Alone in Berlin (Penguin Modern Classics)

66

The Death House

The death house in Plötzensee is now Otto Quangel’s home. The solitary cell in the death house is his last address on earth.

Yes, he is in solitary now. There are no more cellmates for those sentenced to death, no Dr Reichhardt, not even a ‘dog’. The only companion for those sentenced to death is Death: that’s the way the law wants it to be.

From the ghosts in the cells there isn’t a sound to be heard. The condemned are so quiet! Brought together from all corners of Europe: Germans, French, Dutch, Belgians, Norwegians, some of them little more than boys, and good characters, weak characters, bad characters – every temperament is represented, from sanguine to choleric to melancholic. In this establishment, distinctions are blurred, for everyone is so quiet; these men are no more than shadows of their former selves. Only rarely does Quangel hear someone sobbing at night, and then silence, silence… Silence…

He has always loved silence. These past few months, he has been forced to live a life against his own bent: never alone, continually forced to speak, when more than anything he hated speech. Now for one last time he is allowed to return to his own element: silence, patience. Dr Reichhardt is a good man, he learned a lot from him, but now, so close to death, it is better to be without Dr Reichhardt.

He has established (based on what he learned from Dr Reichhardt) a regular routine here in the cell. Everything at the prescribed time: careful washing, a few calisthenics picked up from his former cellmate, an hour’s walk in the morning and one in the afternoon, thorough cleaning of the cell, eating, sleeping. There are books to read here too; each week he is allowed six books in his cell. But he hasn’t changed as much as all that, and he never looks at them. He is not about to start reading in the twilight of his life.

But there is one other thing he has picked up from Dr Reichhardt: while he walks he hums to himself. He remembers nursery rhymes and folk songs from his school days and before. They well up in him from forgotten depths, verse after verse – what a brain he must have, remembering those things after forty years! And then the poems: ‘The Ring of Polycrates’, ‘The Pledge’, ‘The Ode to Joy’, ‘The Erlking’. Only for ‘The Bell’ he can’t quite remember all the stanzas. Maybe he never had them all memorized in the first place; he can’t remember now…

A quiet life, with work, as ever, at the core of his day. Yes, he has to work here too. He has to sort batches of dried peas and pick out the wormy ones, the broken ones, stray seeds of this or that, blackish grey balls of vetch. He likes the work; his busy fingers sort peas hour after hour.

And it’s good, too, that he’s landed this particular job, because it keeps him fed. The good days when Dr Reichhardt shared his meals with him are now well and truly over. What they give him in his cell now is poorly cooked, watery swill – glutinous bread with potatoes to stretch it – and it sits heavy in his gut.

But the peas help. He can’t take many because they’re weighed, but enough to satisfy his appetite. He takes the peas and softens them in water, and when they’ve swelled up he drops them in his soup to warm them through, and then he mashes them. This way he improves his food, of which it would have been true to say not enough to live on and too much to die on.

He senses that the warders know what he’s up to, but they don’t say anything. And the reason they don’t is not because they want to make life easier for the condemned man, but because they’ve witnessed so much misery it has dulled their feelings.

They don’t talk themselves, lest their charges should. They don’t want to listen to any complaints; there’s nothing they can do about them anyway. Everything here takes its rigid course. They are cogs in a machine, iron cogs, steel cogs. If an iron cog happened to soften, it would have to be replaced, and the cogs don’t want to be replaced – they want to be just the way they are.

They don’t provide any comfort because they don’t want to. They are as they are, which is to say indifferent, cold, lacking empathy.

When Otto Quangel was first brought to this cell from the solitary confinement to which Judge Feisler had sentenced him, he thought it would be for a day or two. He thought they would be in a hurry to carry out his sentence, and that would have been fine by him.

But gradually he comes to realize that it can take weeks or months for a sentence to be carried out, even a whole year. There are people sentenced to death who have been waiting for fully a year, who every night go to bed and don’t know whether they will be rudely awakened by the executioner; any night, any hour – while they are chewing their food, while they are sorting peas, while they are slopping out – at any moment the door might open, a hand beckon, a voice say, ‘All right! It’s time!’

There is a monstrous cruelty in the way fear is spun out over days, weeks, months. Nor is it just because of some legal formalities: it’s not just pleas for clemency waiting to be settled one way or another that cause this delay. Some people say the executioner has too much to do; he can’t keep up. The executioner only works here on Mondays and Thursdays. All the other days, he’s on the road; his services are in demand all over Germany; the executioner takes his work with him. But how can it be that in the case of, say, two men sentenced for the same thing at the same time, one is punished seven weeks before the other? No, it’s a question of cruelty, of sadism, of barbarism. They don’t beat you up in this establishment, don’t torture you physically; here the poison is dribbled imperceptibly into you. They don’t want to let your soul out of the clutches of death for a single minute.

Each Monday and Thursday there is commotion on death row. The night before, the ghosts begin to stir; they hunker in doorways, shaking; they listen to the sounds from the corridor. The sentry is still pacing back and forth; it’s only two in the morning. But soon… Maybe today. And they beg and pray, Just these three more days, or these four more days till the next scheduled executions, and I’ll go willingly, but not today, please! And they beg and pray and cajole.

The clock strikes four. Footfall, clank of tin dishes, murmurs. The sounds come closer. Your heart starts to beat; sweat breaks out all over your body. Suddenly a key grinds in the lock. Easy, easy, it’s next door – no, two doors away! Not your turn yet. A stifled ‘No! No! Help!’ Feet scraping. Silence. The sentry’s regular pacing back and forth, back and forth. Silence. Waiting. Terrified waiting. I can’t stand it…

And after an endless delay, after a gulf of fear, an unendurable period of waiting which nonetheless has to be endured, the murmurs, the noise of feet, the rattle of the key… Coming closer, closer, closer. O God, not today, not me! Just three more days. Clank! The keys – that’s my cell. No, yours! It’s next door, a few murmured words, they came for my neighbour. They get him out, the sound of footsteps receding…

Time here crumbles into myriad tiny pieces. Waiting. Nothing but waiting. And the footsteps of the sentries in the corridor. O God, today they’re just going from cell to cell, and I’m next. My – turn – next! In three hours I’ll be a corpse, this body will be stiff, these legs that can still carry me will be pegs, this hand that knew work, caresses, tenderness, sin, will be a rotting piece of meat! It can’t be, but it is!

Waiting – waiting – waiting! And suddenly the condemned man sees the gleam of light outside the window, he can hear the bell saying it’s time to get up. The day is at hand, another working day – and he’s been spared once more. He has another three days’ grace – or four, if it’s a Thursday. Fortune has smiled on him! He breathes more easily; at last he can breathe again – perhaps they’ll just let him live. Perhaps there’ll be a great victory and an amnesty and maybe his punishment will be commuted to life imprisonment!

An hour of breathing more easily!

And then fear begins again, and poisons these three days, or four: last time they stopped right outside my door. Next Monday, they’ll begin with me. Oh, what can I do? Nothing…

And always anew, always anew, culminating twice a week, but every day of the week, fear, every second, fear!

Month after month: deadly fear!

Sometimes Otto Quangel asks himself how he knows all this. He hasn’t talked to anyone, and no one has talked to him. A few mean words from the sentry: ‘Come! Get up! Work faster!’ Perhaps while his tin dish was being filled, something like ‘seven this week’, more mouthed than whispered, and that was the size of it.

His senses had become preternaturally acute: they guessed whatever he couldn’t see. His ears picked up every sound in the corridor: the scraps of conversation as sentries clocked on and off, a curse, a scream – everything revealed itself to him, nothing remained a secret. And then at night, in the long nights that according to regulations went on for thirteen hours but that were never nights at all because a light was kept burning in each cell, then he would sometimes dare to clamber up to the window and hang there listening to the night outside. He knew that the sentries in the yard with their dogs had orders to shoot at any face that appeared in the window – and he heard shots, fairly regularly – but he did it anyway.

He stood there on his stool, sniffing the pure night air (the air alone made the risk worthwhile), and he heard the whispering going from window to window: ‘Karl’s been beaten again!’ or ‘The woman in No. 347 spent the whole day standing downstairs,’ and in time he was able to puzzle things out. In time he knew that the man in the cell next to his had worked in counterintelligence and was supposed to have sold secrets to the enemy; twice already he had tried to kill himself. And in the cell behind his was a worker in a power plant who had allowed the dynamos to fry. And one of the guards, Brennecke, would get you paper and pencil stubs and smuggle letters out, if someone on the outside bribed him with money or, better yet, food. And so on and so on. News and more news. Even death row speaks, breathes, lives. Even on death row, the deep-seated urge to communicate cannot be extinguished.

But even though Otto Quangel – occasionally – put his life on the line to listen at the window, even though his senses never tired of picking up on each little change, still he was not like the others. Sometimes they sensed that there was someone at the window in his cell; once someone whispered, ‘Well, what’s with you, Otto? Got the answer to your appeal yet?’ (They knew all about him.) But he never answered; he never admitted that he, too, was listening. He didn’t belong to them; even though he was facing the same sentence they were, he was different.

And the thing that made him different wasn’t his cussedness, as before, nor the love of peace and quiet that had always set him apart, nor his dislike of speaking that had enjoined him to silence, but the little glass vial that Judge Fromm had slipped into his possession.

The vial of cyanide had made him free. The others, his companions in suffering, had to walk to the end of their designated road; he had a choice. He could die at any minute of his choosing. He was free. In the death house, behind bars and high walls, in chains and irons, he – Otto Quangel, erstwhile master carpenter, husband, father, troublemaker – was free. They had done it, they had made him free as he had never in his life been free before. He, the possessor of the vial, did not fear death. Death was with him at all hours; Death was his friend and intimate. He, Otto Quangel, had no need to wake early on Mondays and Thursdays and listen gibbering at the door of his cell. He was not with them, or not of them, not quite. He didn’t have to torment himself, because the end of all torments was in his possession.

It was a good life he was leading. He loved it. He wasn’t even quite sure he would ever need his glass vial. Perhaps it was better to wait till the very last moment? Perhaps he would be able to see Anna once more? Wasn’t it right to spare them no trouble, no shame?

Let them kill him, that was better! He wanted to know how it felt – it was as though he had an entitlement, a duty to know how they went about it. Up until the moment when they put a noose round his neck, or a block under his head, he wanted to know. And then, at the very last minute, he could still play his trick on them.

Then, in the certainty that nothing could happen to him, that – perhaps for the very first time in his life – he could be just himself, as he was, in that certainty he found calm, serenity, even cheerfulness. His ageing body had never felt so well as during these weeks. His beady bird’s eye had never looked as friendly as it did now in the death cell in the Plötze. His spirit had never been able to roam as easily as here.

A good life it was!

He hoped Anna was doing well, too. Old Fromm was a man of his word. Anna, too, would be beyond chicaneries and torments; Anna, too, would be free, imprisoned and free…