by Hans Fallada
Inspector Zott inclined his head in agreement, and Obergruppenführer Prall walked out.
Chapter 45
INSPECTOR ESCHERICH IS FREE AGAIN
Inspector Escherich is back. The man who was written off as dead or good as dead has returned to life from the basements of the Gestapo. A little rumpled, a little in need of repair, but still, he is back at his desk, and his colleagues hasten to give him their sympathy. They had always gone on believing in him. They had been willing to do everything they could for him. “Only, you know, when the top brass drops someone in it, there’s nothing the likes of us can do about it. You just get your fingers burned. Well, you know all that anyway, Escherich, you understand.”
Escherich assures them he understands everything. He twists his mouth into a grin, but the grin looks a little sad, presumably because Escherich has not yet got the hang of grinning with a few teeth missing.
There were only two people who impressed him when he returned to work. One was Inspector Zott.
“Colleague Escherich,” he had said, “I am not being sent down to the basement in your place, even though I deserve it ten times more than you ever did. Not just because of the mistakes I made, but because I behaved like a bastard to you. My only excuse is that I did really believe you’d done bad work…”
“Don’t mention it,” Escherich had replied with his gap-toothed smile. “None of us have come out of the Hobgoblin case with reputations enhanced, not you, not me, none of us. It’s funny, but I’m quite excited to meet this man who has created such a lot of misfortune for his fellow men with these postcards. He must be a really odd bird…” He looked thoughtfully at the inspector.
Zott extended his parchment-colored hand. “Please don’t think too badly of me, Colleague Escherich,” he said quietly. “And one other thing: I’ve got the idea that the culprit is something to do with the streetcar service. You’ll find it written up in the files. Please don’t lose sight of that in the course of your own investigations. It would make me very happy if at least in that one point my ideas proved to be correct! Just bear it in mind!”
And with those words Inspector Zott disappeared up to his own cubbyhole, there to devote himself entirely to his own theories.
The second, of course, was Obergruppenführer Prall. “Escherich,” he said with raised voice, “Inspector Escherich! How are you feeling?”
“Perfectly well!” replied the inspector. He was standing behind his desk, his thumbs pressed against his trouser seams, a drill he had picked up down in the cells. However much he tried not to, the inspector was trembling. He looked alertly at his superior, toward whom he felt nothing but fear, insensate fear that Prall might at any moment send him down to the basement again.
“If you feel perfectly well, Escherich,” Prall went on, perfectly aware of the effect his words were having, “then you’ll surely be able to work. Or not?”
“I am able to work, Obergruppenführer, sir!”
“And if you can work, Escherich, then you can catch the Hobgoblin? You can do that, can’t you?”
“Yes, sir, I can!”
“In double-quick time, Escherich!”
“In double-quick time, Obergruppenführer, sir!”
“You see, Escherich,” drawled Obergruppenführer Prall, all the while gorging himself on his subordinate’s obvious fear, “you see what good a little spell in the basement does! That’s how devoted I am to my men! You no longer feel terribly superior to me, Escherich?”
“No, Obergruppenführer, certainly not. At your orders, Obergrüppenfuhrer, sir!”
“You’re no longer of the view that you’re the cleverest little bastard in the entire Gestapo, and that nothing anyone else does is worth shit—you don’t think that anymore, do you, Escherich?”
“At your command, sir, Obergruppenführer, no, I don’t think that anymore.”
“Now, Escherich,” the Obergruppenführer went on, giving the flinching Escherich a playful but painful punch on the nose, “whenever you next feel incredibly clever, or you undertake private initiatives, or you think that Obergruppenführer Prall is as thick as pigshit, well, just let me know in time. Then, before things get too bad, I’ll put you down for another little rest cure. All right?”
Inspector Escherich stared helplessly at his superior. He was shaking so hard a blind man would have heard it.
“Well, Escherich, will you tell me in time, whenever you next feel incredibly clever?”
“At your orders, Obergruppenführer, sir!”
“Or if you’re not getting on too well with the work, so that I can give you a little giddyap?”
“At your orders, Obergruppenführer, sir!”
“I think we understand each other, Escherich!”
The master suddenly and most unexpectedly put out his hand to the sufficiently humiliated man. “Escherich, I’m glad to see you back at work. I hope for excellent collaboration. Where are you going to begin?”
“I’m going to get a detailed description of the man from the supervisor at the Nollendorfplatz station. It’s time we got one! And maybe the officer who questioned the two suspects still has a sense of their names. Then I’ll carry on with Zott’s house-to-house inquiries…”
“All right, all right. That’s a start. I want you to report to me every day…”
“At your orders, Obergruppenführer, sir!”
And that was the second conversation that made an impression on Inspector Escherich upon the resumption of his official duties. After a while, he bore no more visible traces of his experience; his teeth were fixed. His colleagues even found that Escherich had gotten a lot nicer. He seemed to have lost his air of superiority and condescension. There was no one he could feel superior to now.
Inspector Escherich works, makes inquiries, questions witnesses, collates descriptions, reads through files, makes telephone calls—Escherich is working much the way he always had. But even if no one notices anything different about him, and even if the man himself lives in hope of one day being able to face Prall, his superior, without shaking, Escherich knows he will never be his old self again. He is just a sort of robot now; what he does is routine. Along with his feeling of superiority, he has lost his pleasure in work—his old conceit was what fertilized, so to speak, the fruit the man bore.
Escherich once felt very secure. He once thought nothing could happen to him. He worked on the assumption that he was completely different from everyone else. And Escherich has had to give up these little self-deceptions. It happened basically in the few seconds after SS man Dobat smashed him in the face and he became acquainted with fear. In the space of a very few days, Escherich became so thoroughly acquainted with fear that now there is no chance of him forgetting it for as long as he lives. He knows it doesn’t matter how he looks, what he does, what honors and praise he receives—he knows he is nothing. A single punch can turn him into a wailing, gibbering, trembling wretch, not much better than the stinking coward of a pickpocket who shared his cell for a few days and whose hurriedly rattled off last prayers are still ringing in his ears. Little better than that. No, no better at all!
There’s one thing still keeping Inspector Escherich going, and that’s the thought of the Hobgoblin. He’s got to catch him; he doesn’t care what happens afterward. He has to look this man in the eye; he has to talk to this man who has been the cause of his downfall. He wants to tell that fanatic to his face what panic, ruin, and hardship he has brought to so many people. He wants to crush him, his secret enemy.
If only he had the man already in his grip!
Chapter 46
THE FATEFUL MONDAY
On the Monday that was to prove so fateful for the Quangels;
on this Monday, eight weeks after Escherich was reinstated in his job;
on this Monday, on which Emil Borkhausen was sentenced to two years in prison, the rat Klebs to one;
on this Monday, when Baldur Persicke—not before time—returned to Berlin from his Napola school and visited h
is father in the drying-out clinic;
on this Monday, when Trudel Hergesell fell down the steps at Erkner Station and suffered a miscarriage;
on this fateful Monday, then, Anna Quangel was in bed with a bad case of the flu. She had a high temperature. Otto sat by her bedside; the doctor had come and gone. They were having an argument as to whether he should drop the postcards today or not.
“You’re not to go again, Otto, we agreed on that! The cards can wait till tomorrow or the day after. I’ll be up and about by then!”
“I want the things out of the house, Anna!”
“Then I’ll take them!” And Anna pulled herself upright in bed.
“You stay where you are!” He pushed her back onto the pillows. “Anna, don’t be silly. I’ve dropped a hundred, two hundred cards…”
Just then the doorbell rang.
They both jumped, as though caught red-handed. Quangel hurriedly pocketed the two postcards that had been lying on the bed.
“Who can it be?” Anna asked anxiously.
And he, too, “Now? At eleven in the morning?”
She guessed, “Maybe something’s happened to the Heffkes? Or the doctor’s come back?”
The bell went again.
“I’ll go see,” he murmured.
“No,” she begged. “Stay here. If we’d been off with the cards, they would have rung in vain.”
“I’ll just have a look, Anna!”
“No, don’t open the door, Otto! Please! I have a bad feeling that if you do, misfortune will come into the house!”
“I’ll go very quietly, and ask you first.” He went.
She lay there, angry and impatient. Why did he never give in, never do anything she asked? There was misfortune lurking outside, but now that it was really here, he couldn’t sense it. And now he won’t even keep his word! She can hear he’s opened the door and is talking to a man. And he promised he would go back and ask her first.
“Well, what is it? Come on, Otto, talk to me! You can see I’m dying of impatience! Who is it? He’s still in the flat, isn’t he!”
“It’s nothing to get excited about, Anna. Just a messenger from the factory. The foreman on the morning shift has had an accident—they want me to go and fill in for him.”
She drops her head back on the pillows, a little relieved, “And you’re going to go?”
“Of course!”
“You haven’t had your lunch!”
“I’ll get something at the canteen!”
“At least take a sandwich with you!”
“It’s all right, Anna, don’t worry. I feel bad about having to leave you alone here for such a long time.”
“You would have had to go at one o’clock anyway.”
“I’ll do my own shift right afterward.”
“Is the man still waiting?”
“Yes, I’m going to go in with him.”
“Well, come back soon, Otto. Take the streetcar today, why don’t you!”
“I’ll do that, Anna. Hope you feel better!”
He was on his way out when she called: “Oh, Otto, will you come and give me a kiss?”
He came back, a little surprised, a little sheepish about this desire for affection that so rarely arose between them. He pressed his lips to her mouth.
She pulled his head down to her and kissed him hard.
“I am silly, Otto,” she said. “I still feel frightened. It must be the fever. But now go!”
And they parted, never to see each other again in freedom. In the confusion of parting, neither of them thought of the cards in his pocket.
But the old foreman remembers them again, as he sits with the messenger in the streetcar. He feels them in his pocket—there they are! He is unhappy with himself; he really should have thought of that! He would rather have left them at home, even have got off the streetcar now and dropped them in some office building on the way But he can’t find a plausible pretext for the messenger. It means he’ll have to take the cards into work with him, which is something he’s never done before, never should have done—and now it’s too late not to.
He’s in a stall in the lavatory. He has the cards already in his hands, all set to rip them up and flush them away, when his eye lights on the words it took him so much time and trouble to write: They are powerful, he thinks, effective. It would be a shame to destroy such a weapon. His parsimony, his “confounded miserliness” prevents him from destroying them, but also his respect for work; everything that constitutes work is sacred to him. The destruction of work is a sin.
But he can’t leave the cards in his jacket, which he wears in the shop. So he puts them in his satchel, along with the bread, and the thermos of coffee. Otto Quangel is well aware that there is a split down the side of the satchel—he tried taking it to the saddler weeks ago to have it restitched, but the saddler was drowning in work, and muttered something about not getting to it for at least two weeks. Quangel hadn’t wanted to be without his case for so long, and he’s never lost anything out of it yet. So he drops the cards in there without a second thought.
He goes through the shop to the locker room. He walks slowly, already looking this way and that. It’s a different crew; there are hardly any familiar faces. Occasionally he nods to someone, and once he lends a hand. The men look at him curiously: a lot of them know him by reputation. Oh, that’s old Quangel, an odd bird, but his men never complain about him, he’s fair, you have to say that for him. Rubbish, he’s a slave driver, he always manages to get every last ounce of energy out of his men. But none of his men ever gripe. He looks odd all right. Is his head on hinges, because that would explain why he nods so stiffly? Ssh, he’s coming back. He can’t stand chatter—anyone caught chattering gets a stare and then an earful.
Otto Quangel has put his satchel in the locker, and the key is in his pocket. Okay, eleven hours, and then the cards will be out of the factory, and even if it’s midnight then he’ll find somewhere to get rid of them; he won’t take them back to the house. He wouldn’t put it past Anna to get up from her sickbed purely to post them somewhere.
With this different shift, Quangel can’t do what he likes to do, which is take up a position in the middle of the room and keep an eye on things. He has to go from one group to the next, and they don’t even understand what his silent glare signifies; some are even brazen enough to try and draw the foreman into conversation. It takes quite a while before the shop is humming in the way he likes, till they have quieted down and realized there’s nothing to do here but work.
Quangel is just on his way to his usual observation post when his foot draws back. His pupils widen, and a shudder goes through him: on the ground in front of him, on the factory floor littered with sawdust and shavings, is one of his two postcards.
He feels a twitch in his hands, he wants to stoop and pick it up discreetly, when he sees the other one a couple of steps further along. Impossible to pick them both up without attracting notice. The eye of one of the workmen is riveted to him. My God, what women they are, staring at him as if they’d never seen a man in their lives.
Bah, I’ll just pick it up, whether they see me or not. It’s none of their business! No, I can’t, it might have been lying there for fifteen minutes already—it’s a miracle that someone else hasn’t picked it up already! But perhaps someone has seen it, then dropped it when he saw the contents. What if he sees me pick it up and put it in my pocket!
Danger! Danger! screams the voice inside Quangel. Deadly danger! Leave the cards where they are! Pretend you never saw them, let someone else pick them up! Get back to your place!
But suddenly something strange comes over Otto Quangel. He’s been writing and dropping these cards for two years now, but he’s never had a chance to see the effect they have on people. He has gone on living quietly, in his gloomy cave, and the effect of the cards, the commotion they must produce, well, he’s imagined it a hundred times, but he’s never yet seen it.
But now I’d like to see it, just onc
e! What can happen to me? I’m one of eighty men here, they’re all as much under suspicion as I would be—more, because I am known to be an old and reliable worker, with no interest in politics. I’ll risk it, I have to see it once.
And before he’s finished thinking it through, he calls out to one workman, “Hey, you! Pick those up! Someone must have dropped them. What are they? What are you staring at?”
He takes a card from the worker’s hand and pretends to read it. But he can’t read just at the moment, he can’t read his own big block capitals. He’s not able to divert his gaze from the face of the worker, who is staring at the card. The man isn’t reading anymore either, but his hand is shaking, and there is fear in his eye.
Quangel stares at him. So fear is the answer, nothing but fear. The man didn’t even read to the end of the card; he barely got past the first line before being overwhelmed by fear.
Quangels hears snickering. He looks up and sees that half the shift is staring at the two men standing around idly in the middle of the shift reading postcards… Or have they got some sense already that something terrible has happened?
Quangel takes the card out of the man’s hand. He has to play this game on his own from now on; the other man is so terrified, he’s no good for anything anymore.
“Where’s the Arbeitsfront representative here? The one in corduroys at the table saw? Okay! Get back to work, and don’t you dare chat, otherwise you’ll be in for a bad time!”
“Listen!” says Quangel to the man at the table saw. “Can you step outside a minute, I have something to show you.” And when they are both standing outside: “It’s these postcards here! The man at the back picked them up. I saw them. I think you’d better take them to the management? Am I right?”
The other man reads. He, too, doesn’t read more than a couple of sentences. “What is this?” he asks in fear. “Were these lying in the shop where we were working? Jesus, they could cost us our lives! Who was it picked them up? Did you notice anything about the way he looked at them?”