by Hans Fallada
He sat like that for a long time. Then thoughts began to creep back into his brain, but they were not good thoughts. They were worries. He thought of the Geheimrat’s letter. That was the beginning of the end. No. It was the end, absolutely. The Geheimrat had remembered himself. Himself—that was his money, the unpaid rent. But because he was certain of not getting it, he wanted to get rid of the tenant. Not only did he forbid all to enter the forest who belonged to his son-in-law or worked for his daughter; not only did he forbid the farm carts to use the forest paths, which would necessitate their going hours out of their way if they went to the outlying fields—he also ordered the forester to keep a watchful eye on the sales made by the farm. Should grain or potatoes or livestock be delivered, the forester was to report immediately by telephone to the old gentleman’s lawyer, who would at once attach the moneys coming in.
It was now evident that from the business point of view Studmann had been right when he had insisted that old Elias be sent with the rent to Berlin on the second of October—the old gentleman would then have had to keep quiet!
“Do you think my father would make difficulties for me in my present situation?” Frau Eva had protested. “No, Herr von Studmann. You’re a very conscientious, very thorough businessman. The rent can wait, but I need a car at once, all the time. No, I will buy the car.” Between the absent father and the chauffeur who had presented the bill for the car with the threat, in case it was not settled, to return to Frankfurt immediately, Frau Eva had decided for the chauffeur.
“Perhaps we could manage by hiring a car,” Studmann had suggested.
“Which will never be available when I want it. No, Herr von Studmann; you are always forgetting that I have to find my daughter.”
Studmann had turned pale, had bitten his lip. He also didn’t say a word about what he thought about these reconnoiters through the countryside. He accommodated himself to them. “As you wish, madam. I’ll discharge the installment agreed upon, therefore. The remainder of the money will easily amount to three-quarters of the rent.…”
“Don’t talk to me anymore about the rent! I’ve told you that my father … in my present situation. Don’t you understand then?” Frau von Prackwitz had almost shouted. Oh, she was uncontrollable these days, so exceedingly irritable. Pagel also had been shouted at once or twice because he hadn’t, when she called him, immediately left everything as it stood. But she was not so unfriendly to him as to Studmann. It seemed inexplicable. Hadn’t she once had almost a weakness for the other? But perhaps she became so unfriendly just because of that weakness? Now she was nothing but a mother; and a mother who neglects her daughter because of her own love affair is surely contemptible!
“I should like you to pay for the car at once, Herr von Studmann. I want to be able to dispose of it freely. Settle that with Herr Finger and his firm. And give him notice. I shan’t need him as chauffeur; I know someone else more agreeable to my wishes.”
Studmann had replied with a bow, extremely pale.
“Pardon me for being a little out of temper, Herr von Studmann.” She held out her hand. “Things are not very well with me—but I hardly need to say this at all.”
Studmann hadn’t realized the effort this little concession cost her. “If I am to settle accounts with Herr Finger I must more or less know what was arranged with him.”
“Settle the whole thing as you think right; I shan’t bother you about it.… Oh, Herr von Studmann,” she had cried, suddenly almost in tears, “must you torment me as well? Have you no feeling at all?” And she had fled from the office. Herr von Studmann gestured heavily towards young Pagel, but remained silent. For a few moments he walked up and down in his office, then he sat down at his desk, unfasted his watch from its chain, and laid it before him.
Pagel had started to type again. During this argument he couldn’t have left the office. Frau von Prackwitz had stood by the door as if she wanted to leave as soon as possible.
Studmann had sat steadily regarding his watch. After a very short time—he must have worked it out—he took the receiver out of the cradle, turned the handle, and gestured energetically to Pagel. Pagel stopped typing. He looked alarmingly forlorn. Whoever had seen him sitting thus, receiver in hand, waiting, would not have said that this man was without feeling. Perhaps he was awkward and annoying; a womanless life had erected so many barriers in the path of his emotions that he could no longer free himself alone; but one saw how the man trembled, and could hardly speak for agitation, when he began to ask Frau Eva for an immediate and quite private interview. Pagel had jumped up and gone to his room. The unhappy Studmann! Now that the battle was almost lost, he knew what he ought to have done. Talk to her as a human being, not as a businessman.
And a minute or two afterwards Studmann had asked Pagel to go to the Villa at once and make up accounts with the chauffeur. “Frau von Prackwitz would like to leave at once. Probably you must go, too. To the firm in Frankfurt. No, Pagel, please, I don’t want to go myself.… Frau von Prackwitz will see me at six o’clock.”
And Pagel had had to go to Frankfurt in charge of the attaché case with the money, Finger the chauffeur not having been authorized to receive the full sum. In the back Frau von Prackwitz sat alone, erect on the edge of the seat, her white face pressed against the window. From time to time she called, “Stop!” Then she would get out and inspect the ground. “Go on slowly!”
She had seen a piece of paper in the ditch; she ran after it. That she hadn’t really expected to find there a message from her daughter was to be seen in the unhopeful way in which she unfolded it. “Go on slowly!”
Again and again she cried out: “Slower! Slower! I want to be able to see each face.” At a speed of fifteen miles an hour the powerful car crept along the roads.
“Slower!”
Ten miles an hour.…
“This is what she always does now,” the chauffeur had whispered. “It doesn’t matter to her where I drive, as long as she can get out and look around. As if the fellow would be still here in the neighborhood!”
She had gone into a road warden’s house. “I’m only allowed to go fast through villages and towns,” explained the chauffeur. “She thinks no doubt that the pair are utterly alone. Well, I’m glad I’m through with it today.”
“Aren’t you at all sorry for her?”
“Sorry? Of course I’m sorry for her. But after all I’m driving a sixty-horsepower Horch and not a pram. Do you think that’s a pleasure for a chauffeur, to loiter about like this?”
Frau von Prackwitz came out of the warden’s house. “Go on slowly!”
Pagel would have liked to hurry. They had to pay for the car before twelve o’clock. Studmann had strictly enjoined this; at twelve the new dollar rate would be announced.… But he said nothing.
It was three o’clock before they reached the town. The dollar was then 320 milliards as against 242 that morning—payment had taken all the rent. In fact there was even a small debt remaining. “Of no importance,” said the gentleman politely. “You can settle that at your discretion.”
Pagel knew that this would be very important to Herr von Studmann. He had hoped Pagel would still bring back a considerable amount as a loan. It would of course be even more important to Studmann that nothing had come of the meeting he had requested at six o’clock. Frau von Prackwitz had stood Pagel up in a local bar. She’d left to fetch the new chauffeur. Hours passed until she returned; the big new car stood driverless on the street. “This is Oskar,” she said and sat down exhausted. “Oskar is the son of a housekeeper of Papa’s. I remembered him. He’s a motor engineer by trade.”
“I have a driver’s license, also,” said Oskar. He was a young fellow about twenty with enormous hands and a face which looked as if roughly formed from a lump of dough; but he appeared good-natured, if a trifle simple.
Frau von Prackwitz swallowed one cup of coffee after the other, eating nothing. “Make a good meal, Oskar. We’ve a long way before us.”
; “You ought to eat something, too, madam.”
“No, thank you, Herr Pagel.… Oskar knew Violet; he will help me to find her. How old was Violet, Oskar, when you left Neulohe to be apprenticed?”
“Eight.”
“At least he will drive as I want, isn’t that so, Oskar?”
“Of course, Frau von Prackwitz. Always very slowly and looking at everyone. I understand. I read about it in the papers.”
Frau von Prackwitz shut her eyes for a moment. Then she said emphatically to Pagel, “I noticed quite clearly how unwillingly this man Finger drove as I wished him to. You all now do what I want unwillingly—you too, Herr Pagel!”
He moved away.
She said, “For goodness sake, let me do what I want. Isn’t it me who’s lost a daughter, after all? If only one of you had been clever enough before! But being clever now? What’s the point of that?”
Pagel was silent.
When they had at last driven off it was after six and quite dark. Wolfgang hadn’t been able to understand why they didn’t go direct to Neulohe instead of by a long roundabout way; why, in spite of the darkness, they seldom drove faster than fifteen miles an hour; why they had to stop again and again while Frau Eva went a few paces into some unknown wood. Wolfgang understood nothing of all that.
Perhaps she just wanted to be alone. Perhaps she only stood there waiting in the dark night, till the engine noise in her body had died away, and the beating of her own heart was again palpable. Did she think that if she felt her own true self that she would feel her daughter, once a part of that self, as well?
Did she stand there awaiting some vision in which they would come through the wood—he and she, the lost ones? Did she see him in front, his bloodless face lowered, the thin-lipped mouth compressed—and her daughter half a pace behind with closed eyes, still in sleep, as the mother had last seen her? Did she see the two wandering homeless over a cold and alien earth, where no hospitable door opened to them, no friendly word ever reached them?
It had been only a little while ago that Pagel had informed her that everything was different from what she feared, that no furtive lover was to be sought for, that the enemy was the manservant. “But that is impossible! I’ll never believe that,” she had cried.
Then she had believed it. She saw the two of them—and it seemed to her that they must eternally be together without a word, each silently chained to the other by the same hellish torment. She saw the pair so plainly that she imagined the servant must be wearing gray gym shoes with grooved rubber soles and Violet a man’s faded overcoat above a dress which did not fit properly because he had put it on while she slept.
Oh, those men, those police, those people from the Public Prosecutor, with their important airs, always ringing up, sending messages, wanting to know this, or measure some shoe! They would never find Violet, she was certain. She alone would meet the girl, some day or other. It didn’t matter where she waited. It just had to be outside—sometime, when the right moment came, she would be on the right spot. Hadn’t those people even wanted to carry out a kind of search of Violet’s room, fingerprints on the windowsill, a hunt for letters? She hadn’t allowed it, but simply locked the room. What was the good of such investigations now? Violet’s room belonged to her mother; when she came home utterly exhausted from her excursions, too tired even to weep, she would, after quickly looking at Achim, unlock the door and sit down by the bed. First she threw an anxious look at the window. But this was locked fast. She hadn’t been careless. Her daughter could sleep on undisturbed. She lay in her bed. Gradually the mother went to sleep too, in the wicker chair next to the empty bed—wishes became dreams! Eventually she slept soundly. Only the next day, when she awoke, did she change, wash herself, and prepare herself for the new day. These mornings, which filled her whole room with a wretched gray pallor, when the childish squabbling of the Rittmeister and his caregiver could be heard so embarrassingly clearly, and when, after the oblivion of sleep, the sense of her loss made itself felt like a consuming fire in her slowly awaking brain … But then there was the car, she would set out at once; she must hurry, the reunion with her daughter was perhaps close at hand. That foolish pedant of a Studmann had no idea what this car meant to her! It was the bridge into the future, her only hope. Yes, indeed. He had asked for a very urgent, hurried and private interview with her, but here she was standing in the wood and it was nine or ten o’clock. He didn’t understand that you don’t leave someone who’s been struck down by misfortune—! Perhaps she was only standing there because he was waiting for her!
Eventually she got back into the car again, and told the driver to continue. Neulohe approached, and then it really was ten o’clock.
Passing through the little town of Meienburg, she had asked to stop again. She was dying of hunger! There was a good hotel here, The Prince of Prussia; she had often been there as a young girl, with her parents.
It was a long time before she could make up her mind what to order; nothing on the menu was exactly right. She ordered wine, all the time watching Pagel out of the corner of her eye. He had said that he wasn’t hungry. He was almost surly—oh, how transparent people had become to her! She saw that he knew about the interview promised Herr von Studmann. Perhaps he knew a good deal more, of glances, certain words, of hopes. A woman can never have any idea how much men confess to one another; it is unimaginable.… Yes, young Pagel was dying of impatience on behalf of his friend; couldn’t he think of her for once? That she perhaps had reasons for hesitating, for waiting? He just didn’t think of her.
She drank a glass or two of wine and also ate a little. Then she got the waiter to unlock the veranda, unused in winter. She stood there a while—tables were piled on one another, the small garden could not be seen, nor the meadows and poplars on the bank of the little river.
At her side stood young Pagel. He didn’t understand why she had had to come here. “I came with Achim on our first outing together, just after we were engaged,” she said in a low voice, on going out. And she turned round to look again. The veranda showed no trace of the almost twenty years which lay between. A whole marriage had slipped by since then, a child had been born, more than a war had been lost. Vanished youth, forgotten laughter—gone forever!
Quieted, she had returned to her table; broodingly she turned the stem of the wineglass in her fingers. She could tell by young Pagel’s manner that he was no longer impatient or sulky or urgent—he had understood.
It is simply not true that youth is intolerant—a genuine young person will immediately understand a genuine feeling.
It had been after midnight when they arrived in Neulohe. “Please tell your friend,” she said, “that I will ring him up early tomorrow as soon as I can see him.”
Studmann without a movement had listened to the message. “I always thought, Pagel, that reliability was a desirable quality in this world,” said he, smiling a little miserably. “Be everything you like, however, but not reliable!” He looked old and tired. “I wrote to Frau von Prackwitz this evening. She will find the letter over there. Well, I’ll wait till tomorrow.”
Morning came. After breakfast Studmann had stayed in the office, not bothering about the farm. At first he tried to keep up the impression that he was working—then he gave that up altogether, a miserable person waiting for sentence.…
However, he didn’t go up to his room. He stayed in his office and walked up and down. His eyes, which now and then involuntarily fell upon the telephone, betrayed what he was thinking. Perhaps she’ll ring after all?
Pagel lay down to sleep, listening to the other man going up and down, up and down, while he himself went to sleep.
At half-past ten Pagel saw the great car drive through Neulohe. He hurried to the office. “Frau von Prackwitz wasn’t here? Hasn’t she rung up?”
“No. Why?”
“The car’s just gone out.”
Studmann seized the telephone. This time his hand did not tremble nor his voice falter. “Studm
ann here—may I speak to Frau von Prackwitz please? … She’s just gone out? … Good. Did she leave a message? … Yes, inquire please. I’ll hold on.” He sat there, his head bowed. “Yes, here.… Only that she’s not coming back today? Nothing else? … Thank you very much.”
He put the receiver down and spoke to Pagel without looking at him. “What was it Frau von Prackwitz told you yesterday evening?” Studmann stretched himself, almost smiling. “I’ve fallen down the stairs again, my dear Pagel, only somewhat more painfully than in the hotel.… Nevertheless I’m firmly convinced that there’s a spot somewhere in the world where absolute reliability is valued. I have decided to accept a situation open to me a long time. I will work in Dr. Schröck’s sanatorium. I am sure that the patients there will know how to value thorough reliability, evenness of temperament and inexhaustible patience.”
Pagel stared at a Studmann who now wished to be the nursemaid of neuropathics and hypochondriacs; was he speaking ironically? Oh, he was absolutely in earnest, never more so. He was not inclined to go along with the madness of this mad era, to be mad himself. Tirelessly, he continued without despairing. He’d certainly experienced a setback, a hope had escaped him, but he bore it. “I’m not a ladies’ man,” he went on. “I’m not fitted for their society. I’m too methodical, too correct—somehow I make them desperate. Once, a long while ago”—a vague gesture to indicate in what nebulous distance it lay—“I was engaged once. I was younger then, perhaps more flexible. Well, she broke off the engagement, all of a sudden. I was very much surprised—‘It’s just as if I’m going to marry an alarm clock,’ she told me. ‘You are absolutely reliable, you don’t go fast or slow, you ring exactly at the right time—you’re simply enough to drive one mad!’—Do you understand that, Pagel?”
Pagel had listened with a polite, interested expression, a trifle unsympathetic. This was the same Studmann who, when he himself was in trouble, had brusquely repelled every confidence.
The setback must have hit him hard. The solution probably came to him as a complete surprise this time, too.
