Alone in Berlin (Penguin Modern Classics)

17

The First Card is Written

For the Quangels, Sunday was not quite so productive – at any rate there wasn’t the clarifying conversation that Anna so fervently desired.

‘No,’ was Otto Quangel’s response. ‘No, Mother, not today. The day got off to a bad start, and on such a day I can’t do what I really want to do. And if I can’t do it, then I don’t want to talk about it, either. Maybe next Sunday. Do you hear that? That’ll be one of the Persickes sneaking up the stairs again – well, let them! So long as they leave us in peace!’

But Otto Quangel was uncommonly gentle that Sunday. Anna was allowed to talk about their dead son as much as she wanted; he didn’t tell her to stop. He even looked with her through the few photos she had of him, and when she started crying, he laid his hand on her shoulder and said, ‘Enough, Mother, enough. Perhaps it’s for the best, when you think of everything he’ll be spared.’

In short, the Sunday passed off well, even without the conversation. It had been a long time since Anna had seen her husband in such a gentle mood; it was like seeing the sun shining one last time over a landscape before winter came and buried everything under sheets of ice and snow. In the months to come, as Quangel became ever colder and more laconic, she would often think back to this Sunday, and it would be both a consolation and an encouragement to her.

Monday brought a new workweek, one of those workweeks that are all the same whether flowers are blooming or blizzards are blowing. Work is always work, and that week people remained as they had always been.

Only one unusual experience befell Otto Quangel that week. As he was going to the factory, he passed retired Judge Fromm in Jablonski Strasse. Quangel would have greeted him, but he was nervous about being seen by the Persickes. Nor did he want to be seen by Borkhausen, who Anna said had been taken away by the Gestapo. Because Borkhausen was back, if in fact he had ever been away, and had been hanging around the front of the building.

So Quangel walked straight past the judge as if he didn’t see him. Judge Fromm apparently felt less need to be cautious – at any rate, he tipped his hat to his neighbour, smiled with his eyes, and went inside.

Very good! thought Quangel. Whoever saw that will have thought: Quangel, always the same rough clod, but that judge, what a gentleman. No one would think they were ever in cahoots!

The rest of the week passed off without any events of note, and then it was Sunday again, the Sunday that Anna Quangel hoped would finally bring the desperately desired and oft postponed discussion with Otto. He had got up late, but he was calm and in a good mood. She sneaked a sidelong look at him as he drank his coffee, a little to encourage him perhaps, but he seemed not to notice, and slowly chewed his bread and stirred his coffee.

Anna felt a certain reluctance to clear the table. But this time it really wasn’t for her to speak the first word. He had promised her the conversation for this Sunday, and surely he would keep his word. Any coaxing on her part would seem like pressuring him.

With a barely audible sigh she got up and took the plates and cups into the kitchen. When she came back for the bread-basket and coffee pot, he was kneeling in front of a drawer in the sideboard, looking for something. Anna Quangel couldn’t remember what they kept in the drawer. It could only be some old, long-forgotten rubbish. ‘Are you looking for anything in particular, Otto?’ she asked.

But he merely gave a grunt, so she retreated into the kitchen to do the dishes and get dinner ready. He didn’t feel like it! Once again, he didn’t feel like it. More than ever she felt the conviction that there was something going on inside him that she knew nothing about, and badly needed to know.

Later, when she came back into the parlour to sit near him as she peeled the potatoes, she found him at the table. The cloth had been pulled off, and the tabletop was now covered with little carving knives, and wood shavings littered the floor around him. ‘What are you doing, Otto?’ she asked, now thoroughly flummoxed.

‘Wanted to see if I still knew how to work wood,’ he retorted.

She was a little irked. Otto might not have the deepest insight into human character, but he must have some sense of what she felt like, as she waited with bated breath for his communication. And now he had got out his wood-carving tools from the early years of their marriage, and was whittling, just as he had done then, reducing her to despair with his endless silence. In those days, she wasn’t as used to his taciturnity as she was now, but today, of all days, even though she was used to it, it seemed to her quite unbearable. Whittling, my God, if that was all it occurred to the man to do, in the wake of such events! If through hours of silent carving he planned to repeat now his jealously guarded silences of then – no, that would be a bad disappointment for her. She had often been badly disappointed in him, but this time she wasn’t going to take it lying down.

While she was thinking all this anxiously, almost despairingly, she was looking half curiously at the longish, thick chunk of wood he was turning thoughtfully in his big hands, now and again chipping off a piece with one of his big knives. Well, it wasn’t a washing-trough this time, that was for sure.

‘What are you making there, Otto?’ she asked, half unwillingly. She had had the odd idea that he was carving some tool or other, perhaps something for a bomb detonator. But even to think like that was absurd – what did Otto have to do with bombs? Anyway, wood probably wasn’t the right material. ‘What are you making, Otto?’ she asked.

At first, he seemed to want to grunt by way of reply, but maybe he felt he had been too curt with her today already, or maybe he was just ready to give her some information. ‘A bowl,’ he said. ‘Want to see if I can carve a bowl. Used to carve lots of pipe bowls, in my time.’

And he continued to turn the thing in his hands, and to whittle away at it.

Pipe bowls! Anna almost spat with indignation. Then, with great irritation, she said it: ‘Pipe bowls! Otto, please! The world’s falling apart, and you’re thinking of pipe bowls! When I hear you talk like that… !’

He seemed to respond neither to her annoyance nor to her words. He said: ‘Of course this isn’t going to be a pipe bowl. I want to see if I can carve a likeness of our Ottochen, the way he used to look.’

Immediately, her mood swung. So he was thinking of Ottochen, and if he was thinking of Ottochen and trying to carve a likeness of his head, then he was thinking also of her, and wanting to please her in some way. She got up from her chair, hurriedly setting down the dish of potatoes, and said, ‘Wait, Otto, I’ll bring the photographs, so you can remember what he looked like.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t want to see any pictures,’ he said. ‘I want to carve Ottochen the way he is inside of me.’ He tapped his brow. And after a while he added, ‘If I can!’

She was moved again. So Ottochen was inside him, he had a firm sense of what the boy looked like. Now she was curious to see the finished head. ‘I’m sure you can, Otto!’ she said.

‘Well,’ he said, but it didn’t sound doubtful – more like agreement.

With that, conversation between the two of them was at an end for the moment. Anna had to go back into the kitchen to see to dinner, and she left him at the table, turning the lump of linden wood between his fingers and, with a quiet, painstaking patience, trimming little curls and shavings off it.

She was very surprised, then, when she came in to lay the table for dinner, to find the table already cleared and the tablecloth replaced. Otto was standing by the window, looking down at Jablonski Strasse, where the children were playing noisily.

‘Well, Otto?’ she asked. ‘Are you already done with your carving?’

‘For today,’ he replied, and at the same moment she knew that their conversation was now imminent, that he was planning something, this strangely persistent man who always waited for the right moment, who could never be induced to do something except in his own sweet time.

They ate their dinner in silence. Then she went back to the kitchen to tidy up, leaving him sitting on a corner of the sofa, staring into space.

When she emerged half an hour later, he was still sitting there. But now she felt she could no longer wait for him to decide: his patience, and her own impatience, made her restless. What if he were still sitting there like that at four o’clock, and after supper? She couldn’t wait any longer! ‘Well, Otto,’ she asked, ‘what’s it to be? No after-dinner nap, like every other Sunday?’

‘Today’s not every other Sunday. “Every other Sunday” is gone for good.’ He got up abruptly and left the room.

But today she wouldn’t let him run off on one of his mysterious errands. She ran after him. ‘No, Otto…’ she began.

He was standing by the front door of the apartment, having just put the chain across. He raised his hand to call for silence, and listened to what was going on outside. Then he nodded and walked past her, back into the parlour. When she came in after him, he was sitting in his place on the sofa, and she sat down beside him.

‘If anyone rings, Anna,’ he said, ‘don’t open until I…’

‘Now, come on, Otto, who’s going to ring at such a time?’ she said impatiently. ‘Who’s going to visit us? Tell me whatever it was you were going to tell me!’

‘I will tell you, Anna,’ he replied with uncharacteristic meekness. ‘But if you pressure me, you’ll only make it harder for me.’

She brushed his hand, the hand of a man who always found it hard to communicate what was going on inside him. ‘I won’t pressure you, Otto,’ she said soothingly. ‘Take your time.’

But right after that, he began to speak, and he spoke for almost five minutes, in slow, terse, carefully considered sentences, after each of which – as though it were the last – he closed his thin-lipped mouth tight. And while he spoke, he kept looking off to one side behind Anna.

Anna Quangel kept her eyes on him while he spoke, not taking them off his face, and she was almost grateful to him for not looking at her, so difficult was it for her to conceal the disappointment that came over her. My God, what had this man come up with! She had had great deeds in mind (and been afraid of them at the same time): an attempt to assassinate the Führer, or at the very least some active struggle against the Party and its officials.

And what was he proposing? Nothing at all, something so ridiculously small, something absolutely in his character, something discreet, out of the way, something that wouldn’t interfere with his peace and quiet. Postcards with slogans against the Führer and the Party, against the war, for the information of his fellow men, that was all. And these cards he wasn’t going to send to particular individuals, or stick on walls like placards, no, he wanted to leave them lying in the stairwells of widely visited buildings, leave them to their fate, without any control over who picked them up, where they might be trampled underfoot, torn up… Everything in her rebelled against this obscure and ignoble form of warfare. She wanted to be active, to do something with results she could see!

But Quangel, once he had finished talking, appeared not even to be expecting any form of demurral from his wife, and she sat there struggling with herself in silence in the corner of the sofa. Wasn’t it her duty to say something to him, after all?

He got up and walked over to the door again to listen. When he came back, he took off the tablecloth again, folded it up, and hung it carefully over the back of a chair. Then he went to the old mahogany bureau, took the bunch of keys from his pocket, and unlocked it.

While he was rummaging in there, Anna made up her mind. Hesitantly she said, ‘Isn’t this thing that you’re wanting to do, isn’t it a bit small, Otto?’

He stopped his rummaging, and still standing there stooped, he turned his head to his wife. ‘Whether it’s big or small, Anna,’ he said, ‘if they get wind of it, it’ll cost us our lives…’

There was something so terribly persuasive in those words, and in his dark, fathomless bird’s eye, that she shuddered. For an instant she saw quite clearly the grey, stony prison yard and the guillotine standing ready, its steel dull in the early dawn light: a mute threat.

Anna Quangel felt herself trembling. Then she looked over at Otto again. He might be right: whether their act was big or small, no one could risk more than his life. Each according to his strength and abilities, but the main thing was, you fought back.

Still Quangel eyed her silently, as though witnessing the struggle she was having with herself. Then his eye brightened, he took his hands out of the bureau, straightened up, and said, almost with a smile, ‘But they’re not going to catch us that easily. If they’re canny, we can be canny too! Canny and careful. Careful, Anna, always on guard – the longer we fight them, the longer we’ll be effective. There’s no use in dying early. We want to live, we want to be around when they fall. We want to be able to say, We were there, Anna!’

He said these words lightly, almost jocularly. Then he went back to rummaging, and Anna leaned back into the sofa, relieved. A load had been taken from her mind. Now she was convinced that Otto had some great plan.

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 unshakeable. 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 labour 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 around 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.