A Stranger in My Own Country

by Hans Fallada

  But of course we won’t do anything until he has bought up the mortgages and has effectively become the owner of the house. You’ll agree to his proposals, but not give your consent to the foreclosure. I know these city types, they can’t wait, things can’t go fast enough for them, and he’ll buy on the strength of your word alone. So then he’ll be the owner, and safely out of the way, and we’ll have no trouble with the wife. She can’t put the house up for auction without your consent, and we’ll make her life there a misery – leave that to me. But we won’t let her move out until she has paid rent for the longest possible time, and definitely not before she has paid out the allowance that has been promised you and your wife for the rest of your lives. And I can guarantee, Sponar, that you and your wife are going to live to a ripe old age!’ That’s more or less what the hard-boiled old bruiser, leathery veteran of many a brawl at political meetings, will have said: not all at once, of course, but one little plan will have led on to another, until the whole villainous scheme had been cooked up to perfection. All three of them will have appeased their consciences by arguing that I was an enemy of the Party, and over the next ten years this neat little excuse was used to justify so much brutality in Germany that the trick they planned to pull on me was just a minor thing by comparison, quite benign and harmless.

  My wife only learned of all this in dribs and drabs, noticing something when she was with the Sponars, or picking up on something said by her delivery lady. It’s a good thing the whole business didn’t just drop on her all at once, like a cold downpour; it might well have proved too much for her. The body can habituate itself to the most potent poisons, it’s just a matter of increasing the dosage gradually. Meanwhile the days passed, one after another, the sentry was still posted out in the street, another stood guard at the back down by the river, and nothing happened. If she had only known where I was she would have tried earlier to escape from this prison, but she knew nothing. (The good doctor had not been able to get a message to her, of course – that’s why the sentry was there.) In the end it was the old lady who told her they were saying in the village that I was in the nick in nearby Fürstenwalde. No sooner had my wife received this tip-off than she made up her mind. She waited until the late evening, after supper, when it was getting dark. Then, in order to throw the evil Sponars off the scent, she turned the taps full on to fill the bath noisily and turned up the volume on the radio, got our sleeping boy out of bed and dressed him. Holding him in her arms and leaving everything else behind, she slipped out into the garden in her stockinged feet, put on her shoes and crept along to the garden gate. She had already observed, especially at night, that the sentries, while still in place, were so tired after their long hours on duty that they relaxed their guard somewhat, often wandering a long way up and down the street. So she waited for such a moment, when the SA man was eighty or a hundred paces away, crossed the street and disappeared into the dark forest of thin pine trees, where she walked on through the night, with no path to follow. The hardest thing to cope with was the child in her arms, who had picked up on her agitation, wouldn’t go to sleep, and kept on asking questions. In the end she managed to calm him down (and herself too, therefore) by telling him little stories in a low voice. She pressed on through the dark, trackless forest, bumping into unseen branches, stumbling over roots, sometimes falling over: but always she was driven on by her single-minded resolve. She wasn’t far from the railway station, but she was frightened to go there. She had reached the point where she thought our enemies capable of anything. Perhaps they had sent her description through to the station, a description that was easy enough to recognize: a tall, heavily pregnant woman. So she carried on feeling her way through the forest, further and further, until she had left the village behind her. Then she struck out for the road, found it, and carried on along it, finding the going a little easier now. It was the same road that I had travelled a few weeks earlier in the ‘jalopy’. She also passed the spot that I’ll never forget as long as I live, where I was supposed to get out and where I had to fight for my life. I had seen it in the sunshine, and will always see it bathed in sunshine, with the thin poles of the scrawny pine trees. She walked past the place at night, it meant nothing to her, and her heart did not beat any faster on that account. It’s a strange planet we live on, and those who are closest to each other still live a long way apart.

  It’s not that far from our village to the town of Fürstenwalde, not much more than ten kilometres, but for a heavily pregnant woman with a three-year-old child in her arms it is a very long way indeed. For weeks on end she had just been sitting in the house and getting no exercise: now she had to step out and keep on going. Sometimes the boy would run along beside her for a bit, and then she would sit down on a milestone and rest for a while. She was also thinking about the two babies she carried inside her, of course, and told herself that all this agitation, worry and over-exertion couldn’t possibly be good for them. But it didn’t help at all. And it didn’t help at all that every kilometre felt like a mile, and that her feet hurt terribly from all the extra weight she was carrying. Nor did it help that she was fretting and worrying about me and about what the future would bring for us. But she was driven on by sheer willpower, and she travelled the road that she had to travel; rough or smooth, she had no choice. The night was all around her, perchance the stars were up above her head, and a wind helped her on her way. But as she was walking she also thought about the people whose actions had brought her to this, having to creep around in secret at night like some tramp. She thought about the men who had seized control in Germany, destroying at a stroke the freedom of the individual in every area of personal life, inviting every kind of arbitrary abuse and putting people at each other’s throats. But it helped her to think like that. It taught this kind, forgiving heart how to hate, it made these eyes, which otherwise only ever looked for the good in life, clearsighted, and not once in the ten years that followed, not for one second, did she ever falter in her hatred. She knew these men are evil, and want only what is evil. It may be that here and there along the way they do something good, but since they want what is evil, it doesn’t count, and their downfall is certain. What is acquired by evil means cannot stand. And now hopefully the hour is nigh when the whole evil edifice will collapse in ruins!

  She reached Fürstenwalde, by then it was already morning, and she went to the railway station. She used the washroom to freshen up herself and the child, and had a bit of breakfast. Then they went to visit me, she saw me again, healthy and in good spirits, and both of us felt our hearts a little lighter. As for what to do next, the only word of advice I could give her was: ‘Go and see Rowohlt, good old Rowohlt – he’ll know of a way out!’

  And so she went to see him, the man who stood by his authors when they were in any kind of trouble, and he knew what to do. ‘You must always go straight to the top’, said Rowohlt, and telephoned a high-profile lawyer,48 a man who had defended the Reichstag arsonist on the authority of the Party, who in the end was executed himself. They arranged a meeting: the famous lawyer, the famous publisher Rowohlt, and the writer’s wife. The wife was rather indignant when she realized that the lawyer, a man of the utmost coarseness and an old Party member, found nothing remotely surprising about her story; to him it was just another run-of-the-mill case. Instead the lawyer cheerily assured her: ‘You’ve come to the right man, dear lady! The district council leader of Lebus is an old school friend of mine. We’ll take a car and scoot straight over there, and I’ll bet you anything: in half an hour I’ll get your husband released!’ This completely unexpected prospect of my early release banished all my wife’s indignation at his blasé acceptance of such a blatant injustice. She gladly climbed into a car with the lawyer, waved goodbye to the publisher, and off they went. What the lawyer and the district council leader talked about in private, regarding conspiracies against the person of the Führer, good and bad political jokes, and Mr von Salomon, we shall never know. We are and always have been
entirely unpolitical people, and this kind of thing is a closed book to us. At any rate, the lawyer came hurrying into the anteroom where my wife had been waiting with pounding heart, pressed a sheet of paper into her hand and said: ‘Take the car and drive like the wind to Fürstenwalde! This is an order for your husband’s immediate release, but it’s Saturday today, and after twelve noon no German courthouse jail will release a prisoner until the Monday! So if you get a move on you might just make it!’ And make it she did: at five to twelve she got the decrepit-looking clerk of the court to stop chewing his pen and stir his stumps, and by five past twelve we were standing out on the street together again – and oh so happy!

  The first thing we did, of course, was to drive to Berlin to my publisher and thank him for his splendid intervention. Then we went for a celebratory dinner (we viewed my release as a definitive victory over our enemies!), collected our son and went home – for my part, I must admit, with a heart full of feelings of triumph and revenge.

  It was still light when we got back to our village. From the railway station we walked along the narrow path through the forest to our house. The sentry in the street had gone, but Mr Sponar happened to be standing in the garden, and he just stared at the three of us, stared and stared . . . We walked past without a word and went upstairs to our apartment. Oh, if only I had been a little more worldly-wise and diplomatic, I would have done nothing now and just left Sponar and his friend Gröschke to fret and stew, safe in the knowledge that I had the district council leader’s release order in my pocket. In time everything would have settled down again, I would have acted as though I knew nothing about the treachery of the Sponars, somehow or other I would have got rid of these dangerous enemies and so would have quietly and gradually come into possession of the villa.

  But I just couldn’t wait, I couldn’t hold my tongue, I had to charge at it like a bull at a gate! I sat down at my typewriter and hammered out a letter to Mr Sponar: ‘Dear Mr Sponar, 1. I hereby give you notice that I am terminating your tenancy. 2. I hereby withdraw my offer of such and such a date giving you rights of residence and a lifetime annuity. 3. . . . 4. . . .’ The list went on, as I exacted my revenge by numbers. I sealed the letter, put it downstairs on the hall table, and climbed into the bathtub, where I bathed my body in hot water and my soul in hot feelings of revenge.

  And what did it all get me? A second visit from the SA! Next morning, when we had barely finished our breakfast, they turned up again. This time there were only three of them, accompanied by a leader I hadn’t seen before, who was not wearing quite so much gold braid; but still, there they were, and just as determined as their predecessors to do whatever it took. I pointed to my release order, and to my civic right to terminate agreements: but to no avail. He told me I had tried to exploit the plight of a fellow German national in order to gain a personal advantage. That contravened a basic Nazi principle, and for that alone he could place me under arrest again forthwith. I had no right, he said, to deprive old Mr Sponar of his villa just because I had loads of money. Either I must agree immediately to withdraw the letter and fulfil all the obligations I had entered into earlier – or else! And he made a dramatic gesture to underline his meaning. And, he added, this time they would make sure I ended up in a place where even the most wily lawyer would not be able to get me out!

  It was the first time in my life that I had been confronted by attempted Nazi blackmail of this kind, and I must confess that the brazenness with which it was presented to me really knocked me back. ‘But surely I am at least allowed to terminate my rental agreement’, I cried angrily. ‘I have no desire to carry on living here!’

  ‘You are not allowed to terminate your rental agreement’, he replied, ‘because by doing so you will aggravate the plight of a fellow German national. Of course, you are free to live wherever you like, but you must carry on paying the rent here! And of course, if you so wish, Mr Sponar will try to find an alternative tenant, at your own expense. If that works out, then of course you are off the hook. As you see, we are bending over backwards to accommodate you here. So: what is your decision? Are you coming with us, or are you going to meet your obligations?’

  What choice did I have? I complied, inwardly raging. Perhaps the leader read something of my feelings in my face, because he said: ‘And I would advise you to be extremely polite in your dealings with the Sponars. Any cause for complaint, and we’ll come down on you very hard!’ And with that they left.

  (27.IX.44.) As for us, we just sat there wondering where it had all gone wrong. I especially didn’t dare look at my wife, having now realized just how much damage I had done to us both by my ill-advised outburst of anger. Neither of us wanted to speak. But in the end I got to my feet and said: ‘Yes, I’ve made a mess of things again, I can see that, you don’t need to look at me like that, Suse! But I’m not going to carry on living here on that account. I can’t stand the sight of those two sanctimonious creeps, and if I had to clap eyes on them every day I’d end up doing something really silly. I’m going to the village to see if I can’t get a car to Berlin, and while I’m gone you can start to pack. Just pack what we’d need for a long trip, and use the big wardrobe trunk too, Suse. I have a feeling that we won’t be living here again!’ And I cast a long and rather wistful look around my large, bright study, the first room for which we had had furniture made to our own design by a master carpenter who still loved his work. Suse followed my gaze, and she doubtless felt a little wistful herself; but she said stoutly: ‘Of course it’s best if we move away from these two-faced people, I can’t stand the sight of them either, and especially not her. He’s just a weedy little man, and he reminds me of a rabbit with that velvet jacket of his. But I do wonder if Berlin is the right place for us? We’re just coming into the hot season, and it would surely be better for the boy to have trees and grass and water, like we had here. It would be good for me too. And it would definitely be better for you.’ (Now she’s thinking about the bars in Berlin, I thought to myself.) ‘Not at all!’ I cried, suddenly excited at the thought of a change of scene and different company. I was already realizing that it would be quite impossible for me to sit around quietly in the countryside after the last few eventful weeks. ‘Not at all, we’ll just move into the Stössinger guesthouse49 for now, I’ll phone them right away and see if we can have a nice big room. And what happens after that, we’ll just have to wait and see. At times like this it’s best not to make any plans at all. As you see, nothing turns out the way you expect it to!’

  Having thus entrusted our collective future to pure chance, I got started on the work of moving house – which proved quite entertaining for me and our boy. The one unpleasant moment for me came when I knocked on the Sponars’ door downstairs and went in with a receipt and a wad of notes in my hand to pay the rent and the annuity in advance for the next quarter. He could not conceal his agitation, and was almost shaking as he darted about looking for pen and ink. He normally signed his name with a flourish, but now he could barely manage a scrawl. The queen, meanwhile, sat by the window, bolt upright and stiff as a ramrod, and she was back at her lace-making again, the wooden bobbins clacking away balefully. Her dark eyes darted restlessly back and forth between her husband and me, and suddenly she laid aside the bobbins, reached out her hand and said imperiously to her husband: ‘Sponar, let me see that!’

  He responded with alacrity, she counted the notes, read and reread what was written on the receipt, handed it to me between the tips of two fingers, and said spitefully: ‘But the furniture and all the other things stay here, as a security for our claims! From now on nothing more is to be removed!’ I could have taken issue with her on that, but for one thing we already had all our essential belongings loaded into the car, which was parked outside the garden gate – I had put off this unpleasant parting visit until the last moment, when Suse and the boy were already sitting in the car. And for another thing, I had only just been hauled over the coals for my precipitate actions, and the effects of such
a drubbing lasted for a few hours, even with me. So I moved not a muscle in my face – the mark of supreme self-control in moments of dire peril, as all the adventure stories tell us – and walked to the door without a word. The queen called after me in a deep, malevolent voice: ‘And tell your wife I hope all goes well with the birth!’ Coming from her, it sounded so malicious and hateful that for two pins I would have turned round and strangled the evil woman with my bare hands.

  But I controlled myself again, and focused on getting out of there as quickly as I could so as not to have to listen to any more. Breathing a sigh of relief, I climbed into the car with my loved ones and called to the driver: ‘Go! Go!’ I was afraid they might come running out after me. My wife asked anxiously: ‘Was there a problem? You look so pale!’

  ‘No’, I replied, ‘it all went fine. But let’s not think about any of this any more.’ And as we took our leave I gazed out at the village as we drove through, and when we passed the house with the sign ‘Karl Gröschke – Building Contractor’ I pointed it out to Suse and showed her what an ugly house it was: the misbegotten brainchild of a country builder with pretentions, and a blot on the sandy landscape. And I began to rhapsodize about the beautiful buildings one sees in southern Germany, where even the humblest dwelling has something of beauty in it, be it only in the way its form is structured and articulated; and where even the simplest woodcutter has something of the artist in him, be it only in the way he carves a wooden spoon with his penknife. Warming to my theme, I soon forgot the little village of Berkenbrück and its inhabitants, and then we were in Berlin and arriving at the Stössinger guesthouse, at which point our lives entered a new and interesting phase, and all our troubles – for now – faded somewhat into the background. We had stayed at the guesthouse once before, in a quiet, tree-lined street in the old west end of the city, but only for a short time on that occasion. But we had enjoyed our stay. It was a very elegant guesthouse, but quite small – it won’t have had more than fifteen or twenty rooms at most. The proprietor50 was an elderly and very shrewd Jewish lady, whom my wife and I came to regard highly. She was very precise in money matters, and her bills were not cheap. But she knew how to keep the business side and the personal side quite separate, and while she was the guesthouse proprietor, she was always the perfect lady. Actually, the term ‘lady’ is somewhat misleading: she was a cultivated and very motherly woman, who was always on hand to offer help and advice. With her motley international clientele she encountered every kind of peculiar and bizarre behaviour, but had learned to smile and turn a blind eye. No doubt she had her fair share of shady customers staying under her roof, international con men at large, but she wasn’t bothered, just as long as they didn’t play the fool in her house and paid their bills on time. But she would not tolerate any kind of smuttiness, such as bringing women of dubious character into the house, or flirting with the very pretty housemaids. If that happened, the eyes of this little old rotund Jewish woman would flash, and even the most well-heeled guest would get his marching orders there and then. If the odd guest came home drunk once in a while and kicked up a racket in the small hours, she would dismiss it with a smile. But when it came to cleanliness she was remorseless, both towards her guests and her maids, who were constantly cleaning the huge rooms from top to bottom.