Every Man Dies Alone

by Hans Fallada

  “Hey there, Johnny, would you know somewhere I can get hold of some cigarettes? But I got no tobacco coupons.”

  “I might do. You got ‘ny money?”

  The boy that Borkhausen had addressed was very blond and blue-eyed, wearing a Hitler Youth uniform, an authentic, alert Berlin face. “Well, give us yer twenty then, and I’ll go and get some for you…”

  “And forget to come back! Not likely, I’m coming with you. I won’t be a minute, Frau Haberle!”

  With that, the two of them had disappeared inside a nearby building. After a while, Borkhausen had emerged from it alone, and without being asked had returned Hetty’s twenty.

  “They were out. The lout just wanted to cheat me of twenty marks! I clouted him one, and he’s still lying there in the courtyard!”

  And they had gone on, first to the post office, and then the travel agent.

  “Well, and what strikes you as odd about that, Hetty? Borkhausen’s just like me: if he wants a smoke he’ll stop a general on the street—and cadge the end of his cigarette off him!”

  “But then he didn’t say another word about cigarettes, even though he didn’t get any! I think that’s strange. Was the boy in on the plan?”

  “What do you mean, was the boy in on the plan? He will have cuffed him, just like he said.”

  “You don’t think the kid was there to watch us?”

  For a moment, even Enno Kluge paused. But then he went on, with his customary ease, “You have a vivid imagination! I only wish I had your worries!”

  She said nothing. But her unease remained with her, and so she insisted that they go into the shop very quickly to fetch his things. Then, using every conceivable care, she would take him to a friend’s.

  He wasn’t at all happy with the plan. He could sense she wanted to shake him off, and he didn’t want to go. She offered him security and good food and no more work than he could handle. And love and warmth and comfort. And then, on top of that: there was abundant wool waiting to be fleeced: Borkhausen had just taken her for two and a half thou, and now it was his turn!

  “Your friend!” he said unhappily. “What friend? A man or a woman? I don’t like going to strangers.”

  Hetty could have told him that the lady in question was an old comrade of her husband’s who was still discreetly working for the cause and would take in any refugee. But now she was suspicious of Enno. She had witnessed his cowardice a couple of times now, and it was better for him not to know too much.

  “My friend?” she said. “A woman like me. Similar sort of age. Maybe a year or two younger.”

  “And what does she do? What does she live off?” he asked.

  “I’m not exactly sure. I expect she works as a secretary somewhere. She’s unmarried, by the way.”

  “Well, if she’s your sort of age, she’s leaving it a bit late,” he said sarcastically.

  She winced, but made no reply.

  “Nah, Hetty,” he said, giving his voice a more tender inflection. “What will I do at your friend’s? The two of us, alone together, that’s the best. Let me stay at yours—Borkhausen’ll be back the day after tomorrow—at least until then!”

  “No, Enno!” she said. “I want you to do what I say now. I’ll go into the flat myself and pack. You can wait for me in a bar. Then we’ll go to my friend’s together.”

  He still had many objections, but in the end he gave in. He gave in when—not without some calculation on her side—she said: “You’ll be needing money. I’ll put some money in your suitcase, enough to see you through the beginning, at least.”

  The prospect of finding money in his suitcase—and she couldn’t possibly give him less than she had given Borkhausen!—that prospect tempted him, and finally convinced him. If he stayed with her till the day after tomorrow, then there wouldn’t be money till the day after tomorrow. But he wanted to know right away how much she was giving him.

  She noticed with sadness what had caused him to relent. He himself was responsible for destroying the last elements of love and respect in her. But she adjusted silently. She had known for a long time that you had to pay for everything in life, and usually more than it was worth. The most important thing now was that he did what she told him.

  When Frau Hetty Haberle approached her flat, she noticed the blond, blue-eyed boy that she had seen before. He was playing on the street with a crowd of other boys. She flinched. Then she waved him over: “What are you still doing here?” she asked. “Do you have to do your running around here on my doorstep?”

  “I live here!” he said. “Where else am I going to run around?”

  She scanned his face for the red mark of a slap, but didn’t see one. Clearly, the brat hadn’t recognized her. He probably hadn’t paid any attention before; he’d been too busy talking with Borkhausen. That would argue against his being a spy.

  “You live here, do you?” she asked. “Funny, I’ve never seen you before.”

  “It’s not my fault if you’re nearsighted!” he retorted cheekily He whistled piercingly on two fingers, and yelled up the housefront: “Ma, ma, look out the window! There’s a woman here who doesn’t believe you’ve got a squint! Ma, show her your squint, will you!”

  Laughing, Hetty went into her shop, now quite convinced that as far as this boy was concerned, she was imagining things.

  But while packing she grew serious again. She wondered if it was right for her to take Enno to her friend Anna Schönlein. Of course, Anna was forever risking her life by taking in unknowns and giving them shelter. But Hetty felt that by leaving Enno Kluge with her, she was taking her a cuckoo’s egg. To be sure, Enno was a bona fide political rather than a common criminal—Borkhausen had corroborated that, but all the same…

  He wasn’t so much thoughtless as utterly indifferent as to what happened to his fellow humans. He simply didn’t care. All he thought about was himself, and he was perfectly capable of running to her, Hetty, twice a day, claiming that he was missing her, and so plunging Anna into danger. But she, Hetty, had some control over him that Anna didn’t have.

  With a heavy sigh, Hetty Haberle puts three hundred marks in an envelope and lays it on top of his things in the suitcase. On this one day she has got through more money than she has put aside in two years. But she is prepared for further sacrifice: she’s prepared to offer Enno a hundred marks for every day he stays in Anna’s apartment. Unfortunately, he’s the type of man who is receptive to such a proposition. He won’t be offended; at most, he will put on a show of being offended to begin with. But at least it should keep him there, since he is so greedy for money.

  Hetty leaves her house with the suitcase in her hand. The fair-haired boy is no longer playing on the street—perhaps he’s gone in to his squinting mother. She makes for the pub on the Alex where she’s arranged to meet Enno.

  Chapter 30

  EMIL BORKHAUSEN AND HIS SON

  Yes, Borkhausen felt exceedingly comfortable in that nice express train in the fine second-class compartment in the company of officers and generals and exquisitely perfumed ladies. It disturbed him not at all that he was neither elegant nor exquisitely perfumed, and that his fellow travelers cast no kindly looks his way. Borkhausen was used to being looked at unkindly. Hardly ever in the course of his wretched life had a fellow being favored him with a kindly look.

  Borkhausen took care to enjoy his good fortune, because he knew it would be brief. It didn’t last till Munich, even as far as Leipzig, which had been his first thought, but only as far as Lichterfelde, because the train happened to make its first stop at Lichterfelde. That had been the mistake in Hetty’s calculations. If one had money to collect in Munich, one didn’t have to go there right away. One might do it later, once one had seen to more urgent business here in Berlin. And the most urgent business he had was to report Enno’s whereabouts to Escherich and collect his five hundred marks reward. Anyway, perhaps he didn’t have to travel to Munich at all, perhaps it was enough to ask the post office to wire the mone
y to Berlin for collection there. He didn’t feel up to a journey to Munich just at the moment.

  So—not without a subtle regret—Borkhausen got off at Lichterfelde. He had a short, spirited debate with the stationmaster about the plausibility of his having reconsidered a journey to Munich between Anhalter Bahnhof and Lichterfelde. Borkhausen struck the stationmaster as a most suspicious individual in any case.

  Borkhausen remained adamant: “Just call the Gestapo if you like, ask for Inspector Escherich, and you’ll soon see whether I’m spinning a line or not, Stationmaster! But you’ll get in plenty of hot water, I’m telling you! I’m here on official Gestapo business!”

  Finally, the official shrugged his shoulders, and allowed him to claim reimbursement for the ticket—it was no skin off his nose. Anything was possible nowadays, and that such dubious characters were running around on Gestapo business was well within the bounds of possibility. So much the worse for everyone!

  Emil Borkhausen then started looking for his son.

  He couldn’t see him outside Hetty Haberle’s pet shop, though the shop was open and customers were coming and going. Hidden behind a poster pillar, his eyes fixed on the door of the shop, Borkhausen wondered what could have happened. Had Kuno-Dieter gotten bored and simply left his post? Or had Enno gone away—maybe back to the Also Ran? Or had the little fellow moved on and left the woman all alone in the shop?

  Emil Borkhausen was just wondering whether to appear brazenly in front of the outwitted Frau Haberle and demand information from her when a little squirt of nine or so addressed him: “Hey, mister! Are you Kuno’s dad?”

  “I am! What is it?”

  “You’re s’posed to give me a mark!”

  “What would I give you a mark for?”

  “For me to tell you my information what I know!”

  Borkhausen made a swift grab at the boy. “First the goods, then the money!” he said.

  But the boy was quicker, and slipped through the man’s arm and shouted: “Forget it! Keep your moldy mark!” And he rejoined his playmates outside the petshop.

  Borkhausen couldn’t follow him there: he preferred not to show himself after all. He shouted and whistled for the boy, cursing him—and himself too, for his own inappropriate economies. But the boy proved not so easy to lure; it was another fifteen minutes before he turned up beside Borkhausen again, standing carefully some yards away from the irascible fellow and announcing cheekily, “Price’s gone up! Two marks now!”

  Borkhausen felt a keen desire to grab him and give him a good hiding, but what was he to do? He had to do what the boy said, because he couldn’t chase him down. “I’ll give you a mark,” he said grimly.

  “No! I want two!”

  “All right, you’ll get two!”

  Borkhausen took a bundle of money out of his pocket, peeled off a two-mark note, stuffed the rest back in his pocket, and waved the bill in the direction of the boy.

  The kid shook his head. “I know you!” he said. “If I take yer money, you’ll make a grab at me. No, lay it down on the ground!”

  Grimly, without a word, Borkhausen did as the boy said. “Well?” he said, straightening up and taking a step back.

  The kid slowly inched toward the note, keeping a watchful eye on the man. When he stooped to pick up the money, Borkhausen was barely able to restrain himself, he so badly wanted to grab the little squirt and teach him a lesson. He could have got him, too, but he withstood the temptation—maybe he would have got no information then, and the brat would scream the whole place down.

  “Well?” he asked once more, menacingly this time.

  The boy answered: “I could play silly buggers and ask for more money, and keep doing it again and again. I could. But I’m not like that. I know you wanted to make a grab at me again this time, but me, I’m not such a silly bugger!” Then, after thus clearly establishing his moral superiority over Borkhausen, he quickly said, “You’re to go home and wait for a message from Kuno!” And with that the boy was gone.

  The two solid hours that Borkhausen had to wait in his basement flat for Kuno’s message did nothing to diminish his rage; if anything they exacerbated it. The kids were howling, and Otti was on the warpath, not sparing him her usual remarks about lazy sons of bitches that sit around all day, not doing anything except smoke cigarettes, and leave all the work to their wives.

  He could have pulled out a fifty, or even a ten, and changed Otti’s foul weather into the sweetest sunshine, but he didn’t feel like it. He didn’t want to be spending yet more money, having just wasted two marks on a useless piece of information he could have got by himself. He was enraged with Kuno-Dieter for having planted a little shit like that in his way. He must have fouled up himself in some way. Kuno-Dieter, Borkhausen decided, was going to get the punishment that other little rat had oiled out of.

  Then there was a knock on the door, and instead of a messenger from Kuno-Dieter, it was a man in civilian clothes who had all too obviously been a corporal in another life.

  “Are you Borkhausen?”

  “Yes, what is it?”

  “Inspector Escherich wants to see you. Get ready, I’ll take you there.”

  “I can’t now,” said Borkhausen, “I’m waiting for a messenger. You can tell the inspector I’ve caught his fish.”

  “I’m to take you to him,” said the ex-corporal stubbornly.

  “Not now! I’m not letting you mess this up. Not the likes of you!” Borkhausen was angry, but mastered himself. “You can tell the inspector I’ve got the bird, and I’m coming to see him later.”

  “Will you not make a fuss, and come along now!” the other repeated stubbornly.

  “I suppose you’ve learned that by heart and they’re the only words you know: ‘Come along now!’ Don’t you understand what I’m telling you?” Borkhausen yelled. “I’m waiting here for instructions, I have to sit here, otherwise our quarry will slip the noose! Is that too hard for you to grasp?” He looked slightly breathlessly at the man facing him, and added grouchily, “It’s the inspector’s rabbit I’m catching, you understand?”

  The ex-corporal said implacably, “I don’t know anything about any of that. The inspector said to me, ‘Fritsche, get me Borkhausen!’ So come along, will you!”

  “I don’t believe it!” said Borkhausen. “You’re too stupid for words. I’m staying here—or are you going to arrest me?” He could see by the other’s expression that that was an impossibility. “Well, get lost then!” he shouted and slammed the door in the corporal’s face.

  Three minutes later he saw the old corporal shuffle across the courtyard, having reconsidered his “Come along with me!”

  As soon as the man had disappeared through the entryway of the front house, Borkhausen started to worry about the consequences that his cheeking the representative of the all-powerful inspector might have. It was purely his rage with Kuno-Dieter that was to blame. It was shameless to leave his father sitting there for hours on end, possibly far into the night. Everywhere you looked, on every street corner, there were boys you could send with a message! But he would show Kuno what a view he took of such behavior. He wasn’t to think he could get away with it!

  Borkhausen luxuriated in fantasies of chastisement. He saw himself thrashing the childish body, doing it with a smile on his face, but not a smile of diminishing fury… He heard him cry out, and he placed one hand over the kid’s mouth while continuing to thrash him with the other, thrash him and thrash him until he was shaking from top to toe, whimpering…

  Borkhausen never tired of rehearsing such scenes to himself. As he did so, he stretched out on the sofa and groaned lustfully.

  He was almost disappointed by the knock of Kuno’s messenger, when it finally came. “What is it?” he asked.

  “I’m to take you to Kuno.”

  This time it was an older boy, of fourteen or fifteen, in a Hitler Youth tunic.

  “But you’re to give me five marks first.”

  “Five marks!” spat
Borkhausen, not daring to openly refuse this big lout in the brown shirt. “Five marks! You’re dab hands at chucking my money around!” He rummaged through his bills, looking for a fiver.

  The big Hitler Youth boy looked tensely at the bundle of money in the man’s hands. “I had to buy a ticket,” he said. “And what sort of time do you think it takes, getting here from the west end?”

  “And your time is precious, eh?” Borkhausen still hadn’t found the note he was looking for. “And the west end, whatever that means! That can’t be. You probably mean Mitte, anyway!”

  “Well, if Ansbacher Strasse isn’t out west, I don’t know…”

  The boy understood too late that he had blabbed. Borkhausen’s money went back in his pocket. “Thanks!” he said with a mocking laugh. “No need to waste any more of your precious time. I’ll find my own way there. The best is probably subway to Viktoria Luise Platz, wouldn’t you say?”

  “You can’t treat me that way! You can’t treat me that way!” said the Hitler Youth, and walked up to the man with fists clenched. His dark eyes glowed with fury. “I spent ticket money, I’ve…”

  “You’ve wasted your precious time, I know, you’ve told me!” laughed Borkhausen. “Get lost, sonny. Stupidity always costs!” Suddenly his rage boiled over again. “What are you doing, still standing around in my flat? Are you hoping to beat me up in my own parlor? Get out of here, unless you like the sound of your own wailing!”

  He shoved the furious boy out of the room and slammed the door shut behind the two of them. And all the way there, till they emerged from the subway at Viktoria Luise Platz, he had a stream of scathing comments for the boy, who never left his side, but who—while still pale with anger—made no more references to money.

  Once on Viktoria Luise Platz, the boy suddenly broke into a trot and was soon far ahead of the man. Borkhausen had to follow him as fast as he could: he didn’t want to leave the two boys talking alone together for any longer than he had to. He wasn’t quite sure who Kuno-Dieter would side with: his father, or this pup.