by Hans Fallada
“Haven’t you got anybody in the Reichswehr whom you could ask in confidence?”
“Good heavens, Studmann. Naturally I could ask, but who knows? In this sort of thing only three or four people are ever really in the know, and they won’t give a definite reply. Did you ever hear of a Major Rückert?”
“No. In the Reichswehr?”
“You see, Studmann, that’s just it. This Rückert is said to be the man who … But I can’t even find out whether he belongs to the Reichswehr or not. Some say yes, others no, and the very cute just shrug their shoulders and say: ‘Perhaps.’ he doesn’t know himself!’ And this sounds as if others were backing him. It’s enough to drive me crazy.”
“Yes,” said Studmann, “I understand. If it’s necessary you’d join in at once; but if they’re crazy adventurers—no, thank you.”
“Quite.”
Both were silent. But Prackwitz still looked expectantly at Studmann, the former first lieutenant and present reception manager (nicknamed “Nursie” by the regiment). He had turned out to be a man with very curious, even suspicious, views about money and God-ordained poverty.… Looked at him as if expecting from his reply liberation from all doubts.
And finally Studmann said slowly: “I think you oughtn’t to worry, Prackwitz. You must simply wait. We learned that from the war. You worried and were afraid only when you were in reserve or lying quietly in the trenches; but once you got the order to advance, then you were all right and went ahead and everything was forgotten. You won’t miss the signal, Prackwitz. We learned in the trenches to wait quietly without brooding over it—why shouldn’t you do the same now?”
“You’re right,” said the Rittmeister gratefully, “and I’ll remember it. It’s funny that we seem to have lost the art of waiting. I think it’s this idiotic dollar. Rush, hurry, quick, go and buy something, make haste, run.”
“Yes,” said Studmann, “to chase and be chased, hunters and hunted at the same time—that makes people so bad-tempered and impatient. But there’s no need to be either.” He smiled. “But now I must be off; I’m not quite free from it myself. I see the porter beckoning me; perhaps a director is already chasing after me to inquire why I’m nowhere to be seen. And I shall chase after the chambermaids, so that the rooms of the departures will be free at twelve. So, good hunting, Prackwitz. And should you be in town tonight at seven and have no engagement—”
“By then I’ll be back in Neulohe some time,” said von Prackwitz. “But I’ve been tremendously pleased, absolutely tremendously pleased, to have met you again, Studmann, and if I come to town again …”
IV
The girl was still sitting on the bed, alone, motionless, idle. Her head drooped; the line of the shoulder, nape and head was feminine and soft. In the small bright face the lips were parted, and the eyes gazing at the worn floorboards saw nothing. Under the overcoat, which had fallen open, the skin glimmered light brown, firm.
The room was stuffy, full of smells. The house was wide awake now and carried on its routine; shouting, calling, weeping, banging doors, clattering up and down the stairs. In this house Life manifested itself mostly in noise and decay. In the copper workshop on the ground floor could be heard the screech of sawing copper, sounding like cats, or children being tortured. Then it was almost quiet again, with only the whirring and humming sound of the leather transmission belts.
The girl heard a clock strike twelve. Instinctively she raised her head toward the door. If he was going to look in after the pawnbroker’s, bringing her something to eat, he ought to come now—he had mentioned something of having breakfast together. But he did not come, and she had a conviction that he would not. He was certain to go straight to his friend’s. If he got money he would come later; but he might also go straight on to the gambling club, and she wouldn’t see him until the early hours of the morning, either penniless or with money in his pockets. Anyway, she would see him again.
And then it hit her: Was it so certain she would see him again? He’d always gone away and he’d always come back. Whatever he’d done, or wherever he’d been, he always ended up with her in Georgenstrasse. He would cross the courtyard, go up the steps—and reach her, either excitedly happy or utterly exhausted. I’ve never made any demands on him, she thought. Why shouldn’t he come back? I was never a burden to him. But was this true? Had she not, in fact, made a demand, unspoken but insistent, that he should always return to her?
Even my love can become a burden to him, she reflected, filled with unutterable sadness, and then he won’t come back.
It grew hotter and hotter. She jumped up from the bed and went to the mirror. Yes, there she was—Petra Ledig. Hair and flesh, a sudden attraction, desire, consummation—the world was full of it. She thought of the thousand rooms in which at this hour the morning desire awakened. Kisses were exchanged, women were slowly undressed, bedsteads creaked, the transient sigh of lust escaped. And people separated at all hours in a thousand rooms, parted from one another every minute.
Had she believed she was secure? That it could continue? In her heart she knew, had always known, that it wouldn’t. In the streets people were all in a hurry, rushing to catch their trains, to meet their girls, to spend their money before it became valueless. What endured, then? How could love endure?
All was futile on which she had set her heart. That they should be married this morning had seemed important enough for her to make a scene about it. Could it change anything? And if she sat there hungry and in debt, was that any reason why he should return? Did it matter in what condition she was deserted—whether, for example, she had a car and a villa in Grunewald, or not? The significant fact was that he did not come back. Whether she jumped out of the window or sold shoes again or walked the streets was all the same in that case.
She remained standing in front of the mirror and looked at herself as if looking at a dangerous stranger she had to be careful of. The figure in the mirror looks very pale, a brownish pale, and as if consumed from the inside. Its dark eyes shone, its hair hanging, with some loose locks, over its brow. She looked at herself breathlessly. It was as if everything was holding its breath. The house seemed to heave another sleepy sigh and then go silent. She herself still breathed. She shut her eyes and an almost painful shudder of happiness ran through her. She felt how warm her cheeks grew; they became hot. A good warmth, a lovely heat! Oh life, oh, love of life! It’s led me from here via there, to here. Houses, faces, beatings, rows, dirt, money, fear. Hear I am, oh, sweet, sweet life! He can never leave me again. I have him inside me.
Life whirred, life bussed tirelessly up and down, stirring in every stone. It overflowed from the windows. It looked askance and it railed. It laughed—yes, it laughed as well. Life—wonderful, sweet, everlasting life! He can never leave me again. I have him inside me. Never thought of it, never hoped for it, never wanted it. I have him inside me. Life was racing, and we were just racing along with it. We never arrived anywhere. Everything slid away from us. Everything was lost. But something remained. Grass doesn’t grow over all footprints, not every sigh is in vain. I remain. And he remains. We!
She had opened here eyes and now looked at herself. This is me, she thought for the first time in her life: she pointed her finger at herself. She was now without fear. He would return. He, too, one day would understand that she was “I” as she understood it. Now that she was no longer “I” but “We,” she understood it too.
V
When the Rittmeister visited Berlin one of his chief amusements was to stroll along Friedrichstrasse and a stretch of the Leipziger, and look at the shops. Not that he made large purchases, or intended to—no, the show windows amused him. To the eye of a provincial they were so wonderfully arranged. In some windows there were delightful trifles which simply dragged you into the shop for the pleasure of pointing at them and saying: “That one.” And in others were to be seen such frightful atrocities that you were moved again and again to laughter. Often he was tempted to carry such an
article home, to see how Eva and Vi would be amused at, say, a man’s head made of glass, the mouth serving as an ash tray. (One could also connect the head with the electric light and it would glow horribly red and green.)
But the experience that, after a few days, these curios stood about the house unnoticed, had made the Rittmeister cautious; he was now content to laugh by himself. If he wanted to take a present back—one may be ever so retired and white-haired a cavalry officer and yet like to stop before a lingerie shop to choose something silky or of lace. It was delightful to buy some trifle of that kind. Every time he entered such a shop the trifles had become lighter and more fragrant, ever more delicate in tint. You could squeeze in one hand a pair of knickers into a tiny ball, and it would spread out again, softly rustling. Life might have become gray and dismal, but female beauty seemed increasingly fragile and delicate. That brassiere made entirely of lace! The Rittmeister could well remember the gray drill corsets of prewar days, into which a husband had to lace his wife as if he were reining in a restive horse.
Or he entered a delicatessen shop. However worthless money might have become, here all the showcases were bursting: green asparagus from Italy, artichokes from France, fattened geese from Poland, Heligoland lobster, corn cobs from Hungary, English jams—the entire world had rendezvous here. Even caviar from Russia was back again; and foreign money, procurable only out of “friendship” and at exorbitant rates even so—here one could eat it up by the hundredweight. It was very puzzling.
After his talk with Studmann, the Rittmeister had plenty of time, so he strolled once again into his old haunts. But this time his joy was damped. Life went on in Friedrichstrasse rather as one imagined it must in an Oriental bazaar. Dealers, beggars, strumpets: almost shoulder to shoulder they stood on both sides of the pavement. Young men displayed suitcases filled with shining cut-glass bottles of perfume. One, yelling and shouting, flourished braces. A woman, disheveled and dirty, handled long, shimmering silk stockings which she offered, with an impudent smile, to the gentlemen. “Something for the little lady, Count. Put them on her yourself, and see what fun you’ll have for that miserable bit of paper, Count.”
A policeman came in sight, looking peevish beneath his lacquered military shako, and to keep up appearances the cases were shut and opened again as soon as his back was turned. Under the house walls, beggars squatted or reclined, all war-wounded, to judge from the placards they carried. But the very young ones could only have been in school during the war, and the old men must have been invalided out long before. Blind men whined monotonously; the palsied shook their heads and arms; wounds were exhibited, terrible scars gleamed fierily on scaly gray flesh.
But the girls were the worst. They strolled about calling, whispering, taking people’s arms, running alongside men, laughing. Some girls exposed their bodies in a way that was revolting. A market of flesh—white flesh bloated with drink, and lean dark flesh which seemed to have been burned up by spirits. But worst of all were the entirely shameless, the almost sexless: the morphine addicts with their contracted pupils, the cocaine sniffers with their white noses, and the cocaine addicts with high-pitched voices and irrepressibly twitching faces. They wriggled, they jigged their flesh in low-cut or cunningly-slashed blouses, and when they made room for you or went round a corner they picked up their skirts (which, even so, didn’t reach their knees), exhibiting between stockings and drawers a strip of pale flesh and a green or pink garter. They exchanged remarks about passing men, bawled obscenities to each other across the street, and their greedy eyes searched among the slowly drifting crowd for foreigners who might be expected to have foreign currency in their pockets.
Amid vice, misery and beggary, amid hunger, fraud and dope, young girls who had hardly left school flitted from the shops, carrying cardboard boxes and bundles of letters. They missed nothing, and it was their ambition to be as insolent as those others, to be got down by nothing, to be scared at nothing, to wear skirts just as short, to snatch as much foreign currency
“You can’t get us down,” said their glances. “You old people can’t take us in,” they said and flourished their boxes. “At present we’re only shopgirls, sales-girls, office-girls. But it only needs a man to cast an eye on us, the little chap here or the fat man there with the mutton-chop whiskers, flaunting his paunch in a pair of checked flannel trousers—and we drop our boxes in the street, and sit this evening in a bar and have a car tomorrow.”
The Rittmeister felt as if he heard them all running and shouting: “Nothing has any value but money. Money. But in point of fact money has no value; the greatest possible enjoyment has to be squeezed out of it moment by moment. Why save oneself up for tomorrow? Who knows where the dollar will stand, who knows whether we shall be still alive tomorrow? By tomorrow younger, fresher girls will be in the running. Do come, old man, you’ve got white hair certainly—but it’s all the more important not to waste any time. Come, dearie.”
The Rittmeister caught sight of the entrance to the Arcade from Unter den Linden to Friedrichstrasse. He always liked to look at the waxworks—so he fled into the Arcade. But he might have come from purgatory into hell. A closely packed crowd surged through the radiantly lit tunnel. The shops paraded huge pot-boiler pictures of naked women, repulsively naked, with revoltingly sweet pink breasts. Chains of indecent picture-postcards hung everywhere. There were trick novelties which would have made a hardened roué blush and the lewdness of the photographs that furtive men stickily pressed into one’s hand could not be rivaled.
But the young boys were by far the worst of all. In their sailor suits, with smooth bare chests, cigarettes impudently sticking in their lips, they glided about everywhere; they did not speak, but they looked at you and touched you.
A tall fair woman in a low-cut dress, very elegant, pushed through the crowd, accompanied by a train of such lads. She laughed loudly, spoke emphatically. The Rittmeister saw her quite close too, his eyes falling on the shamelessly uncovered and thickly powdered breast. Laughingly she looked at him. The pupils of her eyes were unnaturally enlarged, her lower eyelids painted blue-black. Shuddering nausea overcame him at the realization that this rigged-up woman was a man; she was the female for this repulsive crowd of loungers, and yet she was a man.
Regardless of others, the Rittmeister forced his way through the crowd. A whore shouted, “The old man’s got a screw loose. Emil, sock him one. He biffed into me.” But the Rittmeister was already outside and had caught a taxi. “Schlesische Bahnhof,” he directed and leaned back into the cushions exhausted. Then he pulled out of his coat pocket a white, freshly laundered handkerchief and slowly wiped his face and hands.
He forced himself to concentrate on something entirely different—and what was of more interest than his worries? Indeed, it wasn’t easy to manage Neulohe these days. Quite apart from his father-in-law being a rat (and on top of that his mother-in-law with her religiosity), the rent was really too high. Either nothing grew, as last year, or, if anything did grow, one had no laborers, as this year.
But after the conversation with poor Studmann, who had also been tainted by wrong views and was by way of imbibing cranky ideas, and after his little walk through Friedrichstrasse and the Arcade, the Rittmeister thought of Neulohe as an untouched island of purity. To be sure, there were eternal worries, trouble with the farm hands, trouble with the taxes, money troubles, trouble with workmen (and the worst of all was the “in-law” trouble). But at least there was Eva, and Violet, known from her babyhood as Vi.
Certainly Eva was a bit too vivacious: the way in which she danced and flirted with the officers in Ostade would once have been regarded as improper and Vi also had picked up a rude manner (it was often enough to make her grandmother swoon)—but what was this compared with the misery, the indecency, the demoralization which manifested itself in Berlin in broad daylight? Rittmeister Joachim von Prackwitz was made otherwise and had no intention of changing: in his view a woman was of finer stuff than man, she was a delic
ate creature, one to be protected. Those girls in Friedrichstrasse, they were no longer women. A real man could think of them only with horror.
In Neulohe they had a garden where they sat in the evening. The manservant Hubert brought shaded candles and a bottle of Moselle; at the worst the phonograph with its “Yes, we have no bananas” gave a townish flavor to the foliage and the blossoms. But the women were protected. Pure, clean.
One could no longer go with a lady to Friedrichstrasse, in particular when that lady was one’s daughter. And to think that a splendid fellow like Studmann wanted somehow to make this street scum happy, to place himself in some respects on the same footing, merely for the reason that he had to earn money as they did! No, thank you. At home in Neulohe one might think that the Deutsche Tageszeitung exaggerated when it called Berlin a morass of infamy, a Babel of sin, a Sodom and Gomorrah. But when you’d had a sniff of it you realized that those remarks were an understatement. No, thank you!
And the Rittmeister calmed down so far that he lit a cigarette and, contented with the business he had concluded and the prospect of an early return home, approached the station.
His first action was to go to the refreshment room and have a couple of strong cognacs, for he had a presentiment that the sight of his newly engaged harvesters would not be an unmitigated joy. But it wasn’t so bad after all: as a matter of fact only what he expected. The faces were perhaps rougher, more impudent and shameless than before—but what did that matter, as long as they worked and got in the harvest? They oughtn’t to have too thin a time—decent allowances, every week a sheep slaughtered and once a month a fat pig.
