Flotsam (2 page)

Two policemen seized the woman under the arms and lifted her into the wagon.

The lieutenant turned toward Kern and Steiner. “Now, these two. Keep a special eye on them.”

“
Merci
,” said Steiner and got in. Kern followed him.

The wagons drove off. “Have a good time!” shrieked a woman’s voice from one of the windows.

“Slaughter those refugees!” a man roared after them. “It’ll save you food.
Heil Hitler!
”

The streets were still almost empty and the police cars moved rather fast. Behind the houses the sky receded, became brighter
and wider and of a transparent blue; but the prisoners stood in a dark group on the wagons like willows in the autumn rain. Two of the policemen were eating sandwiches. They washed them down with coffee out of flat-bottomed tin cans.

Near the Franz Josef Bridge a vegetable truck crossed the street. The police cars stopped with a jolt and then started on again. At that moment one of the prisoners climbed over the side of the second car and jumped off. He fell diagonally across the mudguard, became entangled in his coat, and struck the pavement with the sound of a cracking branch.

“Stop! Back up!” shouted the leader. “Shoot if he moves!”

The truck jolted to a stop. The policemen scrambled down. They ran to the place where the man had fallen. The driver looked around. When he saw that the man wasn’t trying to get away, he slowly backed up the machine.

The man lay prostrate. He had struck the pavement with the back of his head. Lying there with arms and legs spread out in his open overcoat, he looked like a great bat that had crashed to earth.

“Bring him back!” shouted the lieutenant.

The policemen bent over. Then one straightened up. “He must have broken something. He can’t stand.”

“Of course he can stand. Put him on his feet.”

“Give him a good kick. That’ll fix him up,” the policeman who had struck Steiner advised casually.

The man groaned. “He really can’t stand,” reported the other policeman. “His head’s bleeding, too.”

“Damnation!” The leader climbed down. “No one is to move!” he shouted up at the prisoners. “Damned riffraff. Nothing but trouble.”

The wagon now stood close to the fallen man. Kern could see him clearly from above. He recognized him. He was an
emaciated Russian Jew with a ragged, gray beard. Kern had slept a few times in the same room with him. He remembered clearly how the old man had stood at the window in the early morning, with the phylacteries over his shoulders, bending slowly back and forth in prayer. He was a peddler of yarns, shoelaces, and thread, and had been expelled from Austria three times.

“Come on, get up!” the officer ordered. “What did you want to jump out of the wagon for anyway? Had too much of a record to face, eh? Been stealing and God knows what besides.”

The old man moved his lips. His staring eyes were turned toward the lieutenant.

“What’s that?” the latter asked. “Did he say something?”

“He says he did it because he was afraid,” said the policeman kneeling beside him.

“Afraid? Of course he was afraid. Because he’s broken the law. What’s he saying now?”

“He says he’s done nothing wrong.”

“Everyone says that. But what are we going to do with him? What’s wrong with him anyway?”

“Someone ought to get a doctor,” Steiner said from his place in the wagon.

“Shut up!” the lieutenant barked nervously. “Where are we going to find a doctor at this hour? We can’t leave him lying here on the street indefinitely. Later they’d say we did this to him ourselves. The police get blamed for everything.”

“He ought to be in a hospital,” Steiner said. “Right now.”

The officer was confused. He saw now that the man was seriously injured and that made him forget to silence Steiner. “Hospital! They won’t take him in just like that. You have to have a certificate. That’s something I can’t arrange alone. First I have to report the case.”

“Take him to a Jewish hospital,” Steiner said. “They’ll take him in there without a certificate or a report. Even without money.”

The lieutenant stared at him. “How do
you
happen to know so much?”

“We ought to take him to the dispensary,” one of the policemen proposed. “There’s always an intern or a doctor there. They can find out what’s wrong. And at least we’ll be rid of him.”

The lieutenant had made up his mind. “All right, lift him in. We’ll drive by the public dispensary. One man can stay there with him. What a damned nuisance!”

The policemen hoisted the man up. He groaned and turned very pale. They placed him on the floor of the wagon. He shuddered and opened his eyes, which shone with unnatural brilliance in his sunken face. The lieutenant bit his lips. “What a fool trick! Jumping out of a truck, an old man like him. Go on, but drive slow.”

Under the wounded man’s head a pool of blood slowly formed. His gnarled fingers scrabbled over the floorboards of the truck. His lips slowly retracted baring his teeth. It was as though someone else were laughing silently and scornfully behind a death-shadowed mask of pain.

“What’s he saying?” the lieutenant asked.

The policeman knelt down again and steadied the old man’s head against the jolting of the truck. “He says he wanted to get to his children,” he reported. “Now they’ll starve to death.”

“Oh, nonsense. They won’t starve. Where are they?”

The policeman bent down. “He won’t say. Otherwise they’d be deported. None of them has a permit.”

“That’s a lot of nonsense. What’s he saying now?”

“He says he wants you to forgive him.”

“What?” the lieutenant asked in amazement.

“He says he wants you to forgive him for the trouble he has caused you.”

“Forgive him? What does he mean by that?” Shaking his head, the officer stared at the man on the floor.

The car stopped at the dispensary. “Carry him in,” the lieutenant ordered. “Take it easy. And you, Rohde, stay with him till I telephone.” They lifted the injured man. Steiner bent over him. “We’ll find your children. We’ll look after them,” he said. “Do you understand, friend?” The Jew closed his eyes and opened them again.

Then three policemen carried him into the building. His dangling arms dragged helplessly over the pavement as though he were already dead. After a short time two policemen came back and got in again. “Did he say anything else?” asked the lieutenant.

“No. He was green in the face. If it’s his spine he won’t last long.”

“Fair enough, just one Jew the less,” the policeman who had hit Steiner said.

“ ‘Forgive,’ ” muttered the lieutenant. “What a thing to say! Funny fellow—”

“Especially in these times,” Steiner said.

The lieutenant threw back his shoulders. “Shut up, you Bolshevik,” he roared. “We’ll teach you to be fresh.”

The prisoners were taken to the Elisabeth Street police station. The handcuffs were taken off Steiner and Kern, and they were put with the others in a large dim room. Most of them were sitting in silence. They were used to waiting. Only the fat, blond landlady kept up a steady lamentation.

About nine o’clock they were summoned upstairs one after the other.

Kern was led into a room where there were two policemen, a clerk in plain clothes, the lieutenant, and a middle-aged police captain. The captain was sitting in a swivel chair smoking cigarettes. “Fill in the form,” he said to the man at the table.

The clerk was a thin, acidulous individual who looked like a herring. “Name?” he asked in an astonishingly deep voice.

“Ludwig Kern.”

“Date of birth?”

“November 30, 1916, in Dresden.”

“So you’re a German—”

“No. No nationality. Deprived of citizenship.”

The captain looked up. “At twenty-one? For what reason?”

“None. My father was deprived of citizenship. Since I was a minor, I was too.”

“What had your father done?”

Kern was silent for a moment. A year’s experience as a refugee had taught him to be cautious of every word he spoke to the authorities. “He was falsely denounced as politically unreliable,” he said finally.

“Are you a Jew?”

“My father is—Not my mother.”

“Aha …”

The captain flicked the ashes from his cigarette onto the floor. “Why didn’t you stay in Germany?”

“They took our passports away and told us to leave. We would have been locked up if we had stayed; and if we were going to be locked up anyway we wanted it to be somewhere else—not in Germany.”

The captain laughed dryly. “I can understand that. How did you get across the border without a passport?”

“All you needed then, for short trips across the Czech border, was an identification card. We had that. With it you were allowed to stay for three days in Czechoslovakia.”

“And after that?”

“We got permission to stay for three months. Then we had to leave.”

“How long have you been in Austria?”

“Three months.”

“Why haven’t you reported to the police.”

“Because then I’d have been ordered to leave immediately.”

“Indeed!” The captain struck the arm of his chair with the palm of his hand. “How do you happen to know that?”

Kern did not mention the fact that he and his parents had reported to the police the first time they had crossed the Austrian border. They had been deported the same day. When they came back again, they did not report.

“Perhaps it isn’t so?” he asked.

“It’s not your place to ask questions here. You just answer,” the clerk said sharply.

“Where are your parents now?” asked the captain.

“My mother is in Hungary. She was allowed to stay because she is Hungarian by birth. My father was arrested and deported while I was away from the hotel. I don’t know where he is.”

“What’s your profession?”

“I was a student.”

“How have you lived?”

“I have some money.”

“How much?”

“I have twelve schillings with me. Friends are keeping the rest for me.” Kern owned nothing besides the twelve schillings.
He had earned them peddling soap, perfume, and toilet water. But if he had admitted that, he would have been liable to additional punishment for working without a permit.

The captain got up and yawned. “Are we through?”

“There’s one more downstairs,” said the clerk.

“It will be the same story. Lots of bleating and not much wool.” The captain made a wry face at the lieutenant. “Nothing but illegal immigrants. Doesn’t look much like a Communist plot, does it? Who lodged that complaint anyway?”

“Someone who runs the same sort of place, only he has bedbugs,” said the clerk. “Professional jealousy probably.”

The captain laughed. Then he noticed that Kern was still in the room. “Take him downstairs. You know the sentence. Two weeks’ detention and then deportation.” He yawned again. “Well, I’m going out for a goulash and beer.”

Kern was taken into a smaller cell than before. Beside him there were five prisoners there, among them the Pole who had slept in the same room.

In a quarter of an hour they brought Steiner in. He sat down beside Kern. “First time in the coop, kid?”

Kern nodded.

“Feel like a murderer, don’t you?”

Kern made a face. “Just about. Prison—You know, I can’t get over my early feeling about that.”

“This isn’t prison,” Steiner explained, “this is detention. Prison comes later.”

“Have you been in prison?”

“Yes.” Steiner smiled. “You’ll get a taste of it too, kid. The first time it will hit you hard. But not again. Particularly not
in winter. At least you have peace while you’re in. A man without a passport is a corpse on parole. All he’s really expected to do is commit suicide—there’s nothing else.”

“And with a passport? There’s no place where you get a permit to work too?”

“Of course not. You only get the right to starve to death in peace—not on the run. That’s a good deal.”

Kern stared straight ahead.

Steiner slapped him on the shoulder. “Keep your chin up, Baby. In return for all this you have the good fortune to live in the twentieth century, the century of culture, progress, and humanity.”

“Isn’t there anything at all to eat here?” asked a little man with a bald head, sitting in a corner on one of the plank beds. “Not even any coffee?”

“All you have to do is ring for the head waiter,” Steiner replied. “Tell him to bring the bill of fare. There are four menus to choose from. Caviar if you want it, of course.”

“Food very bad here,” said the Pole.

“Why, there’s our Jesus Christ!” Steiner looked at him with interest. “Are you a regular guest?”

“Very bad,” repeated the Pole. “And so little—”

“Oh God,” said the man in the corner, “and I have a roast chicken in my trunk. When are they going to let us out of here anyhow?”

“In two weeks,” Steiner answered. “That’s the usual punishment for refugees without papers, eh, Jesus Christ? I bet you know that.”

“Two weeks,” agreed the Pole. “Or longer. Very little food. And so bad. Thin soup.”

“Damn it! By then my chicken will be spoiled,” the bald-head
groaned. “My first chicken in two years. I saved up for it, groschen by groschen. I was going to eat it today.”

“Postpone your anguish till tonight,” Steiner said, “then you can assume you would already have eaten it and that will make it easier.”

“What nonsense is that you’re talking?” The man stared indignantly at Steiner. “Are you trying to tell me that would be the same thing, you twaddler? When I haven’t really eaten it? And besides, I’d have saved a drumstick for tomorrow.”

“Then wait until tomorrow noon.”

“That not bad for me,” the Pole broke in, “I not eat chicken.”

“It can’t possibly be bad for
you
—you haven’t a roast chicken lying in your trunk,” growled the man in the corner.

“If I had chicken, still not bad. I not eat her. Not stand chickens. Vomit up afterwards.” The Pole looked very satisfied and smoothed his beard. “For me that chicken no loss.”

“No one’s interested in that, you fool!” the bald-head shouted angrily.

“Even if chicken here—I not eat same,” announced the Pole triumphantly.