Alone in Berlin (Penguin Modern Classics)

71

Anna Quangel’s Reunion

The months came and went, the seasons changed, and still Anna Quangel sat in her cell, waiting to be reunited with her Otto.

Sometimes the warder, whose favourite Anna Quangel had become, said to her, ‘I think they must have forgotten about you, Frau Quangel.’

‘Yes,’ replied No. 76 mildly. ‘It would appear so. Me and my husband. How is Otto?’

‘Fine!’ the warder replied quickly. ‘He sends his love.’

They had all agreed not to tell the kind, hardworking woman about the death of her husband. They always sent regards from him.

Yes, this time fortune really was smiling on Frau Anna: no needless chitchat, no conscientious chaplain destroyed her belief that Otto Quangel lived.

Almost all day she sat at her little knitting machine and knitted socks – socks for soldiers; she knitted them day in, day out.

Sometimes she sang softly to herself. She was firmly convinced that not only would she and Otto see each other again but that they would go on living together for a long time. Either they really had been forgotten, or else they had secretly been amnestied. Not much longer, and they would be free.

Because however little the warders talked about it, Anna Quangel had picked up on it: the war was going badly, and the news was getting worse from week to week. She noticed it from the rapid deterioration in the food, the regular shortages of material to work with, the broken part in her knitting machine, which took many weeks to replace – everything seemed to be in short supply. But if the war was going badly, then things must be going well for the Quangels. Soon they would be free.

So she sits and knits. She knits dreams into the socks, wishes doomed never to come true, hopes she had never previously entertained. She composes an Otto quite unlike the real one, a serene, contented, tender Otto. She has become a young woman again, seeing the whole of life beckoning to her. Doesn’t she even dream sometimes of having more children? Oh, children… !

Ever since Anna Quangel destroyed the cyanide, when she decided after a dreadful struggle to hold on till she saw Otto again, come what may – ever since that time she has been free and youthful and joyful. She has conquered herself.

Yes, now she is free. Fearless and free.

She is fearless, too, during the ever more terrible nights that the war has brought upon the city of Berlin, when the sirens wail, the planes move over the city in ever denser swarms, the bombs fall, the high explosives howl as they detonate, and fires burst out all over.

Even on such nights, the prisoners must stay in their cells. The authorities don’t dare move them to bomb shelters in case they stage an uprising. They scream in their cells, they rage, they beg and plead, they go mad with fear, but the corridors are empty, no sentry stands there, no merciful hand unlocks the cell doors, the guards are all hunkered down in the air-raid shelters.

But Anna Quangel has no fear. Her little machine clatters and rattles, adding row after row of loops. She makes use of these hours when she can’t sleep anyway to knit. And as she knits, she dreams. She dreams of her reunion with Otto, and it is during one such dream that a bomb comes down and turns that part of the prison into ash and rubble.

Anna Quangel had no time to awaken from the dream of her reunion with Otto. She is already reunited with him. She is where he is. Wherever that may be.