take an interest in anyone.
When Otto Quangel had seen the plate of the second lawyer on the first floor, and an arrow pointing visitors up another flight of steps to the doctor’s office, he nodded in agreement. He turned around: he had just been to see a lawyer, and now he was leaving the building. No point in looking further: it was exactly the sort of building he needed, and there were thousands upon thousands of them in Berlin.
Foreman Otto Quangel is standing in the street again. A dark-haired young man with a very pale face walks up to him.
“You’re Herr Quangel, aren’t you?” he asks. “Herr Otto Quangel, from Jablonski Strasse?”
Quangel utters a stalling “Mhm?”—a sound that can indicate agreement as much as dissent.
The young man takes it for agreement. “I am to ask you on behalf of Trudel Baumann,” he says, “to forget her completely. Also tell your wife not to visit Trudel anymore. Herr Quangel, there’s no need for you to…”
“You tell her,” says Otto Quangel, “that I don’t know any Trudel Baumann and I don’t like to be approached by strangers on the street…”
His fist catches the young man on the point of the chin, and he crumples like a wet rag. Quangel strides casually through the crowd of people gathering, straight past a policeman, toward a tram stop. The tram comes, he climbs in, and rides two stops. Then he rides back the other way, this time on the front platform of the second car. As he thought: most of the people have gone their way; ten or a dozen onlookers are still standing in front of a café where the man was probably carried.
He is already conscious again. For the second time in the space of two hours, Karl Hergesell is called upon to identify himself to an official.
“It’s really nothing, officer,” he assures him. “I must have trodden on his toe, and he bopped me one. I’ve no idea who he was, I’d hardly started apologizing when he caught me.”
Once again, Karl Hergesell is allowed to leave unchallenged, with no suspicion against him. But he realizes that he shouldn’t go on trying his luck. The only reason he went to see Trudel’s ex-father-in-law was to gauge her safety. Well, where Otto Quangel is concerned, he can set his mind at ease. A tough bird, and a wicked right. And certainly not a chatterbox, in spite of the big beak on him. The way he lit into him!
And for fear that such a man might blab, Trudel had almost been sent to her death. He would never blab—not even to them! And he wouldn’t mind about Trudel either, he seemed not to want to know her any more. All the things a sock on the jaw can teach you!
Karl Hergesell now goes to work completely at ease, and when he learns there, by asking discreetly around, that Grigoleit and the Babyface have quit, he draws a deep breath. They’re safe now. There is no more cell, but he’s not even all that sorry. At least it means that Trudel can live!
In truth, he was never that interested in this political work, but all the more in Trudel!
Quangel takes the tram back in the direction of his home, but he goes past his own stop. Better safe than sorry, and if he still has someone tailing him, he wants to confront him alone and not drag him back home. Anna is in no condition to cope with a disagreeable surprise. He needs to talk to her first. Of course he will do that: Anna has a big part to play in the thing that he is planning. But he has other business to take care of first. Tomorrow is Sunday, and everything has to be ready.
He changes trams again and heads off into the city. No, the young man he silenced with a punch just now doesn’t strike Quangel as a great threat. He’s not convinced he has any further pursuers, and he’s pretty sure the boy was sent by Trudel. She did suggest, after all, that she would have to confess to breaking a sort of vow. Thereupon they will have banned her from seeing him at all, and she sent the young fellow to him as a sort of envoy. All pretty harmless. Childish games for people who have let themselves in for something they don’t understand. He, Otto Quangel, understands a little more. He at least knows what he’s letting himself in for. And he won’t approach this game like a child. He will think about each card before he plays it.
He sees Trudel in front of him again, pressed against the poster of the People’s Court in that corridor—clueless. Once again, he has the disturbing feeling he had when the girl’s head was crowned by the line, “in the name of the German people:” he can see their names up there instead of those of the strangers—no, no, this is a task for him alone. And for Anna, of course for Anna too. He’ll show her who his “Führer” is!
When he gets to the city center, Quangel makes a few purchases. He spends only pennies at a time, a couple of postcards, a pen, a couple of engraving nibs, a small bottle of ink. And he distributes his custom among a department store, a Woolworths, and a stationery shop. Finally, after long thought, he buys a pair of thin, worsted gloves, which he gets without a receipt.
Then he sits in one of those big beer halls on the Alexanderplatz, drinks a glass of beer, and has a bite to eat, without using his ration cards. It’s 1940, the looting of the invaded nations has begun, the German people are suffering no very great hardship. You can still find most things in the shops, and they’re not even all that expensive.
As far as the war itself is concerned, it’s being fought in foreign countries a long way from Berlin. Yes, from time to time English planes appear over the city. They drop a few bombs, and the next day the populace treks out to view the damage. Most of them laugh at what they see, and say, “Well, if that’s the best they can do, they’ll be busy for another hundred years, and meanwhile we’ll have removed their cities from the face of the earth!”
That’s the way people have been talking, and since France sued for peace, the number of people talking like that has grown considerably. Most people are impressed by success. A man like Otto Quangel, who during a prosperous period quits the ranks, is a rarity.
He sits there. He still has time, he doesn’t have to go to the factory yet. But now the stress of the last few days falls away. Now that he’s visited that corner building, now that he’s made those few small purchases, everything is decided in his mind. He doesn’t even need to think about what he still has to do. It’ll do itself, the way is open bef
ore him. He only needs to follow it. The decisive first few steps have already been taken.
When it’s time, he pays and heads out to the factory. Although it’s a long way from the Alexanderplatz, he walks. He’s spent enough money today, on transport, on little purchases, on food. Enough? Too much! Even though Quangel has decided on a whole new life, he won’t change his old habits. He will remain frugal, and will keep people away from him.
And then he’s back at work, alert and awake, laconic and unapproachable as ever. There’s no visible sign of the change in him.
Chapter 15
ENNO KLUGE GOES BACK TO WORK
When Otto Quangel turned up for work in the carpentry factory, Enno Kluge had already been standing at his lathe for six hours. Yes, the little man couldn’t stay in bed any longer, and in spite of his pain and his weakness he traveled to work. His welcome there was admittedly not that friendly, but what else could he expect?
“Ah, this is a rare pleasure, Enno!” his supervisor exclaimed. “How long are you planning on staying this time, one week or two?”
“I’m completely fit and healthy again, boss,” Enno Kluge eagerly assured him. “I’m able to work, and I will work, as you’ll see!”
“Well,” said his boss, unconvinced, and made as if to go. But he stopped a moment longer, looked Enno in the face appraisingly, and asked, “What’ve you done to your face? You look like you’ve been put through a mangle…”
Enno keeps his face down over the piece he’s working on and doesn’t look up as he finally replies, “Yes, that’s right, boss, a mangle…”
The boss stands there thoughtfully and goes on studying him. Finally, he thinks he can make sense of the whole thing, and he says, “Well, maybe it’s done the trick, and helped you recover some enthusiasm for work!”
With that, the supervisor moved off, and Enno Kluge was happy that his beating had been taken in that way. Let him think he had been roughed up for shirking, so much the better! He didn’t want to discuss it with anyone anyway. And if they all thought that, they wouldn’t bother him too much with their questions. At the most, they would laugh about him behind his back, and he thought: Let them, I don’t care. He wanted to work, and he wanted to astonish them!
With a modest smile, and yet not without pride, Enno Kluge put himself down for the voluntary extra shift on Sunday. A couple of older colleagues, who remembered him from before, made cynical remarks. He just laughed along, and was glad to see the boss grinning too.
The boss’s erroneous assumption that he had been beaten up for shirking had certainly helped with the management as well. He was summoned up there straight after the lunch break. He stood as though in the dock, and the fact that one of his judges was in a Wehrmacht uniform, one in an SA uniform, and only one in a suit, admittedly also decorated with army insignia, only served to heighten his fear.
The Wehrmacht officer browsed in a file, and in a voice equally bored and disgusted proceeded to throw the book at him. On such and such a day released from the Wehrmacht to the armaments industry, first reported in the appropriate works on such and such, worked for eleven days, reported sick with stomach bleeding, used the services of three doctors and two hospitals. Such and such reported fit for work, worked for five days, took three days off, worked for one day, reported recurrence of stomach bleeding, etc., etc.
The Wehrmacht officer put away the file. He looked with disgust at Kluge, or rather he fixed his eyes on the top button of his jacket and said with raised voice, “What do you think you’re playing at, you rat?” Suddenly he was screaming, but you could tell he was a habitual screamer, without any inner excitement. “Do you think you can fool a single one of us with your stomach bleeding? I’ll send you off to a punishment company, and they’ll pull your stinking guts out of your body, and then you’ll learn what stomach bleeding is!”
The officer went on shouting in a similar vein for quite some time. Enno was used to that from the military; it didn’t especially impress him. He listened to the lecture, hands correctly at his trouser seams, eye attentively on his scolder. When the officer stopped to draw breath, Enno said in the prescribed tone, clear and distinct, neither humble nor too cheeky, “Yes, First Lieutenant! Whatever you say, First Lieutenant!” At one point he was even able to push in the sentence—admittedly without any visible effect—”Beg permission to report, sir, volunteering for work. Ready and willing to work, sir!”
The officer stopped just as suddenly as he had begun. He shut his mouth, took his gaze off Kluge’s top button and redirected it to his neighbor in brown. “Anything else?” he asked, with disgust.
Yes, it seemed this gentleman also had something to say, or rather to scream—because all these commanding officers seemed only able to scream at their men. This one screamed about betrayal of the people and sabotage, of the Führer who wouldn’t tolerate any traitors in the ranks, and concentration camps where he would get his comeuppance.
“And how have you come to us?” screamed the brownshirt suddenly. “Look at the state of you, pig! Is this how you show up for work? Whoring around with girls! Come here sapped and drained, and we have the privilege of paying you! Where’ve you been, where did you get yourself those bruises, you miserable pimp!”
“They worked me over,” said Enno, shy under the other’s gaze.
“Who, who was it who worked you over, that’s what I want to know!” screamed the brownshirt. And he brandished his fist under Enno’s nose and stamped his feet.
The moment had come when any kind of thought left Enno Kluge’s skull. Threatened with fresh blows, he was deserted by caution and good intentions and whispered, trembling, “Beg to report, sir, the SS worked me over.”
There was something so convincing in the man’s fear that the tribunal immediately believed him. A comprehending, approving smile spread over their faces. The brownshirt screamed, “You call that worked over? Punishment is the term for that, just punishment.
What is it?”
“Beg to report, sir, just punishment!”
“Well, bear it in mind. Next time you won’t get off so easily! Dismissed!”
For the next half hour Enno Kluge was shaking so hard that he couldn’t work at his lathe. He hung around the washroom, where the boss finally ran him to ground and chased him back to work with a tongue-lashing. He stood next to him, and watched as Enno wrecked one piece after another with his clumsiness. Everything was spinning round in the little fellow’s head: the scolding from the boss, the mockery of his colleagues, the threat of concentration camp and punishment battalion; he could see nothing clearly. His normally deft hands let him down. He couldn’t work, and yet he had to, otherwise he would be completely lost.
Finally the supervisor saw it himself, that this wasn’t ill will and shirking. “If you hadn’t just been off sick, I would say go home to bed for a couple of days and get well.” With those words, the supervisor left him. And he added, “Mind you, you know what would happen to you if you did that!”
Yes, he knew. He carried on, tried not to think of his pain, the unbearable pressure in his head. For a while, the shimmering, spinning iron drew him magically into its spell. All he need do was hold his fingers there and he would have peace, get put to bed, could lie there, rest, sleep, forget! But then he remembered that willful self-mutilation was punishable by death, and his hand recoiled…
That was it: death in the punishment battalion, death in a concentration camp, death in a prison yard, those were the outcomes that daily threatened him, that he had to try and keep at bay. And he had so little strength…
Somehow the afternoon passed, and somehow, a little after five, he found himself in the stream of those going home. He had so longed for quiet and rest, but once he was standing in his cramped little hotel room again, he couldn’t manage to put himself to bed. He trotted off again, and bought himself a few provisions.
And then the room again, the food on the table in front of him, the bed beside him—and it was more than he could
do to stay there. He felt cursed, he just couldn’t stand to be in that room. He needed to buy some toilet articles, and try to get hold of a blue work shirt at some secondhand stall.
Off he trotted again, and as he stood in a chemist’s shop, he remembered that he left a large, heavy suitcase full of things at Lotte’s, when her husband returned on furlough and so roughly threw him out. He ran out of the chemist’s, got on a streetcar, and chanced it: he went straight to Lotte’s place. He couldn’t abandon all his things there! He dreaded getting a beating, but he had to go, he had to go to Lotte’s.
And he was in luck. Lotte was at home and her husband was away. “Your stuff, Enno?” she said. “I put it all down in the cellar, so that he wouldn’t see it. Wait, I’ll find the key!”
But he clutched at her, pressed his head against her thick bosom. The strains of the past few weeks had been too much for him, and he started crying.
“Oh, Lotte, Lotte, I can’t stand it without you! I miss you so much!”
His whole body was convulsed with sobbing. She was taken aback. She was used to men of all shapes and sizes and types, including even a few weepers, but then they were drunk, whereas this one was sober… And all that talk of missing her and not managing with out her, it was ages since anyone had said something to her like that! If they ever had!
She calmed him down as well as she could. “He’s only here for three weeks on his furlough, and then you can come back to me, Enno! Now pull yourself together, and get your things before he comes back. I don’t need to remind you!”
