Nightmare in Berlin

by Hans Fallada

  He kissed her. ‘Bye for now, my dear! As soon as I can!’

  ‘As soon as you can! Bye! Get back safely — oh you poor thing, you’ll be frozen out there!’

  And he was indeed chilled to the bone on the way home, and glad when he finally reached the sanatorium. From the moment he pressed the bell and the door lock started to buzz, all he could think about, despite the cold, was the reception that awaited him, and he fervently hoped they would go easy on him.

  The girl who had opened the door for him, and who was now looking through the lodge window, was the same one who had opened up for him in the afternoon after he had told her a bare-faced lie. She was about to open up her little window, but then thought better of it. Doll climbed the stairs with a sigh of relief, and thought: Well, I’ve got over the first hurdle …

  But what am I like? he thought to himself as he was going upstairs. I’m acting as if I’ve been summoned to the headmaster’s study for playing truant at school. Am I a boy of thirteen, or a man of fifty-two? It’s exactly the same feeling I had back then, and now it even smells the same as it did in the Prinz Heinrich grammar school in Grunewaldstrasse! That tingling, expectant sensation of fear, that smell of dry, dead dust warmed by the sun … It’s true: we never leave school for the rest of our lives. Not me at any rate. I am and always will be the old grammar-school boy, and I’m still doing the same stupid things I did back then!

  Now he pressed the bell button for Men’s Ward III. As always, he had a long wait before somebody opened the door. The old senior nurse looked at him for a moment, as if about to say something, but then let him in without a word. So that’s hurdle No.2, Doll thought to himself.

  Many patients were sitting around in the lobby, as always during the hour between supper and bedtime, while others were marching up and down the long corridor with angry impatience. This was the time when even patients who had lain listlessly in bed all day now got up. Driven by a vague sense of restlessness, perhaps impelled by an unconscious yearning for freedom, they stood or wandered around aimlessly, hardly speaking, until sleep came — generally dispensed by the night nurse in the form of potions, tablets, or injections.

  Doll made his way without a word through this gathering of fellow sufferers, and they in turn paid very little heed to him. That was the big advantage of this ward for ‘difficult’ patients, that you could behave just as you wanted: talking to all and sundry today, not saying a word to anybody tomorrow, being cheery today, and smashing the place up tomorrow. Nothing came as a surprise, and the staff took everything in their stride.

  Doll found his little room, the cell, locked up. Not only the inner door with its little glass spyhole was shut, but also the padded, sound-absorbing outer door. This was an awful lot of trouble to take over the possessions of a man who owned next to nothing. All right, so they had secured a very small piece of soap, a nightshirt, and a comb against possible theft by a kleptomaniac colleague; but now he needed to get into his room! He was dead tired and hungry, and hopefully they had left his supper there in the cell for him, so that he wouldn’t have to go off and find it.

  ‘Mr. Ohnholz’, said Doll politely to the male nurse who was then walking past obliviously, ‘could you please unlock my cell for me?’

  ‘Your cell?’ replied the nurse with a faint grin, and proceeded to do nothing of the kind. ‘Bartel from Room 14 has been in there since this afternoon. He was a bit agitated, if you follow me.’

  ‘And where am I supposed to live now? In Room 14?’ inquired Doll, and still couldn’t quite believe what now seemed the most obvious inference.

  ‘I couldn’t tell you!’ replied the male nurse with a shrug of his shoulders, and was already walking away. ‘As far as I know, no other arrangements have been made.’

  Very nice — just what I wanted to hear! thought Doll, and carried on to the tea kitchen. Well, we’ll see about that — time will tell …

  Sitting in the tea kitchen was his old friend, Nurse Kleinschmidt. They’d sat together trembling with fear in the air-raid shelter a few dozen times, and shared the last cigarette and the last of the real coffee between them when the raid was over.

  ‘Well?’ inquired Kleinschmidt, as Doll sat down without a word on the wooden chair on the far side of the kitchen table. ‘Well? I thought you’d discharged yourself, Mr. Doll?’

  ‘Just a little unauthorised visit to see my sick wife’, replied Doll. ‘And in the meantime they’ve occupied my bunker! Just like the boss, playing God Almighty!’

  ‘God Almighty is always right!’ said the nurse, nodding in agreement. She had as little time for the privy councillor as Doll, and she had known her boss for nigh on twenty years. ‘You know what, Mr. Doll’, she went on, and looked at him meaningfully through narrowed eyes: ‘If I were you, I would settle for voluntary discharge …’, and then after another pause: ‘I wouldn’t wait until they kick up a fuss and chuck me out of a place that has made so much money from me. I’d rather chuck myself out!’

  Doll thought hard about this for a moment. It was getting on for eight o’clock. ‘Have I still got time to catch a train into the city?’ he asked.

  ‘Plenty of time!’

  I’ll get into the house somehow. Mrs. Schulz won’t be very pleased to see me again, but I’ll straighten things out with her somehow. It’s all happening a little faster than I had planned, my return to the world, to an active life, but Kleinschmidt is quite right: it’s better to be doing than to get done!

  ‘Well?’ asked the nurse again, and gave him a searching look.

  ‘Right you are!’ he replied, and got to his feet as he spoke. ‘I’ll see you again, my dear, or rather I won’t see you again — not in this place, anyway!’

  ‘Hang on a moment!’ cried the nurse, and didn’t take his proffered hand. ‘You haven’t had your supper yet! Wait, I’ll get you something!’ And from the warming cabinet she took out a dish of potatoes with carrots. She added some bread, four or five slices.

  ‘I can’t take that!’ protested Doll. ‘That’s more than my bread allowance. I don’t want you to stint yourself on my account.’

  ‘Don’t talk such rubbish’, said Kleinschmidt. ‘I’m only giving you what’s going spare.’ And by way of explanation: ‘Old Bartel had a little turn earlier, and now we’ve given him an injection that he won’t wake up from before tomorrow. So he won’t be needing any supper — that’s why!’

  ‘Well, in that case, thanks very much!’ said Doll, and fell to eating like a ravenous wolf. While he was eating, the nurse slowly and deliberately rolled herself a cigarette from various butt ends, lit it from the gas flame in the warming cabinet, and began asking Doll questions about his wife’s condition, where he planned to live, what sort of possessions he still had, and above all, what his prospects were …

  ‘Well, there now’, she said when he had finished, clearing away the plate and replacing it with a mug of milky coffee and a plate of bread and jam, ‘now you can start all over again, like the rest of us. It can’t do you any harm. And it’ll put paid to any silly ideas!’

  Doll protested: ‘But this bread and jam don’t come from here. Someone else has brought them in — they don’t serve jam butties here. And anyway, I’m completely full up.’

  ‘For a grown man, you don’t half carry on!’ she said in a gently teasing tone. ‘Just be glad that you can eat your fill before the lean times come! Eat up, man!’ she cried, now sounding piqued. ‘Did I say anything when you gave me the last of your coffee and your last cigarette on the morning of 16 February 1944?! Well then’, she went on, calming down now that he was eating, ‘why do you men always have to make such a fuss? You’re worse than a bunch of old maids!’

  Later on, as he was getting ready to leave, she pushed a ‘proper’ cigarette — as opposed to the home-made variety — across the table towards him, together with a twenty-mark note. ‘Now I hope’, she said sternly, ‘you�
��re not going to act all coy again! And I won’t object if you bring me back two cigarettes instead of one. I’ll expect the money back by the end of the month — point of honour, okay? And now get the hell out of here! I’ve put your things in a cardboard box; there’s still room in there for more. And by the way, the last underground train must have gone by now. But the walk to Wilmersdorf is nothing for a strong young man like yourself — especially at this time of year. You may catch pneumonia — which is no bad thing! The way things are, you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble!’

  CHAPTER NINE

  Robinson Crusoe

  The last underground train really had left, and the walk in the dark through a bombed-out Berlin was no bad thing — just as Kleinschmidt had said. Sometimes Doll, who knew Berlin like the back of his hand, actually had no idea where he was. There were hardly any people on the streets to ask, and those he did see hurried on past him so fast, as if they were afraid of him — which they very probably were. Sometimes Doll himself felt a kind of horror creep over him, so monstrous did this nocturnal stone jungle appear, across which a November wind was blowing dark storm clouds. And yet something had changed inside him. When he arrived in Berlin, he had thought: I’ll never be able to work in this city of the dead! But now he thought to himself defiantly: But I will work here, even so! In spite of everything! Or because of it!

  He had to wait a long time outside the locked building. The doorbell was disconnected, and nobody seemed to want to go inside. It was very cold, and Doll’s teeth were chattering. But he steadfastly resisted the temptation to revive his spirits by choosing this moment to smoke the cigarette that Kleinschmidt had given him: he had decided to save it until he was lying in bed, when he was really ‘at home’, in the house that was actually going to become a home for them — if he had anything to do with it. He also dismissed the fear that he might be waiting all night for someone to turn up with a key to the front door, because everyone who lived there had already come home: No, he told himself, I won’t be standing here all night; there’ll be someone still to come. Any time now — I can feel it in my bones!

  For a long time, it seemed that his bones were playing tricks on him. Then a tall, lanky young man came round the corner and said with surprise: ‘Ah, Dr. Doll, it’s you! Forgotten your front-door key? And here you are, standing in the freezing cold without a coat!’

  They knew each other, the way Berliners got to know each other in the air-raid shelters — in passing, exchanging names, telling each other what they did for a living, and trying to decide whether the other was a rabid Nazi with whom one needed to guard one’s tongue. Doll was about to respond with some pleasantry or other, but then said, since the young man was known to be ‘a decent sort’: ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t have a front-door key as yet, nor a coat. We arrived here in Berlin pretty much cleaned out — like so many others today!’

  The stairwell, where all the broken windowpanes had been replaced with cardboard, felt pleasantly warm to him after standing outside in the cold and wind. ‘Ah!’ he said, ‘it’s nice to be in the warm!’

  His companion murmured his slightly surprised assent, and inquired after his ‘good lady wife’. Mr. Doll informed him that she was in hospital, unfortunately, but that he hoped to have her home again soon. The young man said that he hoped so, too, and looked forward to seeing the young lady again soon — she had always helped to boost morale in the air-raid shelter. He — along with all the other residents of the building — had always admired her steady nerve during the worst of the air raids. Her carefree cheeriness had been an example and a comfort to many — including him, as he freely confessed.

  The two men parted with a handshake that was unexpectedly hearty. Then Doll climbed up the next flight of stairs and rang the bell by the door of Mrs. Schulz’s apartment — or rather, his own apartment. He pushed the doorbell hard and repeatedly. He had the cardboard box with his things under his arm, and, despite the ‘pleasantly warm’ stairwell, he still felt a chill running down his back.

  Eventually, the door was opened, just as he switched on the emergency lighting in the stairwell for the eighth time. And again it was the young actress who opened the door to him for this, the start of his second life in Berlin. Alma had since discovered, of course, that this young woman was not at all as mean-spirited and snippy as she had appeared that first morning. On the contrary, she had often displayed great generosity in helping out the Dolls when they were short of food.

  Having opened the door, she said: ‘Oh, it’s you, Mr. Doll! And at such a late hour! Come into the kitchen with me for a moment; I’m just heating up some food for the baby on the stove, and anyway it’s a bit warmer in there with the gas on!’

  Doll sat down wearily on the kitchen chair between the gas stove and the table, the same chair on which his wife had sat so forlornly that September morning, and the bit of warmth from the gas stove really was very pleasant. Miss Gwenda stirred her pan of puréed food, and said: ‘Are you really feeling better now, Mr. Doll? You don’t look all that well, I have to say, and if I was going to collect firewood in the forest I wouldn’t be taking you along, that’s for sure!’

  ‘Oh yes, I’m quite well again’, replied Doll, not entirely truthfully, for at that precise moment he was feeling particularly wretched and low. ‘It’s the hospital air that’s made me look so poorly’, he added by way of explanation, not wishing Miss Gwenda to get the idea that their shambolic way of life, lying around and going without food and sponging off others, was going to start all over again. ‘All these weeks I haven’t been out in the fresh air at all until today. I also went to see my wife, and it was probably all a bit too much for me on my first outing.’

  Miss Gwenda inquired solicitously after the health of his young wife, and so it was quite a while before Doll was able to ask about his room. Was Mrs. Schulz there today? Was she already in bed? Was it possible to speak to her?

  Yes. Miss Gwenda reckoned ‘yes’ — Mrs. Schulz was sleeping here today, as far as she knew. But she couldn’t say if she’d already switched her light off. So Doll crept along on tiptoe to the door of ‘his’ room and peered through the keyhole. Everything was in darkness. He listened at the door for a long time. He could hear someone breathing in their sleep — a soft, wheezing sort of sound followed by a gentle whistle — and he knew now for certain that tonight he could kiss goodbye to a good night’s sleep. As for a warm bed … It looked like he wouldn’t get to enjoy that nice, quiet smoke, courtesy of Nurse Kleinschmidt.

  When he got back to the kitchen, Miss Gwenda and her purée were gone, and the gas was turned off. Here, too, things had shut down for the day without him. He stood there for a while, looking round the kitchen. It was indubitably his, her, the Dolls’ kitchen; every item in it belonged to them, not just the furniture, but also every spoon, whisk, pan, and plate. But when he went to look inside the big, wide kitchen dresser, he found every door locked and the keys removed.

  It’s a funny old world, he thought. They really ought to ask us, at least, and they ought to be paying us a bit of rent, too. What is the position with the rent on the apartment? he suddenly wondered. Miss Gwenda and her little family have only been living here since the end of August, but as for old Mother Schulz, who’s so good at keeping accounts, I’ll be putting the screws on her first thing in the morning for the rent, electricity, and gas. That’ll bring some money in, and even if it’s not a lot of money when you’re paying black-market prices, even a little money is a lot of money to those who’ve got no money at all.

  While he was thinking these thoughts, he had a look at the locks to the pantries, of which there were two in this rather grand kitchen — one on the right of the window and the other on the left. But they were both locked. Of course, he said to himself with a gentle sigh. One is for Mrs. Schulz, the other for Miss Gwenda. They haven’t reckoned on the Dolls. That’ll have to change, too. Tomorrow morning, I’m going straight down to th
e housing office to clarify our rights here. Ah, no, the first thing I need to do is go to the Food Office and get our ration cards; we simply can’t go on as we are, begging and borrowing, and buying stuff on the black market.

  Now Doll was standing by the kitchen table, gazing at it thoughtfully. But it looked too short and too hard to spend the night on. Then he remembered the bathtub, but the chill that still lay in his bones made him shiver at the mere thought of sleeping there, so he dismissed the idea immediately. There was carpeting on the floor of the little lobby, and in the hallway he had seen some sort of woman’s coat hanging on the coat stand. He could use these as blankets.

  But he still wasn’t quite sure this was what he wanted — and then he remembered that the apartment had six-and-a-half rooms, and the half room was for the maid. He went inside and flicked the light switch, but the light didn’t come on, either because the wiring was broken or because there was no bulb in the socket. So he went back to the kitchen, fumbled around with the lighter to get the gas stove lit again, found a newspaper in the waste bin, and rolled it up to make a torch. He used this to light up the maid’s room.

  Yes, the bedstead was still there, with the mattress on top and even the wedge pillow, but nothing else — no bed linen and no bed cover. And it was damned cold in this poky little hole! He used the last of the torchlight to light up the window, and saw that there were only a few shards of glass sticking out from the frame. There was nothing to keep the cool night air out. But he decided to make this his bedroom anyway — a bed was a bed. And, like a typical man, it never occurred to him that a bed could be moved somewhere else, into the kitchen, for example, which was warmer, and protected from the weather. But no, the thought never even occurred to Doll, for the simple reason that he was a man — or so Alma said later, after she had heard about this first night of his.