Once a Jailbird

by Hans Fallada

  ‘Now don’t get rattled; you’re a bag of nerves.’

  ‘But if the bloke goes on nagging like that . . . ’

  ‘Well, let him, you needn’t listen.’

  They looked round. It was much the same as in the Apfelstrasse. Only a little larger: twenty machines instead of ten, and not ten but twenty typists.

  The door opened into an adjacent room. A girl’s head emerged, and then another. They calmly surveyed the new arrivals and vanished once more.

  ‘Inquisitive bits of skirt,’ whispered Maack.

  ‘Are they some of our lot?’

  ‘No way. Much too superior to say a word to the likes of us. They’re permanent staff; their job is to look after the duplicating machines. Ex-convicts can’t be trusted with them.’

  The door into the manager’s office opened.

  Seidenzopf hurriedly departed: ‘Well, goodbye, my young friends.’

  After a short interval Herr Jauch appeared, in a very bad temper.

  ‘That’s your machine. And that’s yours. I haven’t any work for you today. You’d better have a look at your machines. And you’d better practise that capital “S”. I’ve never seen such typing in my life! Now then, don’t look at the machine when I’m talking to you, look at me, please. What sort of script is this?’

  ‘Duplicated typescript,’ said Kufalt, after brief reflection.

  ‘Oh God, oh God in Heaven, and this man has come to work here! It’s violet script! The colour’s violet, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thank God for that, I thought you’d say it was green.’

  Herr Jauch bleated with laughter; and here and there in the room a head was lifted from a typewriter, and bleated too. Maack looked round and noted the heads that remained bent.

  ‘There’s a box over there,’ Jauch went on. ‘Do you see that black box?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s where the ribbons are kept. Find a violet ribbon for your machine—not green, my dear sir; anyhow there aren’t any—that exactly matches this script. It must be exactly the same violet, understand? Exact to the tenth of a degree. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then get on with it.’

  Jauch disappeared, and the pair rummaged in the box.

  ‘Have you any idea what a tenth of a degree of colour is?’

  ‘Not the faintest. Hey, you’ve got off on the wrong foot here. He took a dislike to you from the very start. Well, so much the better for me. Here’s a ribbon for you; it’s the nearest match. I’ll take the other. Now let’s go and try our machines.’

  IV

  No, Kufalt was not very happy. From the day on which he had come out of prison, he had gone forward all the time; he had got over his difficulties, he had learnt to look people in the eye on the street, his efficiency had increased, slowly but steadily; prison, and all its dead, obscene talk, had slipped into the past. He had equipped himself with a room, and possessions of his own, and a modest income, and now . . .

  Now, behind his chair, a fat and pimply little creature stood and talked and groaned: ‘Oh God, what have I done to deserve this! Look here, my man, you must strike the keys regularly. Don’t you see: that “R” is a shade darker than that “E”? That such a man should live—let alone in my typing room!’

  Kufalt sat there with a white, sullen face and pursed lips, and tapped.

  And while he sat, and tapped and tapped, he thought of many things . . . ‘I could get up and leave this place for ever, I don’t need to stay, I’ve got enough to live on for a bit; I would manage all right, and Batzke will soon turn up. Jänsch, who sits in the corner to the left, said if Jauch got too bad we’d watch out for him, and lay into him properly. Jänsch also told me that Jauch himself was one of us, he’s done a stretch, and they’re always the worst. Oh stop blathering on, you clot,’ he said to himself; ‘at quarter past seven I’ll be back home, and perhaps I’ll see Liese Behn; on Thursday evening the kitchen door was open when she was washing herself—oh, her lovely bare back and white, nimble arms!’

  He heard nothing more; he always got quite dizzy now when he thought of that particular woman, his heart fluttered as though it were going to stop, and all the blood rushed to his loins . . .

  ‘What I need is a whore,’ he thought. ‘I must get rid of my obsession, it’s making me crazy, and I’ll never get Liese anyway . . . ’

  And he awoke at a shout: ‘Have you gone crazy? I’ve had enough of you, out you go; get up and pack your things! Do you spell Doktor with a “c”?’

  Yes, there it was: Kufalt looked at the letter, a neat circular addressed to doctors from a laboratory, commending a patent medicine; Kufalt had only to insert the address and superscription: there it was—Herr Doctor Matthies . . . Dear Sir . . .

  It didn’t look quite right. While he had been tapping on and on in a dream, his mind far away, his first few years at school had come back with their Latin, docere, yes that was why, or was it that the continuous nagging had weakened his brain, turned him into another Beerboom, and got him down from seven hundred addresses to three hundred?

  Kufalt stood rather helplessly beside his typewriter; it was summer now, nine hours at the machine, the evenings in the streets where he knew no one, and the nights at the open window, he could not sleep; what had helped him for five long years now helped him no more, he couldn’t . . .

  He stood with a helpless smile, merely wondering how he should set about his departure; he would have to get some papers and a little money, he didn’t really mind going . . .

  ‘And you stand there still and grin! Doktor with a “c”! I never heard of such a thing in all my life. Must I get legs for you?’

  At that moment something happened.

  In the large typing room, where twenty people sat, a voice rang out from a corner: ‘Mean bastard!’

  Jauch swung round, his face paled in an instant to an ashen grey; he stared into the corner and stammered: ‘What! What’s that!’

  Behind him, hardly a couple of metres away, another low voice said: ‘Bash the brute!’

  Jauch looked at Maack, but Maack was busy putting a fresh sheet into his machine; Maack noticed nothing at all.

  And before Herr Jauch could make up his mind, there was another voice, two or three voices, from different parts of the room: ‘Shut your ruddy jaw!’—‘We won’t half skin you!’—‘Long time since you’ve heard yourself yelling, eh?’

  Yet there were only four or five among the twenty who took the risk, who would not stand the eternal bullying, and cracked sometimes . . .

  Kufalt awoke, suddenly realizing that he had almost surrendered without a fight; he shook himself, sat down again at his machine, and rattled on: To Herr Doktor Matthies. Dear Sir . . .

  Meanwhile Jauch, now purple in the face, lips quivering, looked round the room. But they were all at work, not a sound could be heard but the tap-tapping of the machines; Jauch pattered back into his room. But in the doorway he called out: ‘Herr Patzig, please.’

  Patzig, a tall, lanky youth wearing spectacles (an obvious pilferer of petty cash), got up, looked nervously round, went into Herr Jauch’s office, and Jänsch said: ‘If you split, my lad . . . !’

  Patzig muttered something feebly, and was gone. Would he blurt out the names of the hecklers?

  No, he did not. Nothing happened. They were all afraid, Jauch as much as his blue-eyed boys. Kufalt can go on sitting at his machine; but is it any use?

  It isn’t even any use that Jauch stops his scolding and nagging. Jauch knew his men; he was pretty sure he would get the right ones if he put five or six on the street; but he was also pretty sure that they would get him in turn, and give him a good seeing-to if he did.

  So Jauch went about it more cautiously. He would stand in silence for a good half-hour behind Kufalt’s chair, and—every two minutes or so—lay his forefinger on the page, in dumb indication of a typing mistake. And farther on, again and again, that index finger, with its hideo
us torn nail, that thick, crushed nail, yellow with nicotine . . .

  ‘Can’t you pull yourself together a bit, Kufalt?’ asked Maack. ‘After all, he’s right, you do make far too many mistakes.’

  ‘It gets worse and worse,’ said Kufalt. ‘I try and try, but the more I try, the worse it gets. And suddenly I seem to slip away, I feel all empty inside, as though I didn’t exist.’

  ‘I know,’ said Maack with a nod. ‘I know all about it. People who’ve done a long stretch like us have all been through it. You must shake it off as soon as you can. Haven’t you got a girl yet? That helps a bit.’

  No, Kufalt hadn’t got one yet, and it did not look as though he was likely to find deliverance in that respect soon. On the Steindamm there were plenty of girls to be had cheap. But had he been in jail for five years to start that sort of thing again? After all, this was really a new life—was it to begin in that way? No, surely not, quite apart from Fräulein Behn . . .

  From that evening in the Hammer Park, leading first to the wrong lodging and then to the right one, from the conversation with the mother about the daughter—until the glimpse of her in the kitchen at night, when she was washing herself—there had been only one girl for him: Fräulein Behn.

  It was hopeless, futile, she had other admirers, she was a coldblooded little bitch, he did not dare to speak to her; and yet he lay in bed at night and prayed in his heart that she might come: ‘Come! Come! You must come. I’m dying for you. Come just once . . . ’

  All this would perhaps have been easier to bear if he could have borne it alone. But—and this was the worst part of it—he was certain that she felt it. He could sense it through three walls and two rooms; she lay in her bed, and knew. It was in her, it was, perhaps, her joy and her delight; but she never came.

  The window stood open, the curtains swayed in the fresh summer breeze, suburban trains approached, rattled past the windows and sped into the distance—it was a great and dreadful thing that a man should lie like this tormented with longing and desire. For five years had he lain in a little cell, with its opaque glass window, open slantwise in the wall, and cried aloud: ‘Oh let me out, you brutes, just for one night, just for one hour, I shall go mad here.’ Who was it that had said to him: ‘It’s not till a man gets outside that he finds out how bad things can be.’

  He was right; they were very bad, and growing worse.

  V

  Beerboom often came to see him in the evening. Beerboom had not remained the only inmate of the Apfelstrasse Home; fresh ex-convicts had arrived, and he had plenty of company. But he always came along to see his old friend Kufalt, possibly out of affection, in memory of the time when they had been alone together in the Home of Peace.

  Beerboom was no better; indeed it was clear from the sight of him that he was worse, much worse. His face was yellow and haggard; thick, greyish-blue, granular pouches hung under his eyes; he had a fearful, dark, darting, stabbing look; and a wild and ceaseless babble of talk without sense or purport . . .

  ‘Yes, Seidenzopf and Mergenthal and that fine-looking pastor of theirs, Marcetus, can go to hell, the whole lot of them. I shan’t do any more work; yesterday I did forty addresses; you should have heard what they said!’

  He grinned.

  ‘But your money will soon be gone,’ said Kufalt.

  ‘My money? It is nearly all gone. I don’t care. I shan’t need any money at all very soon.’

  Kufalt looked attentively at the brooding, sallow face. ‘Don’t you think of any such thing, Beerboom. You’d get nabbed the very first time.’

  ‘Don’t care if I am,’ grinned Beerboom in reply. ‘I shall have had what I wanted.’

  Kufalt thought for a while, then asked some further questions, but on this matter Beerboom, for all his endless babble of grievances, was not to be drawn: ‘You’ll soon see. Besides, very likely I shan’t do it after all.’

  Kufalt pondered once again: ‘Have you seen Berthold lately?’

  ‘Berthold?’ said Beerboom with a contemptuous wave of the hand. ‘Yes, he’s living in the Langenreihe. Nice little place; he seems to be doing well.’

  ‘Don’t you get mixed up with Berthold,’ warned Kufalt.

  ‘With a man like that? Not likely! I wanted to get my three marks back, but he stung me for five marks more. He promised on his word of honour that he’d give me twenty marks on the first of the month.’ And he added in an entirely different tone, that of the old Beerboom: ‘Do you think I’ll get them? Do you think he’ll give me them? He must give me them, mustn’t he? I could sue him for the money, couldn’t I?’

  ‘But I thought you weren’t going to need any money soon?’ said Kufalt.

  ‘Oh well,’ said Beerboom, with a sudden return of ill humour. ‘Money’s always needed. Do you think I’m going to give it to Berthold? Not me!’

  No, Beerboom could hardly be regarded as the right company, yet Kufalt found him better than waiting in solitude, until the outer door slammed, a light step tripped across the landing and he heard a soft voice say a few casual words to Mother Behn.

  ‘Be quiet for a minute,’ said Kufalt eagerly, and signalled to Beer-boom to stop talking. ‘Come in, please.’

  Yes, she had knocked; just at the wrong moment with Beerboom there, she had come. She stood in the doorway; Beerboom got up nervously and looked at her.

  ‘May I bring some tea for you and your friend?’

  She was very polite, there must be something on her mind; perhaps she had had a bad day, and thought of her mother’s lodger, and offered to bring him and his friend some tea.

  ‘Not for me, thank you,’ said Beerboom hurriedly. ‘I must go at once. I have to be back in the Home at ten.’

  ‘Beerboom,’ said Kufalt in a fury. ‘I told you if you ever again . . . ’

  Liese Behn stood in the doorway and looked from one to the other.

  Beerboom hastily tried to repair his slip: ‘I’m not really his friend. Herr Kufalt just lets me come and see him now and again.’ And, more eagerly: ‘He has nothing to do with me.’

  She was wearing a light blue sleeveless dress, cut with a small square yoke at the neck. It was hot, and that might have been why her hair hung loosely round her face. Her mouth, half open, had a childlike expression.

  ‘Well, I’ll make you some tea,’ she said. ‘The water’s just boiling.’

  But she did not go. Rather she closed the door behind her and said: ‘Won’t you introduce your friend to me?’

  ‘Beerboom,’ said Kufalt; ‘Fräulein Behn.’

  ‘What sort of home do you live in, Herr Beerboom?’ she asked. She did not look at Kufalt.

  ‘Er—well,’ said Beerboom, embarrassed; ‘I hardly know how to describe it . . . ’ And suddenly, as if he had an inspiration: ‘It isn’t a proper asylum, but I’m not quite right in the head.’ He was very proud of this subterfuge, and added, by way of explanation: ‘That’s why I’m allowed to come and see Herr Kufalt now and again.’

  Kufalt felt, from mere despair, an almost irresistible desire to laugh, but Liese did not laugh. She had sat down on the edge of a plush armchair, and surveyed Beerboom with a friendly gaze: ‘In what way aren’t you right—I mean not quite right—in the head?’

  ‘Well, you know,’ said Beerboom; ‘that’s a long story, and I must really get away now.’ He racked his brain to think of something that would not damage Kufalt. ‘Well, Fräulein, it’s something to do with women. I can’t tell you a thing like that, can I?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Liese. ‘I reckon I know more about it than you think.’

  She looked meditatively at Beerboom, and then at Kufalt. Kufalt trembled; it was so easy to see the truth when she had the pair before her. She must know that night after night he lay there and desired her, while still he crept out of her way. Damaged and distorted men, men with a worm in the brain—so easy to recognize.

  ‘Tell me a little bit about it,’ she said with a sudden smile. ‘I’ll be sure to tell you to stop if it gets too bad.’


  ‘Tormentress,’ thought Kufalt. And he added, aloud: ‘But the water must have been boiling long ago, Fräulein Behn. I only meant . . . you said something about tea . . . ’

  He faltered under her look, and stopped.

  ‘Yes, there was something I wanted to say to you, Herr Kufalt,’ she went on. ‘Mother told me a man came here a little while ago, a man in civilian clothes, with a badge, you know, and asked about you. Whether you were out for long in the evening, whether you had much money, and whom you went around with, and so on.’

  She paused, no longer looking at Kufalt, but at Beerboom. ‘I can’t understand . . . ’ Kufalt was like a man who had been struck on the head.

  ‘I tell you just to let you know,’ said Liese. ‘Mother and I don’t mind. Now then, what’s your trouble, Herr Beerboom?’

  Kufalt stood motionless. He felt shattered and yet happy, for he could stay where he was; and ashamed, for she had known about it all, perhaps for a long while—and what now?

  He looked at her but he had passed out of her mind; she was now talking to Beerboom—her cheeks were flushed and her eyes glittered, so eager was she. She got up from her chair and sat down beside Beerboom on the sofa, and they whispered together; how old was she? Twenty-one? Twenty-two? Certainly not more.

  ‘The fact is,’ said Beerboom, ‘I can’t look at a single woman without thinking of that, and of nothing but that, you see. And if I feel like talking to one, or going out with one, I keep thinking of all the others. I can’t make up my mind. It’s so long since . . . ’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Eleven years. All those eleven years it was only the one thing, and now there’s so much, so many ways—you understand . . . ’

  He looked at her helplessly.

  ‘And are things still as they were in—in prison?’

  She had thrust out her lower lip, she kept her eyes on his face. Like the soft wing of a bird, a strand of loose hair hung over her forehead.

  ‘Prison, no,’ Beerboom hurriedly corrected her. ‘I’m a high-security man, a lifer; Kufalt was in a regular prison . . . ’ He looked up guiltily. ‘You don’t mind, Kufalt? Fräulein knows all about it.’