by Hans Fallada
From that time on, blows were the regular currency chez the Borkhausens. At the least provocation, the man let rip. Whatever he had in his hand he flung at her, the bloody bitch who had brought him such misfortune.
And Otti fought back. Never was there anything for him to eat, never any money, never any smokes. Whenever he laid a finger on her, she would scream so loud that all the neighbors came running, and all of them sided with her against Borkhausen, even though they knew she was nothing better than a common whore. And then one day, after he had ripped fistfuls of hair from her scalp, she did the meanest thing of all: she disappeared for good, leaving him with the four remaining brats, none of whom he was at all sure he had fathered. Goddamnit, Borkhausen had had to go to work, regular work, otherwise they would have all starved, and ten-year-old Paula took over the household.
A bad year, it was a fucking rotten year! And he was still consumed with acid hatred of the Persickes, with whom he couldn’t and didn’t dare get even, oh, his helpless rage and envy when it became known in the house that Baldur had got into a Napola school, and finally the small, feeble spark of hope when he saw how old Persicke’s drinking—maybe, maybe after all…
And now he was sitting in the Persickes’ flat, and there on the table under the window was the radio that Baldur had pinched from the old Rosenthal woman. Borkhausen was almost there; all he had to do now was discreetly remove the spy…
Borkhausen’s eyes light up when he imagines Baldur’s fury on seeing him seated at the table in his flat. Cunning devil, Baldur, but not cunning enough. Sometimes patience is worth more than cunning. And suddenly Borkhausen remembers what Baldur planned to do with him and Enno Kluge, that time they broke into the Rosenthal apartment—or rather, it wasn’t even a break-in; they’d been set up… Borkhausen thrusts out his lower lip and looks thoughtfully at this other guy, who has gotten very fidgety during their long silence, and then he says: “All right, why don’t you just show me what you’ve got in those suitcases!”
“Hold on there,” the rat tries to resist, “that’s a bit much, isn’t it? If my friend Herr Persicke has given me permission—that exceeds your rights as superintendent…”
“Cut the crap!” says Borkhausen. “Either you show me what’s in the suitcases, or else you and I are going to the police together.”
“I don’t have to,” squeaks the rat, “But I’ll show you because I want to. The police always make trouble, and now that my Party comrade Persicke has gotten so ill, it might take days before he can confirm my statements.”
“Get on with it! Open up!” says Borkhausen suddenly furious, and he takes a swig from the bottle, too.
The rat Klebs looks at him, and suddenly a wicked smile comes over the spy’s face. “Get on with it! Open up!” With that cry, Borkhausen has betrayed his avarice. He has also betrayed the fact that he’s not the super, and even if he is, then he’s a super who has dishonest intentions.
“Well, chum?” says the rat suddenly in quite another tone of voice. “What about fifty-fifty?”
A punch floors him. To be on the safe side, Borkhausen clouts him two or three times with a chair leg. There, that’s the last of him for an hour or so!
And then Borkhausen starts unpacking and repacking. Once again, old Frau Rosenthal’s linens change owners. Borkhausen works swiftly and calmly. This time no one is going to come between him and success. He’d sooner kill them all, even if it means risking his own head. He won’t be fooled again.
And then, a quarter of an hour later, there was only a brief scuffle with the two constables as Borkhausen left the apartment. A bit of tugging and stamping, and he was tied and cuffed.
“There!” says Judge Fromm. “And that, I think, should spell the end of your time in this house, Herr Borkhausen. I won’t forget to hand your children over to the welfare authorities. Though what happens to them probably won’t interest you very much. Now, gentlemen, let’s take a look inside. I do hope, Herr Borkhausen, you haven’t been too rough with the little fellow who walked up the stairs before you. And then we should find Herr Persicke as well, Constable. Last night, I’m afraid, he suffered an attack of delirium tremens.”
Chapter 43
INTERLUDE: AN IDYLL IN THE COUNTRY
The ex-postie Eva Kluge is working in the potato fields, just as she had always dreamed of doing. It’s a fine day in early summer, and already a little hot to be working; the sky is radiant and blue and there’s almost no wind, especially in the sheltered corner of the field up against the forest. As she hoes, Eva takes off one garment after another; now she’s only in a skirt and blouse. Like her face and arms, her strong, bare legs are golden brown.
Her hoe encounters orach, charlock, thistles, quack grass—progress is slow; the field is choked with weeds. Often, too, the hoe strikes a stone, then it sings with a silvery clang—she likes the sound. Now, at the edge of the forest, Eva has found a clump of red willow herb—it’s a damp little hollow, where the potatoes are small and moldy but the willow herb thrives. She had intended to eat her breakfast now—going by the sun, it’s about the right time—but she wants to see off the willow herb before she allows herself to take a break. She hacks away vigorously, her lips pressed shut. She’s learned to hate weeds, those useless, destructive things, and she chops away at them implacably.
Even if her mouth is tight shut, her eyes are clear and calm. Her expression no longer has that taut, concerned look it had two years earlier, in Berlin. She has grown calmer, she has survived. She knows that little Enno is dead, for her old neighbor Frau Gesch wrote to tell her so. She knows she has lost both her sons—Max fell in Russia, and she had already given up on Karlemann. She is just short of forty-five years old, and has a good bit of life still ahead of her, and she is not despairing; she is working. She doesn’t just want to get through the remaining years, she wants to do something with them.
Also, she has something she looks forward to every day: her evening get-together with the village’s substitute teacher. The regular teacher, Schwoch, is a rampant Nazi, a cowardly little yapper and denouncer, who must have declared a hundred times with tears in his eyes how much he regrets not being able to serve at the front, but instead must follow the Führer’s orders and accept his rural posting. Well, Schwoch finally was drafted into the Wehrmacht after all, in spite of his innumerable medical certificates. That was six months ago. But the war enthusiast has still not seen any action: Schwoch is currently serving in a secretarial capacity in a paymaster’s office. Frau Schwoch regularly travels to her husband to supply him with ham and bacon, but her husband must have shared these tidbits with others: this had borne fruit, Frau Schwoch reported after her last bacon mercy mission, for her beloved Walter had been promoted to corporal. Corporal—when according to orders issued by the Führer in person only frontline troops were eligible for promotion. But in the case of fervent Party members with ham and bacon to disburse, exemptions clearly had to be made.
Well, Eva Kluge doesn’t care about any of that. She knows all about it, has known ever since she quit the Party herself. Yes, she went back to Berlin; once she had recovered her composure, she returned to Berlin and confronted the Party court and the post office. Those were not pleasant days, anything but. They shouted at her, threatened her, and once, during her five-day arrest, beat her. She only just avoided being sentenced to concentration camp—but in the end they had let her go. Enemy of the state—that designation was punishment enough.
Then Eva Kluge had wound up her household. She had to sell a lot of her things—she had only been approved for one room in the village, but she was living alone now. And she wasn’t working exclusively for her brother-in-law, who would have given her only board, and no money at all; she helped all the farmers. She worked in the fields and with the animals, but she was also in demand as nurse, seamstress, gardener, and sheep-shearer. She had deft hands, and she never felt that she was learning something new; it was more like the memory of some task she had known forever but just had
n’t practiced for a long time. Farmwork was somehow in her blood.
But this whole peaceful little existence she had established for herself after so much loss and collapse had only acquired focus and pleasure through the substitute teacher, Kienschaper. Kienschaper was a tall, slightly stooped man in his early fifties, who had white flapping hair and a deeply tanned face with youthfully shining blue eyes. The way he tamed the children of the village with those smiling blue eyes and led them away from the drills and rote memorizations of his predecessor into more human and humanist terrain, the way he walked through the farm orchards with his pruning shears, cutting away deadwood and wild shoots from neglected trees, cutting out cankers and appying carbolic to the wounds—in that same way he had healed Eva’s wounds, soothed her bitterness, and brought her peace.
Not that he talked a lot—Kienschaper wasn’t a great talker. But when he took her to his apiary and told her about the life of bees, which were creatures he loved with a passion, when he walked with her through the fields in the evening and showed her how untidily a certain field was sown and with how little effort it could be made far more productive, when Kienschaper helped a cow to calve or, unasked, righted a toppled fence, when he sat at the organ and improvised for the two of them, when everywhere he went looked tidy and at peace for his having been there—then that did more than any words could do for Eva’s contentment. It was a life gently inclined toward its end, peaceful and bringing peace in a time full of hatred, blood, and tears.
Naturally, Frau Schwoch, an even more fervent Nazi than her warrior husband, took an instant dislike to Kienschaper, and did all her malicious brain could think of to hurt him. She had to provide bread and board for her husband’s stand-in, but she did it with such precise calculation that Kienschaper never got breakfast before classes began, and his supper was always charred, and his room was never cleaned.
But she was powerless in the face of his unflappable cheerfulness. She might spit and rant and speak ill of him, press her ear to the classroom door and then go to the school governors to denounce him—he always spoke to her as though to a badly brought up child that one day would come to see its naughtiness by itself. And in the end Kienschaper went to Eva Kluge for his meals, moved into the village, and the fat and furious Frau Schwoch was forced to conduct her campaign against him at a distance.
When the subject of marriage had first come up between Eva Kluge and the white-haired teacher was something neither of them quite knew. Perhaps they had never spoken about it. It had just presented itself, all by itself. They were in no hurry, either—one day, someday, it would happen. Two aging people, unwilling to face the evening of their lives in solitude. No, no more children—Eva shuddered at the prospect. But friendship, love, intimacy, and above all, trust. She, who in her first marriage had never been able to trust, she, who had always had to take the lead, she now—trustingly—permitted herself to be led for the last stretch of her life. All was darkness, and she had been full of fear and apprehension, and then the sun had peeped through the clouds once more.
The red willow herb lies piled up on the ground; it’s been defeated for now. Yes, it will grow back, that’s what weeds do, and really you should pick it up out of the loosened ground after plowing, because each bit of individual root left underground will put forth new shoots. But Eva knows the place now; she’ll keep an eye on it and she’ll keep coming back until the willow herb is gone for good.
She can stop for breakfast now; it’s time, and her stomach is ready, too. But when she looks across to her bread and the coffee thermos she left on the sheltering edge of the forest, she can see she won’t be having breakfast today, and starts shushing her stomach. Because there is someone there already, a boy of about fourteen, incredibly filthy and wild-looking, and he is gobbling down her bread as if he was close to starving.
The boy is so preoccupied with filling his belly that he hasn’t even noticed that the hoe has stopped its work in the field. He gives a start when the woman draws up in front of him, and he stares at her with big blue eyes under a thatch of matted blond hair. Even though he’s been caught red-handed and he can’t run away, the boy doesn’t look fearful or guilty; there is something challenging, almost taunting in his eye.
In the last few months in the village, Frau Kluge has gotten a little used to these children: the bombing raids on Berlin had intensified, and the populace was called upon to send their children out into the countryside. The provinces are inundated with these Berlin kids. It’s a curious thing; some of these kids can’t adjust to the quiet of rural life. Here they have peace and quiet, better food, undisturbed nights, but they can’t stand it, they have to go back into the metropolis. And so they set off: barefoot, begging for scraps of food, with no money, hounded by rural constables, they make their way resolutely back into the city that almost every night is ablaze. Picked up and returned to their rural communities, they give themselves a little time to put some flesh on their bones, and then run away back home again.
This present specimen with the challenging eye who was eating Eva’s breakfast had probably been on the road for quite some time. She couldn’t remember ever having seen a figure quite as filthy and ragged as this. There were straws in his hair, and she felt she could have planted carrots in his ears.
“Well, is it good?” asked Frau Kluge.
“Sure!” he said, and the one word was enough to confirm his Berlin origins.
He looked at her. “Are you going to beat me?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “Go on eating. I can miss breakfast once in a way, and you’re really hungry.”
“Sure!” he said. And then: “Are you going to let me go?”
“I might,” she replied. “But maybe you’ll not mind if I wash you first, and sort out your clothes a little bit. Maybe I might find a decent pair of pants for you.”
“Oh, never mind that!” he said, dismissively. “I’ll only sell them off when I’m desperate. You’d be surprised at all I’ve sold off in the past year on the road! At least fifteen pairs of pants! And ten pairs of shoes!”
He looked at her proudly.
“Why are you telling me that?” she asked. “It would have been more in your interest to take the pants and not say anything.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe because you didn’t bawl me out for sneaking your breakfast. I don’t like being bawled out.”
“So you’ve been on the road for twelve months?”
“That was a stretch. I had a job in the winter. Working for a publican in some burg. I fed the pigs and washed the beer glasses, I did all sorts. It wasn’t a bad time,” he said reflectively. “Funny guy, the publican. Always drunk, but he was on the level, talking to me as if I was no different to him, same age and all. That’s where I learned to drink and smoke. D’you like schnapps yourself?”
For now Frau Kluge passed over the question whether drinking schnapps was advisable for fourteen-year-olds.
“But you ran away from there too? Are you going back to Berlin?”
“Nah,” said the boy. “I’m not going back to my folks anymore. They’re too common for me.”
“But your parents will be worried about you—they don’t even know where you are!”
“Them worry! They’re pleased to be rid of me!”
“What does your father do?”
“Him? He’s a bit of everything: a spy and a stoolie, and he does a bit of stealing on the side. If he finds anything worth stealing. Only, he’s a bit of a fool, and he doesn’t often find anything.”
“I see,” said Frau Kluge, and her voice sounded a little less gentle after these revelations. “And what does your mother say?”
“My mother? What would she ever say? She’s just a hoor!”
Whap! In spite of her guarantees, he had got his slap.
“You should be ashamed to talk about your mother like that! Shame on you!”
The boy, not really changing his expression, rubbed his cheek.
“I
felt that,” he said. “I don’t want any more like that, thank you very much.”
“You shouldn’t talk about your mother like that! Do you understand?” she asked angrily.
“Why not?” he asked, and leaned back. He blinked contentedly at his hostess, perfectly replete now. “Why wouldn’t I! When that’s what she is. She says so herself. ‘If I didn’t go out on the game,’ she often used to say, ‘then you’d all starve!’ There’s five of us, see, all with different fathers. Mine is supposed to have an estate in Pomerania. I was going to look him up. He must be a queer fish—he’s called Kuno-Dieter. There can’t be that many with such a silly name, so I’m sure I’ll catch up with him in the end…”
“Kuno-Dieter,” said Frau Kluge. “So your name is Kuno-Dieter as well?”
“Just Kuno will do; you can shove the Dieter!”
“All right then, Kuno, where were you evacuated to? What’s the name of the village where you got off the train?”
“I’m not an evacuee! I just ran away!”
He was lying on his side now, his dirty cheek propped on an equally dirty fist. He blinked at her sleepily, all set for a little gossip. “I’ll tell you what happened. My so-called father, it was over a year ago now, he cheated me of fifty marks, and on top of that he gave me a whipping. So I get together a few friends, which is to say they weren’t really friends, just kids, you know, and we cornered him and gave him a bit of a hiding. That was good for him; it taught him that it’s not always the big ones that can do the little ones! And then we stole the money out of his pocket, too. I don’t remember how much it was, the big kids divvied it up among themselves. All I got was a twenty, and then they said to me, You’d better scram now, your old man will murder you or stick you in a juvenile home. Get out in the countryside and lay low with the farmers. And so I got out in the country and hid out with the farmers. And I’ve led a pretty nice life ever since, I’ll say!”
