A Stranger in My Own Country

by Hans Fallada

  The two Storks who now entered his shop with the intention of tripping him up came upon him at an unfortunate time – unfortunate for the chemist. He’d just started to drink again, but hadn’t yet reached the Faust stage; he was just in an unusually chatty and affable mood. He greeted the two strangers warmly and could do nothing better than tell them the latest joke going the rounds about the Winter Relief Organization – a perfectly innocuous joke, as it happens. Whereupon the old man was sentenced to a prison term of one year, the two Storks having sworn that he was not the slightest bit drunk at the time. Despite the fact that the chemist was declared unfit to go to prison by a doctor on the grounds that he was severely diabetic, he had to serve out the whole sentence. He was never quite right after that, and crept around the town silent and withdrawn, distrusting everyone, but most of all himself.

  But Stork the schoolmaster and mayor had made an example of somebody – striking terror into the hearts of the lukewarm! – and felt pleased with himself. But of course the idiot had failed to foresee one consequence of his misdeed, which was that he was ostracized by every decent member of the local community – and there were still plenty of those. Nobody wanted to have anything more to do with this provocateur and informer, who in the first flush of victory had even boasted of his deeds. Everyone gave him a wide berth, nobody wanted to be seen talking to someone like that. In the monthly teacher meetings he was shunned, his own colleagues wanted nothing more to do with him. This had the unfortunate consequence that he retreated even more into his role in Mahlendorf. Here he had the whip hand, here people were dependent on him, here there was no shortage, unfortunately, of toadies and gossip-mongers; there were always people who for one reason or another wanted to suck up to the mayor. His liverish disposition was accentuated by this defeat, which had initially looked like a victory. He put the blame on others, anyone who didn’t belong to the Party was a dubious character and should be eliminated. He stepped up his activities, the number of reports he wrote increased. He was too stupid to see that this didn’t make him any more popular with his superiors either. He was just making more work for them with all his reports, and in most cases nothing ever came of it, because it was all based on gossip and rumour. All the same, a man like him was worth hanging on to – he had his uses. The Nazi Party and the government that emerged from it made a point of investigating every report from an informer, even the ones that were obviously motivated by spite or greed. Informers were useful people, perhaps not ideal candidates for preferment, but always serviceable. Stork couldn’t grasp that. In himself he must have been weary of fighting these petty battles in a country backwater, and longed to bestride a bigger stage, which he hoped to obtain by denouncing more people.

  By that time he had also tired of teaching. School was just a sideline for him, he wasn’t interested in the children any more – he had ceased to be a good teacher a long time ago. His various official duties, the reports he was always writing, his trips to see the district council leader in the county town – these things took up most of his time. And then he had grown so used to hanging around on the village street, chatting and chinwagging, always on the lookout for some tit-bit, the worm he could use to bait his hook, that there was no room in his life for proper work any more.

  His attitude to me and my family was very changeable. His position as mayor and the constant government regulations encroaching on people’s private lives made it necessary to apply to him more and more frequently with questions, requests and petitions of one sort or another. Sometimes he was all smiles and affability, giving us everything we asked for, even things we thought likely to be refused. Another time he would brusquely turn down the most harmless request, only to agree to it three or four days later with an air of gracious beneficence. The truth is he was a coward. Like his eyes, which couldn’t look directly at anyone, he was a cowardly, skulking, treacherous dog from the bottom of his soul. He never dared to attack openly, preferring to creep up and bite you from behind.

  At the time I was having a minor dispute with a small farmer in the village, to whom our mayor lent his support. It was one of those longstanding country disputes that you just can’t avoid in a small village, no matter how careful you are. One evening, just after we had moved to Mahlendorf, I came home from a walk to find a boy sitting in my plum trees and eating plums, while the boy’s horses were busy eating my grass. I shouted at the lad and pointed out that twenty metres away, on the other side of the little stone wall that formed the boundary between our properties, were his father’s plum trees, from which he could help himself just as easily, and rather more honestly. To tell the truth I was less bothered by the theft of the plums – boys will be boys, after all – than I was by having my grass flattened by his horses. This was the start of a long-lasting feud between my family and that of the small farmer, and it was not just me that they cut dead, but all the members of my family and the people who worked for me too. Village feuds are as uncompromising as they are silly.

  Well, we could handle it, and we didn’t take it too much to heart. One day the feud would pass: giving a boy a ticking-off was hardly grounds for undying enmity.

  It must have been about a year later when my mason came to me and asked where he could get some large stones to make a border for a vegetable patch. I directed him to the low fieldstone wall on the edge of my field, and some time later I heard there was a story going around the village, claiming that ‘Fallada has had a boundary stone removed!’

  This is not a nice accusation, especially when it isn’t true. And it must have been untrue, since to the best of my knowledge the boundary with my neighbour’s property – that’s the father of the plum-picking boy – was not marked with stones. That low wall marked the boundary, and according to the information given to me at the time of purchase, the whole of it stood on my land. But since the gossip wouldn’t go away, and a boundary stone I had removed was rapidly becoming a boundary I had shifted in my favour, I went to the district council office and asked to have my boundary marked out with stones by the district surveyor. The big day arrived, the councillor turned up with his team of assistants and a stack of red-and-white poles and grey granite stones marked with an incised cross, while on the other side the small farmer – let’s call him Mechthal – arrived under the protection of mayor Stork. There was a lot of whispering and cogitating between the two of them and the councillor, and it was all too apparent that the missing boundary stone, which had never existed in the first place, featured in the discussion again. The councillor didn’t seem unduly bothered by any of this as he set to work measuring and sighting, looking at old maps, telling his men where to put the poles – ‘More to the right!’, ‘A touch more to the left!’ – peering through strange-looking telescopes and finally saying: ‘The boundary stone goes here!’

  We looked at each other, and I’m afraid I was mean enough to smile, because according to this survey not only the little wall belonged to me, but also . . . ‘Oh I see’, said I, as my smile grew steadily broader, ‘so all the plum trees on your side of the wall also belong to me, Mr Mechthal – I had no idea.’ But he wasn’t smiling now, in fact he looked mightily peeved, and our good mayor had turned quite yellow, as yellow as a well-aged, overripe quince. I must confess that I didn’t have the heart to enjoy my triumph to the full. In the event, although the plum trees on the far side of the wall did actually belong to me, I didn’t make use of them – which didn’t stop the opposing party helping themselves again every so often from the plum trees on my side of the wall. Now the other two fell to whispering among themselves, and then the mayor spoke up for the furious, but not very articulate Mechthal: ‘Look here, Fallada has put up a high fence around his house and garden, and he’s sited the fence so close to the road that the farmers get hitched up on it with a full harvest load. Surely that’s not allowed, Mr Councillor?’ The councillor looked at me, I looked at him, and then I said: ‘Since we’re doing the boundary stones, why don’t we just carry on and mark o
ut the whole property while we’re at it? It’ll cost a bit more, but we’re not bothered about that, Mr Councillor.’ So they set to work again, measuring and sighting and looking on the plans, and eventually the councillor said to my two adversaries: ‘You’re out of luck, gentlemen. Mr Fallada would be within his rights to site his fence another metre and a half further out into the road, and then nobody would be able to get past at all with a horse and cart! Count your blessings, I say – it could be a lot worse!’ So I had won a double victory, but it cost me dear over time, earning me the undying enmity of the mayor and farmer Mechthal, who became the village’s ranking SA officer during the war, and who now makes life uncomfortable for me and my family in every way he can. On the other hand, he and his family are at least speaking to us again; but I actually found their open hostility back then preferable to this bogus friendliness now, which seeks to do me harm wherever it can.

  Here is another tale of our mayor’s endless, unpredictable flip-flopping, all sunshine one day, thunder and lightning the next – though this is something that happened much later. We live in a heavily wooded area, and we had an abundance of timber almost up until the outbreak of war. Most people heated their homes with wood rather than coal, and we were no different. But as industry geared up for war, the forestry authorities became increasingly reluctant to let us have firewood, as every tree was needed for the production of rayon, which was made into fine silk stockings, soft, durable suiting fabrics, and even, I rather think, gunpowder. Eventually the responsibility for allocating firewood was handed over to the mayors of each locality, who were supposed to allocate supplies to each village resident based on the size of the house and the number of occupants. Our own mayor circulated a list, and from this I could see that he had allocated all of three cubic metres of wood to me. I have a fairly large house with a lot of people living in it, and with this allocation of three cubic metres, plus the coal allowance we also had, I would have been able to keep the kitchen range going all year round, plus just one heating stove for three months. So it really wasn’t enough, it seemed to me, and I was enraged by this new dirty trick. But that was just his style, to sneak up and bite you from behind. At the same time I knew that losing my temper with this treacherous man would only make more trouble for me, and so I asked my wife to accompany me: ‘You must come with me and make sure I don’t fly off the handle. If it was up to me I’d slaughter the old bastard!’

  ‘And much good it would do you!’ replied my wife, and she was right, of course.

  So we went to see mayor Stork together, and he received us in a very friendly manner. My own manner was equally friendly as I pointed out that there must have been some mistake with the three cubic metres of firewood I had been allocated. And I did the sums for him and showed him how long the briquettes and wood would last me, just enough for the kitchen range and one stove for half the winter. When I had finished, I felt very pleased with myself that I had made such a convincing case, and I looked expectantly at Stork.

  He smiled and rubbed his hands together and replied in that smarmy way of his: that was all well and good, and I may well have got my sums right, but unfortunately there was nothing he could do about it – there was just no more wood to be had, and so he couldn’t give me any more.

  This did make my hackles rise somewhat, and I reminded Stork that I had two small children and a very old woman living in my house, amongst others, and that if I couldn’t heat the place properly for them, I would effectively be leaving them to freeze to death. He smiled his smarmy smile again and said that was awful, of course it was; but ‘you know the old saying: you can’t get blood out of a stone’, and there simply wasn’t any more wood to be had.

  My temper rising a little more, I pointed out that many people still had wood from the previous year or even further back stored in their yard, yet these people had all been allocated more wood than me, when I didn’t have a single log left. Surely there was a double standard being applied here – ? At this point he became angry too, and said it was nothing to do with him how people chose to manage their stock of wood. If one person was sparing in his use while another burned the whole lot away in one year, that was up to them. At all events, I would not be getting any more wood than my allocation, no matter how much of a fuss I kicked up. I was welcome to lodge a complaint against him – we’d soon see who was in the right here!

  I knew this already, and so I forced myself to calm down, especially as my wife now placed her hand over mine in a gesture of entreaty, and said that perhaps the mayor would get another allocation of wood later on, and might then allow us to have more. But he was not even prepared to send us away with that crumb of comfort. Instead he shook his head adamantly and repeated: there was nothing else apart from the three cubic metres, and there was an end to the matter. Done and dusted! But in the meantime I’d come up with a different idea, and I said: ‘Mr Stork, there’s a national census taking place soon, on 10 October, and wherever a person is resident on that date, that’s where they pay their local taxes. Now, I’ll tell you what I am going to do, Mr Stork: at the beginning of October I am going to move to Berlin with my entire family and stay in a hotel, which means I’ll also be paying my taxes in Berlin – and the parish of Mahlendorf will have to see how it manages without its only real taxpayer!’

  I’d become more and more worked up as I spoke, and the mayor was now equally worked up when he replied: ‘So you think you can threaten me like that? I’ll report you! I’m not going to stand here and be threatened by you!’

  ‘You’re threatening me with a lot worse!’ I shouted. ‘You’re threatening me and my wife with illness and freezing to death!’ ‘That’s enough now’, said my wife. ‘I think it would be better if neither of you said anything more! It’s not going to do anybody any good!’ And with that she hustled me quickly out of the room, because she could see that I was about to explode and say things that would have landed me in deep trouble.

  But I wasn’t ready to calm down yet, and I spent the whole night doing and redoing the sums to work out how much coal and wood we would need, and every time the numbers showed that we simply couldn’t manage with that amount. Surely the mayor must see that for himself! I just couldn’t get my head round the idea that the mayor simply didn’t want to see it, that the whole point for him was to torment and harass me until I lost my temper and said things I would regret. I still thought that such cold, calculating villains only existed in the pages of books. And the mayor wasn’t even that calculating. He was like his name, not ‘stark’ – strong – but only ‘Stork’, only ever doing things by halves. And so it turned out again on this occasion: he phoned me two or three days later and asked me to drop by to discuss ‘the wood business’. I did so, and he greeted me in the most genial manner and inquired with a smile: ‘How much wood do you want, Mr Fallada?’ I was caught off guard: was he just winding me up again? But I stayed calm and said that I needed at least twenty-five to thirty cubic metres of wood for the winter. He beamed: ‘You can have more if you want it! How much would you like?’