Every Man Dies Alone (76 page)

Then she’s back in her cell, and the twine is a tangled bundle on the floor, and she paces back and forth, kicking it into the corners as on her very worst days. She has read the note, and understood. She knows that she and Otto now have a weapon, that they can throw away this wretched life at any moment, when it becomes too unendurable. She doesn’t have to let herself be tormented further; she can, if she wants, end it this minute, while there’s still a last bit of happiness in her from her visit.

She walks around, talks to herself, laughs, cries.

They are listening outside the door. They say, “She’s lost it now. Is the straitjacket ready?”

The woman inside doesn’t notice. She is fighting the hardest struggle of her life. She pictures old Judge Fromm standing in front of her, his expression terribly serious as he tells her to wait till the very last minute, and maybe she would get to see her husband one last time.

And she agrees with him. Of course that’s the right answer: she has to wait, be patient, it might take months yet. But even if it’s just weeks, it’s so hard to wait. She knows what she’s like. She will fall into despair again, cry for hours, be despondent. And they are all so rough with her, never a good word or a smile. The time will be hard to get through. She just needs to toy with it, with her tongue and her teeth, she doesn’t even have to mean it, just practice, and it will have happened. It’s so easy for her now—too easy!

That’s it. Sometime she will be weak and do it, and in the instant that she’s done it, the tiny instant between life and death, she will be sorry, more sorry than for anything in her life: by her weakness and her cowardice she will have robbed herself of the chance of maybe seeing Otto once more. He will be told the news of her death, and he will learn that she has stopped waiting for him, that she betrayed
him, that she was cowardly. And he will despise her—he, whose respect is the only thing that matters to her in the whole world.

No, she must destroy this awful glass vial right away. If she waits till tomorrow it might be too late—who knows what mood she’ll wake up in tomorrow?

But on the way to the bucket she stops.

And again she starts pacing. Suddenly she has remembered that she must die, and how she is to die. She learned in the course of her window conversations at night that it isn’t the gallows that await her but the guillotine. They described it to her, how she will be made fast to the table, face down, staring into a bucket half filled with sawdust, and a few seconds later her head will fall into the sawdust. They will bare her neck, and her neck will sense the chill of the blade even before it comes down. Then the roaring in her ears will get louder and louder, it will be like the sound of the last trump, and then her body will just be a quivering something, the neck spewing thick gouts of blood, while the head in the basket might still be looking at the bloody neck, still able to see, to feel, to hurt…

So they told her, and so she has pictured it many hundreds of times to herself, and sometimes she has dreamed of it too. And now she can free herself of all these terrors with a single bite on a glass tube! And she’s expected to give it up, give up this deliverance of her own accord! A choice between an easy and a horrible death—and she’s expected to choose the horrible death, just because she’s afraid of weakening and dying before Otto?

She shakes her head: no, she won’t weaken. She can manage to wait until the very last moment. She wants to see Otto again. She endured the fear that always seized her when Otto went delivering the postcards, she endured the shock of the arrest, she endured the torments of Inspector Laub, she got over Trudel’s death—she will be able to wait now, for a few weeks or months! She has endured everything—she will endure this as well! Of course she has to keep the poison safe till the last minute.

She paces back and forth, back and forth.

But her new resolve doesn’t ease her. Doubt begins all over again, and all over again she wrestles with it, and again she decides to destroy the poison right away, on the spot, and again she doesn’t do it.

In the meantime, evening has fallen, night. They’ve come and collected the unsorted string from her cell and told her that for her laziness she will have her mattress taken away for a week and be put on bread and water. But she hardly listens. What does she care what they say?

Her soup is on the table, untouched, and still she paces back and forth, dead tired now, unable to think straight, a prey to doubt:

Should I—shouldn’t I?

Now her tongue is playing with the vial in her mouth, without her even knowing, and without her wanting to, she rests her teeth on the glass gently, and cautiously, ever so gently bites down…

Hurriedly she pulls the vial out of her mouth. She paces and practices, she no longer knows what she’s doing—and outside the straitjacket is waiting…

Then suddenly, late at night, she discovers she’s lying on a cot, on bare boards, covered with the thin blanket. She is shaking with cold. Did she fall asleep? Is the vial still there? Did she swallow it? It’s not in her mouth anymore!

She sits up in panic—and smiles. There it is—it’s in her hand. She had it in the hollow of her hand while she was asleep. She smiles, rescued once more. She won’t have to die that other, terrible death…

And while she sits there shivering, she thinks that from now on she will have to fight this terrible battle on every day that dawns, the battle between will and weakness, courage and cowardice. And how uncertain the outcome is…

And through doubt and despair, she hears a gentle, kindly voice: Don’t be afraid, child, there’s nothing to be afraid of…

Suddenly Anna Quangel knows: Now my mind is made up! Now I have the strength!

She creeps to the door and listens for sounds in the corridor. The step of the warder is coming nearer. She stands by the facing wall, and then, when she notices she is being observed through the peephole, she starts pacing back and forth slowly. Don’t be afraid, child…

Only when she is completely sure the warder has passed does she climb up to the window. A voice asks, “Is that you, seventy-six? Did you have a visitor today?”

She doesn’t answer. She won’t answer again, ever. With one hand she clings to the dead light while she sticks the other one out, with the little vial in her fingers. She scrapes it against the stone wall and feels its thin neck snap. She lets the poison fall into the depths of the yard.

When she is back in her cell, she can smell it on her fingers, the bitter-almond smell. She washes her hands and lies down on her bed. She is deathly tired, and she has the feeling she has escaped a grave danger. She falls asleep immediately. She sleeps deeply and dreamlessly and wakes up refreshed.

From that night forth, #76 gave no more cause for complaint. She was quiet, cheerful, industrious, friendly.

She hardly gave any more thought to her horrible death. All she thought about was that she must do honor and credit to Otto. And sometimes, in her dark hours, she heard the voice of old Judge Fromm again: Don’t be afraid, child, there’s nothing to be afraid of.

She wasn’t. Not ever again.

She had got over it.

Chapter 69

IT’S TIME, QUANGEL

It’s still night when a guard unlocks the door to Otto Quangel’s cell.

Quangel, awakened from deep sleep, blinks his eyes at the large black-clad figure that has entered his cell. The next moment, he is wide awake, and his heart is beating faster than usual, because he has grasped what this large figure, standing there silently in the doorway, means for him.

“Is it time, Reverend?” he asks, reaching for his clothes.

“It’s time, Quangel!” replies the minister. And he asks, “Are you ready?”

“I’m always ready,” replies Quangel, and his tongue bumps against the little vial in his mouth.

He begins to get dressed, quietly, without fluster.

For a moment the two of them look at each other silently. The minister is a raw-boned young man, with a simple, even slightly foolish face.

Not too much going on there, thinks Quangel. Not like the good chaplain.

The chaplain in turn sees before him a tall man, exhausted from a lifetime of work. He takes against the face with its sharp, birdlike profile, he takes against the expression of the dark, strangely beady eyes, he takes against the narrow bloodless mouth with the pinched
lips. But the reverend makes an effort, and inquires with as much compassion as he can, “I hope you have made your peace with the world, Herr Quangel?”

“Has this world made peace, reverend?” replies Quangel.

“Unfortunately not yet, Quangel, not yet,” replies the reverend, and his face tries to express a sorrow that he doesn’t feel. He skips that point and moves on: “But have you made your peace with the Almighty, Quangel?”

“I don’t believe in any Almighty,” replies Quangel truculently.

“What?”

The reverend appears almost shocked by the brusque declaration. “Well,” he continues, “if you don’t believe in a personal god, you will at least be a pantheist, won’t you, Quangel?”

“What’s that?”

“Well, it’s quite simple…” The chaplain tries to explain something that he himself doesn’t find simple. “It’s the world soul, you know? Your own immortal soul will return to the great world soul,

Quangel!”

“Everything is God?” asks Quangel. He has finished dressing, and is standing in front of his bed. “Is Hitler God? Is all the killing out there God? Are you God? Am I?”

“You misunderstand me, presumably on purpose,” the minister replies irritably. “But I’m not here to discuss doctrinal questions with you, Quangel. I’ve come to prepare you for death. You must die, Quangel, in a few hours. Are you ready?”

Instead of answering, Quangel asks, “Did you know Father Lorenz in the remand prison?”

The minister, rattled again, answers irritably, “No, but I’ve heard of him. I may say the Lord summoned him at the right time. He has done some disservice to our calling.”

Quangel looked alertly at the clergyman. He said, “He was a very good man. A lot of prisoners remember him with gratitude.”

“Yes,” cried the minister with unfeigned annoyance. “Because he did your bidding! He was a weak man, Quangel. The man of God must be a fighter during these times of war, not a flabby compromiser!” He recovered himself. Quickly he looked at his watch and said, “I only have another eight minutes with you, Quangel. I still have to see some of your companions in travail, to provide spiritual solace to others who, like you, will take their last walk today. Now let us pray…”

The priest, that rough, raw-boned peasant, pulled a white cloth from his pocket and spread it carefully on the ground.

Quangel asked, “Do you provide solace to the women who are to be executed as well?”

His mockery was so obscure that the minister failed to register it. He spread out his snow-white cloth and answered rather distantly, “No executions of women are scheduled for today.”

“Can you remember,” Quangel persisted, “if you’ve visited one Frau Anna Quangel?”

“Frau Anna Quangel? Your wife, I take it? No. I haven’t. I would remember if I had. I have an exceptional memory for names…”

“Can I ask you a favor, Father…”

“Well, out with it, Quangel! You know my time’s limited!”

“I would ask you not to tell my wife that I’ve been executed before her, when her time comes. Please tell her we’ll be dying at the same time.”

“But that would be a lie, Quangel, and as a man of God I cannot violate His eighth commandment.”

“So you never lie, reverend? Have you never lied in your life?”

“I would hope,” said the minister, a little confused by the mocking scrutiny of the other, “I would hope I’ve always done my utmost to keep God’s commandments.”

“So God’s commandments call upon you to deny my wife the comfort of believing that she is dying at the same hour as me?”

“I may not bear false witness to my neighbor, Quangel!”

“That’s really too bad! You’re not the good shepherd, are you?”

“What?” exclaimed the clergyman, half confused, half threatening.

“Father Lorenz was always known as the good shepherd,” Quangel explained.

“No, no, no,” cried the minister angrily, “I have no desire for any honorifics from the likes of you! They would have the opposite meaning, so far as I am concerned!” He calmed down. With a smack he dropped to his knees right on the white handkerchief. He pointed to a spot on the grimy floor next to him (the cloth was only large enough for him). “Kneel down with me, Quangel, and let us pray!”

“Who do I kneel down to?” Quangel asked coldly. “Who do I

pray to?”

“Oh!” the minister exclaimed petulantly, “don’t start that again! I’ve wasted too much time on you already!” From his kneeling position, he looked up at the man with the angry, beaky face. He muttered, “Never mind, I’ll do my duty. I’ll pray for you!”

He lowered his head, folded his hands, and shut his eyes. Then he thrust his head forward, opened his eyes wide, and suddenly shouted
so loud that Quangel jumped, “O my Lord and Christ! All-powerful, all-knowing, beneficent and just God, Judge of good and evil! A sinner lies before you in the dust, I beg you to turn your eyes in mercy upon this man who has committed many misdeeds, to freshen him in body and soul and to forgive him all his sins in your grace…”