Every Man Dies Alone (13 page)

She sat down in her kitchen chair, stared at the blue gas flame, and thought back over her day. Once she’d told the official that she wanted to leave the Party, effective immediately, there had been no end of talk. He’d begun by taking her off mail delivery duties. And then she had been questioned. At midday, a couple of civilians with briefcases had arrived and interrogated her. She was to tell them her whole life story, her parents, her siblings, her marriage…

At first she had been compliant, glad to change the subject after the endless questions about why she wanted to leave the Party. But then, when she was supposed to tell them about her marriage, she had gotten mulish. After the husband, it would be the turn of her children, and she wouldn’t be able to talk about Karlemann without those wily foxes noticing there was something the matter.

No, she’d refused to discuss it. Her marriage and her children were no one’s business.

But these men were tough. They had lots of methods. One of them had reached into his briefcase and started reading a file. She would have loved to know what file it was: surely the police wouldn’t keep a file like that on her, because she had by now noticed that these civilians had the air of policemen about them.

Then they went back to asking questions. The files must have contained something about Enno, because now she was asked about his illnesses, his shirking, his passion for horses, and his women. It all began harmlessly enough, as before, and then suddenly she saw the danger, and shut her mouth and refused to answer. No, that, too, was something private. That didn’t concern anyone. Her dealings with her husband were her affair. Incidentally, she lived alone.

And with that she was trapped again. How long had she been living alone? When was the last time she had seen him? Did her desire to leave the Party have anything to do with him?

She had merely shaken her head. But she shuddered to think that they would probably now question Enno and they would squeeze everything out of that weakling within half an hour. Then she, who had previously kept her shame to herself, would stand exposed for all to see.

“Private! All private!”

Lost in thought, staring at the flickering gas flame, she suddenly jumped. She had made a serious mistake. She should have given Enno money to tide him over for a couple of weeks and told him to go and hide at one of his girlfriends’ places.

She rings Frau Gesch’s bell. “Listen, Frau Gesch, I’ve had another think, I’d like at least to talk to my husband briefly.”

Now that the other woman is doing what she asked of her, Frau Gesch gets upset. “You should have thought about that earlier. Your husband’s been gone for twenty minutes at least. You’re too late!”

“Where has he gone, Frau Gesch?”

“How should I know? You’re the one who threw him out. I expect to one of his women!”

“And you don’t know which one? Please, if you know, Frau Gesch, tell me! It could be very important…”

“You have changed your tune!” Reluctantly, Frau Gesch adds, “He said something about some woman called Tutti…”

“Tutti?” she says. “That must be short for Trudel or Gertrude…

You wouldn’t know her surname, would you, Frau Gesch?”

“He didn’t know it himself! He didn’t even know where she lived, he just thought he could manage to find her. But in the state the man’s in…”

“Maybe he will come back,” says Frau Kluge reflectively. “If he does, send him to me. Anyway, thank you for your help, Frau Gesch, and good evening!”

Frau Gesch doesn’t reply, just slams the door back in her face. She hasn’t forgotten how she was treated earlier. She’s not at all sure she would send the man round, in the event that he does show up again. A woman shouldn’t hem and haw, because it can easily become too late.

Frau Kluge returns to her kitchen. It’s a strange thing: even though the conversation with Frau Gesch didn’t achieve anything, she feels relieved. Things will take their course. She’s done what she could to stay clean. She has cut herself off from husband and son, and now she will cut them out of her heart. She has declared her desire to leave the Party. Now whatever happens will happen. She can’t change it, and even the worst shouldn’t terrify her after what she’s already been through.

It didn’t terrify her, either, when the two men in suits went from asking her pointless questions to making threats. She did realize, didn’t she, that leaving the Party would cost her her job at the post office? And more: if she now left the Party without declaring the reason, that would make her politically unreliable, and for such people there were concentration camps! She must have heard of them? There, politically unreliable individuals could be made reliable in very quick time, reliable for the rest of their days. She surely understood?

Frau Kluge hadn’t been afraid. She insisted on her privacy, and refused to discuss private matters. In the end, they let her go. No, her leaving the Party has not yet been accepted; she will hear a decision in due course. But she has been suspended from the postal service. She is required to remain available in her flat should further questioning…

As Eva Kluge finally remembers to move the forgotten soup pot over the gas, she suddenly decides not to obey in this point either. She’s not going to sit there helplessly in her flat and wait for her tormentors. No, she will take the early morning train to her sister in Ruppin. She can stay there for two or three weeks without registering. They can feed her somehow. They have a cow and pigs and acres of potatoes. She will work with the animals and in the fields. It will do her good, better than delivering letters day in, day out.

Now that she has decided to go to the country, she finds herself moving around more nimbly. She gets out a small suitcase and begins to pack. For a moment, she wonders whether to tell Frau Gesch that she’s going away—she doesn’t have to say where she’s going. But then she decides it’s best not to say anything. Whatever she does, she will do alone. She doesn’t want to involve any other person in it. She won’t tell her sister and brother-in-law anything either. She will live alone, as never before. So far there has always been someone for her to look after: parents, husband, children. Now she’s alone. At this moment it strikes her as very likely that she will enjoy the condition. Perhaps when she’s all alone she will amount to more: she’ll have some time to herself, and won’t need to put herself last, after all the others.

The night that Frau Rosenthal is so afraid to be alone, the postie Eva Kluge smiles in her sleep for the first time in a long time. In her dreams she sees herself standing in a vast field of potatoes with a hoe in her hands. As far as she can see, only potatoes and herself, all alone: she needs to hoe the potatoes. She smiles, picks up her hoe, there’s the clink of a pebble, a weed falls, she hoes her own row.

Chapter 12

ENNO AND EMIL AFTER THE SHOCK

Little Enno Kluge had a much worse time of it than his “chum” Emil Borkhausen, whose wife, be she as she might, at least bundled him off to bed following the experiences of that night, even if she did then promptly rob him. The little gambler also got much more knocked about than that long, bony snitch. No, Enno had an especially bad time of it.

While Enno is trotting around the streets, timidly looking for his Tutti, Borkhausen has got up from his bed, gone to the kitchen, and savagely and broodingly eats his fill. Then Borkhausen finds a pack of cigarettes in the wardrobe, slips it in his pocket, and sits down at the table again, pondering gloomily, head in hand.

Which is how Otti finds him when she returns from the shops. Of course she sees right away that he’s helped himself to some food, and she knows he didn’t have any smokes on him and traces the theft to her wardrobe. Apprehensive as she is, she starts an argument right away. “Yes, that’s my darling, a man who eats my food and snitches my cigarettes! Give them back, I want them back right now. Or pay me for them. Give me some money, Emil!”

She waits to hear what he will say, but she’s pretty sure of her ground. The forty-eight marks are almost all spent, and there’s not much he can do about it.

And she can tell from his answer, nasty though it is, that he really doesn’t know anything about the money. She feels far superior to this man: she’s robbed him and the silly jerk hasn’t even noticed.

“Shut your face!” grunts Borkhausen, not even lifting his head out of his hands. “And get out of the room while you’re about it, or I’ll break every bone in your body!”

She calls back from the kitchen doorway, simply because she always has to have the last word, and because she feels so superior to him (although he does frighten her), “You should try to keep the SS from breaking all the bones in yours, jackass!”

Then she goes into the kitchen and takes her banishment out on the kids.

The man meanwhile sits in the parlor and thinks. He doesn’t remember much about what happened in the night, but the little he recalls will do for him. And he thinks that up there is the Rosenthal flat, which the Persickes have probably picked clean, and it was all there for him, for nights and nights. And it’s his own stupid fault it was fouled up.

No, it was Enno’s fault, Enno got started on the drink, Enno was drunk from the get-go. If it hadn’t been for Enno, he would have got a whole heap of stuff, clothes and linen; and dimly he remembers a radio. If he had Enno in front of him now, he would pulverize him, that wretched cowardly twerp who screwed up the whole thing!

A moment later, Borkhausen shrugs his shoulders again. Who is Enno, anyhow? A cowardly parasite who scrounges off women! No, the real one to blame is Baldur Persicke! That rat, that schoolkid of a Hitler Youth leader always intended to betray him. The job was rigged to produce a guilty party, so that they could help themselves to the booty at their leisure. That was a fine scheme on the part of that bespectacled cobra! How could he let himself be beaten by a snotnosed kid like that!

Borkhausen isn’t quite sure why he’s sitting in his room at home rather than in a detention cell in the Alex.
^*
Something must have interfered with their plan. Dimly he remembers a couple of mysterious figures, but he was too stupefied then to register who they were and what their role was, and he has even less idea now.

But one thing he does know: he’s never going to pardon Baldur Persicke for this. He can creep as high as he likes up the ladder of Party favor, but Borkhausen is going to stay alert. Borkhausen has time. Borkhausen won’t forget. The louse—one day he’ll catch up with him, and then it’ll be his turn to grovel! And he’ll be groveling more abjectly than Borkhausen, and he’ll never get up out of it either. Betray a partner? No, that will never be forgiven or forgotten! All those fine items in the Rosenthal place, the suitcases and boxes and radio, they could all have been his!

Borkhausen goes on bitterly ruminating, always along the same lines, and in between times he sneaks out Otti’s silver hand mirror, a keepsake from a generous john, and examines and gingerly touches his face.

By this time little Enno Kluge, too, has discovered what his face looks like, in a mirror in the window of a dress shop. That has only served to frighten him even more, in fact it throws him into a blind panic. He doesn’t dare look anyone in the face, but he has the feeling everyone is staring at him. He pounds the back streets, his search for Tutti is getting more and more hopeless—it’s not just that he can’t remember where she lives, he has lost his own bearings. Still, he turns in at every entryway and looks up at the windows in the back buildings. Tutti… Tutti…

Darkness is falling fast, and he has to have found somewhere by nightfall, otherwise the police will take him in, and when they see the state of him, they’ll make mincemeat of him till he’s confessed everything. And if he confesses the bit about the Persickes (and in his fear he’s bound to), then the Persickes will simply beat him to death.

He runs around aimlessly, on and on…

Finally, he can’t go any farther. He comes to a bench and hunkers down there, unable to walk on. He goes through his pockets looking for something to smoke—a cigarette would settle him.

He doesn’t find any cigarettes, but he does find something he certainly wasn’t expecting, namely, money. Forty-six marks. Frau Gesch could have told him hours ago that he had money in his pockets, to make the timid little man a bit more confident of finding somewhere for the night. But of course Frau Gesch didn’t want to admit to having gone through his pockets while he was asleep. She is a respectable woman, and as such—after a little inner struggle—she put the money back in his pocket. If it had been her Gustav, well, she would have confiscated it right away, but she draws the line at robbing a man off the street! Of course, she did take three out of the forty-nine marks
she found, but that wasn’t theft, that was just payment for the food she gave Kluge. She would have given him the food without the money, but feeding a man for free when he’s got money in his pockets? She’s not so prodigal as that either.

At any rate, the possession of forty-six marks cheers up the fearful Enno Kluge to no end, now he knows he can always rent a room for the night. His memory starts to function better, too. He still can’t remember where Tutti used to live, but he suddenly recalls the small cafe where they met and where she was often to be found. Perhaps they will have an address for her there.