Every Man Dies Alone

by Hans Fallada

  The clock strikes four. Footfall, clank of tin dishes, murmurs. The sounds come closer. Your heart starts to beat; sweat breaks out all over your body. Suddenly a key grinds in the lock. Easy, easy, it’s next door—no, two doors away! Not your turn yet. A stifled “No! No! Help!” Feet scraping. Silence. The sentry’s regular pacing back and forth, back and forth. Silence. Waiting. Terrified waiting. I can’t stand it…

  And after an endless delay, after a gulph of fear, an unendurable period of waiting which nonetheless has to be endured, the murmurs, the noise of feet, the rattle of the key… Coming closer, closer, closer. O God, not today, not me! Just three more days. Clank! The keys—that’s my cell. No, yours! It’s next door, a few murmured words, they came for my neighbor. They get him out, the sound of footsteps receding…

  Time here crumbles into myriad tiny pieces. Waiting. Nothing but waiting. And the footsteps of the sentries in the corridor. O God, today they’re just going from cell to cell, and I’m next. My—turn—next! In three hours I’ll be a corpse, this body will be stiff, these legs that can still carry me will be pegs, this hand that knew work, caresses, tenderness, sin, will be a rotting piece of meat! It can’t be, but it is!

  Waiting—waiting—waiting! And suddenly the condemned man sees the gleam of light outside the window, he can hear the bell saying it’s time to get up. The day is at hand, another working day—and he’s been spared once more. He has another three days’ grace—or four, if it’s a Thursday. Fortune has smiled on him! He breathes more easily; at last he can breathe again—perhaps they’ll just let him live. Perhaps there’ll be a great victory and an amnesty and maybe his punishment will be commuted to life imprisonment!

  An hour of breathing more easily!

  And then fear begins again, and poisons these three days, or four: last time they stopped right outside my door. Next Monday, they’ll begin with me. Oh, what can I do? Nothing…

  And always anew, always anew, culminating twice a week, but every day of the week, fear, every second, fear!

  Month after month: deadly fear!

  Sometimes Otto Quangel asks himself how he knows all this. He hasn’t talked to anyone, and no one has talked to him. A few mean words from the sentry: “Come! Get up! Work faster!” Perhaps while his tin dish was being filled, something like “seven this week,” more mouthed than whispered, and that was the size of it.

  His senses had become hypernaturally acute: they guessed whatever he couldn’t see. His ears picked up every sound in the corridor: the scraps of conversation as sentries clocked on and off, a curse, a scream—everything revealed itself to him, nothing remained a secret. And then at night, in the long nights that according to regulations went on for thirteen hours but that were never nights at all because a light was kept burning in each cell, then he would sometimes dare to clamber up to the window and hang there listening to the night outside. He knew that the sentries in the yard with their dogs had orders to shoot at any face that appeared in the window—and he heard shots, fairly regularly—but he did it anyway.

  He stood there on his stool, sniffing the pure night air (the air alone made the risk worthwhile), and he heard the whispering going from window to window: “Karl’s been beaten again!” or “The woman in #347 spent the whole day standing downstairs,” and in time he was able to puzzle things out. In time he knew that the man in the cell next to his had worked in counterintelligence and was supposed to have sold secrets to the enemy; twice already he had tried to kill himself. And in the cell behind his was a worker in a power plant who had allowed the dynamos to fry. And one of the guards, Brennecke, would get you paper and pencil stubs and smuggle letters out, if someone on the outside bribed him with money or, better yet, food. And so on and so on. News and more news. Even death row speaks, breathes, lives. Even on death row, the deep-seated urge to communicate cannot be extinguished.

  But even though Otto Quangel—occasionally—put his life on the line to listen at the window, even though his senses never tired of picking up on each little change, still he was not like the others. Sometimes they sensed that there was someone at the window in his cell; once someone whispered, “Well, what’s with you, Otto? Got the answer to your appeal yet?” (They knew all about him.) But he never answered; he never admitted that he, too, was listening. He didn’t belong to them; even though he was facing the same sentence they were, he was different.

  And the thing that made him different wasn’t his cussedness, as before, nor the love of peace and quiet that had always set him apart, nor his dislike of speaking that had enjoined him to silence, but the little glass vial that Judge Fromm had slipped into his possession.

  The vial of cyanide had made him free. The others, his companions in suffering, had to walk to the end of their designated road; he had a choice. He could die at any minute of his choosing. He was free. In the death house, behind bars and high walls, in chains and irons, he—Otto Quangel, erstwhile master carpenter, husband, father, troublemaker—was free. They had done it, they had made him free as he had never in his life been free before. He, the possessor of the vial, did not fear death. Death was with him at all hours; Death was his friend and intimate. He, Otto Quangel, had no need to wake early on Mondays and Thursdays and listen gibbering at the door of his cell. He was not with them, or not of them, not quite. He didn’t have to torment himself, because the end of all torments was in his possession.

  It was a good life he was leading. He loved it. He wasn’t even quite sure he would ever need his glass vial. Perhaps it was better to wait till the very last moment? Perhaps he would be able to see Anna once more? Wasn’t it right to spare them no trouble, no shame?

  Let them kill him, that was better! He wanted to know how it felt—it was as though he had an entitlement, a duty to know how they went about it. Up until the moment when they put a noose round his neck, or a block under his head, he wanted to know. And then, in the very last minute, he could still play his trick on them.

  Then, in the certainty that nothing could happen to him, that—perhaps for the very first time in his life—he could be just himself, as he was, in that certainty he found calm, serenity, even cheerfulness. His aging body had never felt so well as during these weeks. His beady bird’s eye had never looked as friendly as it did now in the death cell in the Plötze. His spirit had never been able to roam as easily as here.

  A good life it was!

  He hoped Anna was doing well, too. Old Fromm was a man of his word. Anna, too, would be beyond chicaneries and torments; Anna, too, would be free, imprisoned and free…

  Chapter 67

  THE PLEAS FOR CLEMENCY

  Otto Quangel had spent only a few days—in accordance with the order of the People’s Court—lying in the dark cell in solitary, freezing miserably in the little iron cage that most resembled a scaled-down version of the monkey house at the zoo, when the door opened, a light came on, and there in the doorway stood his lawyer, Dr. Stark, looking at him.

  Quangel slowly stood up and looked back.

  So that suited and booted gent with his rosy fingernails and his casual drawl had taken it upon himself to pay him a call. Probably to see him suffer.

  But even then Quangel had lodged in his cheek the vial of cyanide, his talisman that allowed him to endure cold and hunger. And so, despite being in rags and shaking with cold and with hunger burning his stomach, he stared back calmly, even with a mocking cheerfulness, at the “distinguished-looking gentleman.”

  “Well?” Quangel finally asked.

  “I’m bringing you the verdict,” said the lawyer, drawing a piece of paper out of his briefcase.

  Quangel didn’t take it. “I’m not interested,” he said. “I know it’s death. And my wife?”

  “Your wife as well. And there’s no appeal.”

  “Good,” he replied.

  “But you can petition for clemency,” said the lawyer. “To the Führer?”

  “Yes, to the Führer.”

  “No, thanks.”

/>   “So you want to die?”

  Quangel smiled.

  “Are you not afraid?”

  Quangel smiled.

  For the first time, the lawyer studied his client’s face with a trace of interest. He said, “In that case, I’ll submit the petition myself.

  “After first calling for me to be sentenced!”

  “It’s the way things happen. Following the death sentence, there’s the petition for clemency. It’s among my duties.”

  “Your duties. I understand. Like defending me. Well, I expect your petition won’t have much effect, so why don’t you just forget it.”

  “I’ll submit it anyway, regardless of what you say.”

  “I can’t stop you, I suppose.”

  Quangel sat down on his cot again. He was waiting for the other man to stop his stupid chatter and leave.

  But the lawyer didn’t leave, and after a long pause he said, “Can I ask you what made you do it?”

  “Do what?” asked Quangel coolly, without looking at the elegant lawyer.

  “Write those postcards. They didn’t accomplish anything, and now they’ll cost you your life.”

  “Because I’m stupid. Because I didn’t have any better ideas. Because I thought they would accomplish something, as you put it.

  That’s why!”

  “And don’t you regret it? Aren’t you sorry to lose your life over a stupid stunt like that?”

  Quangel cast a sharp glare at the lawyer, his proud, old, tough bird-glare. “At least I stayed decent,” he said. “I didn’t participate.”

  The lawyer took a long look at the man sitting there in silence. Then he said, “I have to say, I think my colleague who defended your wife was right: you are both mad.”

  “Do you think it’s mad to be willing to pay any price for remaining decent?”

  “You didn’t need the postcards for that.”

  “That would have been a kind of tacit agreement. What was your price for turning into such a fine gentleman, with creased trousers and polished fingernails and deceitful concluding speeches? What did you have to pay?”

  The lawyer said nothing.

  “You see!” said Quangel. “And you will continue to pay more and more, and maybe one day, like me, you will pay with your life, but you will have done it for your indecency!”

  Still the lawyer said nothing.

  Quangel stood up. “There,” he laughed. “You know perfectly well that the man behind bars is the decent one, and you on the outside are a scoundrel, that the criminal is free, and the decent man is sentenced to death. You’re no lawyer. And now you want to ask for clemency for me—why don’t you just get out of here?”

  “I will appeal for clemency for you,” said the lawyer.

  Quangel remained silent.

  “Well, I’ll be seeing you!” said the lawyer.

  “Hardly—that is, unless you want to come to my execution. You’re cordially invited!” The lawyer left.

  He was coarse and insensitive, and a bad man. But even so he was able to admit to himself that Quangel was the better man.

  The clemency plea was drawn up, and insanity was suggested as grounds on which the Führer might be merciful, but the lawyer knew full well that his client was not mad.

  A petition for clemency was sent to the Führer on Anna Quangel’s behalf as well, but it didn’t come from Berlin; it came from a small poor village in Brandenburg, and the name of the sender on the envelope was Heffke.

  Anna Quangel’s parents had received a letter from their daughter-in-law, that is, from the wife of their son, Ulrich. The letter contained only bad news, and it was couched in short, harsh, unsparing sentences. Ulrich was in an asylum in Wittenau, and it was Otto and Anna Quangel who were to blame. They had been sentenced to death for betraying their Führer and Fatherland. So much for your children! The name of Heffke brings disgrace to all who wear it!

  Speechless, afraid even to look at one another, the two old people sat in their wretched little parlor. The letter, the terrible news, lay on the table between them. They didn’t dare look at it again.

  They had had to scrape by all their lives, humble farmworkers on a large estate under rough stewards. It had been a tough life for them: hard work and few joys. Their pride had been in the children, and the children had turned out well. They had done better for themselves than the parents, and they hadn’t had to work quite as hard—Ulrich became a technician in an optics factory, and Anna was married to a master carpenter. The fact that they hardly ever wrote and never visited, that barely bothered the old people: that was the way of the world, birds flew the nest. At least the children were doing well for themselves.

  And now this pitiless, pitiless blow! After a time, the bony, exhausted hand of the old farmworker reaches across the table: “Mother!”

  And suddenly tears well up in the old woman’s eyes. “Oh, Father! Our Anna! Our Ulrich! And now they’re said to have betrayed our Führer! I can’t believe it, not for the life of me!”

  For three days they were too bewildered to do anything. They didn’t set foot outside the house; they didn’t dare look anyone in the eye, for fear that their shame might already have been broadcast everywhere.

  Then, on the fourth day, they asked a neighbor to keep an eye on their hens, and they set off for Berlin. As they walked down the windswept avenue, the man ahead, the woman in country fashion a step or two behind, they resembled two children who had wandered out into the big wide world, where everything—a gust of wind, a falling branch, a passing car, a crude word—menaced them. They looked so defenseless.

  Two days later, they trekked back down the same windswept avenue, even smaller, more bowed and disconsolate.

  They had achieved nothing in Berlin. Their daughter-in-law had called them a load of names. They hadn’t been allowed to see Ulrich because they had come outside “visiting hours.” Anna and her husband—no one could even tell them what prison they were in. They hadn’t found their children. And the Führer, to whom they had looked for help and comfort, and whose chancellery they had gone to, the Führer wasn’t in Berlin at the time. He was in his principal HQ—Hitler Quarters—busy killing sons, and he had no time to help parents who were in the process of losing their children.

  Why didn’t they file a petition for clemency? someone at HQ had suggested.

  But they didn’t dare entrust their case to anyone. They were afraid of humiliation. They had a daughter who had betrayed the Führer. They couldn’t continue to live there, if that got out. And they had to stay alive to save Anna. No, they couldn’t get help from anyone with the petition—not the teacher, not the mayor, not even the minister.

  Laboriously, after hours of discussion, agonizing, and writing with trembling hands, they drew up a petition themselves. They copied it out, and then copied it out again. It read:

  “Dearly beloved Führer,

  a wretched mother is begging you on her knees for

  the life of her daughter, who committed a grave

  sin against you, but you are so great, you will surely show

  her mercy. You will forgive her…”

  Hitler apotheosized, Hitler in excelsis, lord of the universe, all-powerful, all-seeing, all-forgiving! Two old people—the war rages on, slaughtering millions, but still they believe in him—even as he delivers their daughter into the hands of the executioner they believe in him, no doubt creeps into their hearts; it is their own daughter who is evil, not their Divine Führer!

  They don’t dare deliver the letter in the village, so together they trek to the local town to post it themselves. The envelope is addressed: “To our dearly loved Führer—personal…”

  Then they return home to their parlor and wait faithfully for their god to grant his forgiveness…

  He will be merciful!

  The post takes receipt of both petitions, the perfunctory, hypocritical one of the lawyer and the desperate one from the two grieving parents, and conveys them both, but not to the Führer. The Füh
rer doesn’t care to see such petitions; they don’t interest him. What interests him is war, destruction, and killing—not the avoidance of killing. The petitions go to the Führer’s chancellery, where they are numbered, registered, and stamped: TO BE FORWARDED TO THE MINISTRY OF JUSTICE. Only to be returned if the condemned is a Party member, which is not stated in the petition…

  A double standard. Clemency is for Party members, not for members of the public.

  In the Ministry of Justice, the appeals are again registered and numbered, and are given another stamp: TO THE PRISON ADMINISTRATION FOR ASSESSMENT.

  The post conveys the appeals a third time, and for the third time they are numbered and logged. A secretary scrawls the same formulaic words on Anna and Otto Quangel’s appeals: “Conduct in custody was acceptable. No case for clemency. Return to Reich Ministry of Justice.”

  Once again, a double standard: those who transgress against the prison rules, or even merely follow them, do not qualify for mercy; those others who have distinguished themselves by betraying, abusing, or snooping on a fellow prisoner just might.

  In the Ministry of Justice, they register the returned appeals and stamped them REJECTED, and a pert young lady types from morning till night, Your appeal was declined… was declined… declined… declined… declined… all day and every day.

  Then one day an official tells Otto Quangel, “Your appeal was declined.”

  Quangel, who never made any appeal, doesn’t say anything. It’s not worth it.

  But the post conveys the other rejection to the old people, and the village is abuzz with gossip: “The Heffkes got a letter from the Ministry of Justice.”

  And even if the old couple keep adamantly, fearfully, shakingly silent, a mayor has ways of finding out the truth, and soon sorrow turns into humiliation for two old people…