by Hans Fallada
“I told you, it was me that told him to pick them up! I might have seen them before him! Might, mind!”
“God, what am I going to do with them? I’ll drop them down the loo!”
“You’re going to have to take them to management, otherwise you’ll be making yourself responsible. The man who picked them up can’t be relied upon to keep his mouth shut forever. Hurry along, I’ll fill in for you at the saw.”
Reluctantly, the man walks off. He holds the cards with the very tips of his fingers, as though they were terribly hot.
Quangel returns to the shop. But he can’t go to the table saw right away: the whole shop is in uproar. No one knows anything for certain, but they all have a sense that something has happened. They put their heads together, they whisper and tsk, tsk, and this time the silent birdlike stare of the foreman is no use. He is forced to do what he hasn’t done for years, curse them out loud, threaten punishment, play the wild man.
When quiet returns to one corner of the shop, the opposite corner grows all the noisier, and once things are running reasonably well, he notices that two or three of the machines are unmanned: the bunch have decamped to the lavatory! He chases them down there, and one of them has the nerve to ask, “What was that you were reading a moment ago, boss? Was it really a British propaganda leaflet?”
“Just get back to your work!” growls Quangel, and drives them ahead of him back to the shop. Where everyone is once again chattering. They’ve formed up into little clusters and there is an unprecedented level of disorder. Quangel has to run back and forth, he has to yell, threaten, swear—the sweat is beading on his brow…
And all the while he continues to think, So that’s the effect. Just fear. So much fear they that don’t even read on! But maybe that doesn’t mean anything. In here, they feel they’re under observation. Most of my cards were found by individuals on their own. They could read them in peace, think about them—they would have a completely different effect under those conditions. This is a stupid experiment I’m conducting. Let’s see how it goes. It’s probably just as well that I, as foreman, found the cards and reported them—that will get me off the hook. No, I’ve not risked anything. Even if they search the flat, they won’t find anything. Admittedly, Anna will get a shock—but no, before they do the search I’ll be back and prepare Anna… Two minutes past two, the afternoon shift ought to be coming on, it’s time for my regular shift to begin.
But there is no change of shift. No bell goes off in the shop, no relieving shift (which would have been Quangel’s own) appears, and the machines continue to run noisily. Now the men are getting really restive; they put their heads together more and more frequently, and look at their watches.
Quangel is forced to give up his effort to stop their chatter: there is only one of him and eighty of them; he has no chance.
Then suddenly a gentleman comes down from the office, a smart-looking gentleman with sharp creases and a Party badge. He stands next to Quangel and shouts into the noise, “Shift! Your attention, please!”
All faces turn in his direction—curious, expectant, gloomy, apathetic, hostile faces.
“Circumstances require the shift to continue working for the time being. Overtime will be paid!”
He stops, they all stare. Is that it? Circumstances require? They want a bit more than that!
But he merely yells, “All right, back to work!”
And, turning to Quangel, “I want you to keep them calm and focused! Who is the fellow who picked up the cards?”
“I think it was me that saw them first.”
“I know. That one? Okay, you know his name?”
“No, this isn’t my shift.”
“Of course. Oh, and will you tell the shift that they’re not able to use the lavatories for the time being, and no one is allowed to leave the workshop. There are two sentries posted outside every door!”
And the man with the sharp creases nods brusquely at Quangel and walks off.
Quangel walks down the assembly line. For a moment he studies the work, the hands of the men. Then he says, “For the time being, no one is allowed to leave the workshop or go to the toilet. There are two sentries posted outside every door!”
And before they can ask him any questions, he’s gone on to the next place on the line and repeats his message.
Now he doesn’t need to drive them on or tell them to stop chatting. They are all working silently and doggedly. They all sense the threat hanging over each one of them. Because there is not one among the eighty men there who has not in some way opposed the present government, at least by a word or two! Each one is threatened. Each life is at risk. They are all terrified…
And they continue to turn out coffins. They pile up the coffins, which cannot leave the premises, in a corner of the workshop. To begin with there are only a few, but as the hours go by, there are more and more of them, piled up as high as the ceiling, and new piles have started up alongside them. Coffins and coffins, enough for everyone on the shift, enough for everyone in Germany! The men are still alive, but they are already making their own coffins.
In the midst of them stands Quangel. His head jerks this way and that. He can feel the danger, but it makes him laugh. He has taken a chance, he has thrown the whole machine into disarray, but still he’s just silly old Quangel, the old miser. They’ll never suspect him. He will fight on and on.
Then the door opens, and the man with the sharp creases walks in again. He is followed by a second man, a tall, gangling fellow with a sandy mustache that he keeps stroking.
Immediately all work stops.
And while the manager calls out, “All right, everyone, knock off!”;
while they put down their tools with a mixture of relief and disbelief;
while light returns to their dulled eyes;
while all this is happening, the tall man with the pale mustache says, “Foreman Quangel, I’m arresting you on urgent suspicion of treason. I want you to leave the room quietly, I’ll follow!”
Poor Anna, thought Quangel, and with his head and bird profile upraised, he slowly preceded Inspector Escherich out of the shop.
Chapter 47
MONDAY, INSPECTOR ESCHERICH’S GREAT DAY
This time, Inspector Escherich had worked quickly and efficiently.
No sooner had news reached him that two postcards had been found in the eighty-man shop of the furniture makers Krause & Co. than he knew: this was the moment he had been waiting for for so long. At long last, the Hobgoblin had made a mistake. Now he was going to get him!
Within five minutes he had ordered up enough personnel to seal off the entire factory and he was rushing towards it in a Mercedes, with the Obergruppenführer himself at the wheel.
Once there, Prall was in favor of pulling all eighty men out of the shop immediately and questioning every one of them until they had established the truth, but Escherich said, “First get me a list of all the employees with their addresses. How soon can I have that?”
“In five minutes. What about the men? They’re due to knock off in five minutes’ time.”
“At the end of their shift, tell them they have to carry on working. No explanations. I want two men on every door. No one leaves the room. I want it all done as discreetly as possible; I don’t want the men to grow alarmed!”
The secretary comes back with the list. “The author of the cards must live in one of three streets: Chodowiecki, Jablonski, or Christburger Strasse. Which of the eighty men lives there?”
They go through the list: None! Not one!
It seemed as though Otto Quangel’s luck was holding. He was on the afternoon shift, so his name did not appear on the list.
Inspector Escherich thrust out his lower lip, quickly retracted it, and bit hard on his mustache, which he had just previously been stroking. He had been perfectly sure of himself, and he was now distinctly unnerved.
Apart from the assault on his dearly loved mustache, he showed no trace of his disappointment,
saying coolly, “All right, let’s go through them one by one. Which of you can confirm information? Are you the head of personnel here? Okay, let’s go, Abeking, Hermann… What about him?”
They proceeded incredibly slowly. After an hour and a quarter they had got to H.
Obergruppenführer Prall kept lighting cigarettes and immediately putting them out. He began whispered conversations that trailed off after a sentence or two. He drummed on the windowpanes. Suddenly he burst out, “This is stupid! Why don’t I just…”
Inspector Escherich didn’t even look up. His fear of his superior had finally left him. He was going to find his man, but admitted to himself that drawing a blank on the street addresses had set him back. He didn’t care how impatient Prall got, he wasn’t going to conduct a general questioning of everyone.
“Carry on!”
“Kampfer, Eugen—he’s the foreman!”
“I’m sorry, but we can rule him out. This morning at nine he hurt his hand on the planer. We called in Otto Quangel to replace him…”
“Okay, carry on: Krull, Otto…”
“Excuse me again, but foreman Quangel doesn’t appear on the inspector’s list…”
“Will you stop interrupting! How long are we going to sit here for? Quangel, that old donkey, we can forget about him!”
But Escherich, a spark of hope lighting up in him, asks, “Where does this Quangel live?”
“We’ll have to check; he’s not on this shift.”
“Well, check him then, for God’s sake! And get a move on! I thought I’d asked you for a comprehensive list!”
“Of course we’ll check right away. But I can tell you, Inspector, Quangel’s not your man. He’s an almost senile old guy, who’s worked here for ever. We know him inside out…”
The inspector gestured dismissively. He knew how many mistakes were made by people claiming to know someone inside out.
“Well?” he asked the returning office boy. “Well!”
Not without a little ceremony, the young man intoned, “Foreman Quangel lives at Jablonski Strasse number…”
Escherich jumped up. With wholly uncharacteristic excitement he shouted, “It’s him! That’s our Hobgoblin!”
And Obergruppenführer Prall screamed, “All right, bring the bastard in here, and we’ll rough him up!”
Everyone was excited.
Quangel! Who would have thought it—Quangel? That old fool—it couldn’t be. But then he was the first to pick up the postcards! No wonder, if he was the one who dropped them! But why would he be such a fool as to entrap himself? Quangel—no!
And above them all, Prall’s hysterical screams, “Get me the son of a bitch! I want him roughed up!”
Inspector Escherich was the first to recover his composure.
“If I might have a word with you, Obergruppenführer! Might I suggest that we first conduct a search of Quangel’s apartment?”
“Why go to those lengths, Escherich? In the end the fellow will slip through our fingers again!”
“No one can get out of here! But what if we find some piece of evidence in his apartment that convicts him straight off, that makes it impossible for him to deny his guilt? That would save us a lot of work. And this is the moment for that! Now, while the man and his family have no idea that he’s under suspicion…”
“I’d have thought it was simpler to twist the man’s guts out of his body till he confesses. But do it your way: we’ll pick up his wife at the same time. I tell you this, though, Escherich, if the man tries any funny business, if he throws himself into some machinery or something, then I’ll have your guts for garters! I want to see the fellow strung up!”
“And so you shall! I’ll have someone keep an eye on Quangel secretly through the door. The shift is to carry on, gentlemen, until we’re back—I expect we’ll be an hour or so…”
Chapter 48
THE ARREST OF ANNA QUANGEL
After Otto Quangel was gone, Anna Quangel lapsed into a state of dull stupor, from which she woke suddenly. She felt all over the cover for the two postcards and couldn’t find them. She tried to think, but she couldn’t remember that Otto had taken them with him. No, quite the opposite, now it was coming back to her, it was she who was going to drop them the next day or the day after—that was how they had left it.
So the cards had to be in the apartment still. And, alternately freezing and burning with fever, she starts looking for them. She turns the apartment upside down, she looks in the laundry, she crawls under the bed. She has trouble breathing, and sometimes she has to stop and sit on the side of the bed because she simply can’t go on. She pulls the covers round her and stares into space, having forgotten the postcards again. Then she suddenly jumps up once more and starts looking.
She’s been doing this for hours when the bell goes off. She stops. Was that the doorbell? Who can it be? Who wants something from her?
And she lapses into a further round of feverish thinking, which is interrupted by a second ring. This time it keeps going for a long time, insistently. And then there is the sound of fists banging on the door. She hears the cry: “Open the door! Police! Open up immediately!”
Anna Quangel smiles, and smiling she goes back to bed, pulling the covers over her head. Let them shout and ring all they like! She’s sick, she doesn’t have to open. Let them come back another time, when Otto’s home. She’s not going to let them in.
More ringing, shouting, banging…
Idiots! As if I would pay any attention to their noise! They can all go to hell!
In her present feverish condition, she doesn’t think of the missing postcards, or of the danger of this police visit. She is just pleased to be ill and not to have to answer the door.
Then they’re inside the flat, five or six of them—they’d got hold of a locksmith, or used a skeleton key. She hadn’t had the chain on; because she was sick she hadn’t chained the door after Otto left. Today of all days—otherwise, she always puts the chain on.
“Are you Anna Quangel? Married to Foreman Otto Quangel?”
“Yes, that’s right, sir. Have been for twenty-eight years now.”
“Why didn’t you open the door when we rang and shouted?”
“Because I’m sick, sir. I’ve got flu!”
“Don’t give us that!” yells a fat man in a black uniform. “You’re just pretending!”
Inspector Escherich makes a calming gesture in the direction of his superior. Any child could see the woman really is sick. And perhaps it’s a good thing for them: after all, people sometimes blab when they have a temperature. While his men start searching the flat, the inspector turns to the woman again. He takes her hot hand and says sympathetically, “Frau Quangel, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you…”
He pauses.
“Well?” asks the woman, but she seems quite relaxed.
“I’ve had to arrest your husband.”
The woman smiles. Anna Quangel smiles. Smiling, she shakes her head and says, “No, my dear man, I don’t believe you! No one would arrest Otto, he’s a law-abiding citizen.” She bends over to the inspector and whispers, “Do you want to know what I think? I think this is all a dream. I’ve got a temperature, you know. The doctor said it was flu, and if you have a temperature, you can dream all sorts of things. And you’re all part of my dream: you and the fat man in the black uniform, and the man over by the chest of drawers, going through my clothes. No, my dear man, you haven’t arrested Otto, I’m just dreaming.”
Inspector Escherich replies, also in a whisper, “Frau Quangel, now you’re dreaming about the postcards. You know, the postcards your husband always wrote?”
But Anna Quangel’s senses are not so befuddled that the word postcards doesn’t ring a bell. She gives a start. For an instant, the eyes with which she fixes the inspector are clear and alert. But then, smiling again and shaking her head, she says, “What postcards? My husband doesn’t write postcards! If there’s any writing to be done, I’m the one to do it. But w
e haven’t written to anyone for a long time. We haven’t written to anyone since my son fell. You’re just dreaming that, my dear man, that my Otto writes postcards!”
The inspector detected her start, but that’s no proof as yet. So he says, “Actually, it’s like this: the moment your son fell is when you both began writing postcards. Both of you. Don’t you remember your very first one?”
And with a certain ceremony, he recites, “Mother! The Führer has murdered my son! Mother! The Führer will murder your sons too, he will not stop till he has brought sorrow to every home…”
She listens. She smiles. “It took a mother to write that! My Otto could never have written it, you’re just dreaming!”
And the inspector: “You dictated it, and Otto wrote it! Admit it!”
But she shook her head. “No, dear sir! I couldn’t dictate something like that, I don’t have the brains…”
The Inspector gets up and leaves the bedroom. In the parlor he joins his men in the search for writing things. He finds a little bottle of ink, a pen and nibs, and a field postcard. Armed with those things, he returns to Anna Quangel.
In the intervening time, she has been questioned—after his fashion—by Obergruppenführer Prall. Prall is firmly convinced that all that stuff about flu and temperature is just pretend. Then again, even if he had thought she was really sick, it wouldn’t have made the least difference in his methods. He grabs Anna Quangel by the shoulders, really hurting her, and starts shaking her. Her head slams against the wooden bedstead. He jerks her back and forth twenty or thirty times, and then presses her head down into the pillows, screaming venomously in her face: “You’re still lying to me, aren’t you, communist pig? When—will—you—learn—to—stop—lying! Stop—lying!”
“No!’ wails the woman. “Stop that!”
“Admit you wrote those postcards! Admit—it—right—now! Or—I’ll—beat—your—brains—out, you Bolshevik pig!”
And with every word, he slams her head against the bedstead.
