Tales from the Underworld

by Hans Fallada

  ‘Oh, Papa, but they were about to fly away anyway!’

  A little crossly, Herr Rogge took Thomas by the hand again, and walked him down to the lake. The seed of mischief needed to be dug up before it could put down any roots. Then, standing on the pier, looking out over the surface of the water, he tried to make his son understand how pitiful the fate of the little drowned things was, how they would never be able to fly, never peck at weeds in the fields and garden, never sing their happy little song …

  He brought his son to a rueful, heart-rending weeping, a weeping that seemed not to want to stop, and that was punctuated by cries of: ‘Please, Papa, bring them back! I want the greenfinches to come back …’

  The education of children to little human beings is no easy matter. Herr Rogge couldn’t have borne it if his son had slipped past this little cataclysm in cold oblivion. But when he was lying in his bed that night, next to the bed of his wife Dete, both of them still reading, and the child suddenly started to cry in his sleep, and they ran over to him, and were unable to comfort him, and ‘It’s just a bad dream! Naughty, naughty birds!’ Well, that didn’t seem to be quite the thing either.

  And when Dete asked him mildly: ‘Are you quite sure you didn’t overdo it a bit, Zips?’ Then it was all Herr Rogge could do to answer soberly: ‘Maybe I did. Yes, I’m afraid I probably did. But what should I have done? You can’t just let things like that go on.’

  ‘At any rate, Thomas would never have thrown the little nestlings in the water,’ said Dete with conviction. ‘And you can’t look to a five-year-old for emotional maturity, my dear thirty-five-year-old!’

  ‘Yes, I’m foolish, I know,’ said Zips ruefully. ‘For once in my life I’d really like to know what other people do in a situation like this.’

  ‘That’s a nice conundrum for you to fall asleep over,’ said Dete with a laugh. ‘Because now we’re going to turn the lights off. If I’m not completely mistaken, we’ll be in for a rough old day tomorrow with our Tommy, and all kinds of complaints and squabbles. And that makes it all the more important that we both get a decent night’s sleep.’

  And with that, the lights went out, and the Rogges went to sleep, because I don’t suppose Herr Rogge pursued the question, ‘What do other people do?’ with any very great persistence.

  The night was followed by the day, and then by many other days, and late spring became summer and then autumn. Thomas played and gambolled through the year, and in the evenings he was so tired that hardly a ‘bad’ dream ever came to disturb his childish sleep. No one could tell whether he ever thought about the greenfinches or not, he certainly didn’t raise the subject. But then nor did the others remind him of them, instructions to that effect were given out the very next morning. The only factor not in the Rogges’ control, that ‘horrible brute’ Walter Rehberg, was no longer seen in their son’s circle of friends – perhaps Herr Rogge’s absurd shout of ‘murderer’ had made an impression on him after all.

  The pears ripened and the plums ripened, they took the apples off the trees, and then they dug up the potatoes. Instead of sun, they now had clouds and rain, and the wind whistled around the eaves for many days. The year was coming to an end.

  Thomas was no longer able to play in the garden all day and every day, sometimes he had to sit in his room with his toys. But when he got bored there, he would go up into the attic, and there among piles of kitchen things, suitcases full of odd-smelling clothes, bottles, vases, boxes and crates, and last year’s Christmas decorations, he found no end of things to investigate and build and play with. He could undertake voyages of discovery up there, from Herr Schulz’s carefully shovelled and raked piles of feed into the remotest darkest corners where there was an old rudder and old pictures facing the walls, and suitcases plastered over with all kinds of names.

  There, in one corner, he found a little box with some strange hairy hemispheric shapes on wires, things whose use defied his imagination, though they did evoke some distant memory of cold and ice and twittering from somewhere in his past life. It was this vague memory that may have prompted him to pick up the box in his arms and carry it out with him. His shoes were filled with rye and powdered with groundnut dust, but he made it as far as the steps that led down into the brighter and warmer parts of the house.

  The attic steps were steep, and a five-year-old had to keep hold of the handrail with one hand at least. But if he did that he couldn’t keep hold of the box – and in his dilemma, Thomas threw it down the steps ahead of him.

  Many things one puts down to naughtiness in children are in actual fact nothing but inexperience. If Thomas had anticipated the din the woody, hairy half-spheres would make on the stairs, then surely he would have thought of some other way of getting them down. As it was, he stood in consternation at the top of the stairs as his father came charging out of his study to one side, and his mother out of the kitchen to the other, imagining their little boy was lying in pieces on the landing. Whereas all it was was …

  ‘Oh, it’s the coconuts!’ said Dete, a little irritably. ‘Didn’t you tell me they’d disappeared off the face of the earth, Zips?’

  ‘And so they had,’ retorted Herr Rogge. ‘I turned the whole attic upside down looking for them. God only knows where they’ve sprung from now.’

  ‘Ask you to put something away where you can find it, and this is what happens,’ observed his wife, but at least it was sufficiently quiet so that Herr Rogge could affect not to have heard it.

  ‘Thomas!’ he called out. ‘You’re wearing light-coloured breeks, there’s no point you trying to hide in the dark up there, I can see you. Climb down, you infernally noisy child, and tell us where you magicked those coconut shells from.’

  Herr Rogge was apt to express himself a little fancifully, and one effect of this was that his son would often decline to reply to his appeals, but instead be silly. Hearing the word ‘magicked’, he twisted his features into something he thought might pass for the terrifying visage of a witch, and then he floated down the steps with a ‘Whoo-whoo!’ into his mother’s skirts, and pinched her so hard she gave a scream.

  It took quite some time for the resulting welter of scolding, whooping and gripping to abate, and the one party to learn that the coconuts had been in the corner over by the rudder –

  Dete: ‘Didn’t I always think so!’

  And Zips: ‘Please tell me what you always thought! Nothing at all, to tell you the truth’

  – and for the other to learn that these coconut shells had been in use the winter before last for feeding the birds.

  ‘Then what did the birds have to eat last winter? Will you give the birds something to eat now, Papa? When is winter? Now or soon? Mama, what will you put inside the shells? Mama, why is there wire fixed onto the shells? Papa, what’s coconut butter? Can you tell me how you make coconut butter, Papa?’

  And so on, and so forth, till each parent fled into its respective domain, and Thomas stood all alone with the lost and found receptacles, so contentious a moment ago, and now so utterly disregarded by both the grown-ups.

  But they were not lost again in the course of the autumn. For a while they lay around idly in the nursery, and during that while Thomas would pester his father with his questions: ‘Papa, when are we going to feed the birds? Isn’t it winter yet, Papa?’ But then Thomas found some use for them, he turned them into containers for his toy store, filling one of them with dried peas, another with beans and a third with sweets – and then it was a torment for Dete to see how much good, expensive dry goods were needed to fill up half a coconut shell.

  The last of the leaves had blown down from the trees, the garden was sodden, all the paths were squishy wet, and all the little boy’s shoes were soaked through from jumping in puddles. Then the wind suddenly swung round from West to North to East, and at night – the nights were getting longer and longer – the sky was high, pitch-black, gleaming and sparkling with a thousand stars.

  One morning, Tom’s room was filled
with a dazzling brightness as he was getting dressed, and his mother smilingly drew the curtains, and everything he could see was white! All white.

  ‘Snow!’ exclaimed Thomas. ‘My sleigh!’ yelled Thomas.

  ‘We’re going to start feeding the birds today,’ announced his mother, but that was eclipsed by this pure, cool celestial surprise. With whoops of joy, Tom tumbled in the snow, somersaulted down slopes, tramped into deep drifts – was hauled inside amid cries of protest, clammy as a post in the woods and wet as a pig’s snout. Was put into dry clothes – barely did his mother have a moment to attend to lunch, and he was outside again, whooping, cheering, exuberant: ‘I tell you, the little fellow’s beside himself!’

  It wasn’t until after his afternoon cup of cocoa – it was already getting dark again – that Tom had time and inclination to pay a call on the kitchen. Strange, enigmatic activity there! One of the maids, Isie, had a pile of old bacon rinds in front of her, and was jabbing little holes in them, and threading a piece of string through, and then tied the whole thing in a sort of necklace. Kati, the other, was at the stove, and was cooking something, and Mama had all the coconut shells in front of her, and was filling them out of a paper bag and Kati’s frying pan.

  Thomas had half a mind to tell them off for using ‘his’ shells without permission, but he got too wrapped up in watching his mother filling a porridge of hemp and sunflower and rape seeds and coconut butter, and the pale, transparent mixture was covered by a whitish skin, and finally set into a grey mass.

  ‘Tomorrow morning we’re going to put it out for the birds.’

  ‘Tomorrow? Why not today, Mama?’

  ‘It’s already too dark, Tom. The little birds will all already be asleep.’

  ‘But what have they had to eat today?’

  More snow fell overnight, and they went from tree to tree through the deep drifts, hanging bacon rinds in one place and a coconut shell in another. The garden felt silent and empty, and the bright, snowy countryside seemed to go on for ever.

  ‘Where have all the birds gone, Papa?’ asked Thomas. ‘I can’t see one.’

  And still they went on hanging. ‘You’ll see, Thomas!’ And the old linden tree outside Tom’s window was given the thickest bacon rinds, and not one but two coconut shells! There stood little Thomas, and sometimes he ran out into the garden too, but all it was was just some grown-up nonsense or other. ‘There aren’t any birds any more, just ravens.’

  It was boring, and gliding down the hill to the lake on his sleigh was a thousand times more fun.

  There was a cry, and Herr and Frau Rogge leaped out of bed. Little Tommy in his pyjamas stood by his window, pressing his nose against the glass, and crowed breathlessly: ‘The finches … The greenfinches! Mama, Papa, the finches are back!’

  He looked at his parents with shining eyes, with eyes full of the deep, mysterious light of joy, and then he looked out at the bird-feeder again. There were two greenfinches, hanging on the coconut shells, pecking and eating …

  ‘Our greenfinch Mama! Our finch Papa!’

  Bliss! A sheen from paradise. Bliss of a kind never experienced again.

  Or – more bliss?

  There’s a flutter, a dart, round the corner of the stable. More finches. Thomas gets out of breath counting them: ‘One, two, three, four, five, six – oh, Papa, the drownded birds are back! There’s six of them! Oh, Papa, Mama, they didn’t drowned at all, they’ve forgiven me, our greenfinches!’

  Dete had no need to tap warningly on the shoulder of her husband – what is pedagogy? What is an untruth?

  ‘That’s right,’ said Herr Rogge, and he cleared his throat. ‘Our greenfinches are back – and they’ve come back to you.’

  ‘Our drownded finches …’ said the child, and he drew a deep breath, as though a mighty weight had been taken off his chest.

  Food and Grub

  (1945)

  There was once a young man – not to put too fine a point on it, it was I, the author of these lines – who in his youth was condemned by doctors and his parents to go into agriculture because city life was deemed to be ‘unsuitable’ for his high-strung nerves. So it came about that for a dozen or so years, I parked my feet under the tables of various landowners; I’m afraid I can’t say that they were always the most generous of hosts.

  Good God, though, they were years of plenty, especially those before 1914, and a bit of food here or there couldn’t really have mattered. But many of these people, most of them, in fact, were just mean, and to their wives it seemed to be a matter of honour not to let us have food that was grown on the farm, so that instead of good butter, they would smear our bread with the cheapest margarine, and they fed us on gruel that was sweetened not with sugar but with saccharin.

  I remember a Christmas in the Neumark, on Christmas Eve we farm officials were invited to ‘partake’ at the boss’s table. It was all very festive and cordial, peace on earth and goodwill to all men, as the celebrations would have it. But when I helped myself to a piece of breast when the platter went around, I caught the harsh words of the lady of the house, softened by no spirit of celebration: ‘You might have taken the brown meat, you know! I put it on top specially for you, Herr Fallada!’

  Another time I was a field inspector on Count Bibber’s estates in Pomerania. It was a wonderful estate, seven manors and three small farms, the owner drove for over ten miles on his own land, a little despot. I lived in the stewards’ housing on the main manor, and was fed along with the other officials by Fräulein Kannebier. One morning I came in from the fields chilled to the bone – it was late autumn, and I was overseeing the plough teams. My breakfast is on the table, the usual two pieces of bread and sausage and a bottle of beer.

  Before I could take a bite, my nose is warning me: this liver sausage reeks! Sadly, I push my plate away – I was very young at the time, and was constantly hungry – and I think: oh well, accidents happen. I drink my bottle of beer, and go back out on the fields.

  The next morning it’s the same deal: I’d got over the first time, but today’s bread reminds me, the smell is the same.

  In a rage, I pick up my plate and run into the kitchen. You wretch! I think. This is no accident, I think. I’m not going to let you walk all over me, I think. I can look after myself.

  And: ‘Fräulein Kannebier!’ I say threateningly. ‘This is the second day you’ve given me off sausage for my breakfast. I do proper work here, and I want proper food!’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with that sausage!’ she says, and looks at me insolently with her dark eyes. She has a fat, pale face, I can’t stand the sight of her. I bet she eats everything she doesn’t let me have, and she keeps everything from me she can!

  ‘Smell this!’ I shout, and I hold the plate under her nose. ‘There, did you smell it!’

  She takes a step back. ‘There’s nothing the matter with it!’ she says. ‘It’s not even the least bit high!’ she says. ‘It’s made right here on the estate,’ she even says.

  It doesn’t seem like we can come to an agreement, neither of us will give an inch. I suggest that she give the delicious, home-slaughtered liver sausage to one of the others, and I’ll make do with margarine, but she’s not having that. After a while she starts getting heated, and she wants me out of her kitchen, but I refuse to give in. I’m on sixty marks per month, gross, and I can’t afford to take myself out to breakfast on that. I want my regulation breakfast.

  Finally, in the heat of the argument she lets slip the sentence: ‘The countess personally instructed me to serve that liver sausage for the farm officials’ breakfast!’

  ‘Fräulein Kannebier!’ I exclaim. ‘I refuse to believe that. That’s out of the question. The countess in person! No, it’s all your doing, Fräulein Kannebier!’

  ‘She did so order me to do that!’ repeats Fräulein Kannebier, and turns her back on me. She evidently regrets having said it.

  ‘I’ll go and ask her then, shall I, the countess!’ I say threateningly.<
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  ‘Oh, suit yourself!’ she says crossly. ‘Just get out of my kitchen.’

  A minute later, behold little Field Inspector Fallada trotting across the manor yard in the direction of the main house. He looks neither left nor right, and in front of him he is carrying the plate with the stinking liver sausage sandwiches. I’ll show her! he thinks to himself.

  I walk down the line of lindens across the park, up the drive and reach the entrance hall. The old major-domo Elias, whom I sometimes play skat with on Sunday afternoons, stares at me in wonder. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asks me.

  ‘Elias!’ I whisper like a conspirator. ‘Do you know where the countess is?’

  His look wanders between the plate in my hand and my face. ‘Why do you want to know?’ he asks me suspiciously.

  ‘Never you mind!’ I reply. ‘Just tell me where to find her, everything else is none of your business.’

  Elias has made his mind up. ‘She’s in the breakfast room that opens onto the terrace,’ he whispers back. ‘Straight on, then down the corridor till you get to the blue door. Mind, I never said a thing!’

  ‘Not a thing!’ I confirm. ‘We haven’t even seen each other. Bye!’

  I stand in front of the blue door. By now, my heart has started to pound a little bit. But never mind, there’s no going back on this. I knock and enter, but stay in the doorway.

  This is no cosy little breakfast room, this is a vast hall where they are eating. One entire wall is lined with mirror-glass doors, the flower beds on the terrace provide little sprinkles of colour, the bright and dark clumps of ancient park trees – and in the distance the lake is sparkling away.

  There they are sitting at breakfast, twenty, maybe thirty of them – the manor is always stuffed full of visitors. The gaudy peacetime uniforms of the officers, the dazzling dresses of the ladies. I see a sparkle of silver and crystal, there’s a fabulous smell of freshly ground coffee, and a hundred other good things – and I’m standing in the doorway with my ponging liver sausage sandwiches. Another world, not for little field inspectors on sixty a month!