Tales from the Underworld

by Hans Fallada

  So I slowly got dressed, me chatting to them pleasantly all the while, so they didn’t start to think I was going to try anything. But while I got dressed I took half a step and then another and then another half in the direction of the window, while the arm of the cop with the gun was getting tired, and he was pointing it mostly at the ground.

  ‘All done,’ he says.

  ‘Just my toothbrush,’ I say and reach for the basin.

  ‘Stop!’ he yells, but I fire twice, and then crash backwards through the window. They will have thought, second floor and all that, no chance, but under my window was a veranda roof.

  I crash through the glass; they’re banging away, but far too high because I’m not hanging around. Already I’m skittering down the veranda. There’s another blue in the courtyard; I shoot on sight, he waddles away trying to open his holster, and I’m halfway across the yard.

  I was seeing red. I was in a mean mood. I run out through the entrance to the street, gun in hand. There’s a woman standing in the entrance; she flattens herself against the wall when she sees me and goes deathly pale. I won’t have been a pretty sight either, bleeding from my encounter with the window, revolver in my paw.

  There’s more on the street. ‘Get lost, you sons of bitches!’ I yell, and fire. They’re running and I’m running, up the street and round the corner, along the next street. I’m hoping to disappear in the crowd, but everyone seems to melt away, and the street is empty ahead of me. And if I turn around, I see them coming after me, a thick black mass with a thousand white faces, and shooting.

  I think it’s time to lose the cannon, and only hold it tighter. I think there’s bushes in the park, but the bushes are bare, around me everything looks emptier, what am I running for? I think.

  Go into a building, I think, up the stairs, across the rooftops, to get them off my tail, and I turn into an entrance.

  As I look around, I’m standing in a bank, large room one single door, which is the one I’ve just come through. I start yelling: ‘Everybody out! Get out of here!’ And they stream past me out the door, and outside they’re standing in a big circle, the other side of the square, all in black and no one daring to come any nearer. The last one past me was a pale lardy guy who was trying to run lightly past me when he tripped over an umbrella-holder and lay there flat on the floor, his mouth popping like a fish’s. I fired once more, that was my last shot, and he crawled out of the door, and I was on my own.

  So there I was with all my talent and the empty pistol and nowhere to go. In the tills there was masses of money, more money than I’d seen in my life. But I wasn’t interested, nothing interested me, I had to think about them all running from me, and me standing there. The girl had run off too.

  Outside there was a ringing, fire engines, I thought, is there a fire somewhere? And it came in through the window, a jet of water, God knows how many atmospheres of pressure. I lay flat on the floor, it splattered all over me, I felt as though I had broken all the bones in my body. I couldn’t move one finger.

  So I lay there for a while, and they went on squirting their hose at me, and after a time the cops walked in, and they picked me up.

  I Get a Job

  (1932)

  1

  As autumn came on, the city filled with unemployed, prices climbed ever higher, and our prospects of making a few marks got ever smaller. Willi and I decided to try the provinces: we settled on Altholm. There was a timber factory there where Willi had once done piecework, nailing crates. He had earned good money at the time, and he liked to think back on it, he hoped to maybe get something like that again. It wasn’t so simple for me, I wasn’t up to such physical work, but we thought I could find something there too, with luck.

  We sent our things on ahead of us in a basket as registered freight, and walked the hundred miles. It was a fine, windy, sunny autumn, it did us good to be out of doors and not think about work the whole time. Food cost us practically nothing: there were plenty of apples on the trees, and Willi was able to cadge bread from the country bakers. We always timed our entrance so that there was a woman in the shop, then Willi would go in and stand behind her. He had a funny way of looking at women with his round, seal-like head, that made them laugh, and they gave him whatever he wanted. We never begged for money, we were both fine for clothes, in our nice blue suits, and I had a mac on top, and Willi had his anorak.

  You do all right on apples and bread, it was probably six months since we’d had regular hot meals and we felt pretty good. At night we slept in farmers’ straw for ten pfennigs or so. Before we went off to sleep, they would always go through our pockets for matches and cigarettes. Then they would give us them back the next morning; once one of them even made us a present of a couple of cigars.

  So we made it to Altholm in six or seven days, and found a room with a leather-worker on Starenstraße for six marks a week. There was a table and a chair and a bed, which we had to share, but the nights were drawing in, so that wasn’t all bad. Willi was in luck, on our third day he got a job at his old timber factory. This time he was nailing nesting boxes for chickens, piecework again, and brought home twenty-five or even thirty marks. It was a little factory with untrained workers and non-union pay rates. We knew it was wrong to fall in with an operation like that, but we had been hungry for too long to be picky.

  2

  Jobs I could do were never advertised, but I ran around town a lot, and tried to see what I might possibly do. If I happened to see a queue of people in a shop, I would go in and ask if I could lend a hand. Sometimes I’d get packing work for an hour or so, and would come home with fifty pfennigs. Early doors, I would hang around the station a lot, because when people are travelling somewhere they are more liable to spend money, and occasionally I would get a suitcase to carry, or something like that. Only a uniformed porter spotted me and chased me, scolding me for a blackleg. He called me all sorts of other names, strike-breaker, scab, welfare cheat, and from then on, every time he saw me from a distance he would start shouting. I had to try and avoid being seen by him, so I stopped going to the station.

  My main responsibility was looking after Willi. In the morning I would get up first, make him some coffee and cut him some bread, and then wake him. When he was away in the factory I would tidy the room and wash our clothes, then I would go out and look for work. I had to be back at three, to cook his supper. Now that he was working again, he wanted hot meals and meat. I stuck to our old diet: bread and marge and a herring at lunchtime, but sometimes it got damned hard frying his meat for him, and I would help myself to a little of it. He would almost always notice, he had an uncanny sense of what half a pound felt like and looked like. And then we would fall out and argue.

  It seemed we argued more than we used to in times when neither of us was working. Of course that all stemmed from his feeling that he was the breadwinner, and that gave him licence to find fault and criticize me. Once or twice he would come home drunk on Friday, and then the bed would be too small for both of us, and he would throw me out. I was annoyed with him and irked by my own lack of success at getting work, so I would talk back, and we would sometimes go at it for hours.

  The thing that annoyed him the most was that I had a habit of wearing stiff collars. He was like a kid about it, he couldn’t see that I’d never pick up an office job if I wasn’t wearing a stiff collar. According to him, you should only wear a collar on Sundays; to run around wearing one on weekdays was just vanity. I couldn’t starch and iron my collars myself, and he resented giving me money for it. I would steal it from his pocket when he was drunk, but he would notice later, when I put on a fresh collar, and then our ding-dong would start again.

  Once, I was completely out of them and I borrowed his Sunday collar. I really thought I was going to get a job that day. Well, that didn’t happen, instead I was caught in the rain, and blow me if that evening he didn’t want to take a girl out and found his collar sodden. He fell into a temper, we shouted at each other, and he threw
me out of the room. He was fed up with me, he said, I should go and get a place of my own if I could. In the end the leather-worker put me up in his room, I slept on the sofa, and he and his wife shared the bed.

  The next morning I made Willi’s coffee, same as always, and he didn’t say anything, there was silence between us. As he was walking out the door he stopped and said, I might try with a minister, there was someone in his factory who had been helped to his job by a priest. Then he went. That was his way of being conciliatory, because I couldn’t really be angry with him. It’s not easy being back in work and keeping someone else going who doesn’t really mean anything to you.

  3

  I got the addresses of local ministers from the paper. There were two papers in the town, a big one and a little one. I had only been to the big one once, and they were all full of themselves and snapped at me for wanting some information. They were friendly at the little one, always had time for a chat, and gave me what advice they had. There were five ministers in the town, and I spent the whole of one day going round all of them and putting my case. They listened to me amiably enough, asked me the odd question, but basically they all struck me as people who were used to worse misery than mine. Then they tried to get rid of me as quickly as possible. No one knew of a job for me.

  Willi was nice about it when I told him of my failure, he even took me to the cinema by way of consolation; to show how grateful I was, I took my collar off when we went. Going to sleep that night, he said I should try the Catholic priest tomorrow, the Catholics were where the influence was. I didn’t want to argue with him, so I agreed to try, and got the address. Once again, the managing editor of the paper couldn’t have been kinder, I had to tell him about the Lutheran ministers and promise to report back to him on what happened with the Catholic priest.

  Anyway, I was received by a nun or whatever she was, I couldn’t see much of her face under the big white bonnet, and after a while the priest came along. He was a big, well-built man with white hair, soft-spoken and slow in his speech, probably a farmer’s son from the coast, where they are apt to be strong and silent. He listened to me for a long time, you could see he understood what it felt like to be out of work for four years, and desperate. Finally he said: ‘I’ll give you a letter for the manager of the leather factory. I’m not saying it’ll help. But I’ll give it to you.’ He sat down and started writing, once he looked up and asked: ‘You wouldn’t be of the faith, now, would you?’ I had discussed with Willi the necessity of lying on that point, but I couldn’t help being truthful when he looked at me. He just said ‘that’s fine’ and went on writing.

  I delivered the letter to the manager’s flat and was asked to present myself the next day. When I came, the maid gave me thirty pfennigs and asked me not to call again. I stood there on the steps feeling pretty woebegone. When she was back in the kitchen, I pushed the thirty pfennigs through the slit in the door and ran down the steps while the coins jingled in the box.

  4

  I went to my friend on the paper and told him my story. He said he had expected nothing else, and why didn’t I go round to his place and help his wife move some furniture. She was spring-cleaning, and I gave her no end of help, beating the carpets and scrubbing and waxing the floor – and in the evening my friend came home, and I was to eat with them. He said he had had a word with the proprietor, and he was happy to have me go out on a subscription round. I didn’t even ask about the terms, I just said yes right away, that was how happy I was to hear that. I was told I would be given a pad of receipts with subscriptions for the month. The first month’s I could go ahead and cash, and that would be my commission. It was one-fifty a time. It was a good idea to start with the master craftsmen, because each week the paper carried an article by the union syndic on craft-related questions. I should tell the wives that the serials in the Chronicle were acknowledged to be superior to those in the News. I should take care to read the current serialization. Then I should also bear in mind that anyone who subscribed in the middle of the month would get the paper delivered absolutely free for the rest of that month. That all sounded very good to me, and I went home feeling very enthused, and bursting to tell Willi all about it. At first he was pissed off with me because I hadn’t made him any lunch, but finally he came round to the idea, and reckoned I would probably make a ton of money.

  Early the next morning I went round to my paper, the Chronicle, to get hold of the addresses of craftsmen. It was still too early to set out, the managing editor reckoned I’d best not bother anyone before nine-thirty. So I sat down and read the article by the union syndic, which I thought was very boring, and then a bit of the serial, which was set in very exclusive circles. At half past nine I set off.

  My heart was beating as I stood in front of the first address I’d been given. Before ringing the bell, I waited for it to settle down, but it kept getting louder. I rang, and a girl opened the door. Might I speak to master painter Bierla? ‘Come in,’ and, ‘Papa, here’s someone to see you.’ I was shown into a large room where a nice elderly lady was sitting at a table, chopping cabbage. The master was standing by the window in conversation with another gentleman. ‘Good morning,’ and how could he help. I bowed politely, to his wife as well, and the visitor. ‘Good morning,’ and how I represented the Chronicle, and had come to ask whether Herr Bierla might care to subscribe to our newspaper, perhaps on a trial basis initially. I had thought up a proper little spiel about how ‘we’ represented the interests of trades and crafts, that craftsmen needed to stick together in these difficult times, and then there was the syndic and his magisterial essays, and finally, with a glance at his wife, our celebrated serials.

  Suddenly my talk was over, I didn’t know what else to say, no one spoke, and there was silence. It was so quiet that I started up again, but lost my way, stammered and ground to a halt. Then the woman at the table piped up: ‘We could try it, dear,’ to which he, ‘What does it cost to take the Chronicle?’ Now I had to talk again, there were the free deliveries to your doorstep, the first month’s subscription was gratis, I filled in the little form and gave it to the master, who sent me off with it to his wife. He was back in conversation with his guest. I got my money, one mark fifty for five minutes of talking! When I left I crossed the road to look at the house from the other side. It was a good house, a practical house, I liked it. It was well maintained, with a master painter you expected that attention to detail, in the ground floor there was a shop, Johanssen, tobacconist. For an instant I had the notion of chatting to Johanssen but I decided to stick to my plan, and stay with craftsmen. I took one last look at the house and went on.

  The next master craftsman wasn’t home, nor his wife. The one after had a bone to pick with the syndic, who was a smart alec who took a lot of money from the guilds and had done precious little with it. The one after was very glad I had come because he had always wanted to subscribe to the Chronicle. The News had completely misreported it when he had been called upon to pay a fine just because an apprentice of his happened to do a couple of hours of overtime. And so it went on. Sometimes I had to traipse right the way across the town, the sun was still shining brightly, but the last leaves were falling from the trees.

  At half past one it felt like time to knock off. I was feeling a bit stale and mechanical, and anyway I was cutting into people’s lunchtime. In four hours I had managed to recruit six new subscribers from the twenty-one I had paid calls on, and I had nine marks in my pocket. ‘Not a bad start,’ said the managing editor when I presented him with the addresses of his new readers, so that they would get tomorrow’s edition. Then I got something to eat, cooked and fried, but for myself as well. When Willi arrived everything was ready, and he shared in my pleasure. ‘You’ll be raking in sixty marks a week! My, oh my!’ We made ambitious plans, then we tidied up and went to the cinema together.

  5

  The second day wasn’t as good as the first, and the third was a lot worse than the second. I understood that I had had
my best day, and that there would be no repeat. It wasn’t that I’d been through the painters, and after them the smiths, and then the bakers, who were a totally different class of people. It was that I had lost my élan, and was doing it by rote. You need to be a born seller to go after the fiftieth potential customer with the same zeal as the first. You need to believe in what you’re saying, or at the very least make it seem as though you did. When I was told: We’ve been reading the News for ten years, and the News is better than the Chronicle, why should we change? – then, in my heart of hearts I had to admit they were right. My riposte was abject. In fact, I couldn’t understand what would possess someone to take the Chronicle anyway. The News was always four, or eight, or even twelve pages longer, their four-column layout looked much livelier than our three-. They had as many personals and three times as many business ads as we did. They had a clean look, because they were properly set, whereas we for the most part were matrixed in Berlin. Over time I got to have an eye for all these things, from various people’s complaints. When I took it up with the managing editor later, he would often get angry: ‘Just remember, if we were the News, our subscription drive wouldn’t consist of you.’

  I no longer made twenty-one calls a day, sometimes there were ten, sometimes just three. If I suffered two rebuffs first thing, I wouldn’t feel like going on. I would spend ages walking up and down outside a blacksmith’s, they were hammering away inside, the fire cast a red glow through the windows, then finally I would pull myself together and go in. The master was cutting the frog out of a horse’s hoof and testing the fit of a shoe, a couple of journeymen were making ready to wrap an iron rim on a cart-wheel. I stood in the doorway and waited. I had learned this, it was best not to disturb people while working. While I stood there and watched the fire throwing sparks and listened to the hiss of the bellows, I heard that they were talking about me. ‘’S nothing,’ said one of the journeymen to the master. ‘Just another time-waster.’ – ‘Goes strutting about instead of working,’ declared the other. And the apprentice called shrilly: ‘Buy my buttons and braces and safety pins! Come buy, come buy!’ Then things went quiet again, the journeymen were busy with their wheel, the master was knocking the horseshoe into shape on the anvil. The apprentice was holding it fast with a pair of tongs. The coachman had picked up the leg of his horse so that the hoof was pressed right up against its thigh. They were all of them working, they all had a living they were making. I thought that I too had once gone to a nice clean office at a certain time and done nice clean work. Now I was running around making a nuisance of myself. On the first day of my subscription round I had done it, I walked into the room of the master painter like a chatty earl, an envoy from the fourth estate, but I was no longer able to perform the part with any conviction. Now I felt like a little travelling salesman trying to talk people into something they didn’t want.