Alone in Berlin (Penguin Modern Classics)

14

Saturday: Discord at the Quangels’

The Quangels didn’t speak to each other all of Friday either – that meant three days of silence between them, not even giving each other the time of day. This had never happened in the entire course of their marriage. However laconic Quangel might be, he had managed a sentence from time to time, something about someone at work or at least the weather or that his dinner had tasted particularly good. But none of that now!

The longer it lasted, the more keenly Anna Quangel felt it. Her deep grief for her son was being sidetracked by disquiet about the change in her husband. She wanted to think only of her boy, but she couldn’t when she saw Otto in front of her, her husband of so many years, to whom she had given the greater and better part of her life. What had got into the man? What was up with him? What had changed him so?

By midday on Friday Anna Quangel had lost all her rage and reproach against Otto. If she had thought it might accomplish anything, she would have asked him to forgive her for blurting out that sentence about ‘You and your Führer’. But it was plain to see that Otto was no longer thinking about that reproach; he didn’t even seem to be thinking about her. He seemed to look past her, if not right through her, standing by the window, his hands in the pockets of his work tunic, whistling slowly and reflectively, with long intervals between, which was something he’d never done before.

What was the man thinking about? What was going on inside him? She set down the soup on the table, and he started spooning it down. For a moment she observed him from the kitchen. His sharp bird face was bent low over the bowl, he lifted his spoon mechanically to his mouth, his dark eyes looked at something that wasn’t there.

She went back into the kitchen, to heat up an end of cabbage. He liked reheated cabbage. She had decided she would say something to him when she returned with his cabbage. He could answer as sharply as he pleased: she had to break this unholy silence.

But when she came back into the dining room with the warmed-up cabbage, Otto was gone, and his half-eaten dinner was still on the table. Either Quangel had sensed her intention and crept away like a child intent on remaining stubborn, or he had simply forgotten to carry on eating because of whatever it was that was so consuming him. Anyway, he was gone, and she would have to wait till night-time for him to come back.

But on Friday night, Otto returned from work so late that for all her good intentions she was already asleep when he came to bed. It was only later that he woke her with his coughing. Softly, she asked, ‘Otto, are you asleep?’

His coughing stopped; he lay there perfectly still. Again she asked, ‘Otto, are you asleep already?’

Nothing, no reply. The two of them lay there in silence a very long time. Each knew that the other was not sleeping. They didn’t dare move in bed, so as not to give themselves away. Finally, they both fell asleep.

Saturday got off to an even worse start. Otto Quangel had got up unusually early. Before she could put his watery coffee substitute out on the table, he had already set off on one of those rushed, mysterious errands that he had never undertaken before. He came back, and from the kitchen she could hear him pacing around the parlour. When she came in with the coffee, he carefully folded away a large white sheet of paper he had been reading by the window and put it in his pocket.

Anna was sure it wasn’t a newspaper. There was too much white on the paper, and the writing was bigger than in a newspaper. What could her husband have been reading?

She got cross with him again, with his secrecy, with these changes that brought with them so much disturbance, and so many fresh anxieties in addition to all the old ones, which had surely been enough. All the same, she said, ‘Coffee, Otto!’

At the sound of her voice, he turned and looked at her, as though surprised that he was not alone in the apartment, surprised that he had been spoken to by her. He looked at her, and yet he didn’t: it wasn’t his spouse, Anna Quangel, he was looking at, so much as someone he had once known and now had to struggle to remember. There was a smile on his face, in his eyes, spreading over the whole expanse of his face in a way she had never seen before. She was on the point of crying out: Otto, oh Otto, don’t you leave me too!

But before she had made up her mind, he had walked past her and out of the flat. Once more no coffee, once again she had to take it back to the kitchen to warm it up. She sobbed gently. Oh, that man! Was she going to be left with no one? After the son, was she going to lose the father?

In the meantime, Quangel was walking briskly in the direction of Prenzlauer Allee. It had occurred to him that it was a good idea to look at a building like that properly, to see if his impression of it was at all accurate. Otherwise, he would have to think of something else entirely.

On Prenzlauer Allee, he slowed down; his eye scanned the nameplates on the housefronts as though looking for something specific. On a corner house he saw signs for two lawyers and a doctor, in addition to many other business plates.

He pushed against the door. It was open. Right: no porters in houses with so many visitors. Slowly, his hand on the banister, he climbed the steps, once a grand staircase with oak flooring, which through heavy use and years of war had lost all trace of grandeur. Now it looked merely dingy and worn, and the carpets were long since gone, probably taken in at the beginning of the war.

Otto Quangel passed a lawyer’s sign on the first floor, nodded, and slowly walked on up. It wasn’t as though he was all alone on the stairway, not at all. People kept passing him – either from behind, or coming down the other way. He kept hearing bells going off, doors slamming, phones ringing, typewriters clattering, people talking.

But in between there was a moment when Otto Quangel was all alone on the stairs, or at least had his part of the stairs all to himself, when all of life seemed to have withdrawn into the offices. That was the moment to do it. In fact, everything was exactly the way he had imagined it. People in a hurry, not looking each other in the face, dirty windowpanes letting in only a murky grey light, no porter, no one anywhere to take an interest in anyone.

When Otto Quangel had seen the plate of the second lawyer on the first floor, and an arrow pointing visitors up another flight of steps to the doctor’s office, he nodded in agreement. He turned around: he had just been to see a lawyer, and now he was leaving the building. No point in looking further: it was exactly the sort of building he needed, and there were thousands upon thousands of them in Berlin.

Foreman Otto Quangel is standing in the street again. A dark-haired young man with a very pale face walks up to him.

‘You’re Herr Quangel, aren’t you?’ he asks. ‘Herr Otto Quangel, from Jablonski Strasse?’

Quangel utters a stalling ‘Mhm?’ – a sound that can indicate agreement as much as dissent.

The young man takes it for agreement. ‘I am to ask you on behalf of Trudel Baumann,’ he says, ‘to forget her completely. Also tell your wife not to visit Trudel any more. Herr Quangel, there’s no need for you to…’

‘You tell her,’ says Otto Quangel, ‘that I don’t know any Trudel Baumann and I don’t like to be approached by strangers on the street…’

His fist catches the young man on the point of the chin, and he crumples like a wet rag. Quangel strides casually through the crowd of people gathering, straight past a policeman, toward a tram stop. The tram comes, he climbs in, and rides two stops. Then he rides back the other way, this time on the front platform of the second car. As he thought: most of the people have gone on their way; ten or a dozen onlookers are still standing in front of a café where the man was probably carried.

He is already conscious again. For the second time in the space of two hours, Karl Hergesell is called upon to identify himself to an official.

‘It’s really nothing, officer,’ he assures him. ‘I must have trodden on his toe, and he bopped me one. I’ve no idea who he was, I’d hardly started apologizing when he caught me.’

Once again, Karl Hergesell is allowed to leave unchallenged, with no suspicion against him. But he realizes that he shouldn’t push his luck. The only reason he went to see Trudel’s ex-father-in-law was to gauge her safety. Well, where Otto Quangel is concerned, he can set his mind at ease. A tough bird, and a wicked right. And certainly not a chatterbox, in spite of the big beak on him. The way he lit into him!

And for fear that such a man might blab, Trudel had almost been sent to her death. He would never blab – not even to them! And he wouldn’t mind about Trudel either, he seemed not to want to know her any more. All the things a sock on the jaw can teach you!

Karl Hergesell now goes to work completely at ease, and when he learns there, by asking discreetly around, that Grigoleit and the Babyface have quit, he draws a deep breath. They’re safe now. There is no more cell, but he’s not even all that sorry. At least it means that Trudel can live!

In truth, he was never that interested in this political work, but all the more in Trudel!

Quangel takes the tram back in the direction of his home, but he goes past his own stop. Better safe than sorry, and if he still has someone tailing him, he wants to confront him alone and not drag him back home. Anna is in no condition to cope with a disagreeable surprise. He needs to talk to her first. Of course he will do that: Anna has a big part to play in the thing that he is planning. But he has other business to take care of first. Tomorrow is Sunday, and everything has to be ready.

He changes trams again and heads off into the city. No, the young man he silenced with a punch just now doesn’t strike Quangel as a great threat. He’s not convinced he has any further pursuers, and he’s pretty sure the boy was sent by Trudel. She did suggest, after all, that she would have to confess to breaking a sort of vow. Thereupon they will have banned her from seeing him at all, and she sent the young fellow to him as a sort of envoy. All pretty harmless. Childish games for people who have let themselves in for something they don’t understand. He, Otto Quangel, understands a little more. He at least knows what he’s letting himself in for. And he won’t approach this game like a child. He will think about each card before he plays it.

He sees Trudel in front of him again, pressed against the poster of the People’s Court in that corridor – clueless. Once again, he has the disturbing feeling he had when the girl’s head was crowned by the line, ‘in the name of the German people’: he can see their names up there instead of those of the strangers – no, no, this is a task for him alone. And for Anna, of course for Anna too. He’ll show her who his ‘Führer’ is!

When he gets to the city centre, Quangel makes a few purchases. He spends only pennies at a time, a couple of postcards, a pen, a couple of engraving nibs, a small bottle of ink. And he distributes his custom among a department store, a Woolworths, and a stationery shop. Finally, after long thought, he buys a pair of thin, worsted gloves, which he gets without a receipt.

Then he sits in one of those big beer halls on the Alexanderplatz, drinks a glass of beer, and has a bite to eat, without using his ration cards. It’s 1940, the looting of the invaded nations has begun, the German people are suffering no very great hardship. You can still find most things in the shops, and they’re not even all that expensive.

As far as the war itself is concerned, it’s being fought in foreign countries a long way from Berlin. Yes, from time to time British planes appear over the city. They drop a few bombs, and the next day the populace treks out to view the damage. Most of them laugh at what they see, and say, ‘Well, if that’s the best they can do, they’ll be busy for another hundred years, and meanwhile we’ll have removed their cities from the face of the earth!’

That’s the way people have been talking, and since France sued for peace, the number of people talking like that has grown considerably. Most people are impressed by success. A man like Otto Quangel, who during a prosperous period quits the ranks, is a rarity.

He sits there. He still has time, he doesn’t have to go to the factory yet. But now the stress of the last few days falls away. Now that he’s visited that corner building, now that he’s made those few small purchases, everything is decided in his mind. He doesn’t even need to think about what he still has to do. It’ll do itself, the way is open before him. He only needs to follow it. The decisive first few steps have already been taken.

When it’s time, he pays and heads out to the factory. Although it’s a long way from the Alexanderplatz, he walks. He’s spent enough money today, on transport, on little purchases, on food. Enough? Too much! Even though Quangel has decided on a whole new life, he won’t change his old habits. He will remain frugal, and will keep people away from him.

And then he’s back at work, alert and awake, laconic and unapproachable as ever. There’s no visible sign of the change in him.