The Drinker

by Hans Fallada

  Here I am anticipating somewhat, but in this chapter I want to have done with my description of asylum meals, though it is not yet a closed chapter for me even today. We never got fresh meat to eat, just occasionally shreds—never lumps—of some old red salt meat floating in the gravy, and very rare shreds, at that! There was never butter, sausage or cheese, never an apple. And everything we had was quite inadequate, always watered-down, and badly prepared. Why it was so, I cannot imagine, even today. The prisoners maintained that the head-nurse was eating everything himself. But even the greediest head-nurse can’t put away the food of a few hundred men. Perhaps the authorities wanted to take away our nature a bit, but I must confess that even on this starvation diet, the passions remained lively enough. However there were always folk among us who suffered no such hunger, who even lived fatly, within certain limits. First there were the orderlies, who had to cut, weigh and spread our bread for us. Officially a keeper stood by and watched, but let the telephone ring and the keeper would have to leave the kitchen and go into the glass box, and immediately a few slices would be thickly spread and disappear. Prisoners have sharp eyes, and hunger makes them sharper; it was inevitable that they should get to know that they were being robbed. One might see an orderly chewing a piece of bread in the lavatory, another might surprise him giving it to a “friend” or trading it for tobacco. But there was no point in informing on them. It was difficult to prove anything, almost impossible, for even if the bread was found (which hardly ever happened because no keeper could be bothered to look for it) the orderly could say “I saved it up from breakfast”; and then the orderlies were the keepers’ blue-eyed boys, their tale-bearers; they would not hear a word against them. So practically nothing ever happened about it, but the envy and the hatred was kept awake all the time.

  Even worse than this furtive way of procuring food was a quite legal way, condoned and even encouraged by the authorities. Such of the inmates as still had obliging relatives outside, were allowed to receive food parcels as often as they wished. One might expect that almost every one of the patients would have such relatives outside, who might at least send him a loaf now and then—even dry bread was a longed-for commodity there. But such was not the case. Apart from the fact that many of the inmates could neither read nor write (this dreadful place housed only the last dregs of humanity) or else were too insane or dull-witted to do so, the relatives of the majority did not wish to acknowledge them any more. They had caused grief and shame enough when they were outside, and now that they had been in this place for five, ten, even twenty years, they were done with and forgotten by those outside, to them they were dead and buried.

  No, there were very few who got parcels; out of the fifty-six men in my block, perhaps only five or six. But these sat plump and well-fed at our common meal-table and lay beside the bowls full of watery soup, their thickly-spread bread, with sausage and cheese we never got a taste of; yes I even lived to see a fat peasant who had been put away on account of his ungovernable temper, devouring a roast duck at his ease in front of us, gnawing it bone by bone. He dripped with fat, and we sat by with our eyes growing bigger and bigger, our slavering mouths filling with water, our hands trembling, and our hearts full of envy and greed.

  From all this, from our constant hunger, and our hatred of the thieving orderlies and our envy of the gluttons, arose an endless round of acrimony, quarrels, fights, punishments. There was not a day’s peace in the place, always something going on. One no longer even listened when two men insulted each other in the most obscene manner. One merely walked away when they blacked each other’s eyes and bloodied each other’s noses. One was thankful not to be involved oneself. One had to watch every word that was said, it would be immediately passed on, immediately turned against the speaker.

  For my own part, I must confess that at first it was not only with envy that I regarded these parcel-hogs. It was so simple for me, I had only to write a letter to Magda and I could belong to this privileged class. Magda wouldn’t be one to let her own husband starve! For a week I struggled with myself, and then hunger won, I decided to write. I had neither writing paper nor envelope, and nothing of the sort was provided by the institution; but I saved a slice of bread and got what I wanted. I wrote the letter, and then I waited. In bed of an evening I pictured to myself what would be in the parcel; when I thought of a slice of bread thickly spread with fat liver-sausage, I was nearly sick with hunger and craving. I had calculated the earliest day on which the parcel could arrive, but that day passed, and many days after it, and the parcel did not come. Then I heard that all communications had first to go through the censorship of the medical officer and then be passed over to the administrative offices for franking, and that letters were not sent off immediately, but only after a while, when a number had accumulated.

  “They take their time,” said the prisoners. “Do you think they’ll start running just because you want ’em to? They sit all the firmer on their arses.”

  So I went on waiting and hoping.

  Then one day the head-nurse casually said, “There’s a letter of yours in the office, Sommer. They say it can’t go, you’ve got no money for the postage.”

  “What,” I cried. “Because of twelve pfennigs postage I can’t send a letter! I sent my wife four thousand marks from the remand prison!”

  “You should have kept a few marks back,” said the head-nurse, and tried to pass on.

  “But sir,” I cried, “It’s not possible! Just for twelve pfennigs! They can ring up my wife, and she’ll confirm …”

  “A phone call costs ten pfennigs, and you haven’t got it, Sommer,” said the head-nurse coolly. “Keep calm, your letter will go off all right, next month when your first wages are credited to you.”

  I have no idea whether my letter to Magda was eventually sent off or whether it got lost in the meantime. Anyhow, I never got a food parcel, I always remained among the hungry ones, the greedy envious ones. For by the time I finally had some wages to my credit, I had long become too dispirited to write to Magda.

  40

  I have hurried on far in advance of events. I am still on my first day in the asylum. I have eaten my potatoes very properly with no peel on them, and I am dog-tired after my sleepless night. I turn to the head-nurse and beg him to allow me to lie down on my bed for an hour, since I have not been able to sleep all night.

  “That is forbidden,” says the head-nurse sternly, but then in a milder tone: “All right, lie down. But get undressed and into bed properly.”

  I do so, and I have hardly lain down and shut my eyes before that hated yelling voice rises.

  “Get out of bed this instant, you swine! You’d like that, wouldn’t you, to loaf around while we do your work for you? Get up, get out of that bed!”

  The ever-watchful bloodhound has tracked me down. But now I am in a fury, my hatred gives me strength to protest.

  “Shut your mouth!” I shout furiously. “Do you think you’re better than the head-nurse? He’s given me permission and you, you swine …”

  “He’s given you permission, has he really?” he grinned and slobbered and showed his discoloured fangs. “Well, you must be pretty posh if the head-nurse makes an exception like that for you. Don’t be angry, mate. I’m just here to keep order in the block, otherwise I get sat on by the head-nurse.” Whereupon he disappears, and I lie back, quite content to think that I have got the better of him at last.

  I have really fallen asleep but only for a few minutes, then something causes me to wake up. It is probably not a noise that awakens me, but an instinct by which I scent danger: in this place one develops the instincts of a hunted beast. I am lying on my side looking straight at the stool by my bed, where I put my clothes. I blink, and see something white, busying itself with my things. It is that Lexer again. Very carefully, infinitely quietly he takes up one article of clothing after another, searches the pockets and feels along the seams … my first impulse is to spring up and rush at this devil, this
indefatigable tormentor. But I hold myself back, I remain lying quietly, I watch what he does. Let him search. I grin. I have not the slightest thing in my pockets that he could conceivably want. Not the slightest thing?

  My heart stops and again I would like to jump up, to snatch from him the razor-blade which he has now found, though I had carefully wrapped it in an old newspaper. He throws a glance at me. I shut my eyes, I am asleep. Then, when I peer again, I see that he is wrapping up the blade once more in the newspaper, and he puts it back in my pocket. Then he is gone. But I have realised the danger. With one bound I spring out of bed, take out the blade, and hurry with it to the lavatory. A pull of the plug, and the blade has disappeared, that precious blade that was to have opened the way to freedom for me if all else failed. A minute later I am in bed again. None too soon! For there stands the head-nurse by my bed and he puts his hand on my shoulder. “Wake up, Sommer!”

  I wake up, just right I hope, not too easily, not too slowly.

  “Get up, Sommer!”

  I do so, and stand before him in my shirt.

  “Sommer, have you got something forbidden in your pockets?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You know that anything that cuts is strictly forbidden here, for instance table-knives, razor-blades, nail-files. You know that?”

  “Yes, sir, so I’ve been told.”

  “And you have nothing in your pockets that’s forbidden?”

  “No, sir.”

  A short pause.

  Then: “Sommer, I’m warning you. Own up, and I’ll shut one eye to it. Otherwise, on your first day I’ll put you under punishment for four weeks.”

  “I’ve nothing to own up to, sir.”

  “All right, then turn out your pockets.”

  I do so, beginning with my jacket. I leave the trousers pocket till last.

  “Undo this newspaper, Sommer.”

  I do so. Nothing, absolutely nothing. The head-nurse stands thoughtfully for a moment. Then he goes through my clothes himself, garment by garment, but again nothing.

  “Get dressed, Sommer.”

  I do so.

  “All right. Now send Lexer to me. You will stay in the day-room till the leisure-hour.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I had set them a lovely task: under the supervision of the head-nurse, all the orderlies searched the whole cell, bit by bit. They found all manner of things, but no razor-blade. In the end, they abused Lexer, they imagined it was some idiotic roguish trick of his. But Lexer at least knew that I had really had a razor-blade. I had got the better of him. And strangely enough, though they all abused him, from the head-nurse down, he bore me no grudge. I had got the better of him, that impressed him. From that time, he never picked on me directly, though he could never quite leave off nagging.

  41

  The afternoon was endless. The only slight diversion was that, for our “leisure hour” we were taken outside for two hours from two to four. “Outside” was a small garden within the high prison walls, perhaps four hundred square yards in extent, in which a single narrow path, just wide enough for two people, ran round a grass plot. The sun was shining, it was a fine summer day. But what the sun shone upon was not so fine. I am not speaking now of the surroundings, high walls, red and naked or clothed with dead grey cement, decked with barbed-wire, the bars at the windows, the blind window-panes—this alone is enough to rob the most beautiful summer day of its brilliance.

  But I do not mean all this. I mean my comrades, my fellow-sufferers, who lean against the wall in their discoloured rags squat on a bench, or scuffle along the sandy path, in wooden shoes or barefoot. How revealing is the pitiless sunlight on these faces, which seem merely like distant lost memories. Grief, sadness, bestiality and mad despair. I shut my eyes and see them standing, squatting, scuffling there, as I have seen them a hundred times, and shall perhaps see them a thousand times more. There is a tall shaky man whose close-cropped iron-grey head is covered with blood-red or festering “pig-boils” as they call furuncles here, his face hard and angular and his dark deep set eyes entirely devoid of brightness. Ceaselessly, this fellow, a Rhinelander who was once probably a street-trader, murmurs: “Two hundredweight Kanalstrasse 20, one hundredweight Meier, Triftstrasse 10, market police, market police.…”

  He raises his voice as he looks up to the blind barred windows, waiting for buyers. “Seed potatoes! Seed potatoes! Buy my seed potatoes!”

  No buyers come. Despairingly he shakes his hideous head and begins again: “Two hundredweight Kanalstrasse 20, one hundredweight.…”

  Yet if you ask him what time it is, he looks up at the sun and gives you quite a sensible and approximately correct answer, but no sooner has he done so than he resumes his eternal litany once more: “Seed potatoes! Seed potatoes! Buy my seed potatoes!”

  How it still rings in my ears!

  And then there is that other whom I have already mentioned, the schizophrene who hears voices, whose poor sad head Lexer had so mercilessly beaten against the iron bars—he shuffles round and round in slippers whose entire back part is missing. Suddenly he stops, he lifts his arm and makes a threatening gesture towards sky, walls and bars, but he does not see sky, walls and bars, he sees some invisible enemy whom he now threatens in a most obscene way. He is the only Saxon amongst us, and his abuse is uttered in such a pure Saxon dialect that the few among us who have their senses, smile. But it is really nothing to smile at when this lost man, the son of a good family, abuses the unseen enemy who prevents him from explaining everything to his parents. Why does he always thrust himself in the way, what is he after, this eternal trouble-maker? Isn’t the son the one best qualified to explain things to his parents?

  Apparently this poor fellow had once committed some offence which had separated him from his parents. Perhaps it was only some indiscretion; in any case he was weak—he had wanted to hurry to his parents to explain everything to them; but he had been arrested straight away. And the years went by, one after another, and the iron bars were still between him and his parents, between his guilt and the family discussion that would have set his heart free. He threw himself against the bars, he cared nothing that some swine beat his face till the blood came, he fought day after day with an enemy invisible to us, and day after day he took up the fight anew. In between times, one could exchange a sensible word with him too, about the primitive things of life, how the soup had tasted and where the handbrush was. He even managed a little work; as I have already said, he swept the staircase. Incidentally this Saxon, Lachs, was the one who got most food parcels from home; but unfortunately he no longer noticed what he ate, it was all the same to him whatever the head-nurse put in his hand.

  A third man, who talked a great deal, was a wiry patient with sharp features and a narrow aquiline nose: he looked like a white-skinned Arab. He laboured under the delusion that he was a high-ranking politician of a neighbouring country who had a bad reputation for recklessness, even for murderous tendencies. This patient always walked round in a circle or leaned against the fence which shut off our little grass patch from the main building. When he was thus leaning, he gave the impression that he had been there for ever; his bleached discoloured clothes seemed to melt away in the sunlight, leaving visible only his once-bold Arab face. Most of what he cunningly babbled to himself, with a sardonic giggle, is unrepeatable; he indulged in long fantasies in which he cut off the sex organs of his enemies, male or female, and ate them. Sometimes he indulged in such rigmaroles as this: “It is logical that you should have first to pass the examination at Landsberg, if you want to be a Field-Marshal in England. Otherwise of course it can’t happen. You wear a red-boot on the right foot, a blue one on the left.…”

  He turned and sniggered at me, highly amused, and then immediately in full swing, he mowed down the French with a machine gun and in the same breath he remarked on the unbridled lasciviousness of Tungus virgins. His brain was constantly busy associating the most incompatible things, it was as if he were
threading necklaces in which an old shoepolish tin dangled next to an ostrich-feather fan. With this man, one could have no sensible conversation; if he was addressed, he never listened, but either calmly went on talking or else fell silent. A fellow-prisoner told me that this “Arab”, Schniemann by name, used formerly to be more sensible, and even capable of proper work. He used to go with an outside working party to a factory in the town. There he had made an attempt to escape, but had been recaptured. As he resisted his new arrest with almost animal desperation, a violent commotion broke out around him; in the course of it, somebody had trodden on his arm, and broken it. When he returned from hospital, he was as insane as he is now; his arm, which had mended badly, was no further use to him, and he always kept his hand in his pocket. This added a characteristic and unforgettable touch to his melancholy figure.

  42

  Before I finally return to my own experiences, I must mention one man, a scintillating figure who made his appearance among us for a few brief days at the beginning of my stay here, only to disappear for ever, transferred to another asylum. On my very first day I had heard of a prisoner who because of a fight had already been eight weeks in the punishment cells on dry bread and water. If I thought of this man at all—with a shudder at the seemingly unbearable length of his solitary confinement—I pictured to myself a fellow like Liesmann, a fellow about thirty years old, with a brutal angular face, who wore a black patch over one eye, and went about the block mute and sullen. Everyone avoided him, even the most quarrelsome did not dare to start anything with Liesmann, who had a reputation for suddenly lashing out at the merest hint of an insult, and for not giving over until the other man was battered into submission.