Tales from the Underworld

by Hans Fallada

  But it’s too late to go back. The countess, young as she is, has straight away seen that something’s amiss, and here she is standing in front of me. ‘What brings you here, Herr Fallada?’ she asks. ‘Do you want to speak to the count? I’m afraid he’s not here right now.’

  I never supposed the countess knew of my existence, and by golly here she is even using my name! I am almost overcome. In spite of that, I say my piece as well as I can. ‘Countess, this is the second time I’ve been given spoiled liver sausage for my breakfast.’ I raise the plate ever so slightly in her direction. The countess glances at the sausage, and takes a step back. Oddly, I get the sense that countess and sausage have met before. ‘The cook says you ordered the sausage expressly for us officials.’

  ‘Oh, that wretched Kannebier woman!’ cries the countess, and raises her eyes to the beautiful painted stucco ceiling. ‘She really is too stupid! I told her to use the spoiled sausage for the farm workers, and here she is giving it to the officials!’

  For a moment I stand there stunned. Then I say: ‘Thank you very much, Countess!’ Defeated, I slink back across the court. There really are two different worlds!

  That evening, the count looks me up in my room and fires me on the spot. He’s even prepared to pay something for the pleasure of ridding himself of this Red troublemaker, who importuned the countess over the matter of his breakfast: he pays me an entire quarter’s salary!

  I held many posts during my agricultural period, and none of them for very long. But my shortest spell was on a big estate in Silesia: I worked there for just seven hours, and there too the issue was food.

  This was in 1917. I was in Berlin working for a potato wholesaler and starving and freezing through the wretched turnip winter. In those circumstances, it was easy for Economic Councillor Reinlich to talk me into monitoring the progress of a strain of potato he had bred himself on his estate. I was deeply regretting having gone into the city from the country, where at least there was still bread and fruit and milk and potatoes – and not just turnips!

  One evening, I clambered down from a hunting wagon that had picked me up from the station, I had reached my new sphere of operations. My boss, old Reinlich, was a good old fellow, a bachelor, by the way, corpulent, a bit deaf and a bit untidy – his standards of personal hygiene had little to do with his name.* He showed me to my ground-level room, it was all perfectly all right. ‘Maybe you’d like to get moved in a bit. Supper’s in half an hour.’

  I had hardly washed when I heard the gong. Everything was very patriarchal here: at one end of the table sat the economic councillor, at the other his little wizened sister who ran the household. In between were the various officials: the field inspector, the farm administrator, the milk controller, the book-keeper, the cook. And in established patriarchal country fashion supper began with a flour soup which was spiced by some brownish-blackish clumps. Then there was bread and butter with cheese and sausage – yes, it was a good thing that I had come here, and I would stay a long time. No more turnips …

  Supper was over, and the economic councillor said to his sister: ‘I’m going to sit with Herr Fallada in the office for a while, and talk him through the record-keeping. Would you bring us a bottle of the second-best Mosel.’

  Second-best Mosel and the prospect of something to smoke, it all sounded good, very good. Hang onto your hat, Fallada!

  In comes the sister with the Mosel. The boss glowers up at her from under his spectacles. ‘If I told you once,’ he growls, ‘I must have told you a hundred times to keep the lid of the flour bin shut! But no! The soup was full of mouse droppings again!’

  Then I knew what the strangely spicy little brownish-blackish dumplings I had eaten were. And I thought: something that begins this shittily is only going to go on in the same vein. Knock the dust off your feet, Fallada, and hit the highway!

  I listened with interest to everything the economic councillor told me about his remarkable potatoes, and smoked his cigars and drank his Mosel – all those, after all, were safe from contamination. Then, when I was back in my room, I waited quietly till everyone in the building was asleep. I lifted my two suitcases onto the window seat, clambered out and quietly went back the way I had come seven hours before in the hunting carriage. And as they were sitting down to breakfast on the estate – presumably with flour soup, with the same garnish – the train was already carrying me back to freezing, turnip-eating Berlin.

  The economic councillor never got in touch. Perhaps he understood that there were people who drew the line at a bit of mouse dirt – I hope he did anyway.

  The Good Meadow

  (1946)

  The village had never had enough grazing for its cattle – which wasn’t helped when farmer Karwe sold his big meadow by the lake, and then not to a local, but to the owner of the Waldhof estate.

  ‘What’s he going to feed his six cows then?’ they were asking in the village.

  ‘He’s supposed to have got clear eight thousand from the Waldhof, and none of us could have matched that,’ they said.

  ‘But it still ain’t right,’ they moaned. ‘The lake meadow belongs to the village and not the estate, that’s got enough land as it is.’

  ‘Kurt and his old man are supposed to have practically come to blows over it,’ they gossiped. ‘The old man’s gone mad, he said to Erwin Seiler in the pub, apparently.’

  ‘Kurt needs to watch his lip,’ they reckoned. ‘If old Karwe loses his temper, young Kurt is on a hiding to nothing, in spite of his five-and-twenty years.’

  Kurt was sitting under a cow, and milking into a bucket. One cow along, his sister Rosemarie was doing the same. Old Karwe was standing in the passage, pretending to be busy with something, but under his bushy grey brows he was glowering at his son. ‘What’s the matter with your milking today, Kurt?’ he finally came out with. ‘Then again, if you get plastered, then it’s the poor beasts that have to pay.’

  The son, with red boozy splotches in his face, made no reply.

  ‘Why can’t you act like a Christian, you flaming heathen, you!’ scolded the old man. ‘Can’t you tell you’re hurting Bianca?’

  Again the son made no reply; but the cow Bianca turned her head in the direction of udder and milker, and mooed softly.

  ‘Leave off!’ yelled the old man suddenly. ‘Get out of my byre!’ he yelled still more loudly. ‘You’re a tormentor of animals.’

  ‘And out of your farm and all, eh, Pa?’ asked the son. ‘Because I don’t approve of you selling the lake meadow?’ But he’d taken care to get up and step out into the passage.

  ‘Keep it down, the pair of you,’ said Rosemarie. ‘Mum will hear you in bed, and worry.’

  ‘You can start by shutting up, yourself!’ Karwe growled at her. ‘Without your womanly ways …’ He stopped with a look at his son. ‘I want to show you something in the orchard, Kurt,’ he went on quite calmly. ‘You finish the milking, Rose!’

  ‘Then supper’ll be late,’ lamented the daughter. ‘I can’t do everything at once.’

  ‘Who said anything about that?’ replied her father, leading his son out of the cowshed.

  In the orchard the old man stopped at the fence; his son stood a few feet away, leaning against the trunk of an apple tree. For a while they stood there in silence, the old man looking at his son, and the son looking at the fruit trees, the apples and pears bearing as much as he could remember. Even the Golden Noble apples, which were coming off a heavy yield last year, were full again; they hadn’t taken a year off, as they usually did. ‘But what use is it all?’ thought the son, and probably he’d thought it out loud.

  ‘No, Kurt,’ confirmed the old man. ‘It’s no use being obstinate in the face of me and the world. It won’t get the meadow back.’

  ‘It’s a shame,’ Kurt insisted angrily. ‘How could you make us a subject for gossip like that, Father?’

  ‘The alternative would have been a worse shame, Kurt,’ replied the old man.

  The son spun
round, stared at his father with round eyes. There was silence for a time. The father saw the son getting to grips with it, but declined to help him out.

  Finally he asked quietly: ‘Beese from Bergfeld?’

  The father nodded slowly. ‘That’s right. He wants ten thousand as capital for his haberdashery, else he’ll leave Rose on her own.’

  ‘Let him!’ exclaimed the son angrily. ‘She’ll find someone other than that wretched townie.’

  ‘They’ll marry in a fortnight, at least the child will be born in wedlock.’ He saw the son turn pale under his tan. Farmer Karwe waited another moment, then he repeated: ‘That’s just the way it is!’ and left his son alone in the orchard.

  He took a few steps into it, stopped, looked round to check he was alone. Then he dropped heavily onto the grass, propped his head against a tree and thought: I feel like I’ve been sawn off at the knees.

  He wanted to try and think of one thing at a time, he wanted to order his heart and mind, but everything was pell-mell: Beese the merchant from Bergfeld with the cunning yellow features and the dark, oil-gleaming hair as curly as a ram’s. Then his sister, who had got involved with a character like that who didn’t belong, an enigma, no attachments, an incomer. Someone who could have spent time in prison – and by the time you found out about it, it would be too late. And now he remembered how he had cleared the ditches in the lake meadow with his father, before and after winter. It had been hard, cold, wet work, but it hadn’t felt hard to them, not for a moment; both of them, father and son, had relished the work. The meadow was a living thing for both of them: you had to look after it well, and then it would pay you back with a great yield. Last year, when no one in the village had any hay because of the drought, the lake meadow had yielded up three harvests! And now it was gone, it seemed they had cleared the ditches for others, it was no longer part of the Karwe farm.

  The young man almost groaned with the pain of it. Again he looked around quickly, to see if someone wasn’t listening, then he jumped up and ran off. He didn’t run onto the village street, where they could all see him in his disgrace, he ran along the lakeside, clambering over the garden fences, and didn’t stop running until he was in the lake meadow. He climbed over the rough board fence, he leaped across the wide ditch, he went as far as the corner where the reed roof was, that gave the cattle protection from sun and rain. There he sat down on the side of the trough and looked across the meadow, the Karwe meadow, his meadow …

  Yes, there it was, it hadn’t changed yet, it was still the same. And yet everything was different, it wasn’t the Karwe meadow any more, it was a meadow on some rich person’s country estate, one among many, not a shining individual jewel. You couldn’t tell that it had changed. That was something else that Kurt couldn’t understand: his father and his grandfather and his father before him and a generation before that, and himself as well, each of them a Karwe, they had put their work into the meadow. That was what had made it a good meadow, rewarding labour and love. It had become of a piece with the Karwes, barely separable from the hand that worked it or the heart that was attached to it. But now eighty blue banknotes had changed hands, and it was no longer anything to do with the Karwes – it was like selling a piece of your own heart, for God’s sake! You couldn’t do that!

  No, Kurt couldn’t understand it, this was a mystery he couldn’t fathom, however he racked his brain. And with a sudden effort he pushed all these useless, tormenting thoughts away, and his whole fury settled on his sister: if only Rosemarie hadn’t done what she had done, then Father wouldn’t have sold the meadow, and everything would have remained as it should!

  He sat there silent and tormented in the lean-to, and he didn’t have the strength to get up, it really was as though his limbs had been severed. He would have happily gone to the pub, and maybe forgotten his tormenting thoughts in the chatter of the others, but he couldn’t do that. Also, he needed to talk to Anneliese; they hadn’t seen each other since the terrible news of the sale of the meadow. He hadn’t kept their assignation: it was really important for him to talk to her now, and hear what she and her people thought about the sale, because he wasn’t the same suitor as he had been before. But he couldn’t go to Anneliese either, it was all he could do to sit here in his pain and rage and think about the lost meadow.

  Then he noticed someone else on the meadow, it was the fat, red-faced inspector of the Waldhof estate. He was on horseback, and seemed to be enjoying riding back and forth over the meadow, galloping over the ditches. His horse’s hooves threw up great clods of turf. So that was how they were going to treat his meadow!

  After a while the inspector drew up alongside young Karwe, he patted the neck of his horse, and said: ‘A bit of Bessemer slag and some potash will do wonders for this meadow!’

  ‘The meadow’s good enough without!’ replied young Karwe. ‘It’s not acid.’

  ‘Good enough for you farmers, maybe!’ the inspector retorted. ‘I’ll get more out of it than you ever dreamed.’

  ‘In good years, we had four mowings,’ boasted Kurt. ‘And you should have seen the grass, lovely thick swathes of it …’

  ‘I know,’ the inspector suddenly conceded. ‘To begin with, the boss didn’t want to pay as much as eight thousand. But I told him it was worth it, and it would have been worth ten.’

  ‘Then how much would you be prepared to sell it for?’ asked Kurt softly, and suddenly he could feel his heart beating. ‘Twelve?’

  ‘Sell it?’ said the inspector mockingly. ‘Sell the meadow?’ He looked at the young man. ‘You’re probably not happy about your father selling it? You’d like to buy it back later on, isn’t that right? Well, forget about that, son, this meadow won’t be sold any time, it’s part of the estate now!’

  ‘But what if you were able to get twelve for it, or even fifteen?’ Kurt Karwe persisted. ‘Not that I could make you an actual offer or anything – Lord, it would take me a lifetime to get that much together! But at least so that I had a chance of getting the meadow back one day?’ All of a sudden he had got rather talkative, strange for a quiet fellow.

  The inspector could tell, and he felt almost sorry for the young man. ‘Ach, Karwe,’ he said finally, ‘if you were to offer twenty, it wouldn’t matter. What a big estate has, it keeps. It’s gone. Your father for whatever reason let it go, and now it’s gone for keeps, you understand?’ The young man stared at him. He looked for a way out. ‘You’ll just have to sow serradilla everywhere,’ he said. ‘That way you’ll have some feed. It used to be that a lot more serradilla was grown here in the village, you sell the seeds and keep the hay – you’ll do fine.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure,’ said Kurt Karwe mechanically, thinking about how his father had let the meadow go, for keeps. If it had been him, he wouldn’t have bought Rosemarie a husband. Let her have her baby on her own, there would a big to-do about that at first, and then everyone would just get used to it and carry on. Whereas the meadow would always be missing from the farm, and that’s all there was to it, always, as long as he lived. Father thought about these things the way the old people thought about them, and he was in charge. He, the son, just had to put up and shut up.

  On the eve of the wedding, when Father counted out the money onto the table for his brother-in-law to be, he felt like walking out. Next door the drunken guests were carrying on. His brother-in-law Beese stood beside the table, his hands in his jacket pockets watching as Father laid the money out on the table. As though he saw sums like that every day of his life. Rosemarie stood next to Beese, her arm round his shoulder, her lips moving, as though she was counting along …

  ‘Eight thousand five hundred!’ old Karwe said finally, and put down the last bill. ‘You’ll have to wait a little for the balance, Erwin. It’s a lot of money to raise from such a small farm, you understand.’ His voice had a rare sound of begging.

  Erwin Beese stood there impassive, hands in his pockets, and made no move to take the money off the table. He said: ‘The sum we di
scussed was ten thousand, not eight and a half. You need to be serious in a transaction, especially a transaction like this. Eight and a half and patience isn’t serious. All of me is getting married, I’m not waiting for a little bit to follow in the fullness of time. No, I’m afraid I need the remaining fifteen hundred, Father, everything as we agreed.’

  ‘Livestock prices are hopeless right now, Erwin,’ said the old man, imploringly. ‘I’d have to lose another two cows. See,’ he went on, and gestured to the money on the table, ‘it’s still an awful lot of money. I don’t think there’s ever been this much money on the table, and it’s an old table, it’s from my great-grandfather. You’ll get the rest as soon as the butcher pays a bit better.’

  ‘Whatever you arrange with the butcher is your affair, Father,’ said Beese coldly. ‘It’s nothing to do with me. But when we discussed it, you said ten thousand, you said it, and so it must be. I need the money, I have put in hand a refurbishment of my shop, and ordered a lot of new stock – I must be serious with my suppliers, and so you have to be serious with me!’

  ‘Give me four weeks!’ begged farmer Karwe. ‘Prices must surely have turned by then. Your suppliers won’t all want to be paid at once. If I sold now, I’d be running the farm down. I’ve already run it down quite a bit for my boy, Erwin …’

  Hearing his father begging like that, Kurt felt moved to speak, but Beese got in ahead of him. ‘I have seen enough,’ he said in his arrogant drone, ‘and I can see you’re not serious. You promised me ten thousand on my wedding day, Karwe, that was the deal that was struck between us. Isn’t that right, Rosemarie?’ It was the first time he had turned to his intended; thus far she had been an extra at the deal. ‘Tell your father that was the arrangement, and that you want him to keep his word like a serious businessman.’