by Hans Fallada
So far I’ve only ever seen them on posters for insect powder, but the light that falls through the opaque glass in the cell door puts it beyond doubt: bedbugs. I squash them. They leave big bloodstains on the coverlet. After that I see the blackish-brown stains on the walls in a new light. These are no stray individuals, these are the advance guard of a considerable army with which I will have to get to grips.
My first feeling is indignation. They can be as rigorous as they like in prison, with rules against everything under the sun, but bedbugs surely aren’t on any legitimate roster of penalties. I’m going to complain about this in the morning.
I go back to sleep, but it’s not long before I’m woken by a new stabbing pain. The bedbugs are back. I try and sleep once or twice more, but in the end I’m driven to get up, crawl into my clothes and walk up and down, waiting for it to get light.
The second the key turns in the lock, I make my report: ‘There are bedbugs here!’
‘Bedbugs, eh?’ comes a return question. ‘Your predecessor never complained about them. Tell the duty officer, and he’ll give you something.’
Since I don’t know who the duty officer is, I repeat my complaint each time someone opens the door, maybe twenty times. I’m not given any insect powder. When it’s dark again, and the place is quiet, I bang dementedly on the door. An indignant voice outside gruffs: ‘Shut up in there! What’s the matter?’
‘Where’s my insecticide!’
‘Tell them tomorrow when they unlock the door. And now pipe down, or else I’ll have you put in a punishment cell.’
‘I want a different cell then.’
‘They’re all full,’ and the fellow shuffles off. I spend another night pacing up and down, livid, freezing.
The next morning I make my indignant report.
‘Oh, you and your bedbugs! You obviously weren’t ever in the trenches!’ But I am given my insecticide. A trusty comes along with a white, acrid fluid in a spittoon, with a brush to apply it. ‘There you are. Now keep your cell nice and clean, and paint this on against the bedbugs. That’ll keep you out of trouble.’
I’m on my own again. And I’ve got a job to do. I strip the bed and inspect the mattress and bolster. In some little crannies there are five or six of them, and I smoosh them before they can run off. Full-grown, they are reddish-brown, the little ones are a sort of whitish-yellow aspic colour. Then there’s the pallet itself. I pull out the cross-struts, paint everything out, drive the brush deep into the cracks. They flee. I slaughter them. I want a decent night’s sleep at last.
I go to bed early, so as to be nice and sharp for when my case comes up. I am awakened by the now familiar stabbing pain, followed immediately by itching. My day’s work seems to have been in vain, the bedbugs are out in force.
The worst of it is that for some reason there is no light on in my cell tonight. I begin to wonder if the itching couldn’t be some figment of my imagination. Then I happen to catch one on my face, and another taking a walk up my leg. I sniff them to make sure. The smell of bedbugs isn’t one you’d ever mistake for anything else. It’s a sweetish smell – synaesthetes would call it green – oddly like grass. During my test, I’m put in mind of Flaubert, who found this bedbug smell so arousing on Rustschuk Hanem.*
It’s extraordinary how much those bedbugs get on my nerves. All day I spent seeing the flat brown and whitish forms wherever I looked. Even when I was writing, they seemed to crawl up the inside of the pen. In the desert of prison life, those beasts take on a significance that alarms me. I’m wondering: am I sure they’re not a hallucination on my part?
I remember that I sometimes used to feel a similar itchiness when I was outside, if I hadn’t drunk any alcohol the previous night. Admittedly, I didn’t find bite marks all over my arms and legs when that was the case. But then I remember that a hysteric is capable of ‘thinking’ a tumour, for instance, with such suggestiveness that it will appear the next day. What if something like that is the case with me?
Vainly I try to comfort myself by saying I’ve seen the shapes of the bedbugs myself. But what if this ‘seeing’ is a form of hallucination? Vainly I remind myself of the appearance of two prize examples on my bolster that left spectacular bloodstains. I can still see them emerging from a crack in my pallet between wood and iron, while I was daubing it with paint. I see them sitting in the pleats of my sea-grass mattress.
But the only way this would add up to proof would be if someone else had seen it with me. And the warder expressly said: ‘Your predecessor never complained about them.’ I can’t imagine a human being stoically enduring being nibbled like that.
Next thing. When they brought me the solution, a warder with the trusty, I showed them my right forearm, an astonishing sight, studded with literally dozens of bite marks. They both looked past it as if it wasn’t anything. Well …
And this afternoon, while I was writing, I felt a tickling on my neck, grabbed at it and felt the creature disappear under my shirt. I tore off my shirt – I was sitting there in my shirtsleeves – and surely I must have found the thing if it did exist: I found nothing.
While I was writing, two or three of the bite marks appeared spontaneously on the inside of my left arm, with which I was holding the paper. How is it possible that I fail to see a bedbug on my bare arm, which is in plain view as I’m sitting writing: enter bedbug, bedbug do its business, exit bedbug? – It can’t have been bedbugs, then, but …
Better I get up and pace for the rest of the night. I’m going slightly potty. In fact I don’t see why a doctor doesn’t come and examine me. Aren’t you supposed to be given a physical examination when you’re booked? Those are the rules. The ones that are honoured in the breach, as the saying goes.
5 I Get My Hearing
From hour to hour, from day to day I’m waiting for something to happen. Nothing does. Sometimes, when I’m tired of reading the same newspaper stories on my toilet paper, and chasing bedbugs, and pacing up and down the cell, I imagine I’ve been forgotten.
But no, they don’t forget about you here. Just everything takes its own sweet time. On the fifth day, my cell door is abruptly unlocked. A man stands there in civvies. ‘Come with me, Fallada.’
Corridors, doors, I find myself in a room with a couple of officials in a part of the building that isn’t prison. On one table is my suitcase. So they’ve traced my hotel, that’s clever of them.
‘Fallada, is that your name? Did you sign this?’
‘Yes, that’s my statement.’
‘Well, Count Totz has sent a telegram. They thought you must have had an accident.’
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘Took the opportunity to do a runner, did you? But then, once the money’s spent, the little mama’s boy wants to crawl into his safe little hole.’
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘Do you stand by what’s in your statement?’
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘The first time you’ve done anything like this?’
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘It shows.’
‘He’s had a real change of nature,’ says the second official, who thus far had studied me in silence. ‘Did you buy those clothes with the money you stole?’
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘Right, you’d better take them off then. They’re not yours.’
The two of them stand there and watch as I undress.
‘There. Now put on the stuff in the suitcase. I take it that’s yours?’
‘Yes,’ I say.
I get dressed.
‘That suit’s pretty new too. Did you buy that with the stolen money too?’
‘I must have been wearing something when I left.’
‘Who knows. Maybe some old rags you chucked in a ditch.’
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘Now get a move on. Pack the things away. I should tell you the hotel wants to press charges for non-payment of your room.’
‘That’s good,’ I say.
‘What do yo
u mean by that?’
‘I want a stiff sentence. I intend to come off the sauce while I’m inside.’
The two men burst into hysterical laughter. ‘No fears there! You’ll have more than enough time!’
‘Do you think this is a sanatorium or something?’
Then they look at me for a while in silence.
‘You’re not reckoning on getting out under paragraph 51, are you?’
‘Quite the contrary,’ I say.
‘Quite the contrary – I like that. Because I promise, if you do, you’ll be in for it. Have you ever spent time in the insane wing of a prison?’
‘Naa,’ I say.
‘They dish it out a bit,’ he says meaningly. ‘Not something a little mama’s boy would like.’
‘Don’t try and intimidate me. And I want to talk to a lawyer.’
‘Why don’t you send him a visiting card then?’
‘I have the right to see a lawyer within twenty-four hours of being arrested. I’ve been here for over a hundred.’
‘If counting hours is your thing, you’ll have your hands full for the next something years. Okay, get back to your palace! Hang on, the hat goes in the suitcase.’
‘But I didn’t buy it with stolen money.’
‘It’s brand new.’
‘Sometimes I buy myself new stuff, you know.’
‘Whatever. Back to your cell.’
6 Chuntering
I spent six months and five days in remand prison. All during that time, I expected every day to be taken to an examining magistrate, or at the very least to be presented with the charges against me. Not a bit of it.
During those six months I was in three prisons and more than twenty different cells. Of course I always thought the change of address betokened some progress in my case. Again, not a bit of it.
But I had time, time aplenty. And I used it the way most remand prisoners use their time, for introspection. For that typical remand sickness of moaning or chuntering.
I was soon pretty advanced. For the first four weeks it was the bedbugs that dominated my thoughts and actions. No one outside can imagine the extent of my phobia. How many days and nights I spent, shaking with rage, running round my cell, suddenly pulling my bed apart, going through everything in a demented quest for the creatures, spotting them on the sheets, the floor, in cracks in the floorboards. How they gave me the slip, resurfaced, made mock of me. There was no doctor to help me against my fear of them, exacerbated of course by the symptoms of alcohol withdrawal.
Then I was put in a different prison, and the bedbug phobia abated. Only to be replaced by other fears. In the yard, where we had our half-hour’s exercise every day, there was a push-button with the word ‘alarm’. Every exercise time I fought with myself not to push it, to see what would happen. Then there was cell-cleaning furore, in which I would scour the lino floor of the cell for hours on end, slamming it with the bristle brush till it shone. Completely wiped out, I would then crouch on my stool hugging my legs against my chest so that my feet didn’t spoil the sheen. Till I spotted some corner that wasn’t quite as brilliant as the rest, and I would start all over again.
Others had different troubles. For a long time I had a cellmate, a former officer of justice, who was accused of having tipped off a suspect that he was about to be arrested. This man forgot about his family, his own situation, the approaching hearing, over the obsession with getting the remand system abolished.
His was a particularly grave case: everything that looked self-evident and reasonable and set in stone to him, professionally, looked so radically different to him once he was behind bars himself. Now remand looked to him like criminal madness.
The ideas that took possession of this once-sensible man and to which he tried with endless submissions to convert attorneys, judges and ministers were absurdly childish. For instance, in place of remand prison, a permanent stamp on the right hand of a person awaiting proceedings. While they might be able to conceal it in general by the wearing of gloves, it was to be instituted that no long-distance tickets were to be sold without the buyer showing his right hand to the official at the desk to prove that it was unstamped.
For a time I had another neighbour whose obsession was that there was ‘no paragraph’ that met his case. To begin with, I didn’t see what he was getting at, and because of our continuous invigilation it wasn’t easy to have a proper conversation with a cellmate either. Finally it dawned on me that he meant that his crime was covered by no paragraph of the penal code. He went to see the examining magistrate almost every day, and must have brought the man to the edge of madness himself with his impertinence and stupidity and the bee in his bonnet. I still recall his version of one of their interviews:
Magistrate: Where did you first meet Scharf?
Petersen: I was staying in the Brandenburger Hof, where he liked to drink a beer of an evening.
Magistrate: And that’s when you sold him the wood?
Petersen: No, I never sold him any wood.
Magistrate: Come on, man, tell the truth.
Petersen: That is the truth.
Magistrate: But you knew he dealt in wood?
Petersen: Only at Christmas, when everything was out in the open. That’s when he asked me to sign the purchase agreement.
Magistrate: Yes. On the wood that you’d sold him.
Petersen: No, because I shagged his wife. But there’s no paragraph against that.
Magistrate: Oh, don’t you start that again! Sergeant, take the man away.
Of course a paragraph was finally found that met the case, and Petersen was taken down for a long time for illegal dealing in wood. The night after the sentence, he was put in a rubber cell. He couldn’t get over the fact that there was a paragraph for him.
The most widespread condition of course is ‘chuntering’ – talking incessantly about your case. It’s only human that in the eyes of the person concerned the most minor incident becomes a monstrous case to be laid out before every official and every fellow inmate. For a long time I was put with an elementary schoolteacher who was accused of having falsified a bond, a typical family story. The man didn’t tire of telling anyone and everyone his story. When he had driven the people around him so demented by dint of his incessant repetitions that they no longer listened, he clambered up to the cell window with the help of a table and stool so he could see the wall on the other side of the yard. Then he would bang and shout till a face popped up at a window opposite, and in seconds flat he would tell the fellow ‘the whole story’.
The teacher received regular visits from the marshal, as he was called in prison slang, in other words he had the stool and table taken away to stop him clambering up to the window. Nothing seemed to make any difference, even the furious official was given a report on the latest state of the case, the man would jam his foot in the cell door and go rabbiting on and on.
I ran into the teacher later on in prison proper, and he was still talking about his case. Shortly after his release he shot his wife and himself, even though financially they weren’t that badly off. Probably he never got over the fact that he couldn’t get an appeal going in his case, and saw that to people on the outside his case was a matter of complete indifference.
Then there is a great section of people who don’t survive separation from their families, their wives, their children. Especially at the beginning of remand, it’s almost always extraordinarily difficult to get to see your family. As a result, the prisoner gets the idea he’s been abandoned and despised, there are the most frightful breakdowns ranging from silent crying to wild tantrums. Nothing makes the least difference. It’s almost unheard of for a doctor to take an interest. In the eyes of the officials, ‘chuntering’ is just something that happens during remand.
I have a grim memory of quite a decent official saying to a complete basket case who was crying for his wife all the time: ‘There, there, don’t take it so hard. Once you’ve been with us for a year, you’ll have adjusted qui
te nicely, and in the end you wouldn’t want it any other way.’
The production of individuals who at the end of a year might want things to be different but are incapable of living any other way because they are mentally ill is one of the greatest drawbacks of prison.
7 Robinson Crusoe in Prison
The man entering prison for the first time is like Robinson Crusoe caught in a storm and fetching up on his desert island. None of the gifts and attributes he has developed in his life outside are any use to him inside, in fact they will probably be a hindrance. He has to start again. If he wants to have a bearable existence he will have to forget what he knew, and take a leaf from Crusoe’s book.
For instance, how to get a light without matches or a lighter. In my first few days I managed to get hold of a bit of tobacco, but no amount of cunning, no pleas, no begging could procure me matches, which seemed to be an extremely rare item.
One evening found me sitting pretty disconsolately in my cell, with four or five hand-rolled cigarettes in front of me, crazy for a smoke, but stuck for a light. I jumped to my feet. My predecessor must have known my plight, he must have had some solution, maybe he had left some matches hidden somewhere.
I embarked on a systematic search of my cell. Miracles exist, you just have to want them badly enough. On the top of the lampshade just under the ceiling, only reachable if you piled the chair on top of the table, I finally found these three things: a steel triangular file, a long piece of wood with an embrasure cut into it and, jammed into it and secured with twine, a piece of flint. And finally a tin can with some scorched lint.
Steel, flint and tinder – here was Robinson’s fire-making equipment, I was saved. I stuck a cigarette between my lips, put the tin can with the tinder on the table and set myself to strike sparks. I got the steel to glow, but there were no sparks. I struck and struck for all I was worth, sweat ran down my brow, maybe I struck two or three sparks but they died before they could catch on the tinder.
