by Hans Fallada
No, he knew only too well what threatened him!
She took him to the tram, and carried his case.
Enno Kluge rode back to his hotel, feeling a little better. Only three weeks, four days of which were already up. Then the man would be back at the Front, and he would be able to sleep in his bed! Enno had imagined he could get by without women, but he couldn’t, it was beyond him. He would visit Tutti in that time; he saw that if you put on a show and cried, then they weren’t so bad. They even helped you right away! Maybe he could stay the three weeks at Tutti’s. The lonely hotel room was too awful!
But even with the women, he would work, work, work! He wouldn’t pull any stunts anymore, not he! He was cured!
Chapter 16
THE DEMISE OF FRAU ROSENTHAL
On Sunday morning, Frau Rosenthal woke with a scream from deep sleep. Once again, she had had the horrible recurring nightmare: she was on the run with her Siegfried. They were hiding, and their pursuers walked right past them, even though the two were so badly hidden, she felt the men must be toying with them.
Suddenly Siegfried started running, and she set off after him. She couldn’t run as fast as he could. She cried out, “Not so fast, Siegfried! I can’t keep up! Don’t leave me behind!”
He lifted up off the ground, he flew. Flew at first just a few feet above the cobbles, but then higher and higher, until finally he disappeared over the rooftops. She was all alone on Greifswalder Strasse. Tears ran down her face. A big, smelly hand snuck out and covered her face, and a voice hissed in her ear, “Now I’ve got you at last, you Jewish bitch!”
She stared at the blackout screen in front of the window, at the daylight trickling in through the cracks. The terrors of the night faded before those of the day ahead. Another day! Once again, she had missed the judge, the only person in the world she could talk to! She had been determined to stay awake, but she had fallen asleep again. Another day alone, twelve hours, fifteen hours! Oh, she could stand no more of it! The walls of the room closing in on her, always the same face in the mirror, always counting the same bills—no, she couldn’t go on like that any more. Even the very worst couldn’t be as bad as being locked in alone, with nothing to do.
Quickly Frau Rosenthal gets dressed. Then she goes to the door. She draws the bolt, quietly opens the door, and peers out into the corridor. Everything is quiet in the apartment, and in the rest of the house. The children are not yet making their racket outside—it must be very early still. Perhaps the judge is still in his library? Then she can say good morning to him, exchange two or three sentences with him to gain the courage to withstand the unending day?
She risks it—in spite of his interdiction, she risks it. She crosses the corridor and goes into his room. She shrinks back from the brightness streaming in through the open windows, from the street, from the public life that seems to be here, along with the fresh air. But even more she shrinks back from a woman who is running a carpet sweeper back and forth over the Zwickau rug. She is a bony old woman; the kerchief tied round her head and the carpet sweeper confirm that this is his cleaning woman.
At Frau Rosenthal’s entry, the woman stops her work. She first stares at the unexpected visitor, blinking rapidly, as though not quite believing her eyes. Then she props the carpet sweeper against the table and starts flapping her arms and hands at her, while going “Shh! Shh!” to her as though shooing chickens.
Frau Rosenthal, already in retreat, says pitifully, “Where is the judge? I must speak to him for a moment!”
The woman frowns and shakes her head violently. Then she embarks on a fresh round of hand flapping and “Shh! Shh!” sounds, until Frau Rosenthal has gone back into her room. There, while the cleaning woman gently shuts the door, she collapses into the chair by the table and bursts into tears. All for nothing! Another day condemning her to lonely, senseless waiting! A lot of things are happening in the world—maybe Siegfried is dying right now or a German bomb is killing Eva—but she is condemned to sit in the dark and do nothing.
She shakes her head mutinously: she’s not going to go on like this any more. She just won’t! If she’s going to be unhappy, and persecuted, and live in fear, then at least she’ll do it in her own way. Let the door close behind her forever; she can’t do anything to prevent it. His hospitality was well-intentioned, but it’s not for her.
When she’s standing beside her door again, she reflects. She goes back to the table and picks up the heavy gold bracelet with the sapphires. Maybe…
But the cleaning woman is no longer in the study, and the windows have been closed again. Frau Rosenthal stands in the corridor, near the front door, and waits. Then she hears the sound of crockery, and she goes towards the sound till she finds the woman in the kitchen, washing up.
She holds out the bracelet to her and says haltingly, “I really must speak to the judge. Take it, please take it!”
The servant has furrowed her brow at this latest disturbance. She casts a fleeting glance at the bracelet. Then she starts to shoo her away again, with those rowing motions of her arms and the “Ssh! Ssh!” sounds. Put to flight, Frau Rosenthal goes back to her room. She sinks down beside the bedside table; out of the drawer she takes the sleeping pills the judge gave her.
She hasn’t taken any of them yet. Now she shakes them all out, as many as there are, twelve or fourteen, into the hollow of her hand, goes over to the washstand, and washes them all down with a glass of water… Now she will be able to speak to the judge in the evening, and learn what she must do. She lies down on the bed, fully clothed, the blanket pulled up halfway. Still lying on her back, her eyes turned up to the ceiling, she waits for sleep to come to her.
And it seems to be coming. The tormenting thoughts, the recurring visions of terror born from the fear in her brain, fade. She shuts her eyes, her limbs relax, grow heavy, she has almost found safety in sleep…
But then, on the edge of sleep, it’s as though a hand jolts her back into wakefulness. She starts, she feels such a powerful shock. Her body shudders as in a sudden cramp…
And again she’s lying on her back, staring at the ceiling, the same mill churning out the same tormenting thoughts and images. Then—gradually—it slows, her eyes fall shut, sleep is at hand. Then once again, on the threshold, the jolt, the shock, the cramp that comes over her whole body. Once again, she is expelled from peace, quiet, oblivion…
After the third or fourth time, she no longer expects sleep to come. She gets up, walks slowly, a little unsteadily, to the table, and sits down. She stares into space. She knows that the white thing in front of her is the letter to Siegfried that she began three days ago; she has only written a few lines. She sees more: she sees the banknotes, the jewels. At the back of the table is the tray with her food for today. Normally, she would throw herself at it ravenously, but now she just eyes it indifferently. She doesn’t feel like eating…
While she sits here like this, she has a dim sense that it’s the sleeping pills that have wrought this change in her: they weren’t able to put her to sleep, but they have at least taken away the desperate panic of the morning. She sits there like that, and sometimes she almost nods off in her chair, but then she jumps again. Time has passed, she doesn’t know if it’s a lot or a little, but some of this terrible day must have passed…
Then, later, she hears footfall on the stairs. She collapses—in an instant of self-scrutiny, she tries to ascertain whether it’s even possible for her to hear sounds on the stairs from this room. But the critical minute is already over, and she merely listens tensely to the sound of the person dragging himself slowly up the steps, continually stopping, coughing lightly, and then dragging himself further along by the banister.
Now she doesn’t just hear Siegfried, she sees him, too. She sees him very clearly, as he makes his way up the still quiet staircase to their apartment. Of course they’ve abused him again, he has a couple of bandages carelessly thrown around his head, already bled through, and his face is bruised and splotch
y from their blows. Siegfried is struggling to climb the stairs. His chest is whistling and wheezing, his chest hurt by their kicks. She sees Siegfried turn the corner of the staircase…
For a while she continues to sit. Most probably she has nothing on her mind, certainly not the judge and her agreement with him. She needs to get up to the apartment—what will Siegfried think if he finds it empty?—but she is so terribly tired, it’s almost impossible to lever herself up out of the chair!
Finally she’s on her feet. She takes the bunch of keys out of her handbag, reaches for the sapphire bracelet as if it were a talisman that could protect her—and slowly and uncertainly she makes her way out of the apartment. The door shuts behind her.
The judge, woken after long hesitation on the part of his cleaning woman, comes too late to keep his guest from this excursion into a too dangerous world.
He softly opens the outer door, stands for a while in the open doorway, listens above, listens below. Then, when he hears a sound, namely the swift energetic tramp of boots, he retreats into his apartment. But he doesn’t leave the peephole. If there’s a chance of saving the unhappy woman, he will open his door to her again, in spite of all the danger.
Frau Rosenthal isn’t even aware of passing anyone on her way up the stairs. She is driven by one thought, and one thought only, which is to reach the apartment and Siegfried as quickly as possible. But the Hitler Youth commander Baldur Persicke, on his way to morning roll call, stands there open-mouthed with astonishment as the woman almost brushes past him. Frau Rosenthal, that Frau Rosenthal who has been missing so many days, up and about this Sunday morning, in a dark stitched blouse and no star, a bunch of keys and a bracelet in one hand, laboriously dragging herself up the banister with the other—that’s how drunk she is! Early on Sunday morning, and already drunk out of her skull.
For an instant, Baldur stays where he is, completely dumbfounded. But when Frau Rosenthal turns the corner of the stairs, his mental powers return to him, and his mouth snaps shut. He has the feeling that the moment has come—he mustn’t make a mistake now! No, this time he will take care of the thing himself, and no one, not his father or brothers or Borkhausen, is going to foul it up for him.
Baldur waits till he is sure Frau Rosenthal has reached the Quangels’ floor, then creeps quietly back into his parents’ flat. Everyone is still asleep, and the telephone is in the hallway. He picks up the receiver and dials, then asks for a particular number. He is in luck: even though it’s Sunday, he gets put through, and to the right man. He quickly says his piece, then moves a chair over to the door, opens the door a crack, and prepares to sit and wait for half an hour or an hour, to be sure the quarry doesn’t slip away again…
At the Quangels’ only Anna is up and about, quietly puttering around the flat. In between she looks in on Otto, who is still fast asleep. He looks tired and tormented, even now, in sleep. As though something is leaving him no peace. She stands there and looks thoughtfully at the face of the man she has lived with day after day for almost thirty years. She has long since grown used to the face, the sharp birdlike profile, the thin, almost always shut mouth—it no longer frightens her, any of it. He’s the man to whom she has given virtually her whole life. Looks aren’t important…
But this morning she gets the impression that the face has become even sharper, the mouth even thinner, the furrows on either side of the nose even more deeply etched. He is worried, deeply worried, and she neglected to talk to him in time, to help him carry his load. This Sunday morning, four days after she received the news of the death of her son, Anna Quangel is once again firmly convinced not only that she has to stick it out with this man, but that her obstinacy was wrong in the first place. She ought to have known him better: he always preferred silence to speech. She always had to encourage him to speak—the man would never say anything of his own free will.
Well, today he will speak to her. He said he would, last night, on his return from work. Anna had had a bad day. When he ran off without any breakfast after she had spent hours waiting for him, and when he didn’t come home for dinner, when she realized that his shift had begun and he certainly wouldn’t come back until late, she had been in despair.
What had come over the man, ever since she let slip that unconsidered phrase? What drove him so remorselessly on? She knew him: ever since she’d said it, he’d been thinking only of how to prove to her that it was not “his” Führer at all. As if she had ever seriously meant it! She should have told him she had only said it in the first rush of grief and rage. She could have said quite other things about those crooks who had senselessly robbed her of her son’s life—but that happened to be the form of words that escaped her.
But now she had said it, and now he was here and there, running all sorts of risks to prove himself right and to show her, quite concretely if possible, how wrong she had been! Perhaps he wouldn’t be back. Perhaps he had already said or done something that got the factory direction or the Gestapo on his case—maybe he was already in prison! Restless as that calm man had been so early in the morning!
Anna Quangel can’t stand it, she can’t wait idly for him. She butters a couple of slices of bread, and sets off for the factory. She takes her wifely duties so seriously that even now, where every minute matters that will set her mind at rest, she doesn’t take the tram. No, she walks—saving their pennies, as he does.
From the gatekeeper at the furniture factory she learns that foreman Quangel had come in to work as punctually as ever. She has someone take him the bread and butter he “forgot,” and she waits for the person to return. “Well, what did he say?”
“What do you mean, what did he say? He never says anything!”
Now she can go home with her mind at rest. Nothing has happened yet, despite all the chaos this morning. And tonight she will speak to him…
He comes home. She can see from his face how tired he is.
“Otto,” she beseeches him, “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just somehing that slipped out during my immediate reaction. Please don’t be cross any more!”
“Me—cross with you? On account of something like that? Never!”
“But there’s something you want to do, I can sense it! Otto, don’t do it, don’t plunge yourself into misfortune over something like that! I could never forgive myself.”
He looks at her for a moment, nearly smiling. Then he quickly lays both his hands on her shoulders. Quickly he takes them away again, as though ashamed of his spontaneous tenderness.
“What I want to do now is sleep! Tomorrow I’ll tell you what we are going to do.”
And now it’s tomorrow, and Quangel is still asleep. But another half hour or so doesn’t matter so much now. He is here with her, he can’t do anything that would get him into trouble, he is asleep.
She turns away from his bed and does a few little chores around the house.
By now Frau Rosenthal has reached her front door, in spite of her slow progress. She is not surprised to find the door locked—she unlocks it. She pays no attention to the wild disorder of the place, nor does she spend a lot of time in the flat looking for Siegfried, or calling to him; she has already forgotten that she came upstairs to follow her husband.
Her numbness is growing, growing all the time. You couldn’t say she was asleep, but she’s not awake either. Just as she can only move her heavy limbs slowly and clumsily, so, too, her mind feels heavy and numb. Pictures come up like snowflakes and dissolve before she can see what they are. She is sitting on the sofa, her feet resting on scattered linen, looking about her slowly and muzzily. In her hand she still has the keys and the sapphire bracelet Siegfried gave her at Eva’s birth. The takings of an entire week… She smiles faintly to herself.
Then she hears the front door being carefully opened, and she knows: That’s Siegfried. Here he is. That’s why I came up here. I’ll step out to meet him.
But she remains sitting where she is, a smile spread over the whole of her gray face. She will
receive him here, sitting down, as though she had never been away, had always been sitting here to welcome him.
The door opens, but instead of the expected Siegfried, there are three men in the doorway. As soon as she sees a detested brown uniform among them, she knows: This isn’t Siegfried. Siegfried won’t be here. A slight fear stirs in her, but really only very slight. Now it’s time!
Slowly the smile disappears from her face, which changes color from gray to a greeny yellow.
The three men are directly in front of her. She hears a big, heavy man in a black cloak say, “Not drunk, my boy. Probably an overdose of sleeping pills. Let’s try to see what we can get out of her. Listen, are you Frau Rosenthal?”
She nods. “That’s right, gentlemen, Lore, or strictly speaking Sara Rosenthal. My husband’s in prison in Moabit, I have two sons in the U.S.A., a daughter in Denmark, and another in England…”
“And how much money have you sent them?” Detective Inspector Rusch asks quickly.
“Money? Why money? They all have plenty of money! Why would I send them money?”
She nods seriously. Her children are all comfortably off. They could quite easily take responsibility for their parents as well. Suddenly she remembers something she has to say to these gentlemen. “It’s my fault,” she says with a clumsy tongue that feels heavier and heavier in her mouth, and starts to babble, “it’s all my fault. Siegfried wanted to flee Germany long ago. But I said to him, ‘Why leave all the lovely things behind, why sell the good business here for a pittance? We’ve done nothing to hurt anyone, they won’t do anything to us.’ I persuaded him, otherwise we would have been long gone!”
“And what have you done with the money?” the inspector asks, a little more impatiently.
“The money?” She tries to think. There was some left somewhere. Where did it get to? But concentrating is a strain for her, so she thinks of something else. She holds out the sapphire bracelet to the Inspector. “There!” she says simply. “There!”
