by Hans Fallada
Her daughter’s written: she’s seen a fur coat … only four hundred marks … she’s wanted one for so long … could Mother not help? It would be soooo nice! They get three hundred marks pension, her son-in-law makes seven hundred … But of course she will help. Letters like that are sent care of the neighbours. Her husband mustn’t see them, he mustn’t notice anything at all. If she’s a diligent housewife, she can save fifty marks of the housekeeping money without her husband noticing. She also needs to go to the doctor again, her leg is giving her such gyp … She’s sure she’s ruptured a vein. That makes him happy, he doesn’t mind shelling out forty or sixty marks for something like that.
‘You see,’ he says. ‘Does it hurt? I always told you … not to run around so much. Does it really hurt?’
It makes him happy when she’s in pain or upset. Their son didn’t write on her birthday. ‘You see! I told you so. You always stood up for the worthless so-and-so, and the result is he’s got no respect for you now. He’s right too, now he’s a court official and you can’t even speak proper German.’
His little yellow head bobs around on his narrow shoulders. He laughs. ‘Do you remember the time I wanted to slap his cheeky face, it was Christmas of 1909, and you got in the way, and I slapped you? See!’
He laughs again, then he potters off into the village. Secretly he goes to a café and he stuffs his face with cake. It’s his passion, but it’s not good for him: his gall bladder screams. At nights she gets up and makes him compresses. ‘Hotter!’ he screams. ‘Hotter! It’s because you don’t know how to cook properly.’
‘I’m sure you must have had some cake again, Gotthold.’
‘How can you claim something like that?’
‘Don’t shout so, Gotthold, the neighbours …’
‘That’s why I am shouting. I want them all to know about the kind of wife I have. The woman can’t even speak proper German.’
Five years, ten years, twenty years, thirty years … How many more? Thirty more years? His father lived to be really old. Sometimes she succumbs to despair, then she locks herself away and has a cry. At least she’s safe from him there. Then he comes and rattles the door. ‘What are you doing, locking yourself away? Since when have you locked the door against me? Are you keeping secrets from me? Who wants money from you? Those leeches!’
‘It’s nothing, Gotthold. I just felt a bit sick.’
‘A bit sick? You see. Didn’t I tell you not to eat gherkins at night? They never agree with me.’
Yes, she’s in despair … but for ten minutes at a time … half an hour at the most. She’s just remembered the last time they were together, her daughter-in-law was wearing such an ugly jumper, she’ll knit her a pretty one, buy some wool, get going on it, eight hours a day for one week, her eyes are hurting …
‘Are they really hurting you? I told you …’ But if it’s done, it has to be done quickly. She’s already looking forward to her daughter-in-law’s pleasure. Finished, off to the post office, mailed it. She waits for three days, a week, three weeks, then at last there’s a postcard: ‘Best wishes from the wonderful Baltic. Helga. Hans. PS. The jumper is really nice.’
But she’s on to something else by then. She’s remembered something. They’ve got the little spare room for visitors, though of course they never have any visitors. She’s going to put Gotthold’s bed in there, and keep her bedroom for herself. For thirty years she hasn’t had a single night to herself.
Of course he’ll never agree to it. She lies awake for nights, thinking. There is her sister in Lüneburg. She’ll have to send Gotthold an urgent invitation. What about some financial advice? After all, he is the banker in the family. She’ll have to keep him there for two or three days.
In the meantime she’ll get a man in to help her move the furniture. She’ll do it in such a way that he won’t be able to move it back unaided. He will swear and scold and rant, but he’ll never hire anyone to help him, he’s too stingy. In fact, it probably won’t even occur to him. First she’ll leave the door open between the two rooms, then half-open, then closed, and finally locked. Oh my God, she’ll be able to sleep alone, like she did thirty years ago. She dreams and fantasizes. Please God, let it come to pass. Then at least she’ll have her nights to herself, just like thirty years ago …
Fifty Marks and a Merry Christmas
(1932)
We were newlyweds, Itzenplitz and me, and basically we had nothing. If you’re young and newly married and very much in love, then it doesn’t really matter that much if you’ve ‘basically got nothing’. Of course, we each had our occasional moments of wistfulness, but then the other one would laugh and say: ‘It doesn’t need to be right away. We’ve got all the time in the world …’ And then the little wistful pang was over.
But then I remember a conversation we had in the park once, when Itzenplitz sighed and said: ‘If only we didn’t have to count our pennies the whole time!’
I wasn’t quite sure where this was going. ‘Yes, and?’ I asked. ‘What then?’
‘Then I would buy myself something,’ said Itzenplitz dreamily.
‘And what might you like to buy yourself?’
Itzenplitz hunted around. She really had to think for quite some time before she said: ‘Well, for instance a pair of nice warm slippers.’
‘Surely not!’ I said, astonished at the imagination of my wife Elisabeth (which had become Ibeth, and then somehow Itzenplitz). Because we were conducting this conversation in the middle of summer, the sun was smiting, and as far as I was concerned I couldn’t imagine anything much beyond a cool shandy and a cigarette.
Our Christmas wish-list was the product of this summer conversation. ‘You know, Mumm,’ Itzenplitz said, and she rubbed hard at her long and pointy nose, ‘we should start keeping a record of every wish we think of. Because later on, at Christmas time, everything gets a bit frantic, and we might end up giving each other silly presents we didn’t really want.’
So I tore off a piece of paper from my subscription pad and we wrote down our first Christmas wishes: ‘A pair of warm slippers for Itzenplitz,’ and below that, because we meant to be rigorously fair, I added, after much frowning thought: ‘And a good book for Mumm!’ Mumm is me. ‘Fine,’ said Itzenplitz, and stared at the list with such holy fervour as though a pair of slippers and a book might straight away emerge from the paper.
Our wish-list grew through summer into late autumn, and the first damp snow and the earliest Christmas decorations, grew and grew …‘It doesn’t matter that there’s such a lot on it,’ Itzenplitz comforted me. ‘That means we’ll have a choice. In fact, all it is is a sort of menu. Just before Christmas, we’ll cut out everything impossible, but for now we can still wish.’ She thought for a moment and said: ‘I can wish for whatever I want, can’t I, Mumm?’
‘Of course,’ I replied, unthinkingly.
‘Good,’ she said, and started writing, and after a while I saw: ‘Blue silk evening dress (floor-length).’ She looked at me challengingly.
‘Well, really, Itzenplitz,’ I said.
‘You said I could wish for whatever I wanted.’
‘That’s true,’ I said, and I wrote: ‘And a four-valve wireless set’ – and then gave her the challenging look back. And then we got into a forceful and ingenious debate as to which was more urgently needed, the evening dress or the wireless – when all the time we both knew perfectly well that there was no chance of either for at least five years.
But all that happened much, much later, for now we’re still in the park, it’s summer and we’ve just committed our first wishes to paper. I’ve already had occasion to refer to Itzenplitz’s nose a couple of times – her ‘duck’s beak’ I sometimes called it. Well, she uses it to sniff around, and further to it she has the quickest, dartingest eyes in the world. She’s forever lighting on something, and so at this moment too she cried: ‘Oh, look! Oh, Mumm, it’s our first ten-pfennig piece towards Christmas!’ And she nudged it with the tip of her toe.
>
‘For Christmas?’ I asked, picking it up. ‘I think I’ll just go and get myself three cigarettes for it in the kiosk.’
‘Give it here! It’s going in our Christmas collection tin.’
Lots of novelties here. ‘Since when have you got a collection tin?’ I asked. ‘I’ve never seen you with it.’
‘I’ll find one, you—! Just give me a chance to look.’ And she scanned the trees, as though there was one hanging there somewhere.
‘Why don’t we do it this way,’ I suggested. ‘We’ll think about what we want to spend at Christmas, let’s say fifty marks … There’s six more pay days till Christmas, let’s say we put aside eight marks each time, no, eight marks fifty. And now I think I’ll go and get those cigarettes.’
‘Those ten pfennigs are mine! And as for what you just said, I don’t think I’ve ever heard so much nonsense. We’re going to go about it completely differently …’
‘Oh, you don’t say! Well, spit it out!’
‘When we come back from a trip on Sundays, you know, and we’re dog-tired and we want to take the tram, then we’ll save the fifty pfennigs, and walk, and the harder it is, the more determined we’ll be …’
‘I bet!’ I mocked.
‘And when you’re dying for a shandy, and I’m dying for a cup of cocoa, and when we both feel like a joint of meat on Sunday instead of sour lentils the whole time – oh, you’re such a silly boy! I’m not going to speak to you for three days, and I’m certainly not going to be seen on the street with you …!’
And with that she turned on her heel and shot off, and I slowly tramped after her. Later on, when we got into the city streets, she was walking on one side of the road, and I on the other, as though we had nothing to do with each other. And each time a clump of fat Sunday burghers came along, I would tease her by calling out: ‘Psst, Fräulein! Hey, Fräulein, I want to tell you something!’ The burghers stared and stared at her, and she blushed beet-red and tossed her head crossly this way and that.
But then she did suddenly come running over the road to me, because she had remembered that we had an empty can of condensed milk, with two holes in to pour through, and if I just punched a slit across the top with my chisel, we’d have us a perfect savings tin. Even the make of the condensed milk was ‘Glücksklee’* …
‘Wonderful,’ I mocked. ‘I wonder what money looks like once it’s been marinating for six months in milk dregs!’ Then she was gone again, and I was back to ‘Psst, Fräulein!’ She was ready to blow a gasket.
But then I remembered something, and I raced across the road to her and yelled: ‘Listen, there’s something we both forgot about, which is my fifty marks bonus!’ First, she wanted to slap me down again, and had already begun with who was ever going to give an idiot like me a bonus, but then we stopped to think about it seriously, and we got to wondering if there would even be any bonuses this year, with the economy going so badly and all, but maybe so, yes, almost certainly, and we came to the conclusion: ‘Let’s behave as though there won’t be. But wouldn’t it be lovely if there was …!’
Now I still need to tell you why we turned every penny over and what we were actually living on, and what sort of prospects we actually had of me getting a bonus. It’s not so easy to say what sort of job I had, and today I shake my head when I think of it, and it’s far from clear to me (not so very much later) how I managed to combine all my multifarious activities. Anyway, in the mornings from seven o’clock onwards, I was on the staff of the local rag, and was responsible for half the local news, while sitting opposite me was the editor Pressbold, who filled the rest of the paper with the help of pictures, matrixes, letters to the editor, the wireless programme and a distinctly ropy typewriter. For that I was paid eighty marks a month, and that was all the regular, dependable income we had. Once that was done, though, I would set off on subscription and advertising drives (walks, actually), for which I was paid a bonus of one Reichsmark twenty-five per subscriber, and ten per cent of any advertisement. In addition, I had the collecting of a voluntary supplemental insurance (three per cent of the contributions) and the gathering of membership fees for a gymnastic association (five pfennigs per man and month). And, last and least, I was also secretary of the economic and traffic association, but for that I just had the honour and expenses and the somewhat nebulous prospect of the gentlemen helping me out, if there was ever anything they could do for me.
So I wasn’t short of work, and the dismal part was that all my activities put together barely made me enough money to keep Itzenplitz and me alive – ‘acquisitions’ was a term not known to us. Sometimes I would get home drained and wretched, from running around half the day, ringing on fifty doorbells and earning less than half a mark. Today I am firmly convinced (even if she still won’t agree) that the only reason Itzenplitz was so full of schemes and wheezes was to excite my imagination and get me thinking about other things.
It must have been in autumn, damp fogs and rotten moods in my case, and our Christmas box still hadn’t taken on any firm shape, that I got home one day and found Itzenplitz with a kitchen knife in one hand and a briquette sawn through lengthwise in the other.
‘What on earth are you doing now?’ I asked in astonishment, because she was intent on hollowing out the half-briquette with the tip of her knife. The other half lay in front of her on the table.
‘Be quiet, Mumm!’ she whispered secretively. ‘There are bad people everywhere.’ And she pointed with her knife at the papered-over door behind which lived our neighbour, whom we had dubbed Klaus Störtebeker, after the celebrated corsair.
‘All right, what is it?’ And then I heard, in her best conspiratorial voice, how she had cut the briquette in half, and wanted to hollow it out, and carve a slit in it, and glue the whole thing back together again, and conceal it among the other briquettes. Her eyes sparkled with cunning and secrecy, and her long nose was twitching away more than ever …‘And you’re completely bonkers!’ I said. ‘And anyway, as for Christmas, Heber said there’s absolutely no chance of a bonus being paid, the boss is soooo because the paper is going badly …’
‘All right,’ she said, ‘just tell me everything in order, so I know who gets the briquette thrown at them on Christmas Eve.’
I’ve already said how our editor was a Herr Pressbold. He was a fine gentleman, grumpy, grouchy and getting fatter all the time, who had nothing to say however much he said. All the say was from Herr Heber, who ran accounts and had the ear of the great chief. We little Indians only got to see the great chief twice a year or so, because he liked to roll around the countryside in his Mercedes, where he had a sawmill here and a little provincial paper there, and here a tenement house and there a little country estate.
But his right-hand man in the office, as already stated, was Herr Heber, a lanky, bony, dusty figures man, whom I’d mentioned the matter of Christmas bonus and fifty marks to without getting an answer, in fact he’d asked me if I’d suffered a touch of early frost this year, and did I have the faintest notion of what it meant to be working in a loss-making enterprise, and it would be no thanks to me if the whole shebang wasn’t wound up in the New Year.
The worst thing was that Pressbold, on whose support I’d been counting, was tooting out of the same horn, and even complaining about my absurd notions, I should be glad not to be turfed out, and would be advised not to irk the great chief. And while they were both having a go at me, I thought the whole loss-making business and the worries of the great chieftain didn’t matter a damn to me, because I could see my wish-list being consigned to the four winds, and the warm slippers and the evening dress and the good book and the Christmas duck were all gone to the kibosh.
Yes, the Christmas duck gives me the opportunity to introduce a new character (mentioned just in passing once already) in my account: the neighbour behind the papered-over door, our so-called Klaus Störtebeker. We never found out Störtebeker’s real name, but he lived in the north-facing attic, while we had the south-facing o
ne. He was really dark-looking, with bristly black hair, wild black sparkling eyes and a scruffy black beard. In the town, and especially with the police, he was known and feared as a drinker and a brawler. On the side, he worked as a stoker in the local power station. We lived almost on top of each other; when he turned over in bed, we knew about it, and I suppose he will have heard the odd noise from us as well.
The thing with the duck for instance he definitely heard. That was a Christmas debate between us. In her family and in mine the traditional Christmas fare (or fowl) had been the goose, but we agreed that a twelve-pound goose (‘if it’s any less, it’s just skin and bone’) was a bit much for the two of us. So a duck was what we wanted, the octavo version instead of the full folio, only where to buy it, and how much …?
At that moment there was a raucous yell from Störtebeker’s room, and a moment later a fist battered against the door. As wild in appearance as any jungle creature, but straight out of bed and roaring drunk, we saw Störtebeker in our doorway, dressed only in shirt and trousers, which he held up with his free hand. ‘I’ll get yerz yer Christmas bird,’ Störtebeker gruffed, and he leered at us.
We were first alarmed, and then embarrassed. Itzenplitz rubbed her nose and muttered something about ‘very kind’ and ‘terribly generous’ and I attempted to get out of it by saying we weren’t completely sure whether we were in the market for a goose, or a turkey or …
‘Fools!’ yelled Störtebeker, and slammed the door so hard the plaster rained down from the ceiling.
But he can’t have been too offended by our foolishness because, while not repeating his offer of a duck directly, when he ran into Itzenplitz outside, trying to nail a Christmas tree support from a couple of planks, he took them away from her, and said: ‘I’ll take care of it. I’ve got a planed piece of wood by the stove. Christmas present to yerz. Make a great base.’
But I’m getting ahead of myself again, we were still talking about the bonus. My first attempt was rebuffed, and as a sort of consolation we undertook a financial check-up, to see what we had actually managed to put aside since our decision to save for Christmas. It wasn’t an easy matter, since Itzenplitz had a complicated system of funds: housekeeping money, pocket money, Mumm’s spending money, coal money, acquisitions money, rent money and Christmas money. And since in almost all these boxes and chests, according to our financial state, there was deep ebb, the bit of money we did have tended to go like a badger from one to another, and it wasn’t easy to see where what little went.
