by Hans Fallada
“I’ve had nothing to do with shoes for a long time,” declared Petra. “Nearly a whole year. I’ve been living with a boy-friend, and it was today—no, yesterday midday—that we were to have been married.”
“You don’t say!” said the old woman with wonderment. “And just on a red-letter day like that the little poisonous toad has to go and queer everything by peaching on you? Now, tell me, girlie, what mischief have you really been getting up to, for them to shove you straight away into prison rig? They only do that with real jail-birds, because they think they might escape in ordinary clothes. But if you don’t want to tell me, all right then. I don’t like being taken in, anyway, and I can always see if you’re not telling the truth.”
And so it came about that Petra Ledig, between one and two in the morning, related to a completely unknown elderly woman the rather wretched story of the collapse of her hopes, and how she now stood once again alone in life, and really did not quite know the why or the wherefore.
The old woman listened to it all quite patiently, now nodding her head, now shaking it vigorously and saying: “Yes, I know,” and “That does happen,” or “We ought to tell that to God, but he’s got a bit fed up with his job in the last five years and he’s deaf in one ear.” But when Petra had finished and looked silently at the sick woman below her, or maybe just stared in front of her at all the rubbish she really only became aware of while telling her own story—she no longer understood why, how, for whom and where it all began. The old woman gently laid her hand on her arm and said: “My child—so you are called Petra and he always said ‘Peter’ to you?”
“Yes,” said Petra Ledig rather morosely.
“Then I shall also say ‘Peter’ to you. I’m Frau Krupass—Ma Krupass, they call me in Fruchtstrasse, and you must call me that, too.”
“Yes,” answered Petra.
“I believe what you have told me, and that’s more than the chief of police himself can say. And if what you’ve told me is true—and it is true, I can see it in your face—then today or tomorrow you’ll be out again. For what can they want from you? They can’t want anything! You’re healthy and you haven’t been on the streets, and your name’s displayed in the registry office, too—don’t forget to tell them that; the registry office always works with them.”
“Yes.”
“Well then, today or tomorrow you’ll be out and they’ll also find some things for you to wear from the welfare office—so you’ll be out—and what will you do then?”
Petra shrugged her shoulders uncertainly, but now she regarded the speaker with great attention.
“Yes, that’s the question. Nothing else counts. Thinking and fretting and regretting—that’s all bunk. What are you going to do when you get out—that’s the question!”
“Of course,” said Petra.
“From the looks of you, you ain’t the sort to gas yourself or jump into the canal; and then you want to have your baby, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do!” said Petra with determination.
“And what about the shoes?” inquired Ma Krupass. “Do you want to start that again?”
“I won’t get a job again,” said Petra. “I’ve got no references for the last year; I simply stopped going to my last job, without notice. All my papers are still there. I told you, it all happened so quickly with Wolf …”
“I know, I know,” said Frau Krupass. “But still, you’ll fetch your papers; papers are always handy. So there’s nothing more doing with the shoes, and even if there was, you wouldn’t be earning enough, and then the other business would just happen again, and you don’t want that just now, do you?”
“No, no,” said Petra quickly.
“No, of course not, I know. I was only just saying it. And now there’s one more thing, girlie. Do you know what? I shall call you girlie, and not Peter—Peter doesn’t seem to come easy to my tongue. Well now, there’s your boy-friend—how do things stand with him, girlie?”
“He hasn’t come for me.”
“That’s the sort he is; you are right there. And probably he never will. He’ll think he’ll get into trouble with his gambling if he makes too many inquiries for you with the police, and perhaps he also thinks that you’ve squealed on him.”
“Wolf would never think that!”
“All right, then he doesn’t think that. Very good,” said Frau Krupass submissively. “He may be just as fine a gentleman as you say; I don’t dispute it at all—and yet he doesn’t come. Men are all the same. Do you want to go and look for him, then?”
“No,” said Petra. “Not look for him …”
“And if he comes tomorrow to visit you?” The old woman shot a quick dark glance at the girl, who began to walk up and down, stopping sometimes as if she were listening for sounds in the prison; then she shook her head dejectedly and began walking up and down again. Stopping, she leaned her head against the wall and stood like that for a long time.
“This is how it is,” Frau Kraupass at last said knowingly. “The warder will knock on the door and say: ‘Ledig, come along—visitor!’ And then you will follow him in your slippers, dressed as you are now in your blue prison smock. And then you will come into a room. In the middle there’s a wooden barrier, and he’ll be standing on one side, smartly togged up, and you on the other in your prison dress, and in the middle a warder will be sitting and watching you. And then you will talk to each other and when the warder says: ‘Time’s up,’ he will go out again into the free air and you will go back again to your cell.”
Petra was watching the old woman tensely, with pale face. She moved her lips as if she wanted to say something, ask something, but she said nothing, asked nothing.
“Yes, jail-birdie,” Frau Krupass said suddenly, in a hard angry voice, “now just tell me what mischief have you been up to then, to bring you shuffling back to the cell? And what marvelous thing has he done, so that he can go out into the free air again?”
It was very quiet in the cell. At last Petra said painfully: “But it isn’t his fault.”
“I see,” said the old woman sneeringly. “It wasn’t his fault, I suppose, that you were always hungry and always had to wait up for him, and that he pawned your clothes, though if it hadn’t been for that you wouldn’t have come here at all. It wasn’t his fault, no! He wore the skin off his paws shuffling cards, he was always working night shift!”
Petra wanted to say something.
“Be quiet!” cried the old woman. “Let me tell you something. You’re crazy. He had a good time with you, and when he’d finished having a good time, he hopped it and thought: We’ll look for someone else now, she can go and look after herself—I like that, I must say! I tell you, it makes my gall rise. Haven’t you any self-respect left in your body, girl, to want to stand there in the visitors’ room like a primrose pot with a pink serviette and beam at him—just because he really comes to visit you? Is that marriage, I ask you? Is it comradeship? Is it even friendship? It’s pure wanting to sleep with him, I tell you. You ought to be ashamed, girl.”
Petra’s whole body trembled. She had never yet been so rudely awakened; she had never seen her relationship with Wolf in this light—all the veils which love had drawn over it torn away. She would have liked to cry, “Stop!”
“It may be,” Frau Krupass continued more calmly, “that he’s quite a good man, as you say. He does something for your education, you say. All right, let him, if it amuses him. It would have been better if he had done something for your heart and your stomach, but there of course he doesn’t find himself so clever as he does with books. A good man, you say. But, child, he’s not a man. He might become one some day, perhaps. But you take an old woman’s word for it: what seems like a man in bed is a long way from being one. That’s just a silly idea you young girls have. If you go on with him in the same way, spoiling him and always doing what he wants, and a mother in the background, too, with a nice fat money bag—then he’ll never become a man, but you’ll become a doormat. God forgive
me for saying so!” She breathed hard with exasperation.
Petra stood pale and quiet against her wall.
“I’m not asking you never to see him again. Just let him shift for himself for a while. You can wait a year, or as far as I’m concerned six months (I’m not so particular) and see what he does. See whether he goes on gambling or whether he goes back to his Ma or whether he gets another girl—in that case he never had any serious intentions about you. Or whether he starts doing some sensible work.”
“But I must at least tell him what’s happened to me, or write to him,” pleaded Petra.
“What for? How will that help? After all, he’s been seeing you every day for a year, and if he doesn’t know you yet, then writing’s of no use. And he can ask at the police station—they’ll soon tell him you are here, they won’t keep it a secret. And if he does come to visit you, then as far as I’m concerned you can go down and say to him: ‘This is the way things are, old chap. I shall show what I’m made of, and you shall show me what you are made of.’ And besides that: ‘I’m going to have a baby,’ you will say—not ‘We are going to have a baby.’ For you’re having it and you must keep it, too, and you’ll say: ‘I want the child to have a real man as his father, someone who can earn a bit of grub, something to eat, something to fill our tummies, so that I won’t go fainting in the street.’ ”
“Ma Krupass,” pleaded Petra, for the old woman was again becoming angry.
“Yes, yes, girlie,” she growled, “you can say that safely. It won’t rub the gilt off him, a man’s got to hear that sort of thing now and again, it does him good.”
“Yes, and what am I to do during the six months?”
“Now, girlie”—Frau Krupass was pleased—“that’s the first sensible word you’ve said this evening. Here, come and make yourself comfortable near me on the bed and let’s have a proper talk. We won’t talk any more about men anyway, a real woman shouldn’t talk so much about them, it only gives them swelled heads and they ain’t really so important.… What are you going to do during the year? I’ll tell you. You shall represent me.”
“Oh!” said Petra, a little disappointed.
VI
“Yes, you say, ‘Oh,’ ” said old Frau Krupass quite pleasantly. With a groan she crossed her legs, an action which revealed that she wore not only a very old-fashioned many-pleated skirt (she even had a petticoat underneath it) but also impossibly thick home-knitted woolen stockings—in the middle of summer. “You say, ‘Oh,’ girlie, and you are right. For how is a pretty young thing like you to take the place of an old scarecrow like me? I look like a keeper of a brothel or a flop house, don’t I?”
Petra shook her head with an embarrassed smile.
“But you’re wrong, girlie. And why are you wrong? Because you’ve written out bills in the shoe shop and can add up, and you’ve got eyes in your head that see what they look at. That’s what I told myself as soon as you came into the cell. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘here’s another one who’s got observant eyes, not bleary eyes like the idiots of today who look everywhere and see nothing.’ ”
“Have I really got such eyes?” Petra asked curiously, because her mirror had never given her the impression that her eyes were different from other people’s, and Wolfgang Pagel hadn’t yet said they were, although he had certainly from time to time felt their effect.
“If I say so, then you have,” declared Ma Krupass. “I’ve learned to know eyes in Fruchtstrasse where I’ve got fifty or sixty people running around; they all tell me lies with their mouths, but they can’t lie with their eyes! Well, here am I sitting in this miserable bug-hutch, brooding and wondering how much I’ll get this time; I’d like to think it’ll be three months, but it’ll probably be six. Killich also says it’ll be six, and Killich seldom makes a mistake; he must know, he’s my lawyer.”
Petra wanted to interpose a question, but the old woman nodded her head vigorously. “That’s all still to come. You’ll get to know everything at its proper time, girlie. And just as you said ‘Oh!’ before, so you can afterwards say ‘No!’; it won’t bother me. Except that you won’t say it.” She seemed so certain and so energetic, and at the same time so kind, that Petra lost all the doubts which such acquiescence in a prison sentence had aroused in her.
“And so here I sit and think,” Frau Krupass continued. “Six months in jail are all very well, and after all I do need some rest—but what’ll happen to the business, especially in times like these? Randolf can be trusted, but he’s weak in arithmetic; and now, when everything runs in millions and him using only slate and chalk—that won’t do, child, you can see that for yourself.”
Petra did see it.
“Yes, so here I sit and worry my head about managers, which is a nice word, except that they all steal like hungry crows and don’t think of the old woman in jail. But then you come in, child, and I look at you and your eyes and I see what goes on with that wench and I hear what she calls you—not to mention the attack on me and having my hair pulled out, and wrapping her in blankets—everything done nicely, without temper and yet not like the Salvation Army.…”
Petra sat quite still. But it does every person good to be rewarded with a little recognition, and it does especial good if that person has been ill-treated.
“Yes, and so I thought: She’s all right, she’s the sort of person you want. But then she’s in jail rig-out, you can’t get her. Just drop the idea, Ma Krupass. She’ll be patching shirts a long time after you’ve got out again. And then I hear what you’ve told me, and I wonder if there isn’t just the possibility that they may have sent the child straight from heaven to me in my loneliness.”
“Ma Krupass!” said Petra for the second time.
“There, Ma Krupass, of course, what else could it be?” said the old woman very pleased, and slapping Petra on the knee. “I told you a lot of unpleasant things before, didn’t I? Well, forget it, it won’t hurt you. When I was young I also had unpleasant things handed out to me, and afterwards, too, without stint: the boys were killed in the war and my old man was so depressed he hanged himself. But not at my place in Fruchtstrasse. He was already in Dalldorf, which is now called Wittenau. But don’t worry about it, is what I think—a little bitterness gingers you up.” She leaned forward. “But I am not so very cheerful even now, girlie, you understand that? I just seem cheerful. On the whole, I think the business ain’t worth the candle.”
And Petra nodded her head in complete agreement, and understood clearly that the business did not mean the police station in Alexanderplatz. She understood Ma Krupass’s outlook perfectly; one could find life rather depressing and yet not hang one’s head. In fact she had rather a similar attitude, and when you discover such feelings, you are always pleased.
“Yes, yes—but just because of that I carry on with the business. It keeps me alive. And if one doesn’t keep alive and do something, girlie, then it’s useless; you just rot alive. And what you’ve been doing, always squatting in a furnished room and perhaps, at the most, doing a bit of washing-up for the landlady—that’s no life, girl; it would make anyone crazy.”
Again Petra nodded her head. It was quite impossible to return to the old life. But she would have liked to know what sort of work it was which kept Frau Krupass so fresh and vigorous, and she hoped with all her heart that it was something decent and responsible.
And then Frau Krupass herself said: “Now I want to tell you, girlie, what sort of business I’ve got. Even if people do turn up their noses at it and say that it stinks, it’s still a good business. And it’s got nothing to do with my being in jail, for it’s a decent business—my being in jail is just the result of my own stupidity, because I was greedy for money. I can’t help it. I’ve said to myself a hundred times: ‘Don’t do it, Auguste (my name happens to be Auguste, but I never use it), don’t do it, you earn enough money as it is.’ But I can’t help it. And then I go and get caught—for the third time! And Killich says it’ll cost me six months.”
; Greedy Frau Krupass! She looked very depressed, and Petra could see that her previous talk about six months’ rest was pure bravado—the old woman was by no means hard-boiled. On the contrary, she had an unearthly fear of six months in jail. She would like to have said something comforting to the old woman, but still didn’t exactly know what it was all about. She also hadn’t the faintest idea what the flourishing but dubious, yet apparently decent, business was that Frau Krupass ran.
“Lordy, now I’m sitting here in the dumps,” said Frau Krupass with an almost apologetic smile. “That always happens when you boast about being cheerful and all that. But now listen to me, girlie. Do you know what a rag-and-bone business is?”
Petra, with visions of a musty cellar, nodded slightly.
“Well, girlie, that’s what I’ve got, and there’s no need for you to turn your nose up, it’s a good business and gets one a living and you don’t have to stand for any nonsense from old lechers. Waste paper and old iron and bones and rags, and I’ve got skins too.… But I don’t push a little barrow to the rubbish dumps, not me! I’ve got a big yard, with a truck, and six men working for me. And then there’s Randolf; he’s my supervisor—a bit slow, but trustworthy, as I’ve already told you. Fifty or sixty barrows come to me every day. I pay what’s proper, and they know that Ma Krupass pays the proper prices. And it’s growing from day to day, now that everyone goes round with a barrow because there’s less and less work.”
“But, Ma Krupass, I don’t know a thing about it,” said Petra timidly.
“You don’t need to, my girl. Randolf knows everything, except that he can’t reckon and is slow. You’ll do the reckoning; you’ll keep the books and pay out the money. I’ve got a lot of confidence in you, girlie, and it’ll go all right. In the evenings you’ll phone up the spinning mills and the factories, to ask them what they’re all paying for the stuff that concerns them. I’ll tell you the names and telephone numbers of the people, and you’ll pay according to what they say. And then the truck will deliver at the factories, and you’ll get the money. We send off the paper when we’ve got enough for a truckload. Randolf will tell you all that. That again brings in more money. It cheers you up, girlie, when you take in money; and today any child can do business, when the dollar’s always rising.”
