Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf (29 page)

O. K., everything’s O. K.” Reinhold slaps him on the knee, the lad has a punch, gee whiz, that boy’s got some fist. Franz blusters: “Are we goin’ to get excited on account of a gal? That jane isn’t born yet, is she?”

Life in the desert is often very difficult. The camels search and search and find nothing, and one day we come upon their bleached bones.

The two taxis drive through the town without stopping, after Pums had gotten back in with a suitcase. It’s just about nine when they step on the Bulowplatz. And from now on they go on foot, separately, two by two. They cross under the arch of the city railway. Franz says: “Why, we’ll soon be at the market.” “Yes, here we are. But we gotta fetch the stuff first and then take it across.”

Suddenly the men in front have become invisible, they’re on KaiserWilhelm Strasse, right next to the city railway, and then Franz, too, disappears in a black hallway with his companion. “Here we are,” says the one next to Franz. “You can throw your cigar away now.” “What for?” The other presses his arm, jerks the cigar out of his mouth. “Because I’m tellin’ you, see.” He is off across the dark courtyard, before Franz can do anything. Didja see that? I’ll be damned, leave a fellow standing here in the dark, where’s the rest of ‘em anyway? And as Franz stumbles across the courtyard, there’s a gleam from a pocket flashlight in front of him, he’s blinded, it’s Pums. “Heh there, whatcha doing? You’re not supposed to be here, Biberkopf, you stand in front, you’re to watch out. Better go back.” “Gosh, I thought I was supposed to get something here.” “Back, go back, didn’t anybody tell you anything?”

The light goes out, Franz stumbles back. Something is trembling in him, he gulps: “What’s all this about anyhow, where are those guys?” He is back in front of the big door when two of them come from the rear – murder, thief, they’re pinching things, they’re breaking into this place, I want to get away, away from here, oh, for an ice pond, a sliding-board, and away we go on the shoot the chutes, over the water and back to Alexanderplatz - but they hold him back, Reinhold among them, he’s got an iron claw: “Didn’t they tell you nothin’? You stand here and keep an eye out if there’s any trouble.” “Who? Who says that?” “Listen now, no nonsense, we’re up against it. Ain’t you got any backbone? Don’t try to put on airs. You stand here and whistle if anything is up.” “Me ...” “Hold yer trap, you hear me.” A blow crashes down on Franz’s right arm with such force that he shrinks back.

Franz is standing alone in the dark hallway. He is trembling all over. What am I standing here for anyway? They’ve put one over on me, all right. That dirty dog beat me. They’re swiping something back there, who knows what they’re swiping, why, they’re no fruit dealers, they’re just plain burglars. The long road of black trees, the iron gate, after closing time all the prisoners shall go to bed, in summer they are permitted to stay up till dark. That’s a gang of burglars with Pums as their leader. Shall I go away, or shall I not? Shall 1, what’ll I do anyway? They lured me here, the crooks. They put me here as a lookout.

Franz stood there, trembling and nursing his bruised arm. Prisoners are not to conceal diseases, nor shall they malinger; both offenses are punishable. Deathly silence in the house; from the Bülowplatz comes a tooting of automobile horns. Back in the courtyard there is a sound of cracking and bustling, occasionally the gleam of a flashlight, sh… sh… One of them has gone down in the cellar with a bull’s-eye lantern. They’ve locked me up in here, I’d rather have dry bread and boiled potatoes than stand here for such crooks. Several pocket-lamps flashed in the courtyard, Franz remembered the man with the post-card, a funny chap, really a funny chap. And he couldn’t move from the spot, felt glued to the ground; since Reinhold had hit him, that’s when it started, he’s been stuck here ever since. He wants to, would have liked to, but it didn’t work, it wouldn’t let him go. The world is made of iron, you can’t do anything about it, it comes rushing up at you like a steamroller, nothing to be done about it, there it comes, it rushes on, there they sit on the inside, that’s a tank, inside a devil with horns and flaming eyes, they tear your flesh to pieces. And it rushes on and nobody can escape. Now it twitches in the dark; when light comes, we’ll be able to see it all, how it lies there, what it was like.

I’d like to get away from here, I’d like to get away, those crooks, the dirty hounds, I don’t want anything like that. He tugged at his legs, now wouldn’t that be a joke, if I couldn’t get away. He tried to move. Just as if somebody’d thrown me into a lot o’ dough and I couldn’t get out of the stuff. But it began to work, it was working. It was working with difficulty, but working nevertheless. I’ll get out o’ here, somehow, let ‘em go ahead and swipe that stuff. I’m goin’ to make myself scarce. He took off his overcoat and went back to the courtyard, slowly and anxiously. He would have liked to throw the overcoat into their faces, instead of which, be threw it into the darkness behind the house. The light flashed again, two men ran past him laden with overcoats, whole bundles of them. Meanwhile the two autos had stopped in front of the gateway; in passing him one of the men struck Franz on the arm, it was an iron blow. “Everything all right there?” It was Reinhold. Now two more men came rushing past him with baskets, and then two back and forth without a light, past Franz, who could do nothing but gnash his teeth and clench his fists. They toiled and labored away like savages in the courtyard and across the hallway, back and forth, in the darkness; otherwise they might well have been frightened by Franz. For it was no longer Franz who was standing there. Without his overcoat and cap, his eyes bulging out, his hands in his pockets, lying in wait to see if he could recognize a face, who’s that, who’s that, anyway, no knife at hand, just you wait, maybe in my coat, well, m’laddies, y’don’t know Franz Biberkopf, you’ll find out a thing or two when you grab that boy. Then all four started to run out laden with bundles, one after the other, and a small tubby fellow took Franz by the arm. “Come on, Biberkopf, we’re off, everything’s O. K.”

And so Franz is stowed away between the others in a big car. Reinhold sits next to him, pressing Franz closely beside him, that’s the other Reinhold. They travel without any lights on the inside. “Whatcha pushing me for?” whispers Franz; there ain’t any knife around here.

“Hold yer trap, feller; not a peep out of anybody!” The first automobile is racing along; the chauffeur of the second looks back to the right, steps on the gas, and shouts back through the open window: “Somebody’s after us.”

Reinhold sticks his head out of the window: “Cheese it, get around the corner!” The other car is still after them. Reinhold sees Franz’s face in the light of a street-lamp; Franz is beaming, his face is happy. “Watcha laughin’ at, you monkey, what’s the matter, you crazy or somethin’?” “Can’t I laugh; none of your business.” “If you laugh?” The lazy hound, the good-for-nothing bum! Suddenly something flashes over Reinhold, something he hadn’t thought of during the whole ride: that’s that fellow Biberkopf, who left him in the lurch, who gets his janes to leave him, he’s got the goods on him, the fresh, fat sucker and I told him something about myself once, yep. And by this time Reinhold has forgotten about the ride.

Water in the black forest, you lie so mute. In terrible repose you lie. Your surface does not move, when there is a storm in the forest, and the firs begin to bend, and the spider-webs are torn between the branches, and there is a sound of splitting. The storm does not penetrate you.

This chap, thinks Reinhold, is sitting in clover, maybe he thinks that car back there is going to catch up with us, and here I sit, and him lecturing me, the jackass, about women, and how I should control myself.

Franz keeps laughing to himself, he looks backward through the little window to the street, yep, the car’s after them all right, the jig’s up, wait, that’s your punishment, and even if I do get it in the neck along with the rest of you, they mustn’t make a fool of me, those crooks, those scoundrels, that gang of criminals.

Cursed be the man, saith Jeremiah, that trusteth in man; he shall inherit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land, and not inhabited. The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked: who can know it?

At that moment Reinhold gives a secret signal to the man opposite him, darkness and light alternate in the car, there’s a hunt on. Unperceived, Reinhold has slipped his hand to the latch on the door, just beside Franz.

They are racing into a wide thoroughfare. Franz is still looking back. All of a sudden someone grabs him by the chest and wrenches him forward. He tries to get up, strikes Reinhold in the face; but the latter is terribly strong. The wind roars into the car, snow comes flying in. Franz is thrust right across the bundles, against the open door; with a yell, he grabs Reinhold around the neck. At that moment someone at his side strikes his arm with a stick. The second man in the car gives him a jerk and a whack on his left thigh, and. as he rolls down off the bundles of clothing, Franz is poked through the open door; he tries to catch hold with his legs wherever he can. His arms cling to the running-board.

Then a stick comes crashing down on the back of his head. Crouching over him, Reinhold throws his body out into the street. The door slams to. The pursuing car races over the man. Hunters and hunted vanish into the blizzard.

Let us be happy when the sun rises and its beautiful light is here. Gas light may go out, electric light, too. People get up when the alarm clock rattles, a new day has begun. If it was April 8th yesterday, it is the 9th today, if it was Sunday, it is now Monday. The year has not changed, nor the month, but a change has occurred nevertheless. The world has rolled ahead. The sun has risen. It is not certain what this sun is. Astronomers concern themselves a great deal with this body. According to them, it is the central body of our planetary system; for our earth is only a small planet, and what. indeed, are we? When the sun rises like that and we are glad, we should really be sad, for what are we, anyway; the sun is 300,000 times greater than the earth; and what a host of numbers and zeros there still are, and all they have to say is this: We are but a zero, nothing at all, just nothing. Simply ridiculous, isn’t it, to be happy over that.

And yet, we are glad when the beautiful light is here, white and strong, and when it comes into the streets; and in the rooms all the colors awaken, and faces are there, human features. It is agreeable to touch shapes with one’s hands, but it is a joy to see, to see, to see, to see colors and lines. And we are glad, now we can show what we are, we act, we live. We are also glad in April for that bit of warmth, how glad the flowers are that they can grow! Surely that must be an error, a mistake, those terrible numbers with all the zeros!

Just rise, sun, you don’t frighten us. We don’t care about your many miles, your diameter, your volume. Warm sun, just rise, bright light, arise. You are not big, you are not small, you are just happiness.

*

At this moment she has just stepped, beaming, out of the Paris-Nord Express, that insignificant-looking little person in the fur-trimmed coat with her huge eyes, and her little Pekingese dogs, Black and China, in her arms. Photographers, noise of a cranking film. Softly smiling, Raquel endures it all, patiently, pleased most of all by a bouquet of yellow roses sent by the Spanish colony; for ivory is her favorite color. With the words: “I am crazy to see Berlin,” the famous woman gets into her car and glides away from the fluttering handkerchiefs of Berlin’s morning crowd.

SIXTH BOOK

Now you see Franz Biberkopf neither boozing nor hiding away. You see him laughing now: we must make the best of things each day. He’s in a rage because they had coerced him, they’ll never coerce him again, not even the strongest of men. He clenches his fist in the face of this sinister power of woe, something’s against him without a doubt, tho’ he can’t Quite make it out, but it’s bound to come about, he must suffer the hammer’s blow.

There is no reason to despair. As I continue telling this story on to its hard, cruel and bitler end, I shall quite often use these words: there is no reason to despair; for the man whose life I am reporting is, to be sure, no ordinary man; he is an ordinary man only in the sense that we can clearly understand him and sometimes say: step by step, we might have gone the same way, experienced the very things he experienced. I have promised, unusual though it be, not to keep quiet about this story.

It is the ghastly truth, this thing I have reported, how Franz Biberkopf left his home suspecting nothing, participated against his will in a burglary, and was thrown in front of an auto. He is lying beneath the wheels: he had doubtless made the most honest efforts to go his orderly, decent, and legitimate way. But isn’t this enough to justify despair, what sense can we find in this impudent, loathsome, miserable nonsense, what lying sense can be injected into it so as to construct therewith perhaps some sort of destiny for Franz Biberkopf?

I say: there is no reason to despair. I know something, perhaps many others who read this already discern something. A slow revelation is here in progress, you will experience it as Franz experienced it, and then everything will become clear.

Ill-gotten Gain thrives

Since Reinhold was in such fine form, he just went on with it. He didn’t come home till Monday noon. Let us, dear brothers and sisters, cast a veil of brotherly love, ten yards square, over the intervening time. Over the preceding time we could not do it, much to our regret. Suffice it to establish the fact that after the sun had punctually risen on Monday morning and after there had gradually started the well-known rumble-bumble of Berlin-at exactly one hour after noon, in other words at 1 p. m. sharp, Reinhold kicked Trude, who was overdue, sedentary, and did not want to leave, out of his room. Oh, how I love the week-end, darling, truly, rooly, roo, when the he-goat’s after the nanny-goat. darling, truly, rooly, roo. Another story-teller would probably have thought now of inflicting some punishment on Reinhold, but I can’t help it, it didn’t happen. Reinhold was in a gay mood, and, to magnify his gayety, for the purpose of his increasing gayety, he kicked Trude, who was of a sedentary nature and did not want to leave, out of his room. As a matter of fact, he himself did not want to do it; but the deed occurred somewhat automatically, principally with the participation of his middle-brain; for he was strongly alcoholized. Thus even fate helped our man. The alcoholic saturation is one of the things we have left to the night before; we need only, in order to get along with the story, quickly collect a few loose ends. Reinhold, the weakling, who seemed ridiculous to Franz, and who could never say a hard or energetic word to a woman, managed, at 1 p. m., to give Trude a frightful beating, to tear her hair out and break a mirror over her head, he could do everything; and what’s more, when she yelled, he beat up her mouth into such a bleeding pulp that it was hugely swollen when she went to show it to the doctor in the evening. The girl lost all her beauty within a few hours, and all this as a consequence of these energetic measures on the part of Reinhold, whom she wished, therefore, to have arrested. For the moment, however, she had to put some salve on her lips and close her trap. All this, as I said, Reinhold was able to do because a couple of glasses of booze had narcotized his forebrain, whereupon his middle-brain got a free hand - it was on the whole more efficient, anyway.