Alone in Berlin (Penguin Modern Classics)

5

Enno Kluge’s Homecoming

Eva Kluge finished her delivery round at two o’clock. She then worked till four totting up newspaper rates and surcharges: if she was very tired, she got her numbers muddled up and she would have to start again. Finally, with sore feet and a painful vacancy in her brain, she set off home; she didn’t want to think about everything she had to do before getting to bed. On the way home, she shopped, using her ration cards. There was a long line at the butcher’s, and so it was almost six when she slowly climbed the steps to her apartment on Friedrichshain.

On her doorstep stood a little man in a light-coloured raincoat and cap. He had a colourless and expressionless face, slightly inflamed eyelids, pale eyes – the sort of face you immediately forget.

‘Is that you, Enno?’ she exclaimed, and right away gripped her keys more tightly in her hand. ‘What are you doing here? I’ve got no money and nothing to eat, and I’m not letting you into the flat either.’

The little man made a dismissive gesture. ‘Don’t get upset, Eva. Don’t be cross with me. I just wanted to say hello. Hello, Eva. There you are!’

‘Hello, Enno,’ she said, reluctantly, having known her husband for many years. She waited a while, and then laughed briefly and sardonically. ‘All right, we’ve said hello as you wanted, so why don’t you go? But it seems you’re not going, so what have you really come for?’

‘See here, Evie,’ he said. ‘You’re a sensible woman, you’re someone a man can talk to…’ He embarked on a long and involved account of how he could no longer extend his sick leave, because he had been off for twenty-six weeks. He had to go back to work, otherwise they would pack him off back to the army, which had allowed him to go to the factory in the first place because he was a precision toolmaker and those were in short supply. ‘You see, the thing is,’ he concluded his account, ‘that I have to have a fixed address for the next few days. And so I thought…’

She shook her head emphatically. She was so tired she could drop, and she was longing to be back in her flat, where much more work was waiting for her. But she wasn’t going to let him in, not if she had to stand outside half the night.

Quickly he added, in a tone that immediately struck her as insincere, ‘Don’t say no, Evie, I haven’t finished yet. I swear I want nothing from you, no money, no food, nothing. Just let me bed down on the sofa. No need for any sheets. I don’t want to be the least trouble to you.’

Again, she shook her head. If only he would stop talking; he really ought to know she didn’t believe a word of it. He had never kept a promise in his life.

She asked, ‘Why don’t you get one of your girlfriends to put you up? They usually come through for something like this!’

He shook his head. ‘No, Evie, I’m through with women, I can’t deal with them any more, I want no more of them. If I think about it, you were always the best of them anyway, you know that. We had some good years back then, you know, when the kids were still small.’

In spite of herself, her face lit up at the recollection of their early married years. They really had been good years, when he was working as a machinist, taking home sixty marks a week, before he turned work shy.

Immediately Enno Kluge saw the chink. ‘You see, Evie, you see, you still have a bit of a soft spot for me, and that’s why you’ll let me sleep on the sofa. I promise I’ll be quick dealing with the management, I’m not bothered about the wages, I just want to go on sick leave again and stay out of the army. In ten days I’ll have my medical discharge, I promise!’

He paused and looked at her expectantly. This time she didn’t shake her head, but her expression was opaque. He went on, ‘I don’t want to do it with stomach ulcers this time, because then they don’t give you anything to eat when you’re in hospital. What I’m trying for this time is inflamed gall bladder. They can’t prove you’re lying, all they can do is X-ray you, but you don’t have to have gallstones to have the inflammation. You might, but you don’t have to. That’ll work. I’ll just have to clock in for ten days first.’

Once again she didn’t say a word, and he went on, because it was his belief that you could talk your way into or out of anything and that if you were persistent enough, in the end people would just give in. ‘I’ve got the address of a doctor on Frankfurter Allee, he writes medical excuses just like that, he just doesn’t want any trouble afterward. He’ll do it for me, I’m sure; in ten days I’ll be back in the hospital and you’ll be rid of me, Evie!’

Tired of all the chat, she spoke at last: ‘Look, Enno, I don’t care if you stay here till midnight talking, I’m not taking you back. I’m never doing that again; I don’t care what you say or what you do. I’m not going to let you wreck everything again with your laziness and your horses and your hussies. You’ve done it three times, and then a fourth, and then more, but I’ve reached my limit, and that’s it. I’m going to sit down on the steps, because I’m tired, I’ve been on my feet since six. If you want to, you can sit down, I don’t care. You can talk or not, that’s up to you: as I said, I don’t care. But you’re not setting foot in my apartment ever again!’

She sat down on the same step where he had stood and waited for her. And her words sounded so determined that he felt no amount of talking would change her mind. So he pulled his cap slightly askew and said: ‘Well, Evie, if that’s the way you feel about it, and you won’t even do me a little favour when you know I’m in trouble, the man you had five children with, three of them in the ground, and the other two away fighting for Führer and Fatherland…’ He broke off. He had been talking mechanically to himself, going on and on as he was used to doing in pubs, even though he had grasped that there was no point in it now. ‘All right then, Evie, I’m going. And let me tell you, I’ve no complaints against you, I’m no better than I ought to be, Evie, you know that, but at least I don’t bear grudges.’

‘Because you don’t care about a thing in the world except your races,’ she retorted, in spite of herself. ‘Because nothing else interests you, and because you don’t feel an ounce of affection for anything else, not even for yourself, Enno Kluge.’ But she stopped right away; she knew it was useless talking to this man. She waited a while, and then she said, ‘Weren’t you going to leave now?’

‘I am going, Evie,’ he said surprisingly. ‘Be a good girl. I don’t hold anything against you. Heil Hitler, Evie!’

She was still firmly convinced this leave-taking was a trick on his part, a prelude to a new and stupefying bout of talk. To her limitless surprise, he said nothing further, but really did start walking down the stairs.

For one or two minutes more she continued to sit on the stairs, as though numb. She couldn’t believe she had won. She heard his footfall on the bottom step, he hadn’t stopped anywhere to hide, he really was going! Then the front door banged shut. With trembling hand she unlocked her apartment door; she was so nervous, she couldn’t get the key into the keyhole. Once inside, she put on the chain and slumped into a kitchen chair. Her arms dropped; the struggle had taken the last of her strength. She had no more energy. If someone had prodded her with a finger, she would have fallen out of the chair.

Gradually, as she sat there, strength and life returned to her. She had done it at last, her willpower had defeated his obstinacy. She had successfully guarded her home, kept it for herself. He wouldn’t be sitting around here any more, banging on about horses and stealing every mark and every piece of bread that crossed his path.

She leaped up now, full of renewed courage. This little bit of life was what remained to her. After the endless work for the post office, she needed these few hours here to herself. The delivery round was hard for her, harder with each passing day. Earlier in her life she had suffered from female troubles, and that was why her three youngest were all in the graveyard: they had all been born prematurely. Now her legs were giving her trouble. She wasn’t cut out to be a working woman was what it came down to – she should have been a housewife. But when her husband suddenly stopped working, she had been forced to go out and earn money. Back then, the two boys were only little. It was she who had brought them up, she who had kept this little home going: two rooms, kitchen and bedroom. And, on the side, as it were, she had pulled a man along as well, whenever he wasn’t staying over with one of his fancy women.

Of course, she could have divorced him long ago; he wasn’t exactly discreet about his adulteries. But divorce wouldn’t have changed anything. Divorced or not, Enno would have gone on clinging to her. He didn’t care – there really wasn’t a speck of pride in him anywhere.

She hadn’t thrown him out of the house until the boys had gone off to war. Till that time, she’d always believed she had to maintain some semblance of family life, even though the boys had a pretty shrewd idea what was going on. She was reluctant to let others in on her struggles. If someone asked after her husband, she would say he was off on some installation job. Even now, she paid the odd visit to Enno’s parents, took them something to eat or a few marks, to pay them back, so to speak, for the money that Enno filched from their pathetic pension.

But inwardly, she was long done with the man. Even if he had changed and started working again, and become what he was in the first years of their marriage, even then she wouldn’t have taken him back. She didn’t hate him – he was such a nonentity you couldn’t hate him – he was simply repulsive to her, like a spider or snake. He should have just left her in peace – all she wanted for her contentment was not to see him again!

While Eva Kluge was thinking of these things, she put her dinner on the hob and tidied up the kitchen – she did the bedroom in the morning before going to work. As she listened to the soup bubbling, and the good smell of it spread through the kitchen, she got out her darning basket – stockings were always such a bother; she ripped more of them in a day than she could mend. But for all that she didn’t resent the work, she loved those quiet half hours before supper, when she could sit snugly in the wicker chair in her felt slippers, her aching feet stretched out and crossed – that was how they seemed to rest most comfortably.

After dinner, she wanted to write to her favourite, older boy, Karlemann, who was in Poland. She had rather fallen out with him of late, especially since he had joined the SS. A lot of bad rumours were flying around about the SS. They were supposed to be terribly mean to the Jews, even raping and shooting Jewish girls. But she didn’t think he was like that, not the boy she had carried in her womb. Karlemann wouldn’t do that sort of thing! Where would he have got it from? She had never been rough or brutal in her life, and Enno was just a dishrag. But she would try to put some hint in her letter to him to remain decent. Of course it would have to be very subtly expressed, so that only Karlemann understood it. Otherwise, the letter would wind up with the censor, and he’d get in trouble. Well, she would come up with something – maybe she would remind him of something from his childhood, like the time he stole two marks from her and spent them on sweets, or, better yet, when he was thirteen and went out with that little floozie, Walli. The trouble there had been then, to get him out of her clutches – he was capable of such rages, her Karlemann!

But she smiled as she thought of it. Everything to do with the boys’ childhood seemed lovely to her. Back then, she still had the strength, she would have defended her boys against the whole world, she worked day and night so that they didn’t have to go without what other children got from their fathers. But over the past few years, she had got steadily weaker, particularly since the two of them had gone off to the war.

Well, the war should never have come about; if the Führer really was all he was cracked up to be, then it should have been avoided. Danzig and that little corridor outside it made a reason to put millions of people in daily fear of their lives – that really wasn’t so very statesmanlike!

But then they claimed he was illegitimate or all but. That he’d never had a mother to look after him properly. And so he didn’t understand how mothers felt in the course of this never-ending fear. After each letter from the front you felt better for a day or two, then you counted back how many days had passed since it was sent, and then your fear began again.

She has let the stocking fall from her grip, and has been sitting in a dream. Now she stands up quite mechanically, moves the soup from the stronger hotplate to the weaker one, and puts the potatoes on the better one. While she is doing that, the bell rings. She stands there, frozen. Enno! she thinks, Enno!

She puts the saucepan down and creeps silently in her felt slippers to the door. Her heart calms down: at the door, a little to the side so that she can be seen more easily, stands her neighbour, Frau Gesch. Surely she’s come to borrow something again, a little fat or flour, that she always forgets to return later. But Eva Kluge nevertheless remains suspicious. She tries to scan the landing as far as the peephole will allow, and she listens for every sound. But everything is as it should be: there is only Frau Gesch occasionally scraping her feet in impatience or looking into the peephole.

Frau Kluge makes up her mind. She opens the door, though only as wide as the chain will permit, and she asks, ‘What can I do for you, Frau Gesch?’

Straightaway, Frau Gesch, a wizened old woman worked half to death, whose daughters are living very nicely thank you off their mother, launches into a flood of complaints about the unending washing, always having to be doing things for other people, and never getting enough to eat, and Emmi and Lilli doing nothing at all. After supper they just walk out of the house and leave their mother with the washing-up. ‘Yes, and Frau Kluge, what I came for, I think I’ve got a boil on my back. We only have the one mirror, and my eyes are bad. I wonder if you’d have a look at it for me – you can’t go to the doctor for something like that, and when do I have time to go to a doctor? You might pop it for me too, if you wouldn’t mind, though I know some people just are squeamish about that sort of thing…’

While Frau Gesch goes on and on with her lamentations, Eva Kluge quite mechanically undoes the chain, and the woman comes into her kitchen. Eva Kluge is about to shut the door, but a foot has slid in the way, and Enno Kluge is in her flat. His face is as expressionless as ever; a degree of excitement is betrayed by the trembling of his almost lashless eyelids.

Eva Kluge stands there with her arms hanging down, her knees shaking so hard she can barely stay on her feet. Frau Gesch’s speech has suddenly dried up, and she looks silently into their two faces. It’s perfectly still in the kitchen, only the saucepan goes on bubbling away gently.

Finally Frau Gesch says, ‘Well, Herr Kluge, I’ve done as you asked. But I tell you: this once and never again. And if you don’t keep your promise, and you start the laziness and the pub-crawling and the gambling again…’ She breaks off after looking at Frau Kluge’s face, and says, ‘If I’ve done something stupid, then I’ll help you throw him out right away, Frau Kluge. The two of us together can do it easy!’

Eva Kluge gestures dismissively. ‘Ah, never mind, Frau Gesch, it’s all right!’

Slowly and cautiously she goes over to the cane chair and slumps into it. She keeps picking up the darning and looking at it vaguely, as if she didn’t know what it was.

Frau Gesch says, a little offended, ‘Well then, good evening or Heil Hitler, whichever you prefer!’

Hurriedly Enno Kluge says, ‘Heil Hitler!’

And slowly, as though waking from a dream, Eva Kluge responds, ‘Goodnight, Frau Gesch.’ She pauses. ‘And if you’ve got something with your back…’

‘No, no,’ Frau Gesch says hastily, from the doorway. ‘There’s nothing the matter with my back, it was just something I said. But this is the last time I’m getting mixed up in other people’s affairs. I get no thanks from anyone.’

With that she has talked her way out of the apartment; she’s pleased to be away from the two silent figures – her conscience is pricking her somewhat.

No sooner is the door shut behind her than the little man springs into action. With an air of routine and entitlement, he opens the closet, frees up a coat hanger by bunching two of his wife’s dresses together on one, and hangs up his coat. He drops his cap on top of the dresser. He is always very particular about his things, he can’t stand being badly dressed, and he knows he can’t afford to buy himself anything new.

Now he rubs his hands together with a genial ‘Ah!’ and goes over to the gas and sniffs at the saucepans. ‘Mhm!’ he says. ‘Boiled beef with potatoes – lovely!’

He stops for a moment. The woman is sitting there motionless, with her back to him. He quietly puts the lid back on the pot and goes to stand over her, so that he is talking to the back of her head: ‘Oh, don’t just sit there like a statue, Evie. What’s the matter? So you’ve got a man in your flat for a few days again, I’m not going to make any trouble. And I’ll keep my promise to you as well. I won’t have any of your potatoes – or just the leftovers, if there are any. And those only if you freely offer them to me. I’m not going to ask you for anything.’

The woman says nothing. She puts the basket with the darning back into the dresser, sets a bowl out on the table, fills it from the two pans, and slowly starts to eat. The man has sat down at the other end of the table, pulls a few sports gazettes out of his pocket, and makes notes in a thick, greasy notebook. From time to time he casts a swift glance at the woman eating. She is eating very slowly, but he is sure she has refilled her bowl a couple of times, so there won’t be very much left for him, and he is ravenous. He hasn’t eaten anything all day, no, not since the night before. Lotte’s husband, returning on furlough from the field, drove him out of their bed with blows and without the least regard for his breakfast.

But he doesn’t dare to talk about his hunger to Eva: her silence frightens him. Before he can feel properly at home again here, several things need to happen. He doesn’t have the least doubt that they will, any woman can be talked round, you just need to be persistent and take a lot of nonsense from her first. Eventually, usually quite suddenly, she will cave in, because she’s had enough of resisting.

Eva Kluge scrapes both saucepans clean. She’s done it, she’s eaten the food for two days in one single evening, so now he can’t beg her for any leftovers! Then she quickly does the little bit of washing up, and embarks on a wholesale removal. Before his very eyes, she moves everything of the least value to her into the bedroom. The bedroom door has a lock; he’s never yet managed to get into the bedroom. She lugs the provisions, her good coats and dresses, her shoes, the sofa cushions, yes, even the photo of their two sons into the bedroom – all before his watching eyes. She doesn’t care what he thinks or says. He tricked his way into the flat, he’s not to profit from it.

Then she locks the bedroom door and puts the writing things out on the table. She’s dog-tired, she would much rather go to bed, but she’s decided she’s going to write Karlemann a letter, and so she does. It’s not just her husband she can be tough with, she’s tough on herself as well.

She has written a couple of sentences when the man leans across the table and asks, ‘Who’s that you’re writing to, Evie?’

In spite of herself, she gives him an answer, even though she’d intended not to speak to him. ‘It’s to Karlemann…’

‘I see,’ he says, and puts his sports papers away. ‘I see. So you write to him, and for all I know you send him food parcels, but for his father you don’t even have a potato and a scrap of meat to spare, hungry as he is!’

His voice has lost a little of its indifference; it sounds as though the man is seriously offended because she has something for the son that she refuses to the father.

‘Forget it, Enno,’ she says calmly. ‘It’s my business. Karlemann’s not a bad lad…’

‘I see!’ he says. ‘I see! Then you’ve obviously forgotten the way he was to his parents when he became a pack leader. How everything you did was wrong in his eyes, and he laughed at us as a stupid old bourgeois couple – you’ve forgotten all that, have you, Evie? A good lad is he, Karlemann!’

‘He never laughed at me!’ she feebly protests.

‘No, no, of course not!’ he jeers. ‘And you’ve forgotten the time he didn’t recognize his own mother as she was lugging her heavy mailbag down Prenzlauer Allee. Him and his girlfriend just looked the other way, what a charming piece of work!’

‘You can’t hold something like that against a boy,’ she says. ‘They all want to look good in front of their girls, that’s the way they are. In time, he’ll change, and he’ll be back for his mother who nursed him from a baby.’

For an instant he looks at her hesitantly, as if he had something he wasn’t sure whether to tell her or not. He’s not a vindictive man usually, but this time she’s offended him too badly, first by not giving him anything to eat, and secondly by carting all the valuables into the other room. Finally he says, ‘Well, if it was me that was his mother, I wouldn’t ever want to take my son in my arms again, not after he’s turned into such a thoroughgoing bastard!’ He sees her eyes grow wide with fear, and he says pitilessly right into her waxen face, ‘On his last furlough he showed me a photograph that a comrade took of him. He was proud of it. There’s your Karlemann, and he’s holding a little Jewish boy of about three, holding him by the leg, and he’s about to smash his head against the bumper of a car.’

‘No!’ she screams, ‘No! You’re lying, you’re making it up! It’s your revenge because you didn’t get anything to eat. Karlemann wouldn’t do anything like that!’

‘How could I have made it up?’ he asks, calm again after dropping his bombshell. ‘I don’t have the imagination to make up something like that. And if you don’t believe me, you can go to Senftenberg’s pub, which is where he showed the photo round to anyone who cared to see it. Senftenberg and his old woman, they saw the picture themselves…’

He stops talking. He’s wasting his breath talking to this woman. She sits there with her head slumped on the table, crying. That’s what she gets, and her a postwoman and therefore a member of the Party, who’s taken an oath to support the Führer and his deeds. She can’t be too surprised at the way Karlemann’s turned out.

For a moment, Enno Kluge stands eyeing the sofa doubtfully – no cushions, no blanket. This isn’t going to be a comfortable night! But perhaps it’s the moment to take a chance? He hesitates, looks at the locked bedroom door, and then he acts. He reaches into the woman’s apron pocket as she sits there crying hysterically, and pulls out the key. He unlocks the door and starts rummaging about in the room, not even quietly…

And Eva Kluge, the exhausted, downtrodden postwoman, hears it all too; she knows he’s robbing her, but she doesn’t care. What’s the point of her life, why has she had children, taken pleasure in their smiling and playing, when in the end they just become monsters? Oh, Karlemann, what a sweet blond boy he was! She remembers how she took him to the Busch Circus, and the horses were made to lie down in the sand, and he felt so sorry for the poor hossies – were they ill? She had to comfort him, promise him the hossies were only sleeping.

And now he is going around doing things like that to the children of other mothers! Eva Kluge doesn’t doubt for a second that the story about the photograph is true: Enno really isn’t capable of inventing such things. No, it seems she has now lost her son as well. It’s much worse than if he had merely died, because then at least she could mourn him. Now she can’t take him in her arms again, and she must keep her doors closed against him too.

The man rummaging around in the bedroom has found the thing he has long suspected was in his wife’s possession: a post office savings book. Six hundred and thirty-two marks in it, thrifty woman, but why so thrifty? One day she’ll get her pension, and with her other savings… He’ll start tomorrow by putting twenty on Adebar, and maybe another ten on Hamilcar… He flicks through the book: not just a thrifty woman, an admirably tidy one. Everything in its place – at the back of the book is the card, and there are the credit slips…

He is about to put the savings book in his pocket when the woman shows up. She takes it out of his hand and drops it on the bed. ‘Out!’ she says. ‘Get out!’

And he, who a moment ago thought he had victory in his sights, now leaves the room under her furious glare. Silently and with hands shaking, he gets his cap and coat out of the wardrobe, and without a word he slips past her into the unlit stairwell. The door is drawn shut, and he switches on the stair lights and climbs down the stairs. Thank God someone has left the street door unlocked. He will go to his local; if push comes to shove, the landlord will let him bed down on the settee. He trudges off, reconciled to his fate, used to receiving blows. Already he’s half forgotten the woman upstairs.

She, meanwhile, is standing by the window staring out into the night. Fine. Awful. Karlemann gone, too. She’ll make one last attempt with her younger son, with Max. Max was always the colourless one, more like his father than his dazzling brother. Perhaps she can win Max over. And if not, then never mind, she’ll live by and for herself. But she will keep her self-respect. Then that will have been her attainment in life, keeping her self-respect. Tomorrow morning she will try to find out how to go about leaving the Party without getting stuck in a concentration camp. It will be difficult, but maybe she’ll manage it. And if there’s no other way of doing it, then she’ll go to the concentration camp. That would be a bit of atonement for what Karlemann has done.

She crumples up the tear-stained beginning of the letter to her older boy. She spreads out a fresh sheet of paper, and writes: