Tales from the Underworld

by Hans Fallada

  ‘Calm down,’ I tried to placate him. ‘People are staring.’ I put my hand on his shoulder, to try and induce him to leave.

  ‘Don’t you touch me!’ he wailed. ‘Don’t you fucking touch me …’

  The glazier took a great leap over in our direction. It was too late. Everything went red, then black. The last thing I remember is a sense that I was falling.

  It must have been a fabulous punch, technically perfect: I only came round in the emergency ward. And it took a long time for my poor brain to grasp that my good friend Otsche had signed me up for a minor role in his drama. I had played my part in covering an otherwise hopeless retreat, and the girl with the hot gems in her valise had got away.

  And Otsche too, who wasn’t so entirely innocent of girl or jewels as he claimed to be, Otsche too was gone. ‘You know, in the ensuing confusion,’ the still-sweating glazier told me.

  It’s all fair enough. And, to be perfectly honest, I’m quite happy not to have to confront Otsche in some courtroom in my present state. I think he’d find me upsettingly ugly.

  A Visit to Jemmy-Max’s

  In a careless hour once I lent my friend, Jemmy-Max, an out-of-work burglar, the sum of seventy-five Reichsmarks. Ever since then, I have taken it upon myself to apply to him every Friday night for partial repayment. Because, through some inscrutable quirk of circumstance, Jemmy-Max has been in work for the past few weeks, he is a hard-working locksmith and takes home sixty marks a week. Or do they ever get there?

  After barking my shins on some damned flight of stairs in the harbour quarter and by my ensuing yells widely alerting all the denizens as to a stranger’s presence in their ward, I have taken to simply turning up at Max’s. The house lacks such basic amenities as gas, doorbell or electric light. Locks seem to have been dispensed with for the opposite reason, their imperfections and inadequacies being all too widely understood.

  Max is sitting at a table by the light of an oil lamp, shaving. I put on my winningest smile. ‘I just came by to see you, old son. How are you off these days? You know I really need at least ten marks.’

  Max looks at me glumly. ‘Rock bottom, Doctor.’

  ‘But Max, that can’t be, you’ve trousered your week’s wages this lunchtime.’ I flatter him: ‘Go on, be sensible, otherwise you’ll never get out of debt.’

  ‘Have you any idea of the extent of my obligations!’ He waxes elegiac. ‘In my old housebreaking days, I always used to pay my debts right away. But ever since I’ve gone straight, I can’t be that irresponsible any more.’

  ‘Sixty marks is a fair chunk of change,’ I say dreamily. ‘There’s nothing for it, you’ve got to spit up at least ten. You’ve got earnings on the side and all.’

  ‘When I’m straight, I’m straight. I won’t do any more jobs.’

  ‘You don’t need to do anything, Max.’

  ‘You mean my old lady, going on the game at the patriotic monument? It’s no good, I’m telling you. I’d have thought by the first of the month at least that line of business might have perked up, there’s usually some players on the first, but Jesus! Poor woman out on her feet all day long in this weather, and no one comes across.’

  ‘Business gone soft?’

  ‘The girl’s willing, I tell you. She’s not sitting around in cafés, spending her money. But if the punters can’t …!’

  Max is all down in the dumps. No travelling salesman could be more dejected about the state of the textile industry than Max about his pavement princess. ‘I bought her new stockings and combinations, nothing’s any good.’

  ‘Now, Max,’ I say soothingly, because I’m feeling his pain, ‘I didn’t know things were quite this bad for you. What do you say we leave it till next Friday?’

  Jemmy-Max has finished shaving and is reaching for his jacket. The wallet he pulls out seems strangely swollen to me. He opens it, and as he thumbs through the banknotes, his face is beaming.

  I am astounded. Green fifties, brown twenties, lots and lots of them. ‘Max, where does all this dosh come from? That must be well over a thousand!’

  ‘A thousand? I doubt it.’

  ‘Well, look.’ I pull out my own, rather leaner wallet, produce his IOU. ‘Here, Max, why don’t we clear this up on the spot.’

  Max’s beam widens. ‘Oh, Doctor, Doctor. You don’t get it, do you. Can’t you tell this is all funny money?’

  ‘Funny money?’ I ask in bewilderment.

  ‘Sure. Funny money!’ he echoes. ‘Natch. Take a look. I’ve combed all the coin dealers and numismatists in Hamburg to get this load together. It’s all Inflation money.’

  I thumb through the notes. Now that he’s told me, I notice something. These brown twenties do look a shade different to our current ones, these green fifties aren’t just exactly what the Reichsbank presses into your hot little hands nowadays, but I’ll admit, I wouldn’t have detected it.

  ‘Nor do thousands of other people neither!’ he says, well pleased. ‘You just need to have a good eye for when you can chance it. And if you fall for it, you’ve been swindled by someone. Of course, I never go out with more than one at a time, this is my supply. Can I tempt you, Doctor?’

  ‘I think I’ll wait, Max, if it’s all one to you,’ I say. ‘There’s no great hurry. I couldn’t fool anyone if I were trying to foist one of those funny fifties on them.’

  Max grinned with cheerful contempt. ‘You’re just a solid citizen, aren’t you. I’d like to know what you’d do in a strange city without a penny, and not knowing anyone. You’d probably go straight to the lost and found and report yourself missing. Well, take comfort, not everyone can crack it. What about it, then? Coming out with me tonight? One of these notes is burning a hole in my pocket.’

  Max is quite right, I’m just a timid, honest citizen, and so I found I had other engagements for that evening.

  But I’ve noticed that every Friday since, I check and double-check any notes that come into my hands. I am terrified lest I get one of Max’s billets-doux, and am left sitting on it. You see, he’s just as inflexible as the Reichsbank: he doesn’t change funny money.

  Dear Lotte Zielesch

  Dear Lotte Zielesch,

  A day or two back in your column in the 8 Uhr-Abendblatt you were pleased to talk about the expenses we housebreakers incurred on the job, and shed a tear about our sorry prospects. Lotte, you’re quite right! But this in your shell-like, authoress, we have an old saying: the best break-ins are done with an iron, and not with dynamite.

  What good is it to me if I blow a grade-A safe and find a bit of loose change! I don’t make my expenses, and the next day I get a bad press. Much more useful than dynamite is reliable information as to where you might find money poorly secured, like on pay day, at a racecourse, or after a dividend pay-out. But information like that is about as plentiful as virgins nowadays.

  And should you ever make your way to a police exhibition, then you’ll see that history-making jobs were not done with shop-quality tools, but with a crowbar and a couple of home-made wire jemmies; if there is explosive involved, then it’s likely to be the home-made variety, and filled into tin cans. If that was the rule – simple tools and good information and a reputable fence financing the operation – then who wouldn’t become a housebreaker!

  And while I’m on, let me tell you that the honest-to-goodness break-in is facing extinction. I know lots of lads who are specialists in breaking and entering, and they are forced to go on the state, just because the work can’t feed a man these days. Money’s so short, and when you turn up at your fence’s with half a rack of mink coats, what are you offered for the goods? Chickenfeed!

  Now, if we’d come into the world with velvet paws! Pocket work is a different business. But unfortunately my hands are too clumsy for it, and I’m too old to learn. And so a man in his prime is put on starvation wages, doing little cheap jobs, and the pride of the profession suffers. I mean, what would the other lads say if one of us was forced into a racket like begging with me
naces or wound up in jug? All the respect you’d accrued in twenty years, certificated by our system of justice, would be shot to pieces. I’d have to be ashamed if I met a policeman!

  Well, any road, I want to thank you, Lotte, for putting in a word for our difficult occupation in these trying times. If there’s anything I can do for you (a nice necklace or what have you) just say the word to

  Your Jemmy-Max

  Farmers in the Revenue Office

  (1931)

  When a townie, a trader, a craftsman, or (as we like to say) an entrepreneur has a problem with the Revenue, then he sits himself down and writes his declaration or his petition or his complaint − at any rate he writes something. Farmers have never been great ones for writing, though, and the proliferation of authorities during the 14–18 War and after has done little to cure them of their aversion. I had a boss in the country once, a very respectable landowner and quite literate, who issued a strong edict against taking up a pen on a Friday. ‘Writing is the source of all evil,’ he would proclaim. ‘Did you ever meet anyone who did well from writing on a Friday?’ I couldn’t say I had. ‘You see!’ he crowed and, just in case, locked up the ink bottle and typewriter. ‘Time was, it was only labourers that wrote.’

  This landowner received a visit from a Revenue official who wanted to repay some excess tax. (These things do happen, it was long ago.) But it was a Friday, and it wasn’t possible to get anyone to sign anything. Saturday was pay day, and the Revenue office was a long way away, money was short, but a signature – absolutely not! ‘If I were you, I’d get off my land sharpish,’ said my boss menacingly. ‘You’ve got a nasty pencil thingummy behind your ear, and it makes me ill to so much as look at it. I don’t think any good will come of that.’

  There are two worlds, and when they collide you get fire and brimstone. And things don’t always pass off so smoothly as on this next occasion, when the lord of a hundred acres sold his motor plough, bought during the Inflation. He had put an ad for it in the local rag, the motor plough was sold, the money went where last year’s snow goes, and then there was a letter from the Revenue (which is an avid reader of the local press): ‘We note there is no mention in your annual accounts of proceeds from the sale of the advertised motor plough, etc. etc.’ – ‘Put it with the other stuff,’ said my boss. I put it on what he was pleased to call the dung heap. Time passed, and a further letter came from the Revenue: ‘1. We ask you for immediate response to our query of the nth inst. regarding tax due on the sale of your motor plough. 2. In case of deferral, we request reasons.’ – ‘Just write this,’ said my boss: ‘To the Tax Office in Altholm. Firstly. I have never owned a steam plough. Secondly, see firstly. Yours faithfully …’ The Revenue didn’t get in touch again.

  But these teasing arabesques are in a minority: the man was a landowner and had a sense of humour; more usually when a small farmer sees the official letterhead, he panics. Total incompetents proceed like the Rügen farmer who drove up with a load of cabbages – took them down ten miles of rough track too, wouldn’t you know it – and offered to pay his taxes in kind, in the form of his cabbages. ‘The wholesaler offers me sixty pfennigs, but the local paper says the official rate is one-ten. You’re not telling me you’re not official!’ The taxman can talk with the tongue of an angel, but the farmer won’t get his head around it. The man sat there in the Revenue office, and every half-hour or so he heaved a sigh and improved his offer. By the time the office closed, he was down to sixty-five pfennigs. It was a fair price and they were excellent cabbages, but no one would play ball and he was baffled – baffled and furious.

  Another story comes to mind – this from the time of the Inflation – of a landowner buying his wife a silver fox. Unfortunately his book-keeper had entered the acquisition under ‘livestock’. Then when the time came for doing the inventory, they were an animal short in the stables. It had to be there, it was down on paper as an acquisition, and the owner was suspected of having sold the horse cash down – till the silver fox came out of the wardrobe and the receipt was produced from the file.

  Today’s farmers don’t have it easy, not at all, but I almost think the bailiffs have a harder time of it. I’m not thinking about overwork, and making your way from farm to farm over rough tracks, and negotiating the savage dogs, the hostile faces, the muttered threats. He’s just a public official, he doesn’t set the taxes he has to collect, he doesn’t know how they’re calculated and why they are calculated as they are. All he has to do is seize and impound. And in the end, to auction off.

  I once attended an auction like that, and I’ll never forget it. It was a tiny farm, just about fifty acres, and a lot of bidders had come out. There was the auctioneer, and there were his assistants, and everything was all set to begin. But there was a group of farmers standing in the corner, not so very many, but it was probably the entire village. They stood there quietly, some way off, on a little rise. The first lot was called, it was a cart. And the first bid was called. And in the same moment as the little crofter, ten villages away, called out his ‘Twenty marks’ there was a sort of grumble, or groan, like a distant roll of thunder. The farmers stood there quite still, they didn’t move their lips, and you can groan without opening your mouth.

  There were rural constables on the farm, there were many more bidders and interested parties than farmers, and there were in fact two or three more shy bids, but after a while there weren’t any more. The cart was knocked down, just for the sake of a price having been achieved, but the successful bidder had suddenly disappeared, vanished, not there. The auction was a failure. The farm was of course sold after all, the stock was shipped out here and there to other areas, and the mortgage-holder was left owning the farm.

  But I can still see the farmers standing there, grumbling with mouths closed.

  I think of this as an ongoing war as I write this, and whenever it comes to be read. It isn’t easy to lose a farm that has been in the family for generations, nor is it easy to drive someone away from such a farm when they haven’t done anything. Both are difficult, and if you’re asked whose fault it is – always the question, who’s really to blame? – then you can only answer in the words of Theodor Fontane, ‘well, that’s a wide field’.

  Kubsch and His Allotment

  (1931)

  In the beginning, all land was farm land, arable land. Plough and scythe went over it in everlasting alternation. Then speculators came and they saw that the land was good land, even by their lights, and that there were woods and lakes nearby. An estate agent moved into the old manor house, and posts went up in the middle of fields with signs that read: Plot 85/86 or road B13.

  Kubsch was a small employee at Bergmann’s or Pintsch’s, on two hundred and twenty gross. Twenty-four years old. Things at home were tight. His girl worked in administration somewhere, and if they pooled their savings, it came to sixteen hundred marks, which wasn’t bad for a start. They saw the land, they saw the cheerful-looking summer houses, they saw the first green leaves, they were brave. It meant his commute to work was ninety minutes, and things might occasionally get a little lonely for the intending Frau Kubsch. But they would be together within their own four walls, not at the mercy of ill-tempered relatives, snatching little stolen kisses in the corners of pubs and entrances of houses.

  One Sunday morning Kubsch went into the office, and bought allotment 368, and paid eighty marks down. That in effect was their wedding. Minnie said proudly, ‘See!’ Whatever was still to come, registry office and church, was more for the relatives, who liked to make a fuss.

  If a person insists on living out in the wilderness, the first and most important thing is to lick it into shape, so that he can feel at ease there. Kubsch had to enclose his little portion of the planet, Minnie insisted on it, the estate agents demanded it, it was an imperative to him too. The second thing was a summer house to live in, but it wasn’t to be an ordinary summer house, but one of those dinky wooden huts, with a little bedroom, a little kitchenette and a
little balconette. The house came, grew and flourished; if you put a deckchair out on the veranda, you had your feet in the open; when Kubsch wanted to help with the washing-up he would stand outside the kitchen window and Minnie passed the plates out to him, there was no room for him in the kitchen. And the third thing needed was a well. They were lucky: just twenty feet down the well-digger struck groundwater. For an outlay of just a hundred and twenty marks they had a lovely green well with pure, natural water, not the artificial stuff that comes in pipes.

  They toured their demesne; it was early summer or late spring. Thank God the little house couldn’t accommodate much in the way of furniture, it was full already. Then again, their wallets were empty, the sixteen hundred were gone; now they had to start work.

  It’s remarkable what can be squeezed out of two hundred and twenty a month when there’s a will. Kubsch trotted off in his good suit every morning at a quarter to seven and was back home at a quarter past six, when he changed into his oldest clothes and got to work. Weeds were ripped out, potatoes hurriedly laid out, cabbages and tomatoes planted, parsley sown, strawberries planted.

  Kubsch had to learn on the job. He had no neighbours to turn to for advice, even though neighbours eventuated. One was the well-to-do Herr Knopp, who drove out on Saturdays in his small automobile. He paid a gardener to do his garden, and his house was built from brick. Their other neighbour was good with his hands, but he was far too mean to give them any tips, and such things as he did tell them were usually wrong. Kubsch would squinny over the fence to see what this neighbour was doing; sometimes it turned out well, sometimes not so well. But Minnie was dear in offering help, when she wasn’t missing all her girlfriends from the office who she used to have such lovely gossips with. If things got too bad they would lock up the garden for two or three days, and spend a few nights on the sofas or floors of friends. And when they then returned to their summer house it seemed all the more lovely, fresh, clean and peaceful.