Every Man Dies Alone (6 page)

Well, the war should never have come about; if the Führer really was all he was cracked up to be, then it should have been avoided. Danzig and that little corridor outside it made a reason to put millions of people in daily fear of their lives—that really wasn’t so very statesmanlike!

But then they claimed he was illegitimate or all but. That he’d never had a mother to look after him properly. And so he didn’t understand how mothers felt in the course of this never-ending fear. After each letter from the front you felt better for a day or two, then you counted back how many days had passed since it was sent, and then your fear began again.

She has let the stocking fall from her grip, and has been sitting in a dream. Now she stands up quite mechanically, moves the soup from the stronger hotplate to the weaker one, and puts the potatoes on the better one. While she is doing that, the bell rings. She stands there, frozen. Enno! she thinks, Enno!

She puts the saucepan down and creeps silently in her felt slippers to the door. Her heart calms down: at the door, a little to the side so that she can be seen more easily, stands her neighbor, Frau Gesch. Surely she’s come to borrow something again, a little fat or flour, that she always forgets to return later. But Eva Kluge nevertheless remains suspicious. She tries to scan the landing as far as the peephole will allow, and she listens for every sound. But everything is as it should be: there is only Frau Gesch occasionally scraping her feet in impatience or looking into the peephole.

Frau Kluge makes up her mind. She opens the door, though only as wide as the chain will permit, and she asks, “What can I do for you, Frau Gesch?”

Straightaway, Frau Gesch, a wizened old woman worked half to death, whose daughters are living very nicely thank you off their mother, launches into a flood of complaints about the unending
washing, always having to be doing things for other people, and never getting enough to eat, and Emmi and Lilli doing nothing at all. After supper they just walk out of the house and leave their mother with the washing-up. “Yes, and Frau Kluge, what I came for, I think I’ve got a boil on my back. We only have the one mirror, and my eyes are bad. I wonder if you’d have a look at it for me—you can’t go to the doctor for something like that, and when do I have time to go to a doctor? You might pop it for me too, if you wouldn’t mind, though I know some people just are squeamish about that sort of thing…”

While Frau Gesch goes on and on with her lamentations, Eva Kluge quite mechanically undoes the chain, and the woman comes into her kitchen. Eva Kluge is about to shut the door, but a foot has slid in the way, and Enno Kluge is in her flat. His face is as expressionless as ever; a degree of excitement is betrayed by the trembling of his almost lashless eyelids.

Eva Kluge stands there with her arms hanging down, her knees shaking so hard she can barely stay on her feet. Frau Gesch’s speech has suddenly dried up, and she looks silently into their two faces. It’s perfectly still in the kitchen, only the saucepan goes on bubbling away gently.

Finally Frau Gesch says, “Well, Herr Kluge, I’ve done as you asked. But I tell you: this once and never again. And if you don’t keep your promise, and you start the laziness and the pub-crawling and the gambling again…” She breaks off after looking at Frau Kluge’s face, and says, “If I’ve done something stupid, then I’ll help you throw him out right away, Frau Kluge. The two of us together can do it easy!”

Eva Kluge gestures dismissively. “Ah, never mind, Frau Gesch, it’s all right!”

Slowly and cautiously she goes over to the cane chair and slumps into it. She keeps picking up the darning and looking at it vaguely, as if she didn’t know what it was.

Frau Gesch says, a little offended, “Well then, good evening or Heil Hitler, whichever you prefer!”

Hurriedly Enno Kluge says, “Heil Hitler!”

And slowly, as though waking from a dream, Eva Kluge responds, “Goodnight, Frau Gesch.” She pauses. “And if you’ve got something with your back…”

“No, no,” Frau Gesch says hastily, from the doorway. “There’s nothing the matter with my back, it was just something I said. But this is the last time I’m getting mixed up in other people’s affairs. I get no thanks from anyone.”

With that she has talked her way out of the apartment; she’s pleased to be away from the two silent figures—her conscience is pricking her somewhat.

No sooner is the door shut behind her than the little man springs into action. With an air of routine and entitlement, he opens the closet, frees up a coat hanger by bunching two of his wife’s dresses together on one, and hangs up his coat. He drops his cap on top of the dresser. He is always very particular about his things, he can’t stand being badly dressed, and he knows he can’t afford to buy himself anything new.

Now he rubs his hands together with a genial “Ah!” and goes over to the gas and sniffs at the saucepans. “Mhm!” he says. “Boiled beef with potatoes—lovely!”

He stops for a moment. The woman is sitting there motionless, with her back to him. He quietly puts the lid back on the pot and goes to stand over her, so that he is talking to the back of her head: “Oh, don’t just sit there like a statue, Evie. What’s the matter? So you’ve got a man in your flat for a few days again, I’m not going to make any trouble. And I’ll keep my promise to you as well. I won’t have any of your potatoes—or just the leftovers, if there are any. And only those if you freely offer them to me. I’m not going to ask you for anything.”

The woman says nothing. She puts the basket with the darning back into the dresser, sets a bowl out on the table, fills it from the two pans, and slowly starts to eat. The man has sat down at the other end of the table, pulls a few sports gazettes out of his pocket, and makes notes in a thick, greasy notebook. From time to time he casts a swift glance at the woman eating. She is eating very slowly, but he is sure she has refilled her bowl a couple of times, so there won’t be very much left for him, and he is ravenous. He hasn’t eaten anything all day, no, not since the night before. Lotte’s husband, returning on furlough from the field, drove him out of their bed with blows and without the least regard for his breakfast.

But he doesn’t dare to talk about his hunger to Eva: her silence frightens him. Before he can feel properly at home again here, several things need to happen. He doesn’t have the least doubt that they will, any woman can be talked round, you just need to be persistent and take a lot of nonsense from her first. Eventually, usually quite suddenly, she will cave in, because she’s had enough of resisting.

Eva Kluge scrapes both saucepans clean. She’s done it, she’s eaten the food for two days in one single evening, so now he can’t beg her
for any leftovers! Then she quickly does the little bit of washing up, and embarks on a wholesale removal. Before his very eyes, she moves everything of the least value to her into the bedroom. The bedroom door has a lock; he’s never yet managed to get into the bedroom. She lugs the provisions, her good coats and dresses, her shoes, the sofa cushions, yes, even the photo of their two sons into the bedroom—all before his watching eyes. She doesn’t care what he thinks or says. He tricked his way into the flat, he’s not to profit from it.

Then she locks the bedroom door and puts the writing things out on the table. She’s dog-tired, she would much rather go to bed, but she’s decided she’s going to write Karlemann a letter, and so she does. It’s not just her husband she can be tough with, she’s tough on herself as well.

She has written a couple of sentences when the man leans across the table and asks, “Who’s that you’re writing to, Evie?”

In spite of herself, she gives him an answer, even though she’d intended not to speak to him. “It’s to Karlemann…”

“I see,” he says, and puts his sports papers away. “I see. So you write to him, and for all I know you send him food parcels, but for his father you don’t even have a potato and a scrap of meat to spare, hungry as he is!”

His voice has lost a little of its indifference; it sounds as though the man is seriously offended because she has something for the son that she refuses to the father.

“Forget it, Enno,” she says calmly. “It’s my business. Karlemann’s not a bad lad…”

“I see!” he says. “I see! Then you’ve obviously forgotten the way he was to his parents when he became a pack leader. How everything you did was wrong in his eyes, and he laughed at us as a stupid old bourgeois couple—you’ve forgotten all that, have you, Evie? A good lad is he, Karlemann!”

“He never laughed at me!” she feebly protests.

“No, no, of course not!” he jeers. “And you’ve forgotten the time he didn’t recognize his own mother as she was lugging her heavy mailbag down Prenzlauer Allee. Him and his girlfriend just looked the other way, what a charming piece of work!”

“You can’t hold something like that against a boy,” she says. “They all want to look good in front of their girls, that’s the way they are. In time, he’ll change, and he’ll be back for his mother who nursed him from a baby.”

For an instant he looks at her hesitantly, as if he had something he wasn’t sure whether to tell her or not. He’s not a vindictive man
usually, but this time she’s offended him too badly, first by not giving him anything to eat, and secondly by carting all the valuables into the other room. Finally he says, “Well, if it was me that was his mother, I wouldn’t ever want to take my son in my arms again, not after he’s turned into such a thoroughgoing bastard!” He sees her eyes grow wide with fear, and he says pitilessly right into her waxen face, “On his last furlough he showed me a photograph that a comrade took of him. He was proud of it. There’s your Karlemann, and he’s holding a little Jewish boy of about three, holding him by the leg, and he’s about to smash his head against the bumper of a car.”

“No!” she screams, “No! You’re lying, you’re making it up! It’s your revenge because you didn’t get anything to eat. Karlemann wouldn’t do anything like that!”

“How could I have made it up?” he asks, calm again after dropping his bombshell. “I don’t have the imagination to make up something like that. And if you don’t believe me, you can go to Senftenberg’s pub, which is where he showed the photo round to anyone who cared to see it. Senftenberg and his old woman, they saw the picture themselves…”

He stops talking. He’s wasting his breath talking to this woman. She sits there with her head slumped on the table, crying. That’s what she gets, and her a postwoman and therefore a member of the Party, who’s taken an oath to support the Führer and his deeds. She can’t be too surprised at the way Karlemann’s turned out.

For a moment, Enno Kluge stands eyeing the sofa doubtfully—no cushions, no blanket. This isn’t going to be a comfortable night! But perhaps it’s the moment to take a chance? He hesitates, looks at the locked bedroom door, and then he acts. He reaches into the woman’s apron pocket as she sits there crying hysterically, and pulls out the key. He unlocks the door and starts rummaging about in the room, not even quietly…

And Eva Kluge, the exhausted, downtrodden postwoman, hears it all too; she knows he’s robbing her, but she doesn’t care. What’s the point of her life, why has she had children, taken pleasure in their smiling and playing, when in the end they just become monsters? Oh, Karlemann, what a sweet blond boy he was! She remembers how she took him to the Busch Circus, and the horses were made to lie down in the sand, and he felt so sorry for the poor hossies—were they ill? She had to comfort him, promise him the hossies were only sleeping.

And now he is going around doing things like that to the children of other mothers! Eva Kluge doesn’t doubt for a second that the story about the photograph is true: Enno really isn’t capable of inventing
such things. No, it seems she has now lost her son as well. It’s much worse than if he had merely died, because then at least she could mourn him. Now she can’t take him in her arms again, and she must keep her doors closed against him too.

The man rummaging around in the bedroom has found the thing he has long suspected was in his wife’s possession: a post office savings book. Six hundred and thirty-two marks in it, thrifty woman, but why so thrifty? One day she’ll get her pension, and with her other savings… He’ll start tomorrow by putting twenty on Adebar, and maybe another ten on Hamilcar… He flicks through the book: not just a thrifty woman, an admirably tidy one. Everything in its place—at the back of the book is the card, and there are the credit slips…

He is about to put the savings book in his pocket when the woman shows up. She takes it out of his hand and drops it on the bed. “Out!” she says. “Get out!”

And he, who a moment ago thought he had victory in his sights, now leaves the room under her furious glare. Silently and with hands shaking, he gets his cap and coat out of the wardrobe, and without a word he slips past her into the unlit stairwell. The door is drawn shut, and he switches on the stair lights and climbs down the stairs. Thank God someone has left the street door unlocked. He will go to his local; if push comes to shove, the landlord will let him bed down on the settee. He trudges off, reconciled to his fate, used to receiving blows. Already he’s half forgotten the woman upstairs.

She, meanwhile, is standing by the window staring out into the night. Fine. Awful. Karlemann gone, too. She’ll make one last attempt with her younger son, with Max. Max was always the colorless one, more like his father than his dazzling brother. Perhaps she can win Max over. And if not, then never mind, she’ll live by and for herself. But she will keep her self-respect. Then that will have been her attainment in life, keeping her self-respect. Tomorrow morning she will try to find out how to go about leaving the Party without getting stuck in a concentration camp. It will be difficult, but maybe she’ll manage it. And if there’s no other way of doing it, then she’ll go to the concentration camp. That would be a bit of atonement for what Karlemann has done.

She crumples up the tear-stained beginning of the letter to her older boy. She spreads out a fresh sheet of paper, and writes:

“Max, my dear son, it’s time I wrote you a little letter again. I’m still doing all right, as I hope you are, too. Father was here a moment ago, but I showed him the door—all he wanted was to rob me. I am also breaking off relations with your brother Karl, because of atrocities he has committed. Now you are my only son. I beg you, please keep your self-respect. I will do all I can for you. Please drop me a line or two yourself, if you have a chance. Kisses, from your loving Mother.”