A Stranger in My Own Country (27 page)

Next morning he asked me to come and see him again, and told me – all affability now – that he intended to ask the tax office for an expert opinion on the point at issue. Whether he really did, or whether his much cleverer, but also much more dangerous wife came to the aid of his feeble understanding overnight, I don't know. In any event, I never heard another word about this whole tax business. But he never forgave me this defeat and quite a few others besides, as I would learn to
my cost in due course. Even so, he was determined to make an example of a few people in this lukewarm neck of the woods, so that everyone would feel a little bit afraid and more ready to submit to his rule. I was first on his list. We already knew that he and his wife were in the habit of trying to glean from our young housemaids, the women who worked in the garden and other workers, what went on in our house and what we talked about. In general I was very lucky in this regard: apart from two exceptions, nobody from our house blabbed in all those years. And there would have been plenty to report; within my own four walls I frequently gave free rein to my loose and impious tongue. . . . But as luck would have it we had just had to fire an older lady who worked for us as a housekeeper, who not only had a son in the SS, but had also – and this was the high point of her life – embroidered a large tablecloth for the Führer himself! She had delivered it in person, and refused to budge until she had placed this work of art, decorated with blue cornflowers and golden ears of wheat, into the hands of the great man himself, and had shaken him by the hand! Following her stormy dismissal without notice, this creature, who certainly wasn't a perfect fit with the kind of home life we led, had spent long hours sitting with our mayor Stork and relating the table talk of the Falladas. The usual reports had then been drawn up and forwarded. Unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately – neither the Gestapo nor the district council leader's office used them to start proceedings against me, because they contained claims so ludicrous that not even an anti-Nazi writer could be supposed capable of such absurdities. Our effusive embroiderer of tablecloths, it seems, had shown herself to be even more stupid than the mayor, and she had got all my little stories mixed up. When she claimed, for example, that I had said that 65 men decorated with the Blood Order
¹⁵⁵
had been shot at the time of the Röhm Putsch in our little town (1300 residents), this was such arrant nonsense that not even a moron could possibly have believed it. There was not a single holder of the Blood Order living in the entire place, and there certainly hadn't been any shootings during the Röhm Putsch. So nothing came of it this time round; they were saving me up for later. But schoolmaster Stork called in his brother,
also a Nazi, also a member of the SA, and also a ‘March Martyr', and the two of them now went around in plain clothes, the
provocateur
and his witness, looking for someone to make an example of. They began by visiting the pharmacist in our little town, a man of nearly seventy, who had once belonged to the Stahlhelm, who had strong nationalist sentiments and up until the Nazi seizure of power had been the king of the little town. They greeted him with a ‘Heil Hitler!', and the old pharmacist responded with ‘Good day to you'. Our schoolmaster Stork asked him whether he ever said ‘Heil Hitler', and the pharmacist, who had never once allowed the hated greeting to pass his lips, replied genially that of course he would greet people with H.H. the moment this form of greeting was prescribed by law. And was there anything else he could do for the gentlemen? Having been suitably dismissed with a flea in their ear by this old bruiser, they now trotted off two doors down to the town's chemist. This chemist, who was likewise an elderly man in his sixties, was something of a sad case, despite the fact that he had succeeded in building up a flourishing business; at one time he had probably thought he was destined for something better than running a country store that typically sold everything from aniseed oil to Harz Mountain cheese, and from rolls of film to spades. The man was a quiet, respectable, educated man, courteous and well-mannered, but every six months or so the madness would come upon him, tormented thoughts of a wasted life, almost put behind him, now overwhelmed him again, and he took to the bottle. He drank for three or four days solid, then staggered home, slept it off, and was once again a respectable, dependable man of business for the next six months. During these bouts of heavy drinking he had the curious habit of quoting from
Faust
, which he knew by heart, reciting Part II with especial relish. The fact that the townspeople ridiculed this proclivity and showed not the slightest appreciation for
Faust
Part II merely confirmed him in his contempt and in his belief that his life had been wasted.

The two Storks who now entered his shop with the intention of tripping him up came upon him at an unfortunate time – unfortunate for the chemist. He'd just started to drink again, but hadn't yet reached
the
Faust
stage; he was just in an unusually chatty and affable mood. He greeted the two strangers warmly and could do nothing better than tell them the latest joke going the rounds about the Winter Relief Organization – a perfectly innocuous joke, as it happens. Whereupon the old man was sentenced to a prison term of one year, the two Storks having sworn that he was not the slightest bit drunk at the time. Despite the fact that the chemist was declared unfit to go to prison by a doctor on the grounds that he was severely diabetic, he had to serve out the whole sentence. He was never quite right after that, and crept around the town silent and withdrawn, distrusting everyone, but most of all himself.

But Stork the schoolmaster and mayor had made an example of somebody – striking terror into the hearts of the lukewarm! – and felt pleased with himself. But of course the idiot had failed to foresee one consequence of his misdeed, which was that he was ostracized by every decent member of the local community – and there were still plenty of those. Nobody wanted to have anything more to do with this
provocateur
and informer, who in the first flush of victory had even boasted of his deeds. Everyone gave him a wide berth, nobody wanted to be seen talking to someone like that. In the monthly teacher meetings he was shunned, his own colleagues wanted nothing more to do with him. This had the unfortunate consequence that he retreated even more into his role in Mahlendorf. Here he had the whip hand, here people were dependent on him, here there was no shortage, unfortunately, of toadies and gossip-mongers; there were always people who for one reason or another wanted to suck up to the mayor. His liverish disposition was accentuated by this defeat, which had initially looked like a victory. He put the blame on others, anyone who didn't belong to the Party was a dubious character and should be eliminated. He stepped up his activities, the number of reports he wrote increased. He was too stupid to see that this didn't make him any more popular with his superiors either. He was just making more work for them with all his reports, and in most cases nothing ever came of it, because it was all based on gossip and rumour. All the same, a man like him was worth
hanging on to – he had his uses. The Nazi Party and the government that emerged from it made a point of investigating every report from an informer, even the ones that were obviously motivated by spite or greed. Informers were useful people, perhaps not ideal candidates for preferment, but always serviceable. Stork couldn't grasp that. In himself he must have been weary of fighting these petty battles in a country backwater, and longed to bestride a bigger stage, which he hoped to obtain by denouncing more people.

By that time he had also tired of teaching. School was just a sideline for him, he wasn't interested in the children any more – he had ceased to be a good teacher a long time ago. His various official duties, the reports he was always writing, his trips to see the district council leader in the county town – these things took up most of his time. And then he had grown so used to hanging around on the village street, chatting and chinwagging, always on the lookout for some tit-bit, the worm he could use to bait his hook, that there was no room in his life for proper work any more.

His attitude to me and my family was very changeable. His position as mayor and the constant government regulations encroaching on people's private lives made it necessary to apply to him more and more frequently with questions, requests and petitions of one sort or another. Sometimes he was all smiles and affability, giving us everything we asked for, even things we thought likely to be refused. Another time he would brusquely turn down the most harmless request, only to agree to it three or four days later with an air of gracious beneficence. The truth is he was a coward. Like his eyes, which couldn't look directly at anyone, he was a cowardly, skulking, treacherous dog from the bottom of his soul. He never dared to attack openly, preferring to creep up and bite you from behind.

At the time I was having a minor dispute with a small farmer in the village, to whom our mayor lent his support. It was one of those longstanding country disputes that you just can't avoid in a small village, no matter how careful you are. One evening, just after we had moved to Mahlendorf, I came home from a walk to find a boy sitting in my plum
trees and eating plums, while the boy's horses were busy eating my grass. I shouted at the lad and pointed out that twenty metres away, on the other side of the little stone wall that formed the boundary between our properties, were his father's plum trees, from which he could help himself just as easily, and rather more honestly. To tell the truth I was less bothered by the theft of the plums – boys will be boys, after all – than I was by having my grass flattened by his horses. This was the start of a long-lasting feud between my family and that of the small farmer, and it was not just me that they cut dead, but all the members of my family and the people who worked for me too. Village feuds are as uncompromising as they are silly.

Well, we could handle it, and we didn't take it too much to heart. One day the feud would pass: giving a boy a ticking-off was hardly grounds for undying enmity.

It must have been about a year later when my mason came to me and asked where he could get some large stones to make a border for a vegetable patch. I directed him to the low fieldstone wall on the edge of my field, and some time later I heard there was a story going around the village, claiming that ‘Fallada has had a boundary stone removed!'

This is not a nice accusation, especially when it isn't true. And it must have been untrue, since to the best of my knowledge the boundary with my neighbour's property – that's the father of the plum-picking boy – was not marked with stones. That low wall marked the boundary, and according to the information given to me at the time of purchase, the whole of it stood on my land. But since the gossip wouldn't go away, and a boundary stone I had removed was rapidly becoming a boundary I had shifted in my favour, I went to the district council office and asked to have my boundary marked out with stones by the district surveyor. The big day arrived, the councillor turned up with his team of assistants and a stack of red-and-white poles and grey granite stones marked with an incised cross, while on the other side the small farmer – let's call him Mechthal – arrived under the protection of mayor Stork. There was a lot of whispering and cogitating between the two of them and the councillor, and it was all too apparent that the missing
boundary stone, which had never existed in the first place, featured in the discussion again. The councillor didn't seem unduly bothered by any of this as he set to work measuring and sighting, looking at old maps, telling his men where to put the poles – ‘More to the right!', ‘A touch more to the left!' – peering through strange-looking telescopes and finally saying: ‘The boundary stone goes here!'

We looked at each other, and I'm afraid I was mean enough to smile, because according to this survey not only the little wall belonged to me, but also . . . ‘Oh I see', said I, as my smile grew steadily broader, ‘so all the plum trees on your side of the wall also belong to me, Mr Mechthal – I had no idea.' But he wasn't smiling now, in fact he looked mightily peeved, and our good mayor had turned quite yellow, as yellow as a well-aged, overripe quince. I must confess that I didn't have the heart to enjoy my triumph to the full. In the event, although the plum trees on the far side of the wall did actually belong to me, I didn't make use of them – which didn't stop the opposing party helping themselves again every so often from the plum trees on my side of the wall. Now the other two fell to whispering among themselves, and then the mayor spoke up for the furious, but not very articulate Mechthal: ‘Look here, Fallada has put up a high fence around his house and garden, and he's sited the fence so close to the road that the farmers get hitched up on it with a full harvest load. Surely that's not allowed, Mr Councillor?' The councillor looked at me, I looked at him, and then I said: ‘Since we're doing the boundary stones, why don't we just carry on and mark out the whole property while we're at it? It'll cost a bit more, but we're not bothered about that, Mr Councillor.' So they set to work again, measuring and sighting and looking on the plans, and eventually the councillor said to my two adversaries: ‘You're out of luck, gentlemen. Mr Fallada would be within his rights to site his fence another metre and a half further out into the road, and then nobody would be able to get past at all with a horse and cart! Count your blessings, I say – it could be a lot worse!' So I had won a double victory, but it cost me dear over time, earning me the undying enmity of the mayor and farmer Mechthal, who became the village's ranking SA officer during
the war, and who now makes life uncomfortable for me and my family in every way he can. On the other hand, he and his family are at least speaking to us again; but I actually found their open hostility back then preferable to this bogus friendliness now, which seeks to do me harm wherever it can.