Alone in Berlin (Penguin Modern Classics)

20

Six Months Later: The Quangels

After six months, the writing of the postcards on Sunday afternoons had become a habit, a sacred habit, if you like, that was part of their everyday lives, just like the profound quiet they lived in, or their relentless economizing. For them, these were the best hours of the week, when they sat together on a Sunday, she on the sofa with some mending or darning, and he at the table, the pen in his big hand, slowly crafting one word after another.

Quangel had now indeed doubled his initial output of one card per week. On some good Sundays, he even managed to turn out three. No two cards ever said the same thing. Instead, the more the Quangels wrote, the more mistakes by the Führer and his Party they discovered. Things that when they first had happened had struck them as barely censurable, such as the suppression of all other political parties, or things that they had condemned as merely excessive in degree or too vigorously carried out, like the persecution of the Jews – such things, now that the Quangels had become enemies of the Führer, came to have a completely different weight and importance. They proved the mendacity of the Party and its Führer. And, like all converts, the Quangels had the desire to convert others, and so the tone of their postcards was never monotonous, and they were never short of material.

Anna Quangel had long since forsaken her quiet listening role. Now she sat on the sofa, speaking animatedly, suggesting topics, formulating sentences. They did their work in the most harmonious togetherness, and this deep, inner togetherness that they had only discovered now, after long years of marriage, became a great source of happiness to them, spreading its glow across their weeks. They saw each other, so to speak, with a single glance, they smiled, each knowing that the other had just thought about their next card, or the effect of their cards, of the steadily increasing number of their followers, and of the public that was already impatiently waiting.

Neither Quangel doubted for one moment that their cards were being passed from hand to hand in factories and offices, that Berlin was beginning to hum with talk about these oppositional spirits. They conceded that some of their cards probably wound up in the hands of the police, but they reckoned no more than one out of every five or six. They had so often thought and spoken about the great effectiveness of their work that the circulation of their cards and the attention that greeted them was, as far as they were concerned, no longer theoretical but factual.

And yet the Quangels didn’t have the least actual evidence for this. Whether it was Anna Quangel standing in a food-queue, or the foreman with his sharp eyes taking up position among a group of chatterers – bringing their prattle to an end merely by standing there – not once did they hear a word about the new struggler against the Führer and the missives this unknown sent out into the world. But the silence that greeted their work could not shake them in their faith that it was being discussed and having an effect. Berlin was a very large city, and the scattering of the postcards took place over a very wide area, so it was clear that it would take time for knowledge of their activities to permeate everywhere. In other words, the Quangels were like most people: they believed what they hoped.

Of all the precautions that Quangel had deemed necessary at the outset only one had been dropped: the gloves. Careful consideration had led him to conclude that these awkward accoutrements that did so much to slow down his work were of no practical value. He presumed the cards would go through so many pairs of hands before one ever landed with the police that not even the most sophisticated detective would be able to work out which set of prints was that of the author. In other respects, Quangel continued to observe extreme caution. He always washed his hands before sitting down to write, held the cards gently and by the edge, and when he wrote he always kept a piece of blotting paper under his writing hand.

Meanwhile, the act of dropping the cards in large office buildings had long since lost the charm of novelty. The drops, which had once seemed so fraught with danger to him, had, over time, turned out to be the easiest part of his task. You walked into a busy building, you waited for the right moment, and then you were on your way back downstairs, a little relieved, a little easier in the gut, with the thought in your mind, ‘Another one that passed off well,’ but otherwise not particularly excited.

At first Quangel had dropped the cards on his own, and Anna’s company had been particularly unwelcome to him. But then it came about quite of itself that here, too, Anna had become his active accomplice. It was a strict rule with Quangel that cards – whether one or two, or even three – always left the house the day after they were written. But there were days when he couldn’t walk because of his rheumatism, and other days when caution demanded that the cards should be left in widely distant parts of the city. That implied time-consuming train rides, which a single person could hardly hope to accomplish in the course of a morning.

So Anna Quangel took over her share of the work in the deliveries as well. To her surprise she discovered that it was far more nerve-racking to stand in front of a building, waiting for her husband to emerge from it, than to go in and drop the cards herself. When doing it herself, she was always the embodiment of calm. As soon as she had entered a likely or designated building, she felt secure in the press of people going up and down stairs, she abided her opportunity patiently, and quickly set down her card. She was perfectly sure that no one had seen her making the drop, and that no one would remember her well enough to give a description of her person later. In truth, she was much less eye-catching than her husband with his sharp birdface. She really was every inch the little working-class woman, trotting off to the doctor.

There was only one occasion when the Quangels were disturbed during their Sunday writing. But even then, they hadn’t shown the least agitation or confusion. As they had talked through many times, Anna Quangel had quietly crept out into the corridor at the sound of the ring and had looked at the visitors through the peephole. In the meantime, Otto Quangel had packed away the writing things and slipped the card, still in progress, inside a book. He had just written the words: ‘Führer, lead – we follow! Yes, we follow, we’re a herd of sheep for our Führer to drive to the abattoir. We have given up thinking…’

Otto Quangel slid the card inside a radio-kit manual of his dead son’s, and when Anna Quangel came in with the two visitors, a short, hunchbacked man and a dark, tall, tired-looking woman, he was already sitting over his whittling, tinkering with the bust of their boy, which was now pretty well advanced, and, as Anna Quangel thought, becoming a better and better likeness. It turned out that the little hunchbacked man was Anna Quangel’s brother; they hadn’t seen each other for almost thirty years. The little hunchback had previously worked in an optical factory in Rathenow, and had recently been brought to Berlin to work as a specialist in a firm producing equipment for use on submarines. The dark, tired-looking woman was Anna’s sister-in-law, whom she had never met before. Otto Quangel had not met these two relatives, either.

On that Sunday, there was no chance to do any more writing, and the half-finished card remained in Ottochen’s radio-kit manual. However much the Quangels were opposed to visits, to friendship and family, for the sake of their peace and quiet, they couldn’t find it in themselves to object to the unexpected appearance of this brother and sister-in-law. The Heffkes were quiet people themselves, members of some religious sect, that, to go by occasional hints they dropped, suffered persecution from the Nazis. But they hardly talked about such things, and politics formed little part of the conversation.

But Quangel listened in astonishment to hear Anna and her brother, Ulrich Heffke, swap childhood reminiscences. For the first time he heard what Anna had been like as a child, a girl full of glee, wickedness and tricks. He had met his wife when she was almost middle-aged; it had never occurred to him that she had once been completely different, before her arduous and joyless years as a domestic had robbed her of so much of her strength and optimism.

While the two siblings chatted together, he could picture the small, poor village in Brandenburg. He heard how she had had to keep geese, how she had tried to avoid the hated job of digging potatoes and had often been beaten for that reason. And he learned that she was well liked in the village, because, stubborn and brave as she was, she had rebelled against all forms of injustice. Once, she had even hit a tyrannical schoolteacher three times in a row with a snowball – and had never been betrayed as the guilty party. Only she and Ulrich had known it was her, and Ulrich never tattled.

No, this was no disagreeable visit, even though it meant their output was two cards fewer than usual. The Quangels were perfectly sincere when they promised to call on the Heffkes some time soon. They kept their word, too. Five or six weeks later, they looked them up in the little temporary accommodation they had been given in the west of the city, near Nollendorfplatz. The Quangels took advantage of this visit to finally drop a card out west. Even though it was a Sunday and offices had little traffic, it passed off safely.

From that time on, reciprocal visits took place every six weeks or so. They weren’t overly stimulating, but for the Quangels it did at least mean a change of air. For the most part, Otto and his sister-in-law sat there silently and listened to the conversation between the two siblings, who never tired of talking about their childhood. It felt good to Quangel to get to know this other Anna too, even though he could never connect the woman who lived at his side and that girl who knew about farmwork, played tricks on people, and still had the reputation of being the best student in the little country school.

They learned that Anna’s parents were still living in her birthplace, very old now – Ulrich mentioned that he was sending them ten marks a month. Anna Quangel was about to say that the Quangels would do the same, but she caught a warning look from her husband just in time, and stopped.

It wasn’t till they were on their way home that he said, ‘Nah, better not, Anna. Why spoil the old people? They have their pension, and if your brother sends them ten marks a month, that’s plenty.’

‘But we have so much money saved up!’ Anna implored him. ‘We’ll never get through it. Earlier on, we thought it would do for Ottochen, but now… Let’s do it, Otto! Even five marks a month!’

Unmoved, Otto Quangel replied, ‘Now that we’re involved in our undertaking, we have no idea what we might need money for at some stage. It’s possible we’ll need every last mark of it, Anna. And the old people have got by without us so far – why shouldn’t they continue?’

She didn’t reply – feeling a little offended – maybe not so much out of love for her parents, because she didn’t often think about them, and only sent them a Christmas letter every year out of a sense of duty, but she did feel a little ashamed and mean in front of her brother. He wasn’t to think they couldn’t afford what he could afford.

Anna said obstinately, ‘Ulrich will think we can’t afford it, Otto. He won’t think much of your job if it doesn’t run to that.’

‘What does it matter what other people think of me,’ retorted Quangel. ‘I’m not going to take money from the bank for something like that.’

Anna sensed this was his last word. She didn’t say anything more, but knuckled under as she always did when she heard a sentence like that from Otto. Nevertheless she felt a bit hurt that her husband paid such scant regard to her feelings. But then, Anna Quangel soon forgot her injury when they resumed their work on the great project.