by Hans Fallada
It got dark, still I was striking away. It was night, and I was striking. There was no fire. The cigarette in my mouth was half chewed-up, and that was how I found the secret – not of striking a light, not tonight, that took a few more evenings’ practice, but at least of chewing tobacco.
The hidden meaning of certain phrases that are still used outside, though they have long lost their original sense, became apparent. In one prison there was the custom of only allowing inmates one jug of fresh water every twenty-four hours. Habituated to two issues of water a day, I had poured away my dirty water and had no fresh. I would have liked to wash my hands, but as the saying goes: you shouldn’t pour away your dirty water before you have fresh.
We were given bread in the morning and evening, in the form of a sturdy half-pound wedge. In the mornings you cut it up into slices for yourself, but you couldn’t do that at night: there was a nonsensical rule that said inmates had to leave knife and fork outside the cell door in the evening in a cloth bag. That left you sitting in front of a great lump of bread which, try as you might, you couldn’t wrap your mouth around to bite. You had no option but to revert to the biblical action: you broke bread.
But all these plain, simple actions that you learned were only external indications of a wholly new world. You had wound up in a type of existence where you could look to no one else for anything, only yourself. The more you cut yourself off, the more certain you could be of being left in peace; the more you looked to help from others – warders, officials, lawyers – the deeper the difficulties you were storing up for yourself in future.
8 Chicanery of One Sort or Another
As a rule, the new bod coming into prison for the first time has no other wish than to be left in peace. If he’s not a fool, he will realize soon enough that every wish he expresses – even the most natural and obvious – will lead to him being taken by any official, great or small, for a troublemaker. He cuts his cloth accordingly and tries to keep to a minimum his contact with Messrs Guard, Senior Guard, or beyond them the galactic multitudes of master machinists, foremen, overseers, secretaries, inspectors, chief inspectors and governors.
But there are times when he will have a wish to express. His arrest has come precipitately, he wants to write a letter home, to vest power of attorney in someone, to request that something or other be sent to him. Very well. He asks for leave to write a letter. The first thing he is told is that he is only allowed to express such a wish at one particular time of day, unlocking time.
He masters his impatience and the next morning asks to be allowed to write a letter. His wish is noted, and if he is very lucky he will be given a printed letter form as early as that afternoon, complete with a letterhead bearing his name, details, cell number and designation: remand prisoner. He would like to get a piece of letter paper without this perfectly superfluous letterhead on it that does not concern the addressee and that seems, moreover, to find him guilty before he has even received sentence; but to get one he would have to ask specially. If the request is approved he must, if he has money, get it bought on his behalf; if not, he will have to use the unlovely paper to write to some friend or other, and ask him to send some proper letter paper. Then, in one or two weeks, if all goes well, he will be in a position to write his urgent letter.
Then he sees on the letter form that he is only allowed to write along the lines, not between them, not on the edge of the paper; that he will have to get by on four sides of small octavo, that larger formats will as a rule not be authorized; that he will have to be as brief as possible, and other such ridiculous stipulations.
Perhaps his money was confiscated when he was taken in; then he will have little chance of actually mailing his letter, once completed. For a first letter, the state is supposed to bear the postage, but often that tends to be ‘forgotten’. Or his letter is impounded. Then either he will be informed of this – a mere four weeks later, and all the while he’s been consumed with impatience for a reply – or else, in the interest of the case against him, he will not be told at all. Both are possible, and he won’t know which it is.
Among the stipulations that come with the letterhead there is one missing, the most important: that the remand prisoner is not allowed to write anything about his ‘case’. This condition, which is unwritten, merely observed in practice, prevents him from writing to his friends or next of kin about the reason for his arrest, the reason for writing.
Take another example: he has got something to smoke, say a visitor has left him some cigarettes. But the visitor failed to take account of the fact that his friend is in prison, he didn’t think to bring matches as well. If the prisoner brought money with him into prison, then he’s in reasonably good shape, he just needs to wait for the day of the week to come round when he is allowed to express wishes. Then matches will be bought for him with his money and, a mere three to nine days after the wish presented itself, he will already be able to indulge it.
If he has no money, though, he will have to take the route of deceit, using trusties, who are the inmates who swab the corridors and dole out food. He will have to pay the asking rate. When I was still green in prison, three matches set you back one cigarette.
Of course he then runs the risk of being shopped to the authorities, with his tobacco seized and his smoking privileges withdrawn because he has shown himself unworthy, he has broken the good and holy law of the prison edicts.
Another helpful stipulation has it that the prisoner, unless he is sick, may not lie on his bed during the day. By day the bed has to be folded up against the wall. You are only ill if a doctor has declared you to be ill. If you’re ill, but haven’t yet seen a doctor – and in some prisons he only does his rounds once or twice a week – then you are not allowed to lie down. If you do, punishments threaten, and scenes are made.
Of course all these difficulties – and they are legion – are only there for the novice. The experienced inmate, who has been through the remand process a few times, will know the ropes. He will keep his complaints to an absolute minimum. The way he keeps his cell, receives his meals, talks to the trusties, answers the warders, all identify the old jailbird whom no guard would want to mess with – he wouldn’t want the aggravation.
It’s the new inmate who has to deal with the onerousness of prison. More than that: he is often victim to the whims of the guards, who are badly paid, nervous, stressed-out people at the best of times, and who don’t mind taking out their frustration on a helpless victim. I can recall one especially shaming instance of this.
The only variation in the endless days of the remand prisoners is the exercise hour. Then they are let out into the fresh air for half an hour where, three paces apart, they make the familiar rounds of the yard. Talking, of course, is prohibited, but everyone, of course, talks. Anyone caught talking gets yelled at, and if he repeats the offence he will be taken out of line and made to pace back and forth all by himself, along some distant wall. That’s the rule anyway, but even in my first few days I witnessed an exception.
Ahead of me was a scrawny little Jew, a dentist, I heard, who had failed to pay some tax and had been sentenced to prison, then paid up – but was arrested before the payment was put through. Now he was in prison, and vainly trying to get information through to his wife as to what office she should go to with proof of payment. He was doing time for a misdemeanour he had, albeit tardily, atoned for, and with every day he saw his small practice dwindling further and was helpless while the authorities took him for both money and penalty.
Of course he was incredibly agitated, pleased to have found a listener, and was chattering away. He wasn’t even particularly indiscreet about it; five or six paces in front of each guard he would fall silent, and begin again after that little kowtow. But a fat moustached guard took against him, probably because he was a Jew – most prison officials, as ex-NCOs, are anti-Semites – and he got yelled at.
For the next two or three circuits he kept still, but then he couldn’t manage it any
more, he had to say a couple more words, and once again they spotted him. He was made to step out of line, caught a torrent of abuse and was taken back to his cell and lost the rest of his time off.
The following morning. My man is walking ahead of me, as before, with lowered head, visibly resolved not to say a word. But that’s not going to help him, the other side is every bit as determined to yell at him again. ‘You were talking to the man behind you. I warned you yesterday,’ and so on and so forth.
The dentist tries to protest, but they haul him off. The following morning the same rigmarole. ‘Next time you’ll land up in a punishment cell!’
He’s the sergeant’s bunny, as the phrase goes, and we watch him go, pale, trembling with fury and humiliatingly bawled-out.
I never saw him again. I hope he managed to get through his remaining ten or twelve days. But I’m afraid he looked to me like a suicide candidate, one of those who, for all the talk of ‘humane’ treatment, just don’t get on in prison.
9 Tobacco
When I was arrested that September night and taken to my cell, I was filled with a consuming thirst for alcohol. I had had nothing to drink for five or six hours, and I thought I was simply going to die unless I got some alcohol. I could hardly wait for morning, to see a doctor. But when morning finally came with its dishwater coffee and hunk of dry bread, I didn’t ask to see the doctor. Somehow the new environment had stung me to resistance. I didn’t want any alcohol any more, I wanted a long sentence where I could finally and lastingly break the habit.
And that’s what I did. In all my time in prison I hardly missed alcohol, and I feel so completely cured now that I am happy to drink the odd glass of beer or wine in company, but alcohol as such has quite lost its appeal to me. I get on better without it.
Instead I suffered a different craving, from the very first day: a hunger for tobacco. It’s barely comprehensible to me that I got over a serious addiction with hardly any trouble, but never got to grips with the other, lesser one. Perhaps it’s that I saved all my will-power for the fight against alcohol, perhaps it’s that my fellow inmates all had the same trouble as I did. The cry for tobacco is the universal cry from every prison, every jail, every penal establishment, and the desire for it is what drives all those hidden swindles that always manage to get the better of the surveillance systems in prison. All the passing-on of messages, the trading in money, in clothes, in food and soap – all those are just ancillaries compared to the overwhelming business of tobacco.
When I was delivered to my cell, I didn’t have even one cigarette with me. Morning came, the hunger for nicotine came, and the first words I addressed a fellow inmate, a blue-uniformed trusty, were: ‘Psst, mate, could you spare a drag?’
I had waited for a moment when the guard was unlocking the cell next to mine, but the trusty gestured dismissively, I wasn’t getting anything. Each time they opened my door I would try and cadge a drag, and the gestures of the trusties turned to mockery, open ridicule. They pointed me out to the guards as the one who was desperate for a smoke. I saw I wasn’t going to get any help from them. Either they had nothing themselves, or they wouldn’t give it up without something in return – and at that time I had no idea what I had to offer them.
Those first days in the Alex I met no one, there was no exercise, and I would have been destroyed by my nicotine addiction if, in the course of going through my pockets, I hadn’t found a couple of mouthpieces. I ripped a long bristle out of the broom and pushed it through the mouthpiece. When I pulled it out the other end, it was coated with the thick brown precipitate of tobacco. It tasted as bitter as bile, but it was so good, so good that my whole body enjoyed the sticky mess and calmed down a little.
Even then I was cautious enough to remind myself that the residue in the two mouthpieces wouldn’t last for ever. And since there was no way of knowing when I would next get tobacco, I restricted my intake to one of those nicotine-tipped bristles every three or four hours.
Then there was my interrogation by the police, which at least had the virtue of bringing almost fifty cigarettes into my possession. When I had to change, I managed to pick two packs of cigarettes and a box of matches out of my valise and smuggle them into my underpants. How good it felt when I was back in my cell, filling my lungs with fragrant smoke, past and future were equally unimportant compared to that instant’s joy: prison wasn’t at all bad if it allowed you such pleasures.
But what are fifty cigarettes to a serious smoker! They were used up long before I left the Alex, even though I took out the filters and rolled up the leftover tobacco in newspaper to smoke. I was soon back on my bristles and mouthpieces.
Then I was removed to Moabit, and on the way I was allowed to smoke all I wanted. There were twenty or thirty of us in the ‘green August’,* all of us excited by the prospect of change. Most of us, along with our personal effects, had been given our smokes for the move. All of it was going to have to be surrendered when we arrived in Moabit, so we lit up with divine calm and doled out cigarettes with blithe assurance. I stuffed what I was given – which was no small amount – up my trouser legs into my socks and, in spite of the jeering of the others, I was able to convey the contraband into Moabit. It was in flagrant violation of the administrative rules, but those rules are framed in such a way that a prisoner has no option but to breach them. The system ensured that one became a comrade to one’s fellow inmates, united with them in opposition to a system that was petty, vindictive and stupid. In Moabit things were better for me, there was the exercise hour, there was association, and almost every day there were at least of couple of fag-ends that I could roll up into a festive cigarette for the end of the week. And if everything went pear-shaped I would resort to snaffling dog-ends, a dangerous and exciting sport that I could play every exercise hour. It was like this: the yard where we had our exercise was used before us by those exalted individuals, the serious criminals. Unlike us small fry, they weren’t released in a swarm of thirty or forty to shamble round and round under the supervision of three or four guards; no, they went out singly, or at most three or four at a time, under strict guard and (this was enforced, just about) in silence.
These exalted personages were of course allowed to smoke – which we could only do in our cells – and they had the wherewithal too. And since they had no reason to economize, they tossed the ends in the yard. It was these butts that we now collected up, snaffled them, which is to say picked them up casually, as it were en passant, as if there was something the matter with your shoe or pulling up a sock. The orbit was invariably soon picked clean, but there were still those butts that were outside the ring, in the proximity of the guards.
And then it was a matter of the enterprise and discretion and sheer need of the individual. The very hardest ones were left till last. When we gathered to troop off back to our cells, there was often a little barging, and you might be able to take two or three steps to the side to reach the precious half-inch of tobacco. And the happiness you felt when you’d snaffled five or six dog-ends! That was an entire cigarette. A day with a cigarette was good, and a day with nothing was bad, it was that simple.
But here too some guards showed their meanness. They made a note of the collectors and waited calmly till the end of exercise, then called you, told you to empty out your pockets onto the ground. Not content with that, they sometimes told you to trample the ends into the ground, lest someone else try and pick them up. A scene like that would leave you seething with fury, harbouring fantasies of revenge and mocking the pious twaddle of the regulations that blathered on about reforming characters. I’d like to see anyone reform on such treatment.
But there was a weapon you could use even against the guards: you simply put the ends you found in your mouth. They were safe there, and in the form of chewing tobacco they lasted much longer. And that was how, in spite of my initial revulsion, I learned to chew tobacco.
10 The Sentence
The big day in the life of any remand prisoner is of
course his day in court. Before he finally enters the anonymity of blue or brown gear, and for a greater or lesser time, there is this day which is all about him. Judges, prosecutors, lay assessors, defending counsel, the onlookers in the public gallery, the series of witnesses: they all remind him of his life outside. He is allowed to talk about himself, once again he has a character, everyone is talking about him, thinking about him. And then there’s the prospect of the struggle for those who have some hope of being acquitted.
On that March day, there were three of us awaiting trial. We were introduced in the presence of the warden, we were dressed, we got given our civilian clothes back. Oh, the feeling of a proper suit, after your baggy prison gear!
In the last few weeks, ever since I’d known the date of my hearing, I had one grave worry: in the time I’d spent in my own clothes in the Alex and in Moabit, my white stiff collar had turned black. An appeal to have it washed at my expense in time for the hearing was turned down. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll provide you with a scarf.’
Now, I really didn’t want to show up in front of people who had known me in my past life in a blue-chequered prison scarf. But I wasn’t a complete novice at this stage either. I got hold of my trusty, informed him of the size and shape of the collar, and from some corner of the prison, from a man I never saw, and through a whole chain of middlemen, I was given exactly the collar I wanted: pristine white. It wasn’t the cheapest collar in the world, it set me back two packets of tobacco and three rolls of chewing tobacco. But I got it, just like you can get anything you want in prison if you can pay for it.
In the ‘green August’ I made the acquaintance of my two fellows, a young man of twenty and an old and steady-looking fifty-year-old. Both were quite convinced they would be acquitted, they were completely innocent. The young fellow, a cobbler’s apprentice, was charged with having broken into seltzer booths and tobacconists’ kiosks, the older man, a master butcher, with having duped several people with worthless IOUs. I seemed to be the only one who was expecting a conviction, and I got pitying smiles for not having lied about my case.
