by Hans Keilson
“Frau Fiedler,” Albrecht said after a while, “I got a letter today. From Fritz.”
Her head jerked up.
“He’s in Mariazell, in Austria. He’s doing well and he told me to tell you he says hello.”
“Thank you,” she said without moving, and her face remained stiff. Then she ran out of the store, into the back room. Albrecht followed her and found her bent over the table, crying more violently than he had ever heard anyone cry. It was as though she were crying out all her misery and worry from the depths of her soul. She was shattered, her body shook. Between her sobs, he heard:
“I didn’t deserve that from him, no, not that.”
He stood next to her and looked helplessly down at her. He felt a very strong desire to stroke her arm, as though that would help calm her down, or even to take her into his boy’s arms. If only he had had the courage! But he didn’t know what to do, and suddenly he felt afraid. He could no longer keep still, his hands were wet with sweat, and he could feel his pounding pulse in his neck. He fled, running out of the room. Out on the street, he ran and ran without turning around, but he couldn’t get rid of his fear, he had the feeling that it was sinking deeper and deeper into him, taking more and more possession of him. It’s not fear, he said, half out loud, but then what is it? He didn’t know. He got home late that day.
* * *
At the end of the month, Albrecht’s sister came home for the holidays. She had been away almost a year now, and had changed—time changes everything, it never lets up. A year ago, when she’d left home, she had been a young girl, with daydreams, eating candy. Now she was standing on her own two feet in life and things had changed. She worked as hard as a man and had become a full-fledged woman as well. It took very little time before she understood how things were going at home, but still, she wanted to be sure.
“What’s wrong with Father and Mother?” she asked Albrecht with an innocent look on her face, as though simply asking for information. “They both look terrible, haven’t you noticed?”
“When you’re with them all the time you don’t notice,” he answered. The truth was, he never would have noticed on his own; he silently vowed to pay closer attention in the future. “I think Father is worried about things,” he continued, “but you can’t get anything out of him.”
“You think?” she shot back in a nasty voice. “You live here with them and you say you think? Don’t you know?”
“Of course I do,” he said heatedly. He couldn’t reveal the extent of his ignorance. “I know that he’s worried—but so’s everyone these days.”
Anneliese wasn’t satisfied as easily as that. “But surely you see what’s going on around you, or do you spend all your time dreaming?”
No, he’s not dreaming, what makes her think that? He may not always be perfectly alert and focused, he admitted that. But all their parents ever did anymore was worry, it had slowly taken over their lives. The life they would lead in their old age depended on what was happening now; it was no wonder they thought about it so much, every hour of every day, but Albrecht was a lot less affected by it, he thought about it only now and then and was busy with other things the rest of the time. Was he really supposed to spend his young life brooding? And Father himself always tried to protect him from their troubles, didn’t he? He knew what was happening, he knew a lot, but did he need to spend every hour of the day thinking about it?
“But don’t you talk about the situation at the table or anything?”
“No, never. It’s all just hints and suggestions. I think they’re ashamed.”
“Ashamed? Hmm, yes, you might be right about that,” Anneliese said. She even marveled at her brother for a moment. How had he come to that idea?
Not long afterward, when she put the question to her father to learn once and for all how things really stood, he turned nasty, downright abusive. As always, he answered that it was his business, he didn’t want anyone else to interfere, she was probably worried about herself, about getting married, and who knows what else, which he quickly and vigorously dismissed. All nonsense!
Anneliese just laughed—thinking about herself and getting married? Now that was a bit much. “You don’t need to worry about that,” she said, “and by the way, I’m leaving tomorrow if that’s the way it is here. I feel sorry for the boy, I can’t stand it myself.”
“Go ahead,” Father answered. He stayed pigheaded, with a tense, grim look on his face, but totally confused, you felt sorry for him.
Anneliese put her arms around his shoulders very affectionately and said in a soft, calm voice: “But I really would like to know.… Maybe I can help, you get to know a lot of people when you live in the big city, or don’t you think so?”
Herr Seldersen nodded. “But what do you want to know? Nothing’s changed, I just have to make sure that I can pay the interest on time, on top of the current bills.”
“Interest, what kind of interest?”
“I borrowed some money from the bank a few weeks ago, so that I could buy inventory.”
“They just gave it to you?”
“No, of course not. I had to put up the furnishings of the store as collateral.”
Pause.
He had forgotten about the savings accounts and the piano. He didn’t mention them.
“That was the right thing to do,” Anneliese said after thinking about it for a moment, “if it meant you got a little breathing room.”
“Breathing room, yes, of course,” Father said quickly, “for a little while. But the debt remains, you can’t deny that, and now there are interest payments too!”
Of course the debt was still there; it was anchored in place, so to speak, and the relief that they felt at first was soon revealed as perhaps nothing more than self-deception.
“And now?” Anneliese asked.
“Now nothing,” Father answered. “Wait and see, who knows what’ll happen?”
That sounded dismal. Anneliese thought some more.
“Maybe it wasn’t the right thing to do after all, to take the money so quickly. You should have thought it through more carefully, maybe there were other options. But when you always act alone and never tell anyone anything, you never have a complete view of the situation!”
“Hmm, hmm, you may be right,” Father said, abashed. He was not as young as he used to be, that’s true, but what else could he do? Oh, she could talk, but what did she know?
No answer. Then, after a while:
“You should have tried to come to some kind of agreement with your creditors and pay off all the debts at once.”
Herr Seldersen didn’t understand. “Give up the store and file for bankruptcy? I couldn’t do that,” he said in disbelief. “Then what?”
“No, that’s not what I mean. You could continue the business: not even the newspapers would find out, everything would be arranged privately. You agree to a fixed sum with your creditors that you then pay off at once and the rest of the debt is canceled.”
Pause.
“Yes, yes,” Father said. He did not want to admit straight-out that he hadn’t thought of that possibility. In truth, he had only a vague sense that such agreements were even possible, outside of court.
“It wouldn’t be exactly pleasant,” he began, “to go to people I’ve been ordering goods from for more than twenty years with a suggestion like that.… And anyway, to be able to offer a fixed sum like that, I’d have to have the money ready, and where would I get it? Tell me that! I’m not in a position to come up with even that much. You can’t forget, we don’t have capital backing us, we don’t have reserves, that’s the cause of the whole catastrophe.”
“Catastrophe! You’re always exaggerating like that,” she replied sullenly. She was sick to death of hearing her father use such expressions. He always did, taking visible pleasure in anything that minimized and devalued himself and his situation. His eyes turned red and he was short of breath. In truth, you had to pity him, standing there so small and beaten down
, no longer wanting to appear the way he really was.
“Really, you haven’t saved or put aside anything you can use now? That’s impossible!”
“It’s true.” Father nodded his head. Nothing saved, nothing put aside—he had to admit it, it was incredible. Anneliese fell silent. The situation was hopeless, if you really thought about it; there wasn’t the slightest chance it would work out. Did he realize that himself? Was he constantly carrying this certainty around with him? She could not think of anything more to say—now she felt shattered herself. The more time she spent at home, the more she longed for the day when she would leave. No, she couldn’t live in this gloomy environment for long without being infected herself with the discouragement and dejection filling everything. She secretly wondered how Albrecht could stand it: he was still young, after all, and had a right to expect and hope for certain things. Either he didn’t understand what was happening and just daydreamed his way through life, or else he was coming to terms with everything only slowly, with a while yet before he was done.
The days passed quickly and Anneliese went back to Berlin.
* * *
Early that spring, the workers at the nearby brick factories went on strike, demanding higher wages. About four hundred men refused to continue working under the old conditions. It was a delicate situation: many new hires had been made at the start of the year and they actually had every reason to be happy that they had been given work again, but prices were higher; life was more expensive, while the wages stayed the same as before.
It was the first time in a long while that something concrete and serious was in the air. The events of that year didn’t stop outside the city gates—their city too was tangled up with the fate of the country as a whole, and had to bear its part of the burden. But everything happened less abruptly and definitively here than events seemed to elsewhere. Even a firm resistance lost something of its power here, and the distinction between it and what it was opposing seemed muddier somehow; a kind of easygoing slackness affected everything, even the most dramatic undertakings. The people looked around less questioningly, they thought things through a bit more slowly, even sluggishly, if simply and directly. It took some time before any new experience took hold in them, and then—well, maybe everything had been going well enough for them before, so that they had no reason to complain. They did their work, earned their keep, found their pleasures and diversions, and had the forest and rivers, the endless vistas over the fields, and the spring breeze. Was there anything else one could want? Still, as things got worse and worse over the years, here too, the change came over them to a greater extent. Where had their peace and laughing contentment disappeared to? What was going on now had nothing in common with the meaning and spirit of the landscape of that place—something else had forced its way in, something that had not grown from this soil and that threatened disruption and unrest.
The strike lasted for three weeks, then the money ran out and the workers had to give in. Their representatives entered into negotiations and an agreement was reached. Only three hundred men were rehired; the rest were let go. The three hundred who could keep working did so under worse conditions than before the strike. That was how every attempt the workers made to improve their situation ended.
But meanwhile, business was at a standstill except for the grocery stores, and they had to go deep into debt too. Trade stalled, sales plummeted, bills that came due could not be paid. Each turn of events pulled the others along with it, in a long chain of misfortunes following one upon the other.
Then the factories started operating again, but the bitterness remained. Four city policemen and four rural officers were permanently stationed there—in times of unrest, the gendarmes of the neighboring villages were called in. Tensions between the population of the city and the rural police ran especially high.
Again and again something was secretly brewing among the workers, but it never broke out into the open in earnest. One day, when notices were put up in one factory calling for a new strike until the hundred laid-off workers were hired back, management fired fifty men on the spot who seemed especially unruly and dangerous. That afternoon there were rallies on the market square. Groups of five and ten workers filled the streets and sidewalks, stopping traffic. But they just stood around, without starting anything serious. They lacked a unifying leadership and decisive will, they looked over to where the police were standing; clearly they weren’t sure what to do in this situation. What would happen? There was an uneasy tension in the air, but neither side could make a decisive first move. The police didn’t dare to take action, since they were obviously in the minority and wanted to wait for reinforcements. And aside from that, there was no reason to act yet. They made do with patrolling the streets and sending home curious children who were standing around watching. When they weren’t obeyed right away, they often reinforced their warnings by grabbing the little scamps and bringing them back to their homes. But nothing happened, other than a lot of talking and shouting. And it was the same the next day. The reinforcements from the neighboring villages were sent back, no longer needed. It seemed as though the excitement was gradually subsiding and the calm of the spring was returning to the city.
Then came news of another outburst. The district capital, with more than thirty thousand inhabitants and major ironworks, lay a half hour’s train ride away. The unrest there broke out much more seriously than in Albrecht’s hometown, with street fighting, casualties, and many injured. The uproar spread out to the surrounding countryside. One day the rumor went around that rioters were coming in a convoy of trucks—but it was only a rumor.
Again all the streets near the market square were filled with people looking around, anxious and agitated. The shops closed and shopkeepers rolled the grates down over their windows. This time it was serious. You could feel an enormous sense of decisiveness in the air, although for the moment a strange hesitation held everyone under its spell. The police sat in the guardroom and waited; one of them stepped outside now and then, looked up and down the street, and disappeared again. Finally, all the way down at the end of the street, there was a glittering and flashing in the sunlight that seemed bigger than anything that had come before. It was blinding. Twenty armed rural police had arrived on bicycles, with sabers affixed to their handlebars and guns strapped to their backs, chinstraps holding their shakos in place. They came riding slowly up the street, an impressive troop, and disappeared with their bicycles into City Hall without paying any attention to the threatening looks and shouts on all sides. The crowd in front of City Hall—old men, married men, a few women, isolated young people—started moving; slowly they started pushing forward toward City Hall from all the streets nearby. The guardroom door slowly opened and policemen came out, calm and full of dignity: twenty-five of them, led by their major. He demanded in a loud voice that the demonstrators disperse, clear the streets and the square. The first rows of the masses pushing forward didn’t change direction, and although a few, less courageous ones in the middle tried to stop where they were, the crowd shoved forward and carried them with it. The policemen formed a chain, but the crowd broke through it and the individual policemen stood hemmed in by the demonstrators. They shouted at the crowd to come to their senses—did they want it to end in bloodshed? The men looked furiously, silently, down at the ground; a few women and young men shouted out loud curses. They pushed ahead. What did they have in mind? They reached for the saber that the major had drawn.
Then he pulled out his revolver and beat a circle clear around him, and every other policeman did the same. Already the front rows were pulling back and the women started screaming, running, and the young people turned pale when they saw the black mouths of the guns in front of them. The men in the front rows were not rowdies or daredevils; they had come through artillery fire safely, and burning villages, and undermined trenches, and gas attacks, they had stayed alive and now they were standing in their homeland looking down the barrel of a gun pointed right a
t them.
The rows of protesters loosened and the policemen forced their way into them, pushing the protesters apart with their polished sabers. No shots were fired and it stayed calm that night. The next morning, the first time anyone tried to repeat the events of the previous day, several men were arrested, handcuffed, and led through the streets to prison flanked by three policemen with bayonets drawn.
* * *
Fritz Fiedler came back home of his own free will. He had come to an agreement with his parents that they wouldn’t force him to do anything anymore. When Herr Fiedler had heard where Fritz was staying, he wanted to go straight there, but his wife held him back. So he waited patiently, let three more weeks go by, only wrote a single letter, and finally, one day, set out. A kid like that, he murmured quietly to himself several times.… And what was he doing down there? Working for a farmer! It was a mystery to Herr Fiedler. But he went with the firm intention of convincing Fritz to come back—amicably and without any pressure. He wanted to bring him back in person. Fritz was not especially glad to see his father show up there one day. “What a beautiful place you’ve found!” Herr Fiedler said admiringly, and it was a nice place to stay for a few days, he thought. Fritz, meanwhile, kept working for the farmer; there was a lot to do, and at night he fell into bed exhausted and happy. His father occasionally asked him how long he really planned to stick it out there. “As long as they’ll have me,” Fritz answered without a second thought. “Or until I find something better,” he added after a moment.
Then Herr Fiedler thought the time had come to tell Fritz everything he and his wife had figured out during their weeks of painful brooding. They had realized that Fritz was serious about his decision to drop out of school. They had accepted it. Now he should just come back and look around for a new career in peace, one he was suited for and that offered good prospects for the future. They wouldn’t push him into anything—it was all going to be left up to Fritz, Herr Fiedler promised. But he should come home.
