Alone in Berlin (Penguin Modern Classics)

35

The First Warning

Hitler’s surprise attack on Russia had given Quangel’s rage against the tyrant new fuel. This time Quangel had been able to follow a policy from its very inception. None of it had surprised him, from the first ‘defensive’ concentrations of troops on the border to the actual invasion. He had known all along that they were lying – Hitler, Goebbels, Fritzsche, whatever their names were, their every word was a lie. They were incapable of leaving anyone in peace, and in angry dismay he had written on one of his postcards, ‘What were the Russian soldiers doing when Hitler attacked? Why, they were playing cards – no one in Russia was thinking of war!’

Nowadays, when he walked up to groups of people in the factory talking about politics, he sometimes wished they wouldn’t scatter quite so quickly. He wanted to know what other people had to say about the war.

But they lapsed into sullen silence; loose talk had become very dangerous. The relatively harmless carpenter Dollfuss had long since been replaced and Quangel could only guess at the identity of his successor. Eleven of his workforce, including two men who had been at the furniture factory for twenty years, had disappeared without trace: either in the middle of the shift or they hadn’t come to work one morning. He was never told what had become of them, and that was further evidence that they had spoken a word out of turn somewhere and been packed off to a concentration camp.

In place of these eleven men there were now new faces, and often the old foreman asked himself whether all eleven weren’t spies, whether half his workforce wasn’t set to eavesdrop on the other, or vice versa. The air was thick with betrayal. No one could trust anyone else, and in that dismal atmosphere the men seemed to grow ever duller, devolving into mechanical extensions of the machines they serviced.

But sometimes out of that dullness a terrifying rage would explode, like the time a worker had fed his arm into the saw and screamed, ‘I wish Hitler would drop dead! And he will! Just as I am sawing off my arm!’

They had had a job pulling that lunatic out of the machinery, and of course nothing had been heard of him since. He was probably long dead now, or so you had to hope! Yes, you had to be damned careful, not everyone was as far beyond suspicion as that ancient, work-dulled workhound Otto Quangel, who seemed to have no interest in anything beyond completing the daily quota of coffins. Yes, coffins! From bomb crates they had descended to coffins, wretched things made out of the cheapest, thinnest pasteboard and stained brown-black. They knocked out tens of thousands of these coffins, filling freight trains, entire train stations, many stations, all full of them!

Quangel, his head alertly jerking toward all the machines in turn, often thought of the many lives that were put in the ground in these coffins, lives cut short, futilely cut short, and wondered whether they were the victims of bombing raids, and thus mainly old people, mothers, and children, or whether they had been bundled off to concentration camps – a couple of thousand coffins every week for men who hadn’t been able to mask their convictions, or didn’t want to – every week a couple of thousand coffins to one single concentration camp. Or perhaps these freight trains full of coffins really did travel the long distance to the Front – though Otto Quangel didn’t really want to believe that, because what did they care about dead soldiers! A dead soldier was no more to them than a dead field vole.

The cold, birdlike eye blinks angry and tough in the electric light, the head moves jerkily, the thin-lipped mouth is pressed tight. Of the turbulence, the revulsion that live in this man’s breast no one has the least inkling, but he knows there is still much to do. He knows he has been summoned to a great task, and now he no longer writes only on Sundays. He also writes on weekdays before going to work. Since the attack on Russia, he has also written letters; these take him two days to write, but he needs an outlet for his rage.

Quangel admits to himself that he is no longer working with his old caution. He has happily escaped detection now for two years; never has the least suspicion fallen on him, and he feels quite secure.

A first warning to him was the meeting with Trudel Hergesell. If instead of her it had been someone else standing on the steps watching, then it would have been all up with him and Anna. Not that it mattered about the two of them; no, the only thing that mattered was that the work got done, today and every day to come. But the fact that Trudel had seen him drop the card had been the grossest carelessness on his part.

What Otto Quangel had no way of knowing was that at this point Inspector Escherich already had two descriptions of his person. Otto Quangel had been seen on two other occasions dropping the cards, each time by women who had then curiously come up and looked at the cards but hadn’t raised the alarm in time to trap the culprit in the building.

Yes, Inspector Escherich had two descriptions. The only regrettable thing was that they departed from each other in almost every detail. There was only one point that they agreed on, which was that the culprit’s face had been very striking, not at all like an ordinary face. But when Escherich asked for a closer description of this striking face, it turned out that the two women either had no gift of observation or else were unable to find words for what had struck them. Neither of them was able to say more than that the culprit had looked like a real criminal. Asked what a real criminal looked like, they shrugged their shoulders and said that was something that he and his men ought to know better.

Quangel had long hesitated over whether to tell Anna about his encounter with Trudel or not. In the end he decided to do so: he didn’t want to keep anything secret from her.

She had a right to learn the truth: the danger of Trudel giving them away was very small, but if there was any danger at all Anna had a right to know it. So he told her about it exactly as it had happened, not glossing over his carelessness.

Anna’s reaction was absolutely characteristic. Trudel getting married and expecting a baby did not interest her in the least, but she whispered in consternation, ‘But think what would have happened, Otto, if it had been someone else standing there, someone in the SA!’

He smiled contemptuously, ‘But it wasn’t anyone else! And from now on I’m going to be more careful!’

But she was not at all assured. ‘No, no,’ she said vehemently. ‘From now on, I’ll do all the drops. No one notices an old woman. You’re too striking; everyone notices you, Otto!’

‘No one’s noticed me in two years, Mother. There’s no chance of me letting you do the most dangerous job of all on your own! I would feel I was hiding behind your apron skirts!’

‘Yes,’ she said irritably, ‘now you trot out all your stupid masculine clichés! What nonsense: hiding behind my apron skirts! I know you’re brave, you don’t have to prove it to me. But I’ve also learned that you’re incautious, and that’s what’s changed my mind. I don’t care what you say!’

‘Anna,’ he said, and he took her hand, ‘you mustn’t do what other women do, and claim that a mistake is a habitual mistake! I’ve said I will be more careful in future, and you must believe me. For two years I’ve done it pretty well – why should it go any worse in future?’

‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t drop the cards,’ she replied stubbornly. ‘I have had some experience of it.’

‘And so you will continue to do, in future. If there are too many for me, or if my rheumatism plays up.’

‘I’ve got more free time than you. And I really don’t attract notice. Plus my legs are in better shape. And I don’t want to be shaking with fear all the days I know you’re going out with the cards.’

‘What about me? Do you think I can sit here happily at home while I know you’re running around outside? Don’t you understand I’d be ashamed if you bore the bulk of the danger? No, Anna, you can’t demand that of me.’

‘Well, let’s go together. Four eyes see more than two, Otto.’

‘If there are two of us, we’re more conspicuous. It’s easier for a single person to disappear in the crowd. And I don’t believe that four eyes see more than two in something like this. Plus, don’t be angry with me, Anna, but it would make me nervous to have you walking at my side, and I think it would be the same for you.’

‘Oh, Otto,’ she said. ‘I know that when you want something, you get your way. I can never talk you out of anything. But I’ll be sick with worry now that I know you’re in so much danger.’

‘The danger is no greater than it ever was, no greater than when I dropped the very first card in Neue Königstrasse. There is always danger, Anna, for anyone who does what we do. Or do you want us to stop?’

‘No!’ she exclaimed. ‘No, I couldn’t go two weeks without our postcards! What are we living for? Those cards are our life!’

He smiled grimly, and looked at her with a grim pride.

‘You see, Anna,’ he said then. ‘That’s the way I like you. We aren’t afraid. We know what the risks are, and we’re ready, ready anytime – but with luck it’ll happen a long way down the road.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I always think it will never happen. We will survive the war, survive the Nazis, and then…’

‘Then?’ he asked now, because suddenly – after their eventual victory – there was a vista of a completely empty life ahead of them.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I think even then we’ll find something that’s worth fighting for. Maybe quite openly, and without so much danger.’

‘Danger,’ he said. ‘There’s always danger, Anna; otherwise, it’s not fighting. Sometimes I feel sure they won’t get me, and at other times I lie awake for hours and hours, thinking about some lurking danger that hasn’t occurred to me. I think and think, and nothing comes up. But there is danger threatening from somewhere, I can sense it. What could we have forgotten, Anna?’

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Nothing. So long as you’re careful with the drops…’

He shook his head impatiently. ‘No, Anna,’ he said, ‘that’s not the way I meant. Danger’s not on the doorstep, and not in the writing part. Danger is somewhere else, but I can’t think where. We’ll wake up one day and know it was always there, but we never saw it. And then it’ll be too late.’

She still didn’t understand. ‘I don’t know why you’re suddenly worrying, Otto,’ she said. ‘We’ve thought and tested everything a hundred times. As long as we’re careful…’

‘Careful!’ he exclaimed, annoyed because she didn’t understand him. ‘How can you guard against something when you don’t know what it is! You don’t understand me, Anna! It’s not possible to calculate everything in life!’

‘No, I suppose I’m not understanding you,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘But I do think you’re worrying about nothing, Father. I wish you would sleep more at night, Otto. You’re not getting enough sleep.’

He didn’t say anything.

After a while she asked, ‘Do you know Trudel Baumann’s new name, and where she lives?’

He shook his head. He said: ‘I don’t know, and I don’t want to know.’

‘But I want to know,’ she said obdurately. ‘I want to hear it with my own ears that there was no problem with dropping the card. You shouldn’t have left it to her, Otto! A girl like that, how does she know what to do? Perhaps she put the card down where people could see her. And once they have a young woman like that in their power, it won’t be long before they know the name Quangel!’

He shook his head, ‘No, I’m sure there’s no threat to us from Trudel.’

‘But I want to be sure!’ cried Frau Quangel. ‘I’m going to go to her factory and ask after her.’

‘You’ll do no such thing, Mother! Trudel no longer exists for us. No, don’t say anything, you’re staying here. I don’t want to hear one more word about it.’ Then, seeing her still looking stubbornly at him, ‘Trust me, Anna, I’m right. We don’t need to talk about Trudel any more – that’s over. But,’ he went on more quietly, ‘but when I lie awake at night, I often think we’re not going to make it, Anna.’

She looked at him with big, staring eyes.

‘And then I picture to myself how it will be. It’s good to think about such things in advance, that way nothing will surprise you. Do you think about it sometimes?’

‘I know what you’re talking about, Otto,’ Anna Quangel replied evasively.

He stood with his back against Ottochen’s bookcase, his shoulder brushing against the boy’s radio assembly guide. He looked piercingly at her.

‘As soon as they’ve arrested us, we’ll be separated, Anna. We might see each other two or three times more, at the interrogation, at the trial, maybe for the last time half an hour before the execution…’

‘No! No! No!’ she screamed. ‘I don’t want you to talk about it. We’ll get through, Otto, we have to!’

He laid his big, rough worker’s hand calmingly on her small, warm, trembling one.

‘And what if we don’t make it? Would you regret anything? Would you like any of what we’ve done to have remained undone?’

‘No, nothing! But we’ll get through undiscovered, Otto, I feel it!’

‘You see, Anna,’ he said, without responding to her latest assertion. ‘That’s what I wanted to hear. We will never regret anything. We will stand by what we’ve done, no matter how they torture us.’

She looked at him, and tried to suppress a shudder. In vain. ‘Oh, Otto!’ she sobbed. ‘Why do you have to talk like that? You’ll only draw the calamity upon us. You never used to talk like that!’

‘I don’t know what’s making me talk to you like this today,’ he said, stepping away from the bookcase. ‘I have to, at least once. Probably I’ll never talk about it to you again. But I had to do it once. Because you must know, we’ll be very much alone in our cells, without a word to each other, we who haven’t been apart for one single day in twenty years and more. It will be very difficult. But we can be sure the other won’t weaken, that we can depend on each other, in death as in life. We will have to die alone too, Anna.’

‘Otto, to hear you talk, it’s as though it was imminent! And yet we’re free, and no one suspects us. We could stop any day, if we wanted…’

‘But do we want to? Is it even possible for us to want to?’

‘No, and I’m not saying we want to, either. I don’t, you know that! But I don’t want you to talk as though they’d caught us and there was only death ahead of us. I’m not ready to die yet, Otto, I want to live with you!’

‘Who wants to die?’ he asked. ‘Everyone wants to live, everyone – even the most miserable worm is screaming for life! I want to live, too. But maybe it’s a good thing, Anna, even in the midst of life to think of a wretched death, and to get ready for it. So that you know you’ll be able to die properly, without moaning and whimpering. That would be disgusting to me…’

For a while there was silence.

Then Anna Quangel said quietly, ‘You can rely on me, Otto. I won’t let you down.’