by Hans Fallada
On his way home to Lotte, Enno Kluge was grinning again. So, solid, hard-working Eva was in a jam herself, and had taken off to Ruppin to her relatives, and no longer dared show her face in Berlin! Of course, Enno hadn’t been stupid enough to let the postal officials know where Eva had gone to; he was as smart as Frau Gesch any day of the week. It would be one last way out: if things ever came to a head in Berlin, he could always turn up at Eva’s, maybe she would take him in. She might feel constrained in front of her relatives not to treat him too coldly. Eva still set store by appearances and a good reputation. Plus he had her over a barrel with Karlemann’s heroic deeds; she wouldn’t be able to stand it if he started telling her relatives about that. She’d sooner have him back.
One last way out, if everything went pear-shaped. For the time being, he still had his Lotte. She was really pretty okay, except for her gabbiness and her damned habit of bringing men back to the flat. He had to spend half the night, sometimes the whole of it, hunkered in the kitchen—and that meant no work again the following morning.
Work would never come right again, and he knew it really. But maybe the war would end sooner than people thought and he would succeed in keeping them off his back. And so he had very gradually fallen into his old habits of idling and staying away. When the boss saw him he would flush purple. Then there was a second telling-off from the management, but this time it hadn’t had much effect on him. Enno Kluge knew the game: they needed workers, they couldn’t afford to just throw him out!
Then there had been a run of three days off in quick succession. He had met this delightful widow, no longer in her first flush of youth, a bit of spare flesh on her, but still decidedly a cut above his other women of the moment. My God, she even had a flourishing pet shop business near the Königstor! She traded in birds and fish and dogs, she sold feed and collars and sand and dog biscuits and mealworms. You could buy tortoises there, frogs, salamanders, and cats… A business that was really thriving, and she was a good, hard working businesswoman.
He had identified himself to her as a widower, and he had made her believe Enno was his surname; she called him Hänschen. Definitely, he was in with a chance with this woman—he had seen that pretty clearly on his days off, when he helped her out in her shop. A man like him, in need of a little tenderness, that was just what she needed, really. She was at that point where a woman gets to wondering if she’ll ever find a man again for her old age. Of course she would want to marry him, but he would be able to sort something out there. After all, there were now such things as war marriages, where they weren’t that fussy about paperwork, and he certainly wouldn’t have to worry about Eva making a nuisance of herself. She would be pleased to be rid of him for good, she wouldn’t suddenly kick up!
With that, he suddenly felt a burning desire to be done with the factory for good. He had to play the invalid anyway, as he had been away for three days without permission, so why not go the whole way! And during his medical leave he could work on charming this widow, Hetty Haberle. He felt disgusted by Lotte now. He couldn’t stand that situation any more, not the backchat, not the other men, and least of all, not her advances to him when she was juiced up. No, in three or four weeks he wanted to be a married man and living in a well-regulated home! And for that he needed a doctor.
Number 24. It’ll be another half hour yet till it’s Enno’s turn. Mechanically, he climbs over everyone’s feet and goes out in the hallway again. In spite of the dragon of an assistant, he wants another cigarette in the john. He’s in luck and gets there unnoticed, but no sooner has he taken the first couple of drags than the cunt is banging on the door again.
“You’re on the toilet again! You’re smoking again!” she yells. “I know it’s you! Get out of there at once, before I call the doctor!”
That awful shrill voice! He gives in right away, preferring, as he generally does, surrender to resistance. He lets her chase him back into the waiting room, without offering a word of apology or defense. And there he is leaning against the wall again, waiting for his number to come up. And her about to snitch on him to the doctor, the bloody bitch!
The receptionist, having chased little Enno Kluge back to his place, is walking back down the corridor. She’s shown him who’s boss, all right!
Then she sees a card on the floor, a little way away from the mail slot. It wasn’t there five minutes ago, when she let in the last patient, she’s sure of that. She never heard the bell go, and it’s not the regular time for the mail, either.
All this has gone through the receptionist’s mind as she stoops to pick up the postcard, and later she is sure that even before she held it in her hands, before she knew what sort of card it was, she had the feeling that it was something to do with that sneaky little man.
She casts an eye on the card, reads a few words, and runs into the doctor’s office: “Doctor! Doctor! See what I just found in the corridor!”
She interrupts the consultation, she has the half-naked patient dispatched into the other room, and then she gives the doctor the card to read. She can hardly wait for him to get to the end, and already she’s voicing her suspicion: “It really can’t have been anyone but that little shit! I took against him right away, with his shifty eyes! He had such a guilty conscience, he couldn’t sit still a minute, he was forever going out into the corridor, twice I had to chase him out of the toilet! And as I’m doing it the second time, I see the card lying on the floor. It can’t have been dropped in from outside, it’s too far from the mail slot! Doctor, call the police before the man slinks off! Perhaps he’s run off already, I’d better look and see…”
With that she runs out of the doctor’s office, leaving the door wide open behind her.
The doctor stands there with the postcard in his hand. He is terribly embarrassed that something like this had to happen during his office hours! Thank God it was his receptionist who found the card and he can prove that he hasn’t been out of the office for the past two hours, not even to go to the toilet. The girl’s right, the best thing is to call the police right away. He starts looking up the number of the local police station in the phone book.
The girl peeks through the open doorway. “He’s still here, doctor!” she whispers. “Of course he thinks he can deflect suspicion from himself. But I’m completely certain…”
“All right,” the doctor interrupts his agitated assistant. “Shut the door now. I’m talking to the police.”
He makes his report and is instructed to keep the man there till someone from the station arrives. He passes the instruction to his assistant, tells her to call him the moment the man gets ready to leave, and sits down at his desk. No, he can’t see any more patients, he is too agitated. How could something like this happen, and why did it have to be to him? What a selfish and unscrupulous fellow, this postcard writer, plunging people into such difficulties! Didn’t he think of the trouble he would cause with those confounded cards!
Really, this card was the final straw. Now the police were on their way, perhaps he would find himself under suspicion, they would search the premises, and even if it turned out that their suspicion was wrong, they would still find, in the servant’s room at the back…
The doctor stood up, he at least had to warn her…
And sat down again. How could he come under suspicion? And even if they found her, she was his housekeeper, which was what it said on her papers. It had all been thought about and talked through a hundred times, ever since that time over a year ago when he had had to divorce his wife, a Jewess—under pressure from the Nazis. He had done it principally in response to her pleas, to keep the children safe. Later on, after changing his address, he had installed her as his “housekeeper,” with false papers. Really, nothing could happen, she didn’t even look especially Jewish…
That damned card! Why it had to involve him, of all people! But probably that was how it was: whoever it came to, it would create panic and fear. In these times everyone had something to hide!
; Perhaps that was precisely the purpose of the card, to provoke panic and fear? Perhaps such cards were a fiendish device, to be distributed among suspicious individuals, to see how they reacted? Perhaps he had been under surveillance for a long time already, and this was just a further means to monitor his response?
At any rate, he had behaved correctly. Five minutes after the card was found, he had got in touch with the police. And he was even able to come up with a suspect, perhaps some poor devil who had nothing to do with the affair. Well, it wasn’t his problem, he had to get himself clear if he could! The main thing was that the doctor was spared.
And even though these thoughts have made the doctor a little calmer, he gets up and quickly and deftly fills a little morphine syringe. That will allow him to face the gentlemen who are on their way to him with serenity, even boredom. The little syringe is the aid to which the doctor has increasingly resorted ever since the humiliation, as he still considers it, of his divorce. He’s not an addict, far from it, he sometimes goes five or six days without morphine, but when he encounters difficulties in his life, and that seems to be more and more frequently, then he takes morphine. It’s the only thing that helps; without it he would lose his nerve. Oh, if only the war were over and he could leave this wretched country! He would be happy with the meanest little junior post abroad.
Some minutes later, a pale, slightly tired-looking doctor receives the two gentlemen from the police station. One of them is a uniformed sergeant, brought here to watch the door to the corridor. He immediately sits down in the receptionist’s place.
The other, Deputy Inspector Schröder, is in civilian clothes—and the doctor hands him the postcard. Did he have a statement to make? Well, there’s not much he can say, he’s been treating patients for the past two hours without interruption, perhaps twenty or twenty-five patients. But he will ask Fräulein Kiesow.
The receptionist comes in, and she has plenty to say. She describes the creep—her term—with a venom that seems out of proportion to the crime of two harmless smoking episodes in the toilet. The doctor observes her closely, how aroused she is, her voice often cracking as she answers the questions. He thinks, I really must get her to do something about her hyperthyroidism. It’s getting worse and worse. She’s so excited that she’s basically no longer rational.
The deputy inspector seems to be thinking along the same lines. With a peremptory “Thank you! I think we’ve heard enough for the moment!” he brings her account to an end. “One more thing, Fräulein! Would you show me where you saw the card on the corridor? As precisely as you can!”
The receptionist puts the card down on a spot where it seems impossible it could have got to from the mail slot. But the deputy inspector, aided by his sergeant, repeatedly pushes the card through the slot till it lands close to the designated point. Perhaps just three or four inches away…
“Couldn’t it have been lying here, Fräulein?” asks the deputy inspector.
The receptionist is visibly shocked at the success of the deputy inspector’s experiment. She declares quite categorically, “No, the card can’t have been so close to the door! If anything, it was a bit further along the corridor than I first thought. I think it was just behind the chair here.” And she points to a spot a foot and a half further away. “I’m almost sure I bumped against this chair when I picked up the card.”
“I see,” says the deputy inspector, and calmly studies the hate-filled woman. Privately, he strikes out all her evidence. She’s a hysteric, he thinks. Short of a man. Well, they’re all in the field, and she’s not the best-looking girl I’ve seen, either.
He turns to the doctor: “I would like to spend three minutes in your waiting room as a newly arrived patient, and observe the accused man without him knowing who I am. Would that be possible?”
“Of course. Fräulein Kiesow will tell you where he’s sitting.”
“Standing!” says the receptionist angrily. “A man like that won’t sit! He’d rather trample around on everyone else’s feet! His guilty conscience won’t leave him in peace. That creep…”
“Where is he now?” the deputy inspector interrupts her again, rather impolitely.
“Before, he was standing next to the mirror by the window,” she replies, offended. “Of course I can’t tell you where he is now, he’s so restless!”
“I’ll find him,” says Deputy Inspector Schröder. “I have your description to go on, after all.”
And he goes into the waiting room.
There is some unrest in the waiting room. It’s twenty minutes since the last patient was called—how long are they meant to have to wait? God knows they have enough other things to do! Probably the doctor is attending to wealthy private patients, and leaving the others to rot! But that’s what all doctors do, you can go to anyone you like, it’s always the same story! Money talks, and to hell with everything else!
While the patients trade increasingly lurid anecdotes on the venality of doctors, the deputy inspector silently scrutinizes his man. He identified him right away. The man is neither as restless nor as creepy as the receptionist described him. He is standing quite calmly beside the mirror, taking no part in the general conversation. He looks dull-witted and a little timid. Laborer, reckons the deputy inspector. No, a little better than that, his hands look deft, traces of work, but not hard work, suit and coat kept up with great care, though not enough to prevent their age and wear from becoming apparent. Nothing resembling the profile of the man you would expect from the tone of the card. The card writer had a forceful style, after all, and this scaredy-cat…
But the Deputy Inspector knows there’s only so much point in going by appearances. And this man is sufficiently implicated by the witness’s statement that they will have to look him over. The postcard writer seems to have flustered a few feathers upstairs—not long ago, there was another “Highly Confidential” order to give top priority to the case.
It would be nice to book a little success, thinks the deputy inspector. It’s time for a promotion.
Amid the general unrest he walks almost unnoticed to the little man by the mirror, taps him on the shoulder, and says, “Would you mind coming out into the corridor for a moment or two. I’ve got some questions for you.”
Enno Kluge follows him out, obedient as he always is when faced with an order. But as he follows this unknown gentleman, he feels a surge of fear: What’s this about? What does he want? He looks like a policeman, talks like a policeman, too. What do the police want with me—I’ve not done anything!
At the same moment, he remembers the break-in at the Rosenthals’. There’s no doubt about it, Borkhausen’s gone and ratted him out. And his fear grows. He’s been sworn to silence and if he does say something, that SS man will beat him up again, only much worse! He daren’t say anything, but then this cop will have a go at him, and then he will end up talking after all. He’s between a rock and hard place… Oh the fear!
As he steps out into the corridor, four faces look expectantly at him—but he doesn’t see them, he just sees the policeman’s uniform, and he knows he was right to be afraid, and that he really is between a rock and a hard place.
His fear lends Enno Kluge qualities he doesn’t ordinarily possess, namely decisiveness, strength, and speed. He shoves the surprised deputy inspector, who never expected it from the little weakling, into the arms of the sergeant, runs past the doctor and receptionist, tears open the door, and is already running down the stairs…
But behind him the sergeant is blowing a whistle, and Enno isn’t fast enough to get away from the long-legged young man. He catches up with Enno on the bottom step, gives him a clout that knocks him down onto the steps, and when he can see again past the spinning suns and stars, the sergeant says with a friendly smile, “All right, then, give us your mitts! Gonna have to cuff you. Next time you go anywhere, I’m coming, too, okay?”
And already the steel is jingling around his wrists and he’s headed back upstairs, between the silent, angry-loo
king detective and this contentedly smiling sergeant, for whom this attempt at flight was just a little escapade.
Upstairs, where the patients are now thronging the corridor and aren’t at all annoyed anymore at having to wait so long to be examined by their doctor, because an arrest is always an interesting development—and to go by what the receptionist said, this arrest is of a political nature, a Commie apparently, and Commies deserve whatever is coming to them—upstairs, then, they file past all these faces into the doctor’s office. Fräulein Kiesow is immediately sent outside by the deputy inspector, but the doctor is permitted to be present during the questioning, and he hears the deputy inspector say: “All right, my son, sit down, take a breather after your recent exertions! You look pretty shattered, I must say! Sergeant, why don’t you take the cuffs off this gentleman. He won’t run off again—will you?
“No, no!” promises Enno Kluge in despair; already the tears are pouring down his face.
“I wouldn’t advise it either! The next time, we’ll draw pistols, and I’m a decent shot, son.” The deputy inspector continues to address Kluge, who is twenty years his senior, as “son.” “Now, don’t cry like that! You won’t have done anything too terrible. Or?”
“I’ve done nothing!” Enno Kluge blurts out between tears. “Nothing whatever!”
“Of course not, son!” the deputy inspector agrees. “That’s why you take off like a startled bunny when you see the sergeant’s uniform! Doctor, haven’t you got anything that would help this poor wretch feel a little better?”
Now that the doctor feels all danger to himself is averted, he looks at the unhappy little man with a good deal of sympathy: he’s one of those natural victims who are invariably knocked for a loop by any setback. The doctor is tempted to give the man a jab of morphine, in the lowest concentration. But in the presence of the detective, of course, he doesn’t dare. A little bromide…
