Alone in Berlin (Penguin Modern Classics)

31

A Visit to Fräulein Anna Schönlein

Borkhausen’s announcement that he had run Enno Kluge to ground in the west of Berlin had plunged Inspector Escherich into a quandary. He had answered reflexively: ‘I’m coming right over!’ Then, once he was ready to go, he had second thoughts.

So there was the wanted man, the man he had spent the last several days hunting for. He just needed to lay his hands on him. Throughout the tense and impatient search, he had looked forward to the moment when he would get him in his grip; any thoughts of what he would do with him once he had him he had angrily put from his mind.

But that time was now at hand, and the question arose: what was he going to do with Enno? He knew it, he knew it with the utmost certainty: Enno Kluge was not the author of the postcards. During the search for him, he had been able to obscure that knowledge, he had even, in his chat with Deputy Inspector Schröder, discussed the possibility that Kluge was guilty of other things besides.

Yes, precisely – other things, not this. He hadn’t written the postcards! Not in a million years! If he arrested him and brought him back here to Prinz Albrecht Strasse, then nothing would keep his boss from interrogating Kluge personally, and then everything would come out, nothing about any postcards, but plenty about a deceitfully procured signature on a statement, that was for sure! No, it wasn’t possible to bring Kluge back here!

But it was equally impossible to allow Kluge to continue to roam, even under constant supervision; Prall would never concede that. Nor would he allow himself to be jollied along much longer, if Escherich suppressed the news that Kluge had been found. He had dropped a couple of pretty broad hints that he was ready to put someone else in charge of the whole Hobgoblin case – someone more diligent, more proactive. The inspector couldn’t take the humiliation – and anyway, the case had become important to him personally.

Escherich sits at his desk, staring into space, gnawing at his beloved sand-coloured moustache. I’m in a trap, he says to himself. A bloody trap I’ve gone and made for myself. Whatever I do is wrong, and if I don’t do anything that’s the worst of the lot. I’m bloody stuck.

He sits there, thinking. Time goes by, and Inspector Escherich is still thinking. Borkhausen – bloody Borkhausen! Let him stay there and watch the house! He’s got all the time in the world! And if he lets Enno slip through his fingers, then I’ll rip his guts out, inch by inch! Five hundred marks, and can I bring them with me, please! A hundred Ennos aren’t worth five hundred marks! I’ll smash his face in, bloody fucking Borkhausen! What do I care about Kluge, I need the author of the postcards!

But then, while he continues to sit and brood, Inspector Escherich comes to a slightly different view of what to do with Borkhausen. At any rate he gets up, and goes to Accounts. There he takes receipt of five hundred marks (‘paperwork later’), and returns to his office. He had thought of driving to Ansbacher Strasse in his official car and taking a couple of men with him, but he cancels the request – he doesn’t need a car or manpower.

It’s possible that not only has Escherich come to a different view of what to do with Borkhausen, perhaps he’s thought of what to do with Enno Kluge as well. Anyway, he takes his big service revolver out of his pocket, and instead pockets a light pistol, recently picked up in the course of a confiscation. He’s already tried it out, the little thing fits nicely in his hand, and it shoots straight.

All right, let’s go. The inspector stops in the doorway, takes a last look around. Something odd happens: without meaning to, he makes a sort of salute to the room, he bids goodbye to his office. So long… A dark presentiment, a feeling he’s almost ashamed of, that he won’t see the office in quite the same way again. Till now, he was an official, someone who hunted human beings in the same way you might sell stamps: diligent, methodical, by the book.

But when he gets back to this room later tonight, or maybe even early tomorrow morning, he might not be the same official. He will have something on his conscience, something he won’t be able to forget. Something he alone knows, but all the worse for that: he will know it, and he will never be able to exonerate himself.

Escherich leaves his office, half-ashamed of his little histrionics. We’ll see, he says, to calm himself. It could all pan out differently. But first I’m going to have to talk to Kluge… He takes the underground, and it’s dark by the time he gets to Ansbacher Strasse.

‘You do like to leave a man hanging around!’ growls Borkhausen furiously when he sees him. ‘I’ve not eaten anything all day! Did you remember my money, Inspector?’

‘Shut up!’ snaps the inspector, which Borkhausen correctly interprets as an affirmative. His heart begins to beat a little more easily: money in prospect!

‘Where is he then, Kluge?’ the inspector asks him.

‘I don’t know!’ replies an offended-sounding Borkhausen, to anticipate possible remonstrations. ‘I can’t go inside and ask after him, when he knows me from before! My guess is he’s probably in the garden house at the back, but you’ll have to find that out for yourself, Inspector. Anyway, I’ve done my job, now I want my money.’

Disregarding this, Escherich asks Borkhausen what Enno’s doing this far west, and how he managed to find him.

Borkhausen is obliged to give him a detailed report, and the inspector takes notes on Hetty Haberle, the pet shop, the evening scene on his knees: this time the inspector writes everything down. Of course, Borkhausen’s report is not complete in every detail, but that’s not to be expected. No one can demand that a man admit his own humiliation. Because when Borkhausen reports on how he came to take money from Frau Haberle, he ought also to report on how it went missing again. He ought also to have reported on the two thousand marks that are now sitting in Munich waiting to be collected. No, no one can expect that of him!

If Escherich had been on slightly better form, he might have noticed a few inconsistencies in the snoop’s report. But Escherich is still preoccupied with other things. Ideally he would send Borkhausen away, but he needs him a while longer, and so he says: ‘Wait here!’ and goes into the house.

He doesn’t go straight through to the back but first to the concierge’s flat in the front house, and makes some inquiries there. Only then, accompanied by the concierge, does he enter the garden house, and slowly climbs the stairs to the fourth floor.

The concierge was unable to confirm to him that Enno Kluge was living in the building. The concierge is only responsible for tenants in the front house, not the people in the garden building. But of course he knows everyone who lives there too, not least because he allocates the ration cards to all. Some of them he knows well, some less well. For example, there is Anna Schönlein, who lives on the fourth floor, and in his view, she’s well capable of taking in a man like that. The concierge has his eye on her anyway, because all sorts of rabble are forever spending the night at her flat, and the post secretary on the floor below is adamant that she had the radio tuned to foreign stations at night. The secretary wouldn’t quite swear to the fact, but he did promise to keep his ear cocked in that direction. Yes, the concierge had been meaning to talk to the block warden about Schönlein, but why not to the inspector now. He urged him to start his inquiries at Schönlein’s, and only if it turned out that the man really wasn’t there, to ask on the other storeys. All in all, the people living in the garden house were decent enough.

‘This is the one!’ whispers the concierge.

‘You stand here, so that she can see you through the peephole,’ the inspector whispers back. ‘Now give a reason why you’ve come up, pigfood for the NSV or the Winter Relief Fund.’^∗

‘Done!’ says the concierge, and he rings the bell.

Nothing happens, and the concierge rings again, and a third time. All is quiet within.

‘Not at home?’ whispers the inspector.

‘I doubt it!’ says the concierge. ‘I haven’t seen her go out all day.’

And he rings a fourth time.

Suddenly, without the two men hearing a sound within, the door opens. A tall, bony woman stands in front of them. She is wearing baggy, faded tracksuit trousers, and a canary yellow jersey with red buttons. She has a thin, sharp face, splotched with red, as the faces of consumptives often are. Also, she has that feverish gleam in her eyes.

‘What is it?’ she asks curtly, and betrays no shock when the inspector plants himself in the doorway, so that the door can’t be closed.

‘I’d like a few words with you if I may, Fräulein Schönlein. I’m from the Gestapo. Escherich is my name.’

Again, no sign of shock; the woman continues to look at him with her fevered eyes. Then quickly she says: ‘Come in!’ and leads the way into her flat.

‘You stay by the door!’ the inspector whispers to the concierge. ‘If anyone tries to get in or out, shout!’

The room in which the inspector now finds himself is a little messy and dusty. Ancient velvet upholstery with carved pilasters and ball and claw feet from the last century. Velvet curtains. An easel with the picture of a bearded man on it, a blown-up colour photograph. There’s cigarette smoke in the air, a few butts in an ashtray.

‘What is it?’ repeats Fräulein Schönlein.

She’s standing by the table, hasn’t offered the inspector a seat.

The inspector sits down anyway, takes a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, and gestures at the picture. ‘Who’s that of?’ he asks.

‘My father,’ says the woman. And again she asks: ‘What is it?’

‘I had some questions I wanted to ask you, Fräulein Schönlein,’ says the inspector, and offers her a cigarette. ‘Sit down, have a cigarette!’

The woman says quickly: ‘I never smoke!’

‘One, two, three, four,’ Escherich counts the stubs in the ashtray. ‘And the room smells smoky. Have you got visitors, Fräulein Schönlein?’

She looked at him calmly, without panic. ‘I never admit to smoking,’ she said, ‘my doctor has forbidden me to smoke on account of my lung.’

‘So you don’t have any visitors?’

‘I don’t have any visitors.’

‘I’ll just take a quick look around your flat,’ says the inspector, and gets up. ‘No, please don’t trouble yourself. I’ll find my own way around.’

He walked quickly through the other two rooms packed with sofas, cabinets, wardrobes, armchairs and gilt. Once, he stopped to listen, his face up to a wardrobe, smiling. Then he returned to Fräulein Schönlein. She was still standing as he had left her, by the table.

‘It has been reported to me,’ he said, sitting down again, ‘that you receive plenty of visitors, visitors who tend to stay with you for two or three nights, but are never registered. Are you aware of your obligation to register visitors?’

‘Almost all my visitors are nephews and nieces, who never stay with me for more than two nights. So far as I know, I’m not obliged to register visitors for under four nights.’

‘You must have a very large family, Fräulein Schönlein,’ said the inspector gravely. ‘Almost every night you have one, two, even three people camping here with you.’

‘That’s a gross exaggeration. In point of fact, I do have a very large family. Six siblings, all of them married with children.’

‘And some dignified old ladies and gentlemen among your nephews and nieces!’

‘Naturally, their parents call on me once in a while as well.’

‘A very large family, and very fond of travelling… By the way, something else I’d been meaning to ask you: Where do you keep your radio, Fräulein Schönlein? I didn’t see one on my rounds just now.’

She pressed her lips together: ‘I don’t own a radio.’

‘Of course not!’ said the inspector. ‘Of course not. Just as you’ll never admit that you smoke cigarettes. At least radio music does no harm to the lungs.’

‘No, just the political orientation,’ she said ironically. ‘No, I don’t own a radio. If music has been heard playing in my apartment, it’s from the portable gramophone on the shelf behind you.’

‘Which has been heard to speak in foreign languages,’ added the inspector.

‘I own many foreign dance records. I don’t think it’s a crime to play them on occasion to my visitors, even in wartime.’

‘You mean, to your nephews and nieces? No, surely that’s not a crime.’

He stood up, thrust his hands in his pockets. Suddenly he wasn’t speaking teasingly, he said brutally: ‘What do you think will happen, Fräulein Schönlein, if I arrest you, and leave an agent in your place? He would welcome your visitors, and scrutinize the papers of those nephews and nieces of yours. It could be one of your visitors could even come bearing gifts – say, a radio! What do you say?’

‘I say,’ replied Fräulein Schönlein coolly, ‘that you came here with the intention of arresting me, so it doesn’t really matter what I say. Let’s go! I suppose you’ll allow me to slip on a dress for these tracksuit bottoms?’

‘Not so fast! Of course, it’s to your credit that your first thought should be to free the gentleman hiding in your closet before we leave. Even a moment ago, when I was walking around your bedroom, he seemed to be suffering from shortage of breath. I daresay the mothballs in the closet…’

The red splotches were gone from her face. She was white as a sheet as she stared at him.

He shook his head. ‘Dear, oh dear!’ he said with mock disapproval. ‘You do make it so terribly easy for us! And you’d like to be conspirators? You’re trying to bring down the state with your childish games? The only people you’ll bring down are yourselves!’

Still she stared at him. Her mouth was tight shut, her eyes had a feverish gleam, her hand was still on the doorknob.

‘Well, you’re in luck, Fräulein Schönlein,’ the inspector continued, in a tone of easy, contemptuous superiority, ‘inasmuch as you’re of no interest to me, not tonight anyway. All I’m interested in is the man in your closet. It could be that, once I consider your case more narrowly back in my office, I may feel obliged to pass on a report about you to the appropriate authorities. As I say, it could be, I’m not sure yet. Perhaps at the given time, your case will seem too trivial – not least in view of your state of health…’

Suddenly it burst from her: ‘I don’t want your mercy! I hate your pity! My case is not trivial! Yes, I regularly put up political victims here in my flat! I have listened to foreign radio stations! There, now you know! Now you can’t spare me any more – regardless of my lungs!’

‘Now now, old girl!’ he said mockingly, looking almost pityingly at the strangely old maidish figure in her tracksuit bottoms and yellow jersey with the red buttons. ‘It’s not just your lungs, it’s your nerves that are shot! Half an hour’s interrogation from us, and you’d be surprised what a whimpering wreck we’ll have reduced you to! It’s a very unpleasant thing to experience. Some people never get over it, they just string themselves up.’

He looked at her once more, nodded gravely. Contemptuously he said: ‘And those are the kind of people who like to call themselves conspirators!’

She flinched, as though struck by a whip, but said nothing in reply.

‘But in the course of our nice conversation we’re forgetting all about the visitor in the closet,’ he carried on. ‘You’d better come along, Fräulein Schönlein! Unless we spring him soon, it’ll be all up with him!’

Enno Kluge really was close to suffocation when Escherich dragged him out of the closet. The inspector laid the little fellow on the chaise longue, and moved his arms up and down a few times, to help start him breathing again.

‘And now,’ he said, and looked at the woman, who was standing silently in the middle of the room, ‘and now, Fräulein Schönlein, I suggest you leave me and Herr Kluge alone for a quarter hour or so. It’s probably best you sit in the kitchen, where you won’t be able to snoop!’

‘I’m not a snoop!’

‘No no, just as you never smoke cigarettes, and only play dance records to the edification of your nieces and nephews! Come on, go and sit in the kitchen. I’ll call you when I need you!’

He nodded to her once more, and saw that she really did go into the kitchen. Then he turned his attention to Herr Kluge, who was now sitting up on the sofa, training his colourless eyes fearfully on the inspector. Already, the tears were beginning to trickle down his cheeks.

‘Well now, Herr Kluge,’ said the inspector soothingly. ‘Are those tears of joy at this unexpected reunion with your old friend Escherich? Did you miss me very much? To tell the truth, I’ve missed you too, and I’m very glad I’ve run into you again. But I don’t think anything will come between us now, Herr Kluge!’

Enno’s tears poured down his cheeks. He gulped back a sob: ‘Oh, inspector, you promised to let me go!’

‘And didn’t I do just that?’ asked the inspector in surprise. ‘But that doesn’t mean I can’t take you back if I find I can’t do without you. What if I have a new statement for you to sign, Herr Kluge? As my good friend, you surely wouldn’t refuse me such a small favour, would you?’

Enno trembled under the level stare of those mocking eyes. He knew the eyes would draw everything out of him, he would blab, and then one way or another he was lost for ever more…