Alone in Berlin (Penguin Modern Classics)

11

It is Still Wednesday

In the end Frau Gesch wasn’t so hard-hearted as to wake the little man after an hour on the sofa. He looked so pitiable lying there in his exhausted sleep, the purple bruises slowly coming up on his face.

He had his lower lip pushed out like a sad child, and sometimes his eyelids trembled, and a deep sigh shook his chest, as though he were about to begin crying in his sleep.

When she had got her dinner ready, she woke him and gave him some food. He muttered his thanks to her. He ate like a wolf, looking at her from time to time, but not saying a word about what had happened to him.

In the end she said: ‘All right, that’s all I can give you, otherwise I won’t have enough left for my Gustav. Why don’t you lie back down on the sofa, and have some more sleep. I’ll talk to your wife…’

He muttered inaudibly; whether in agreement or disagreement was unclear. But he went back to the sofa willingly enough, and a minute later he was asleep again.

When Frau Gesch heard her neighbour’s door open in the late afternoon, she crept over quietly and knocked. Eva Kluge opened right away, but stood squarely in the doorway. ‘Well?’ she asked defensively.

‘Excuse me for bothering you again, Frau Kluge,’ began Frau Gesch, ‘but I’ve got your husband lying next door. An SS man brought him in early this morning. You must have just left.’

Eva Kluge persisted in her defensive silence, and Frau Gesch continued, ‘He’s in quite a state, I think there’s no part of him that’s not bruised. I don’t know the ins and outs between you and your husband, but you can’t put him on the street as he is. Why don’t you have a look at him, Frau Kluge!’

Frau Kluge was unyielding: ‘I don’t have a husband any more, Frau Gesch. I told you, I don’t want to hear any more.’

And she started to go back inside her flat. Frau Gesch said quickly, ‘Now don’t you be in so much of a hurry, Frau Kluge. After all, he’s your husband. You had children together…’

‘Now that’s something I’m especially proud of, Frau Gesch!’

‘There is such a thing as inhumanity, Frau Kluge, and what you’re proposing to do is inhuman. You can’t put him out in his condition.’

‘And what about the way he treated me over all those years, was that human? He tormented me, he ruined my entire life, and in the end he took away my beloved son from me – and I’m supposed to be human to someone like that, just because the SS has given him a beating? I wouldn’t dream of it! All the beatings in the world won’t change that man!’

After these angry and vehement words, Frau Kluge slammed the door shut in Frau Gesch’s face. She couldn’t stand to hear any more. Perhaps to avoid more talk, she might have taken the man into her flat, and then have regretted it ever after!

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 become 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.