by Hans Fallada
“Stop it, Minna, you drive anyone crazy with all your talk!” said Frau Pagel. “Read the letter. I’m eating now.”
However, although Frau Pagel ate a really good breakfast, and also did every justice at midday to the 900,000,000 mark trout, her reply to Wolfgang was not written that day. The information he requested was not so easy to obtain; the trail from Georgenkirchstrasse to Fruchtstrasse was not so easy to discover. Minna had to make many a journey to the registration offices, spend many an hour patiently waiting for information, questioning and being questioned, before she at last found herself in front of the large plank fence on which (alongside the usual scribblings of children—“Whoever reads this is daft”) was painted in large white letters “Emil Krupass, widow: rags, bottles and bones.”
“Here?” Minna asked herself doubtfully. “They’ve sent me to the wrong place again!”
She peered through the gateway into the large yard, which certainly did not look very inviting with its mountains of rusty old iron, its multitude of dirty bottles and its heap of burst mattresses. “Look out!” shouted a young scamp dashing into the yard with a dog-drawn barrow, missing her by a hair’s-breadth.
Minna followed him hesitatingly. But on her asking at a shed for Fräulein Ledig she was answered readily: “She’s by the rags. Over there at the back—the black hut!”
Poor thing! thought Minna. I suppose she must be finding it hard to scrape up a bit of a living. It was frightfully dirty in the old hut, and the stink was even more frightful. With a feeling of comfort she thought of her pretty clean kitchen. And if Petra was really stuck in here, she was three times as sorry for her. “Fräulein Ledig!” she shouted into the gloom where figures crouched and dust whirled, making her cough.
“Yes?”
She wore a bluish-green overall and looked queerly changed, but there was still the simple clear face.
“Lord, Petra, child, is it really you?” said Minna staring at her.
“Minna!” cried Petra in joyful surprise. “Have you really found me then?”
(And neither had an inkling that they were suddenly using the informal “du” with each other, which they’d never done before. But that’s life: There are people who only notice how much they like each other when they meet again, after not having seen each other for a long time.)
“Petra!” And Minna, of course, at once blurted out: “Look at you! You aren’t—?”
“Yes, I am,” she smiled.
“When?”
“At the beginning of December, I think,” replied Petra.
“I must write and tell Wolfi about it at once!”
“You are not to tell him about it in any circumstances!”
“Petra,” said Minna imploringly, “you’re not angry with him, are you?” Petra merely smiled. “You don’t bear him a grudge, do you? I would never have thought it of you.” They regarded each other silently for a while in the dusty rag hut, where women monotonously sorted the rags. They looked critically, as if they wanted to see how much the other had changed. “Come out of the bad air, Petra. We can’t talk here.”
“Is he outside?” Petra thought of what Ma Krupass had once said, that she would run to him if he were standing on the other side of the street. She did not want to. Minna looked at Petra guardedly. Suddenly she knew that it was of no little importance what sort of stepdaughter she would have been. Wolfgang’s mother had already born enough sorrow.
“Do you want us to stand till we take root in this muck and filth?” cried Minna, stamping her foot. “If he is outside he won’t bite you!”
Petra turned pale. But she said firmly: “If he’s outside then I am not going out. I promised.”
“You won’t go out, eh? That’s a nice thing. You won’t go to the father of your child? Whom do you promise such things to?”
“Oh, do be quiet, Minna.” This time it was Petra who stamped her foot. “Why is he sending you, then? I thought he would have become a bit different, but that’s the way he always was. If he found anything unpleasant to do, he got others to do it.”
“You mustn’t excite yourself so, Petra. That can’t be good for it.”
“I’m not excited in the least!” said Petra, growing ever angrier. “But can you expect anyone not to be annoyed if he never learns anything and never changes? I suppose he’s crept under his mother’s skirts again. It’s all just as Ma Krupass said it would be.”
“Ma Krupass?” asked Minna jealously. “Is that the widow whose name is on the fence outside? Do you tell her all the doings of our Wolfi? I would never have thought it of you, Petra!”
“One must have someone to talk to,” said Petra firmly. “I couldn’t go on waiting for you. What’s he doing now?” And she motioned with her head toward the street.
“So you are really afraid of him and don’t want to see him?” said Minna, terribly angry. “After all, he is the father of your child!”
But suddenly it seemed as if some thought had wiped all doubt, all fear and worry from Petra’s face. Its former clear character traits were apparent again; in times of greatest distress at Madam Po’s Minna had never seen that face look either angry or tearful. And there was the old tone in her voice, the old ring. It was the ring of the old bell—trust, love, patience. Petra quietly took Minna’s shaking hand between her own and said, “You know him, too, Minna, you saw him grow up, and you know that one can’t be angry with him when he laughs and cracks his jokes with us poor women.… Your heart goes out to him straight away, you feel happy and think no more of anything he might have done to you …”
“Yes, God knows!”
“But, Minna, now he’ll have to be a father and think of others. It mustn’t just be that everyone should look happy when he is there; he must help in sharing troubles and work and also put up with an angry face sometimes, instead of running off at once for the day. And Ma Krupass is right, I’ve thought of it hundreds of times these past weeks: he must become a man before he can be a father. At present he’s merely a child whom we’ve all spoiled.”
“You are right, Petra, God knows.”
“And if I stand here with you and go all hot and cold, it isn’t because I’m angry or bear him a grudge or want to punish him! If he came in here, Minna, and gave me his hand and smiled at me in his old way, I know that the first thing I’d do would be to hug him, I’d be so happy. But, Minna, that must not be. I’ve realized that I mustn’t make things so easy for him again. In the first hour it would be wonderful, but in the next I should be thinking: Is my child to have such a spoiled darling for its father, one for whom I have no proper respect? No, Minna, God forbid! Even if I have to run away from here, run away from him and from my own weakness! I promised Ma Krupass and myself: he must first be something. Even if it’s only something quite small. And anyway I don’t want to see him at all for six months.” She paused for a moment. “But now he’s again crept under the skirts of you old women!”
“But he hasn’t, Petra!” cried old Minna joyfully. “What silly ideas you’ve got! He hasn’t done that at all.”
“Now you’re lying, Minna. You just told me yourself.”
“I said nothing of the sort! No, just come out with me now. I’ve had enough of your stink and dust.”
“I’m not going out. I’m not going to him!”
“But he isn’t outside! You’re just imagining it.”
“You said it yourself, Minna—please, let us stay here.”
“I said I wanted to write to him that you are expecting a baby. How can I want to write to him if he’s standing outside? You’re just imagining it all, Petra, because you are afraid, afraid of your own heart and afraid for the child. And because you’re afraid, everything’s all right. And now just let anyone, madam or anyone else, say anything against you—I know different. I’m glad you’ve spoken this way. I know now what I have to write to him, not too much and not too little. Now ask for an hour off and come out, there must be something like a café in the neighborhood. I pinched his le
tter for you, and madam didn’t say a word although she saw me. But you must give it back; you can copy it quickly if you like. Well, where shall we go? Can you get the time off?”
“Why shouldn’t I get the time off?” said Petra with bravado. “I take time off when I like! Everything you see here,” and she went with Minna to the hut door, “everything, the rags, the paper, the old iron and the bottles—it’s all under my management, and the men working here too, of course. Herr Randolph,” she said to an old man, “I’m going up to my room for a bit with my friend. If there’s anything special you’ve only got to call me.”
“What do you call special, Fräulein? Do you think they’ll be bringing in Kaiser Bill’s crown this afternoon? You go and have a lie down. If I was you I wouldn’t stick all afternoon among the rags!”
“Very well, Herr Randolph,” said Petra happily. “After all, it’s the first time I’m having a visitor here.”
And the two of them went up to Ma Krupass’s little flat, sat down, talked, and talked more.
When the time came for Minna to go home to make supper for her mistress, she did what she had not done since time immemorial; she went to the telephone and announced that she was not coming, that the key of the larder was in the right drawer of the kitchen sideboard behind the spoons, and that the key to the right drawer was in the pocket of her blue apron hanging up with the tea towels. And before Frau Pagel had quite grasped these clear instructions, Minna had already hung up. “Otherwise she’d start pumping me on the telephone, and she can wait for once. Now go on telling me about your Ma Krupass—pinches cuff links and yet has a good heart. Such things are neither in prayer book or bible. How long has she got, did you say?”
“Four months—and that’s just as if the court had known, for I’ll be confined at the beginning of December and she’ll be coming out at the end of November. She didn’t appeal—her lawyer said she ought to be glad. But still, it’s a pity when an old woman like that is up before the judge. I was there, and he told her off properly, and all the time she was crying like a child.”
It was half-past ten before Minna came home. She saw the light in her mistress’s room, but “You can wait!” she told herself, and crept quietly to her bed. But not quietly enough. For Frau Pagel called out: “Is that you, Minna? Well, thank God for that. I was beginning to think you were taking to night life in your old age.”
“Seems like it, madam,” said Minna staunchly. And then, with affected innocence: “Is there anything else madam would like?”
“Why, you deceitful cat!” cried Frau Pagel angrily. “Are you pretending you don’t know what’s itching me? What have you found out?”
“Oh, nothing special,” said Minna off-hand. “Just that madam will soon be a grandmother.” And with that she fled into her room with a speed that one would never have thought possible in such an old bag of bones, and slammed the door, as if to say: “Consulting hours are over for this evening.”
“Well, I never!” said old Frau Pagel, vigorously rubbing her nose and looking dreamily at the spot on the carpet where her vixen of a servant had been standing. “That’s a nice way to tell me! Grandmother! A moment ago a widow without any encumbrances, and now suddenly a grandmother.… Oh, no, we shan’t swallow that medicine, even if you do give it to me so craftily, you spiteful old devil!”
With that Frau Pagel shook her fist at the empty passage and withdrew into her room. But she could not have thought the news too bad, for she fell asleep so soundly that she did not hear Minna creeping out of the house with a letter. And it was now past midnight!
This letter was the beginning of that correspondence which, even though it did not contain a line from Petra Ledig, turned Wolfgang Pagel into a young man who, in Herr Studmann’s words, looked as if he wanted to embrace the world.
III
When Wolfgang Pagel bicycled to the prisoners on his own, and Violet von Prackwitz agreed to this without demur, although she would rather have spent the morning with the young man herself, it was because a higher will prevailed to which everyone had to agree: That of the Principal Warder Marofke. This ridiculous, conceited little man with a potbelly not only made the faces of his convicts sullen—whenever he entered the farm office with one of his never-ending requests, Frau von Prackwitz groaned: “Lord, here he is again!” and Studmann frowned. The workers, the chief guards and their assistants cursed the principle—but quietly. The girls in the kitchen cursed “the conceited clown”—only very loudly.
Marofke was always finding something wrong. First the mutton was too fat, then the pork was too scanty. There had been no peas for three weeks, but white cabbage had been cooked twice a week. The men didn’t return punctually from work, and the meals were not punctual. That window had to be walled up, otherwise the prisoners could see into a room occupied by girls. It was not permissible for the lavatory next to the barracks to be used by villagers—women, for instance. It was likewise not permissible for women to let themselves be seen near the gang at work; it might excite the men.
There was no end to it. Yet this potbellied rascal made life damned easy for himself. He usually left the supervision of the gang to his subordinates, the four warders, and sat almost the whole day in his barracks, drawing up lists in a self-important manner, or writing reports to the prison administration, or striding restlessly through the rooms, pulling every bed to pieces, for inspection. A spoon handle from which a prisoner had made himself a pipe cleaner aroused him to intense thought. What could it signify? A pipe cleaner, of course; but whoever could make that could also make a skeleton key! And he inspected every lock, every iron bar, every socket. Then he strode to the closet, lifted up the lavatory seat, and looked down to see if there was only toilet paper or perhaps the torn bits of a letter there.
But most of the time he sat outside the barracks in the sun, twiddling his thumbs over his fat belly, eyes half-closed, thinking. The people who saw him sitting there so comfortable and sleepy laughed at him contemptuously. For in the country it is a shame for any healthy man to laze during the harvest. Everyone is needed; there are not enough hands.
But it must be admitted that the principal warder was not daydreaming in the sun; he actually was thinking. He thought uninterruptedly of his fifty prisoners. He recalled their sentences, their crimes, their ages, their relations with the world, how much time each had still to serve. He examined their characters man by man, he thought of incidents in the prison, trifling events which, however, vividly revealed what a man was capable of. When the men ate, rested, talked, slept, he observed them. He noticed who spoke to whom; he noticed friendships, hostilities. And as a result of his observations and reflections there was a continuous redistribution; enemies were placed together, friendships were torn asunder. Those who hated each other had to sleep in neighboring beds. Continually Marofke changed the order of sitting at table; he decided who should work by himself, whom the warders must always keep their eyes on.
And the prisoners hated their Marofke like the plague; the warders, to whom he gave endless trouble, cursed him behind his back. At the slightest contradiction he went scarlet, his fat belly shook, his hanging chops trembled. “I make you responsible for it, warder!” he shouted. “You have sworn an oath to do your duty!”
“These fault-finders always exist!” said Studmann with disgust. “It’s best to let them alone. Even God wouldn’t do anything right for them!”
“No!” said Pagel. “This time you are wrong. He is a really cunning fox. And efficient.”
“Now I ask you, Pagel!” said the irritated Studmann. “Have you ever seen this man doing regular duty like his colleagues? Yes, sit in the sun and think out new complaints, that’s all he can do. Unfortunately, I can’t say anything to the fellow; he’s subject only to the prison authorities. But you can be certain if I were his superior I’d give that fat fellow a bit of exercise!”
“Very efficient,” Pagel had persisted. “And cunning. And diligent. Well, you’ll see.”
; Yes, Pagel was the only one who believed in the merits of this unbearable buffoon, and it was probably because of this that the two got on well together.
That morning, before riding out to the field, Pagel had paid the principal warder a short visit. Herr Marofke was very susceptible to such courtesies. He was sitting at his table, his face red, staring at a letter which the postman had probably just brought him. Pagel could see that there was a storm in the offing. “Well, any news from the western front, chief?” he asked.
The little man jumped to his feet so suddenly that his chair fell over with a crash. Slapping the letter, he cried: “Yes, news, but not good news! Rejected—my petition to be relieved is rejected!”
“Did you want to leave us?” said Pagel, astonished. “I didn’t know that.”
“Me leave? Nonsense! I wouldn’t let myself be relieved of such a difficult post. Me a shirker? No, never have been—people can say what they like about me. No.” He was calmer. “I can tell you about it—you’ll keep your mouth shut. I made a request that five men should be relieved because they no longer seem safe to me. And the pen-pushers in the office have rejected it—they say my request has no grounds! They have to have a murdered warder in their office before they have their grounds. Idiots!”
“But everything is quite peaceful,” said Pagel soothingly. “I haven’t noticed the slightest thing. Or did anything happen last night?”
“You also think that something must happen first,” growled the principal warder sullenly. “If anything happens in a prison gang, young man, then it is already too late. But I don’t blame you for that; you’ve no experience, and you know nothing about convicts.… Even my colleagues don’t see anything—only this morning they said again that I had a bee in my bonnet—but better to have a bee in your bonnet than be a night owl that sees nothing by day.”
“But what in heaven’s name is wrong?” asked Pagel, surprised at so much sullen rage. “What have you found, officer?”
