The Drinker

by Hans Fallada

  46

  I return now to my own experiences. It is still the day of my arrival, the leisure-hour is just over, I have formed my first impressions and made my first acquaintances, and now I stand in the long dim corridor that remains gloomy even on the brightest day. Hour after hour I wander to and fro, idle, tormented and yet dulled. I am glad when the head-nurse or a warder comes by with a patient taking washing to the store or carrying a pile of old documents. At least something is happening! What is happening does not concern me, and really nothing is happening at all, but I am diverted from myself and my uncertain fate; I may not, I cannot bear myself any longer.

  Sometimes I stand by the one window that is accessible to me—the other is obstructed by the glass box—and stare out over the barb-wired walls, into freedom, which lies glittering in the sun “outside”. They must be limes; they shade a highway along which cars are speeding by, I see girls in bright dresses riding on their bicycles—but I turn my head away and walk on in the gloomy corridor. Life outside tortures me, it does not belong to me any more, I am severed from it, I want to know no more about it. Drive on, all of you. May the trees wither, the sand blow over meadows and fields, there should be desert about such a death-house as this, dry dead desert.

  Sometimes I go into one of the two day-rooms, either the big one or the small one, and sit there for five or ten minutes with my fellow-sufferers. Fellow-sufferers? They cannot suffer as I do, their fate has been decided already, it is the uncertainty that torments me so much.

  Some sleep with their head on the table (for it is forbidden to sleep in bed), others stare dully ahead, a small youngish man, completely crooked, with a squint in both eyes (but each in a different way), and a pear-shaped head, has an incredibly dirty pack of cards in front of him, and very slowly he lays one card on the other and grins stupidly at it. One has a newspaper in front of him, but he is staring over the top of it, and one has even taken his trousers off and with a face distorted by pain he examines the suppurating and bleeding furuncles on his leg—at our meal-table!

  I retire in disgust and stand in the corridor again. I read the name-plates on the cells; I read: Gothar, Gramatzki, Deutschmann, Brandt, Westfal, Burmester, Röhrig, Klinger. And as I go on I repeat them to myself, repeat them like the vocabularies I used to learn as a child: Gothar, Gramatzki, Deutschmann, Brandt … I go on repeating the list, till it sticks. Then I pass on to the next name-plate … So I learn, I pass the time, this endless time, two and a half endless hours! What are two and a half hours outside? And what are they here? Then at last the inside working parties march back to their cells, the mat-weavers and brush-makers; doors are slammed, shouts are heard, water runs in the wash-room, pipes are lit. Life, thank God, a bit of life!

  And already the cry is heard: “Here comes the factory party!” And immediately after, another cry: “Food servers fall in!”

  A little later we are sitting in the day-room which is now fully occupied; those who have been in the factory are asked for news, and they tell how this time they had to carry boxes weighing a hundredweight and a half, whereas yesterday the boxes only weighed one hundredweight twenty pounds. At once a furious quarrel breaks out, concerning how this difference in weight is to be explained. We do not need to worry about our food, it just eats itself, it is water with a few morsels of kohlrabi. I am still so finicky that I put these morsels, which are completely woody, beside my bowl. A great toil-worn hand reaches across the table, takes hold of the morsels and stuffs them into a wide-open mouth. Immediately a furious voice calls to me from the other side of the table.

  “Why the hell do you give Jahnke your kohlrabi? The bastard stuffs everything into him that he sets eyes on!”

  And Jahnke roars back furiously: “What’s it to do with you what I eat, snotnose? If the new fellow gives me his kohlrabi, that’s his business. Are you his keeper? Every young snotnose round here wants to act the keeper… !”

  Fortunately, in this new quarrel in which of course others immediately join (“Shut that row, God damn you! Can’t you keep quiet!”—“What’s up with you?”—“He’s right! We want some peace!”—“I’ll shout as much as I want to!”), fortunately, in all the uproar which now arises, I am completely forgotten. But the keeper in the glass box, which has a window on to our day room, does not even lift his head at the din, he goes on calmly reading his newspaper.

  The meal is over, I have managed what yesterday I had thought impossible; I have ladled into myself a whole quart of warm water. At the moment I feel satisfied. But in the night the rumbling of my stomach will teach me that I am utterly and absolutely unsatisfied. From now on, I too am to be among those who constantly visit the bucket. The head-nurse collects together all the men who are supposed to or want to see the doctor, the latter only if he approves of their intentions. From our section alone, about twenty men fall in, I am not among them.

  Outside the bars which separate one corridor from the staircase, other sick men from the two buildings opposite have gathered. I count over thirty. And now “the women” march in, mostly girls, led by their wardress. They are put quite close to the wall, and the wardress keeps a sharp look-out so that none of us can exchange a word with them. But that is over seventy patients—and already it is past seven in the evening! Is the doctor going to hold his consultations till well past midnight? The outlook for me is bad. “Are there always so many?” I ask another patient.

  “So many?” he answers indignantly. “It’s only a few today. In this cursed place every single one is ill. But I don’t report sick any more, there’s no point in it.”

  The doctor came while I was at the other end of the corridor. I did not notice him. But that does not matter, I am not seeing him today, in any case. It is better that way, with more than seventy patients he would not have proper time for me. It is better for me to wait till some other day when things are quieter. I have to tell him my story in full detail.

  The head-nurse calls: “Foot-patients first, shoes off!”

  And now it starts, at a breath-taking speed. Six men at a time are ushered into the consulting room, and at the latest after one minute the first man is out, doctored and treated!

  The head-nurse calls: “Shirts off, you others! Fall in, one behind the other.”

  The girls watch how the men slip out of their shirts. This arouses the anger of the wardress, a robust elderly person with a red face. She rushes up to one girl who has a few curls hanging at her temples, under her kerchief.

  “What’s this?” she cries angrily. “All you think of is men, eh? Wait, I’ll show you to make yourself pretty here!” and she tears the scarf off the girl’s head.

  “What!” she cries indignantly. “You’ve been pinning curls up, have you? Haven’t I told you a thousand times you’ve got to wear just a simple parting? I’ll show you!”

  And she tugged at the girl’s hair, she tugged the few poor curls apart. Without a sign of protest or pain the girl patiently moved her head this way and that as her tormentor pulled her hair. But I had no time to follow this shocking incident (which I seemed to be the only one to find shocking) any further.

  The head-nurse came towards me. “Quickly, Sommer, pack up your bedding and your things. You’re being transferred!”

  My bedding and belongings were packed into a bundle quickly enough, and I followed the keeper, who opened a cell door near the glass box. The cell was smaller than my former one, but there were only four beds in it. Fortunately one did not sleep in two tiers here. The cell was lighter and more airy too, it did not smell bad. I had decidedly bettered myself; I rightly attributed it to the doctor’s influence. “Thank God, he’s favourably inclined towards me,” I thought. “Everything’s all right.” Meanwhile the head-nurse had chased an old man out of bed.

  “Come on, come on, out of it, Meier,” he cried. “Be a bit quick about it. You’re going in Wing 2.”

  “Oh God!” wailed the old man; “Have I really got to move, sir? I get pushed around all the time! I’v
e only had this bed a few weeks! And it was so peaceful in here, and such nice air.…”

  But the head-nurse was not inclined to listen to an old man’s jeremiads.

  “Out of it, Meier!” he shouted and he gave the old man a violent push. “Stop your nattering!”

  With his bundle of bedding, the old man staggered out of his cell on his thin sticks of legs; his short shirt barely covering his behind.

  “You can make your bed later!” said the head-nurse. “Now come with me to the doctor. He’s waiting.”

  47

  The doctor really was waiting for me—hardly an hour had gone by and a good seventy patients had already been treated.

  Dr Stiebing, in a white coat, smiled at me amiably, invited me to sit down, and even offered his hand. The head-nurse stood in the background, with watchful eyes, waiting; not a word, not a movement, did he miss. I was pleased that he saw with what discrimination the doctor treated me, this friendly greeting now, beforehand, the transfer to a better cell—he would be careful about dealing too hard with me.

  “Well,” said the doctor, smiling, “Now you’ve landed up with me, Herr Sommer. A fortnight ago we could have put you in somewhat more comfortable surroundings, my colleague Mansfeld and I. Well, well, you’ll be able to bear it here. It is a well-disciplined place, you’ll get your rights here. A little discipline is good for everybody, isn’t it?”

  He was really amiability itself. Rather touched, I thanked him for the better sleeping quarters allotted to me.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” said the doctor. “We’ll do what we can to make your stay here easier. Of course there are certain unchangeable house-rules.…”

  He looked at me with a friendly expression of regret.

  Then: “And you’ll do everything you can to lighten our task, too, won’t you, Herr Sommer?”

  I assured the doctor of this, and asked whether he had to make a report on me.

  “No, not yet,” he said quickly. “I suppose they will ask me for one, but for the time being you have just been assigned here for a stay, Herr Sommer.”

  “But then everything will take so long!” I wailed. “Why can’t you make out your report immediately? It’s quite a clear affair. It’s only a slight case of uttering threats, and I’m convinced that Magda, that my wife will testify that she had not really felt herself menaced by me at all. For such a small matter as that, they can’t keep me here for weeks!”

  I had been speaking more and more seriously and emphatically. I wanted to make it clear right away what an enormous disparity existed between my slip and my stay here.

  “But, but,” cried the doctor, and laid a soothing hand on my arm. “Why are you in such a hurry! First you must have a thorough rest and get quite well again …”

  “But I am quite well,” I assured him.

  “No dizziness?” asked the doctor. “No sweating? No loss of appetite and then sudden hunger? No longing for alcohol?”

  “I simply never think of alcohol!” I cried, shocked at such a dangerous suspicion. “I feel absolutely well!”

  “Really no symptoms of de-alcoholisation then?” asked the doctor doubtfully. “Well, how is it, head-nurse? Have you noticed anything?”

  I looked expectantly into the hard dark face of the head-nurse. He could not have noticed the slightest thing, of that I was sure.

  “Yesterday evening,” he reported, “Sommer felt an urgent hunger and demanded supper, but he only ate four or five spoonfuls of it. Lexer swore today that Sommer had a razor-blade in his pocket; we couldn’t find it, but still—as a rule Lexer’s information has been reliable up to now. Then, too, Sommer is very restless, he can’t stay in one place for five minutes, can’t occupy himself with anything, hasn’t touched a newspaper …”

  “But,” I cried, indignant and shocked at such misleading information, “there’s quite other reasons for all that. That has nothing to do with alcohol or the symptoms of de-alcoholisation either. Really, doctor, I never think of schnaps …”

  The doctor and the head-nurse both smiled thinly.

  “But really,” I cried still more emphatically. “I have had such a shock, with my arrest and all its consequences; I’ll never touch another drop of alcohol as long as I live!”

  “That sounds better,” said Dr Stiebing amiably, and he nodded.

  “And if I only ate a little of my cabbage soup yesterday, it’s merely because I’m not used to this kind of food. Certainly,” I added hastily, “the cabbage soup was very good, but at home I just eat different things …”

  They both looked at me watchfully.

  “And if I’ve been walking up and down a bit and haven’t been able to rest, it is quite explicable, in my position. Anyone who is uncertain about his whole future is bound to be restless. Anyway, everybody paces about if they have to wait a long time, you can see that in any dentist’s waiting-room or police-court corridor …”

  “All right, all right,” the doctor interrupted, but I had the feeling that I had not convinced him, and that he did not find it “all right” in the least.

  “And what about the razor-blade? You’ve quite omitted that!”

  I tried not to blush—and yet.… No, perhaps I did not blush at all, I only imagined it. In any case I said with great firmness, “I didn’t omit the razor-blade. I just didn’t think any more of it. I’ve never had a razor-blade here. Why should I? I’ve got no razor.…”

  Perhaps I pretended to be too simple, perhaps the doctor had it in mind that an accused person always protests most vigorously against a false charge. In any event, I found this preliminary discussion, in which my case was not even mentioned, full of snares and subterfuges.

  I could not guess what the doctor thought of my words. Quite kindly, he said:

  “In any case, I hear that it’s not long ago since you first started to drink, so the effects of de-alcoholisation shouldn’t be so drastic. You were previously in remand prison too …”

  “Yes,” I said, “and I worked every day in the wood-yard there—I volunteered for it—and you can ask any warder whether I didn’t do as much work as anyone else, though I’m not really used to this kind of work.”

  “You drank quite heavily then?” asked the doctor, and he seemed disinclined to pursue enquiries about the quality of my wood-cutting. “One might say, very heavily?”

  “Never more than I could stand!” I assured him. “I never staggered, sir, and I never fell about.”

  For a moment I was obliged to recall that scene when I tried again and again to pull myself up on to the roof-edge below Elinor’s window, and kept falling back into the bushes. And immediately another scene came to mind, a scene which the medical officer himself had witnessed, when more than half-seas over, I had sat at the inn table kicking up a din with a villager just as drunk as myself, and I had nearly fallen over as I went out, and Dr Mansfeld had to help me to the car.…

  “I shouldn’t have said that,” I thought desperately. “That was wrong. It detracts from my other absolutely true remarks.”

  I wanted to prevent the health officer from turning this over in his mind, so I continued quickly: “In any case, in that scene with my wife which they first put down as attempted murder, I was in full possession of my mental faculties. I knew perfectly well what I was doing, and I did not do a bit more than I intended. And I had had comparatively little to drink before it.”

  “Yes, my dear fellow,” said the doctor, suddenly smiling almost sarcastically, “our two views of what constitutes a little to drink seem somewhat far removed from each other. Reckon up for me how much you had to drink every day, on an average, as far as you can remember.”

  I thought of Mordhorst and how he had reproved me for my foolish truthfulness in giving the magistrate such a detailed account of my consumption of liquor. I reflected whether the doctor would already have received these documents for perusal and decided that was hardly likely, since he had not yet been asked for a report. Nevertheless I decided to be very care
ful, not to deceive him too much, and to try to make as good an impression as possible. Till now, I had had little success with my statements, that much was clear. But everything depended on making a good impression on the doctor at the outset; once you’ve won a man over, it is difficult for any subsequent reports, even if quite unfavourable, to shake this good first impression. So I reflected, and arranged my testimony accordingly. I had hardly ever drunk more than a bottle a day, and mostly less.… What I had had to drink in the inn, I really couldn’t say for sure, because I had been drinking out of small glasses, and had mixed my drinks, and also I had paid for other people, I declared. The doctor listened to my rather rambling discourse with his head in his hand, almost in silence, just occasionally throwing in a question. Finally, when I had no more to say, he said: “As I told you, no report about you has been asked for yet. We’ve just had this little preliminary chat, so as to get to know each other. But get the idea out of your head, Sommer (Sommer! no more ‘Herr’ Sommer), that your account of things can decisively influence your stay in this place. The only thing that can influence your future is your will to be strong and to resist the sort of temptations you had before.…”

  He looked at me seriously. I am not very quick-witted, indeed I am a rather slow thinker, so I nodded eagerly in token of my will to be better. (Only ten minutes later, when I was in bed, did it become clear to me that with this phrase, the doctor had branded my statements as lies—of course he had already been handed the documents and had seen there how I had accounted for my consumption of alcohol for pretty well every day, and had put the amount much higher than I had tonight. So it was already definitely too late to make that “good first impression”.)