Every Man Dies Alone (68 page)

Trudel Hergesell, who was capable of hating as much as loving (and who, as she was being told about Jesus, was full of a violent hatred for Frau Hänsel standing not ten feet away), to begin with Trudel Hergesell had rejected such a doctrine. It struck her as too soft. It wasn’t Jesus Christ who appealed to her heart, but Father Friedrich Lorenz. When she beheld this man, of whose grave illness no one could remain unaware, when she saw him taking on her fears as if they were his own, never thinking about himself, when she saw his courage as he slipped her a note with a message about Karli, and when she heard him go on to speak to the two-faced Hänsel just as kindly as he did to her, even though he knew the woman was capable of denouncing him at any moment to the hangman, then she would feel something akin to happiness, and the profound peace that emanated from this man who could not hate but only love, and loved even the very worst people.

This new feeling did not bring with it any softening of Trudel Hergesell’s attitude toward the Hänsel woman, but perhaps she became a little more indifferent, a little less intent on her hatred.
Sometimes, in the course of pacing back and forth across the cell, she would suddenly stop in front of Frau Hänsel and ask her, “What makes you do it? Why do you snitch on everyone? Do you hope to get a lesser punishment?”

When addressed this way, Frau Hänsel would keep her evil yellow eyes locked on Trudel’s. Either she would not offer any reply or else she would say, “Do you think I didn’t notice you pressing your tits against the chaplain’s arm? I think it’s really low, to try to seduce a man who has only days to live! Just you wait, I’ll catch you at it one day! You won’t get away with it!”

What the chaplain and Trudel Hergesell weren’t supposed to get away with remained unclear. All Trudel would offer by way of reply to such accusations was a brief, mocking laugh, and then she would set off on her endless tramping back and forth in the cell, always occupied in her mind with Karli. There was no getting around the fact that news of him was getting steadily worse, however discreetly and gently the chaplain tried to convey it. If he said there was no news, that his condition was unchanged, that meant that Karli had not sent her a greeting, which could only mean that he was unconscious. Because the chaplain would not lie—Trudel had learned that—he would not pass on a greeting when he had not been instructed to do so. He scorned the cheap consolation that one day would be unmasked as a lie anyway.

But Trudel also learned from the questions of the examining magistrate that her husband was in a bad way. There was never any reference to any new testimony from him. She was expected to give information about everything, and she really didn’t know anything about the suitcase of Grigoleit’s that had plunged both of them into their doom. Though the methods of the magistrate were not as deceitful and downright brutal as those of Inspector Laub, he had just as much stamina. Trudel always returned to her cell exhausted and demoralized. Oh, Karli, Karli! Just to see him one more time, to sit by his bedside, to press his hand, silently, without a word!

There had been a time when she had supposed she didn’t love him and would never be able to love him. Now she was full of him, the air that she breathed was him, the bread she ate, the blanket that kept her warm, all him. And he was so near, a couple of corridors, a couple of flights of steps, a door—but in the whole world there was no one so merciful as to conduct her to him, even once! Not even the tubercular chaplain!

They were all afraid for their lives, with no one willing to risk making a serious effort to help her in her helplessness. Then suddenly
there swims into her memory the morgue in the Gestapo basement, the lanky SS man lighting his cigarette and saying, “Girl! Girl!” to her, her search among the corpses after she and Anna had undressed the dead Berta—and now that strikes her as a mild and merciful hour, when she was allowed to look for Karli. And since then? Her beating heart locked up between iron and stone! Alone!

The door is unlocked, much more slowly and respectfully than the way the warders do it, and there is even a soft knock: the chaplain.

“May I come in?” he asks.

“Please, please come in, Chaplain!” cries a tearful Trudel Hergesell.

Meanwhile Frau Hänsel glares and mutters, “What does he want this time?”

And then all at once Trudel rests her head against the bony, panting chest of the priest, her tears are flowing, she buries her head in his chest and implores him, “Chaplain, I’m so afraid! You must help me! I’ve got to see Karli, just once! I’m sure it’ll be the last time…”

And the harsh voice of Frau Hänsel: “I’ll report you! I’ll report you right now!” while the chaplain strokes her head gently, and says, “Yes, child, you shall see him once more!”

She is shaken by an ever stronger sobbing, and she knows Karli is dead, that she hadn’t looked for him in the morgue for nothing, that she had had a foreboding, a presentiment.

And she wails, “He’s dead! Oh, Father, he’s dead!”

And he answers, giving the only consolation he can to the condemned woman, “Child, his sufferings are over. It’s harder for you.”

She hears it. She tries to think about it, understand what it means, but the light dims, then everything goes dark before her eyes. Her head slumps forward.

“Will you give me a hand, Frau Hänsel!” the chaplain pleads. “I’m not strong enough to manage her on my own.”

And then it’s night outside, night meets night, darkness meets darkness.

Trudel, the widowed Frau Hergesell, has woken up, and she knows that she isn’t in her cell, and she knows too that Karli is dead. She can see him lying on his narrow cot in his cell, his face youthful and small and shrunken, and she thinks of the face of the child she was carrying, and the faces merge into one another, and she knows that she has lost everything there is to lose in this world, that she has lost husband and child, and that never will she love again, never will she conceive again, and all because she left a postcard on a windowsill for an old
man, and that this has annihilated her whole life and Karli’s with it, and there will never be sunshine and happiness and summer for her again, or flowers…

Flowers on my grave, flowers on your grave…

And with the intense pain she feels radiating out, chilling her like ice, she closes her eyes again and tries to return to night and oblivion. But night is outside, it remains there, it doesn’t enter her, but suddenly heat courses through her… She leaps up out of bed, she wants to run away from this ghastly pain. But a hand reaches for her…

It grows light, and once more it’s the chaplain who is sitting with her, holding her. Yes, it’s a different cell, it’s Karli’s cell, but they’ve already taken him away, and the man who was in here with Karli has gone as well.

“Where has he gone?” she asks breathlessly, as though she had just run here.

“I will say my prayers at his grave.”

“What good will your prayers do him? You should have prayed for his life, while there was still time!”

“He is at peace, child!”

“I can’t stay here!” says Trudel feverishly. “Please, let me return to my cell, Chaplain! I have a picture of him there, I have to see it right away. He looked so different.”

And as she says this she knows quite well that she is lying to the good chaplain, deliberately, to deceive him. She doesn’t own a picture of Karli, and she never wants to go back to the cell with Frau Hänsel again.

The thought rushes through her head: I’m out of my mind, but I must disguise myself well, so that he doesn’t know it… I just need to keep my madness hidden for five more minutes!

The chaplain leads her carefully on his arm out of the cell, down many corridors and flights of steps, back into the women’s prison, and from the passing cells she hears deep breathing—they are sleep-ing—and from others nervous pacing—they are fretting—and from still others the sound of crying—they are grieving, but no one has such grief as she does.

The chaplain is busy unlocking and then locking a door after her; she doesn’t take his arm again, and the two of them walk silently down the unlit passage with the dark solitary cells, where the drunken doctor has broken his word and not released the two sick prisoners after all, and then they are climbing many flights of steps to Block V, where Trudel’s cell is.

There on the top passage, a warder shuffles toward them, and she says, “It’s twenty to midnight, and you’re only returning Hergesell now? What kept you so long, Chaplain?”

“She was unconscious for many hours. Her husband has died, you know.”

“I see—and you took it upon yourself to comfort the young widow, is that right, Chaplain? Nice—nice! Frau Hänsel has told me you take every opportunity of throwing yourself at her. A nice comfort session at the dead of night is even better, though, eh? I must make a note of it in my log!”

But before the chaplain can get out a word of reproach for her foul insinuation, they both see that Trudel, the widowed Frau Hergesell, has clambered over the iron railing on the corridor. For a moment she stands there, gripping the railing with one hand, her back toward them.

And they call out, “Stop! No! Don’t do it!”

They dash toward her, hands reaching out to grasp her.

But Trudel Hergesell has already dived into the void. They hear a rush of fluttering air and then a thump.

And then everything is deathly silent, while the two of them, pale-faced, lean down over the rail and see nothing.

They take a step toward the stairs.

And in that instant all hell broke loose.

It was as though the prisoners had been able to see what had happened through their cell doors. First, there might have been a single scream, but it went from cell to cell and from block to block, from one side of the corridor to the other and across the central atrium.

And on its way, the scream was augmented by yelling, howling, shrilling, keening, raging.

“You murderers! You killed her! Why don’t you kill the lot of us, you butchers!”

And there were some who clung to their window bars and yelled it into the yard, so that the men’s wing awoke from its troubled sleep and likewise began to rage, scream, yell, wail, and despair.

It accused, it accused with one, two, three thousand voices: the beast screamed its accusation from one, two, three thousand muzzles.

The alarm sounded, and they drummed their fists against the iron doors, then battered the doors with their stools. Iron bedsteads were picked up and dropped. Tin plates were kicked around the floors, bucket lids banged, and the whole establishment, the whole of the gigantic prison, suddenly stank like a latrine many hundreds of times multiplied.

The riot squads got into their uniforms and reached for their rubber truncheons.

Cell doors were unlocked:
click click!

And the ripe smacking sound of rubber truncheons on skulls was heard, and the roar of fury rose, mixed with the scraping of fighting feet and the high bestial yells of epileptics and the enthusiastic yodel-ing of idiots and the shrill whistles of pimps…

Water was splashed in the faces of the attacking guards.

And in the morgue Karli Hergesell lay perfectly still, with a child’s small and gentle face.

The whole thing was a wild, gruesome symphony, performed in honor of Trudel, née Baumann, and then the widowed Frau Hergesell.

Meanwhile she herself lay on the ground, half on the linoleum and half on the dirty gray cement of Block I.

She lay perfectly still, her small gray girlish hand half open. Her lips were flecked with blood, and her sightless eyes looked at some unknown world.

Her ears, though, still seemed to hear the wild infernal noise swelling and diminishing, and her brow was creased, as though pondering whether this could be the peace that the good chaplain had promised her.

In consequence of this suicide, it was the prison chaplain, Friedrich Lorenz, who was suspended from duty, rather than the drunken doctor. Charges were laid against the priest. Because it was a crime and the abetting of a crime to enable a prisoner to put an end to his own life: only the state and its servants were supposed to have that prerogative.

If a detective pistol-whips a man so badly that his skull is fractured, and if a drunken doctor allows the injured man to die, both are an example of due process. Whereas if a priest fails to hinder a suicide, if he allows a prisoner to exercise his or her will—that will is supposed to have been taken away—then he has committed a crime and must be punished.

Unfortunately—rather like Frau Hergesell—Father Friedrich Lorenz cheated justice by dying of a hemorrhage just as he was about to be arrested. A suspicion had arisen that he had enjoyed immoral relations with some of those in his care. But he had found, to use his own word, peace, and he was spared much.

This was how it came about that until the trial Anna Quangel did not learn of the deaths of Trudel and Karl Hergesell, because the successor of the good chaplain was either too fearful or unwilling to pass messages among the prisoners. He confined himself to the cure of souls, in those instances where it was explicitly requested.

Chapter 60

THE TRIAL: A REUNION