Every Man Dies Alone (21 page)

He carried his little bottle of ink, his postcards in their envelope, and the large white gloves to the table. He uncorked the bottle, seared the pen nib with a match, and dipped it in the ink. There was a quiet hiss; he looked attentively at the pen and nodded. Then he awkwardly pulled on the gloves, took a card from the envelope, and laid it down in front of him. He nodded slowly at Anna. She was alertly following every one of these meticulous and long-considered preparations. Then he indicated his gloves and said, “Fingerprints—see!”

Then he picked up the pen, and said softly but clearly, “The first sentence of our first card will read: ‘Mother! The Führer has murdered my son.”

Once again, she shivered. There was something so bleak, so gloomy, so determined in the words Otto had just spoken. At that instant she grasped that this very first sentence was Otto’s absolute and irrevocable declaration of war, and also what that meant: war between, on the one side, the two of them, poor, small, insignificant workers who could be extinguished for just a word or two, and on the other, the Führer, the Party, the whole apparatus in all its power and glory, with three-fourths or even four-fifths of the German people behind it. And the two of them in this little room in Jablonski Strasse!

She looks across at her husband. While she’s been thinking all this, he has just got to the third word of the first sentence. With unbearable patience, he is drawing the capital
F
of the word
Führer
. “Why don’t you let me write, Otto!” she begs. “I can do it much more quickly!”

At first he just growls back. But then he does give her an explanation. “Your handwriting,” he says. “They would catch us sooner or later by the handwriting. This here is a sign-writing style, block capitals, like type…”

He stops, and goes on drawing the letters. Yes, he’s planned it all. He doesn’t think he’s forgotten anything. He knows this style from the plans of furniture designers; no one can tell from such a style who’s doing it. Of course, with Otto Quangel’s large hands unused to writing, it looks particularly crude and coarse. But that doesn’t matter, that won’t betray him. If anything, it’s a further advantage: the postcard will have something poster-like about it that will catch the eye. He goes on drawing patiently.

And she, too, has become patient. She is beginning to adjust to the idea that this will be a long war. She is calm now; Otto has considered everything; Otto is dependable, come what may. The thought he has given to everything! The first postcard in the war that was started by the death of their son is rightly about him. Once, they had a son; the Führer murdered him; now they are writing postcards. A new chapter in their lives. On the outside, nothing has changed. All is quiet around the Quangels. But inside, everything is different, they are at war…

She gets her darning basket and starts darning socks. Now and then, she looks across at Otto slowly drawing his letters, not ever changing his tempo. After almost every letter he holds the postcard out at arm’s length and studies it with narrowed eyes. Then he nods.

Finally, he shows her his first completed sentence. It occupies one and a half very generous lines of the postcard.

She says, “You won’t get much on each postcard!” He answers, “Never mind! I’ll just have to write a lot of postcards!”

“And each card takes a long time.”

“I’ll write one card every Sunday, later on maybe two. The war is far from over, the killing will go on.”

He is unshakable. He has made a decision, and will act on it. Nothing can reverse it, nothing can deflect Otto Quangel from his chosen path.

He says, “The second sentence: ‘Mother! The Führer will murder your sons too, he will not stop till he has brought sorrow to every home in the world.’”

She repeats it: “Mother, the Führer will murder your sons too!”

She nods, she says, “Write that!” She suggests, “We should try to leave that card somewhere where a lot of women will see it!”

He reflects, then shakes his head. “No. Women who get a shock, you never know what they will do. A man will stuff it in his pocket, on the staircase. Later on, he’ll read it carefully. Anyway, all men are the sons of mothers.”

He stops talking, and goes back to his drawing. The afternoon goes by; they don’t think about supper. It’s evening, and the card is finished at last. He stands up. He takes one more look at it.

“There!” he says. “That’s that. Next Sunday the next one.”

She nods.

“When will you deliver it?” she whispers.

He looks at her. “Tomorrow morning.”

“Let me come with you, the first time!”

He shakes his head. “No,” he says. “And especially not the first time. I have to see how things go.”

“Come on!” she begs him. “It’s my card! It’s the card of the mother!”

“All right!” he determines. “You can come. But only as far as the building. Inside, I want to be on my own.”

“All right.”

Then the card is carefully pushed inside a book, the writing things put away, the gloves slipped into his tunic.

They eat their supper, barely speaking. They hardly notice how quiet they both are—even Anna. They are both tired, as though they have done an immense labor or been on a long journey.

As he gets up from the table, he says, “I’m going to go and lie down.”

And she, “I’ll just tidy up in the kitchen. Then I’ll come, too. I feel so tired, and we haven’t done anything!”

He looks at her with a glimmer of a smile on his face, and then he goes to the bedroom and starts to get undressed.

But later, when they are both lying in bed in the dark, they can’t get to sleep. They toss and turn, each listens to the other’s breathing, and in the end they start to talk. It’s easier to talk in the dark.

“What do you think will happen to our cards?” asks Anna.

“People will feel alarmed when they see them lying there and read the first few words. Everyone’s frightened nowadays.”

“That’s true,” she says, “Everybody is…”

But she exempts the two of them, the two Quangels. Almost everybody’s frightened, but not us.

“The people who find them,” he says, saying aloud things he’s thought through a hundred times, “will be afraid of being seen on the stairs. They will quickly pocket the cards and run off. Or they may lay them down again and disappear, and then the next person will come along…”

“That’s right,” says Anna, and she can see the staircase before her eyes, a typical Berlin staircase, badly lit, and anyone with a card in his hand will suddenly feel like a criminal. Because in fact everyone thinks the way the writer of the cards thinks, but they can’t let it show, because it’s a capital crime…

“Some,” Quangel resumes, “will hand the card in right away, to the block warden or the police—anything to be rid of it!
^*
But even that doesn’t matter: whether it’s shown to the Party or not, whether to an official or a policeman, they all will read the card, and it will have some effect on them. Even if the only effect is to remind them that there is still resistance out there, that not everyone thinks like the Führer…”

“No,” she says. “Not everyone. Not us.”

“And there will be more of us, Anna. We will make more. We will inspire other people to write their own postcards. In the end, scores of people, hundreds, will be sitting down and writing cards like us. We will inundate Berlin with postcards, we will slow the machines, we will depose the Führer, end the war…”

He stops, alarmed by his own words, these dreams that so late in life have come to haunt his heart.

But Anna Quangel is fired by this vision: “And we will have been the first! No one will know, but we will know.”

Suddenly sober, he says, “Perhaps already there are many thinking as we do. Thousands of men must have fallen. Maybe there are already writers like us. But that doesn’t matter, Anna! What do we care? It’s we who must do it!”

“Yes,” she says.

And he, once again carried away by their prospects: “And we will keep the police busy, the Gestapo, the SS, the SA. Everywhere people will be talking about the mysterious postcards, they will inquire, suspect, observe, conduct house to house searches—in vain! We will go on writing, on and on!”

And she: “Maybe they’ll even show the Führer himself cards like ours—he will read our accusations! He will go wild! It’s said he always goes wild when something doesn’t happen according to his will. He will order his men to find us, and they won’t find us! He will have to go on reading our accusations!”

They are both silent, dazzled by their prospects. What were they, previously? Obscure characters, extras. And now to see them alone, exalted, separate from the others, not to be confused with any of them. They feel a shiver; that’s how alone they are.

Quangel can imagine himself at work, in front of the same machinery, driving and driven, alert, looking round from machine to machine. For them he will always be idiotic old Quangel, obsessed by work and his squalid avarice. But in his head he carries thoughts like none of them. They would die of fright if they carried such thoughts. But he, silly old Quangel, he has them. He stands there, fooling everyone.

Anna Quangel is thinking of their expedition tomorrow to deliver the first postcard. She is a little dissatisfied with herself for not insisting on going into the building with Quangel. She wonders whether to ask him to let her. Maybe. Generally, Otto Quangel doesn’t allow his mind to be changed by appeals. But maybe tonight, given his unusually affable mood? Maybe right now?

But it’s taken her too long to get there. Quangel is already asleep. So she closes her eyes, she will see if it’s possible tomorrow. If it is, she will certainly ask.

And then she, too, is asleep.

*
A “Blockwart” was a low-ranking Party official installed to be superintendant of a building (or a block of buildings) and gather information about the tenants.

Chapter 18

THE FIRST CARD IS DROPPED

She doesn’t dare mention it until they are on the street, that’s how taciturn Otto is this morning. “Where are you going to drop the card, Otto?”

He answers gruffly, “Don’t talk about it now. Not on the street.” And then he adds, in spite of himself, “I’ve got a house on Greifswalder Strasse in mind.”

“No,” she says decisively. “No, don’t do that, Otto. That’s a bad idea!”

“Come along!” he says angrily, because she has stopped, “I tell you, not on the street!”

He walks on, she follows him, and insists on her right to debate. “Not so close to where we live,” she stresses. “If it winds up in their hands, they’ll have an indication of the area right away. Let’s go down to the Alex…”

He reflects. Perhaps she’s right, no, she is right. One has to reckon on anything. And yet, this abrupt change of plan doesn’t suit him at all. If they go all the way down to the Alexanderplatz, time will get short, and he has to go to work. Also, he doesn’t know of any appropriate buildings around the Alex. There are bound to be loads of them, but you have to look for the right one first, and he’d rather do that on his own, not with his wife.

Then, quite suddenly, his mind is made up. “Okay, Anna,” he says. “you’re right. Let’s go to the Alex.”

She looks at him gratefully. She is glad he has accepted some advice from her. And because he has just made her so happy, she decides she won’t ask him for the other thing, his permission to enter the building with him. He can go alone. She will be a bit scared while she waits for him to come out—but why, really? Not for a moment does she doubt that he will come out. He is so calm and cold, he won’t let himself be caught out. Even if he were in their hands, he wouldn’t give himself away, and he would fight himself free.

As she walks along, thinking such things, at the side of her silent husband, they have turned off Greifswalder Strasse into Neue Königstrasse. She has been so preoccupied with her thoughts that she hasn’t noticed the intensity with which Otto Quangel’s eyes have been scanning the houses opposite them. Now he suddenly comes to a stop—it’s quite a bit further to the Alexanderplatz—and says: “There, have a look in that shop window, I’ll be back in a jiffy.”

And already he’s off across the road, walking toward a large, bright office building.

Her heart starts to pound. She feels like calling out: No, not there, we said the Alex! Let’s stay together a bit longer! And: Won’t you at least say good-bye to me first! But already the door is banging shut behind him.

With a deep sigh, she turns toward the shop window. But she sees nothing. She presses her brow against the cold glass, and everything flickers and runs before her eyes. Her heart is beating so hard she can hardly breathe; all the blood seems to have rushed to her head.

So I am afraid, she thinks. My God, he must never find out, otherwise he’ll never take me with him again. But then, I’m not really afraid, she thinks. I’m not afraid for me, I’m afraid for him. What if he doesn’t come out?

She can’t stop herself, she has to look at the office building. The door is pushed open, people come, people go; why doesn’t Quangel come? He must have been gone five minutes, no, ten. Why is there a man running out of the building? Is he calling the police? Don’t say they’ve caught Quangel the very first time!