The Drinker

by Hans Fallada

  “I was six years in gaol without once being punished,” he told me on one occasion.

  Simply as he said it, the words had a ring of pride. He liked best to talk of his time in prison. He told me about his work, he recounted in full detail how he had begun by weaving material for mattresses, and had progressed to shirt-material. Then he had been put on to knitting stockings on the “flat machine”—I could hardly imagine what a flat machine was, even after I discovered that there was also a “round machine” for knitting stockings.

  Then came Holz’s best time in gaol; he became a washer-up in the kitchen. Here he had as much to eat as he wanted, was in the company of his comrades, and even got to see women at least once a day. These women came from the nearby women’s prison to fetch food. Despite all precautions, glances and notes were exchanged and they even managed to pass bread, sausage and margarine to the women. Holz assured me that he only did what all his companions among the kitchen-staff did, but when the affair came to light they put the entire blame on him, and he was taken out of the kitchen. Only his good conduct saved him from the punishment cells. A horrible year ensued: Holz had to pick oakum in a solitary cell—and at the mention of this task how very clearly I recalled Magda’s arrangement with the prison administration, and my journey to Hamburg. Eventually Holz, being considered not liable to escape, was put on to outside work, and the prison cell only saw him at bed-time, he worked outside the whole day through, in the open fields, or in the sawmill in winter-time, Holz liked to talk of all these simple things. He still knew every task that had been allotted to him; strands which had given him trouble in picking he could still describe with the same fresh anger he must have felt in his solitary cell.

  But Holz’s speciality was his disquisitions on food. Since everybody was always hungry, they constantly talked about food, probably it was all they thought of. Talking of food was a kind of mania, it only made the pangs of our hunger worse, but we could never leave off. In this Holz was an absolute master. Not that he thought up any refined meals to make our mouths water, no, his descriptions were of a biblical plainness. The meals he described were simply the same as those a common labourer eats, they were the meals he got in the convict prison. His head, never used for deep thinking, was sufficiently clear for him to tell me of any slight change in the usually constant prison menu; he still knew the ups and downs of the bread ration; the number of potatoes a prisoner under punishment is entitled to at midday instead of bread, and the extra allocation of bread, sausage and cheese for overtime and land-workers. He still knew all the Christmas extras, and he was most eloquent when he described how a farmer, pleased at a good piece of mowing, had given the convict-party pieces of bread spread thick with “good butter” or dripping, and five cigarettes per man as well. Each experience of this kind had engraved itself deep in his memory, and even today his voice trembled as he described how his stomach had not been able to stand the unwonted rich food, and he had brought it all up again. Holz’s accounts of food were as simple as that, yet I always liked to hear them over and over again, they were so moving! But each time, it struck us that a convict got about twice as much to eat as an institution inmate.

  “There, you can see,” Holz would say, “how they rob us! But what can you do? A donkey is there to carry turnips and get beaten, and we’re worse off than a donkey, because he is worth a few marks whereas with us, they’re glad when we’re dead.”

  Holz would say such things without any reproach, without bitterness even. For him, they were the matter-of-fact evidences of the unalterable way of the world.

  In the asylum, Holz enjoyed a good reputation, both among the keepers and the prisoners. Here too he had immediately been put on to outside work without any probationary period, he worked in a gravel pit, for a building contractor. There he came into contact with many “civilians,” and had all kinds of things given him. He always had a couple of matches to spare for a friend, or a little onion, and he was the much-envied possessor of a glass containing salt, and of nutmeg and pepper. With these, he beautified his water-soup. From an old sardine tin which he found, he made a grater by punching holes in the bottom with a nail, and with this he would grate parsley-roots, celery-roots, carrots, raw potatoes even, if his hunger was very keen. With all these trifles, which a man “outside” would take entirely for granted, he garnished his plain life, and brought a little joy into it, and always had something to look forward to. He never joined in any game, either because he could not play or did not want to. He never read a newspaper, and only listened to the lightest dance-music on the radio.

  “That cheers me up!” he would say then. A little light would come into his eyes, and he would smile, a rare and touching smile. All in all, a modest courageous man—I am glad that I never seriously tried to find out about his crime, I do not want to blacken this picture.

  50

  These were the three companions with whom I shared the cell that first night, to whose heavy breathing I listened, while shame, remorse and anger shook my heart. Outside the window stood the night, sometimes I raised my head and saw a few stars twinkling; I read a poem about them once, how they have been looking down for thousands of years, with the same cool glitter, on human joy and human sorrow. At the time, it had not touched me, but now it did, and I wondered whether the stars had ever witnessed such a desperate, so foolishly-occasioned sorrow as that which had overtaken me. It seemed almost impossible. And as the night-hours slowly dragged on, one after the other, from chime to chime, towards the new morning, I thought more leniently of Magda and the cunning doctor, and I swore to myself once again that next time I would be shrewder and more truthful. I convinced myself that nothing was lost yet, and I imagined long conversations with the doctor, in which I displayed a rare wit and a charming candour.

  Eventually—an hour or so before unlocking-time—I really fell asleep. In my dream I was in my home town, I went through its streets and alleys, I saw many friends and acquaintances but they did not see me and passed by me without a greeting. Eventually I saw Magda sitting on that bench that is associated with our earliest schoolday friendship. I went towards her and sat down beside her. But she did not notice me. I wanted to touch her dress, I reached out my hand, but I could not grasp her dress. I tried to speak to her, and I did speak too, but my voice made no sound, I could not hear it, and Magda could not hear it either. Then I realised with a sharp terror that I was only a shadow wandering among the living, that I was dead. I was so terrified that I awoke—the head-nurse’s key was rattling in the lock and his voice cried “Get up!”

  Yes, a new morning was beginning and now I was no longer a guest in the death-house, instead I was enrolled in the ranks with the others, like all of them I whiled my gloomy hours away here. They made no more fuss of me, they spoke to me, and then they began to quarrel with me, in the washroom they shoved me away from the basins, and sneered at me when I tried to keep my fingernails clean with a sharpened stick.

  Look at him! What’s he doing that for? He’s as deep in the mud as we are!” And I made my little deals like them. I saved a slice of bread from my roaring hunger and traded it for a few crumbs of tobacco, and the first time I was cheated, there was very little tobacco, and a great deal of dried roseleaves mixed in it. Once, too—I will confess—I stole from our orderly Herbst two slices of bread thickly spread with butter, which he had hidden under his bolster. But I was so excited, that I neither enjoyed them, nor did they agree with me. That is the only thing I ever directly stole. I am a weak man, I know that now, but I am no thief. My fear is always greater than my appetite, and in that I am weak too.

  And on this first day, when the order to “Fall in” sounded, I lined up with the others, enrolled among them, I had no advantage now over any of them. A keeper came and took me to a single cell in which there was no bed, only a table, a stool, and a number of different working materials, at which I stared with anxious and wondering eyes, convinced that such a clumsy man as I would never in my life be ab
le to learn such strange work. I saw the ready-cut brush- and broom-holders, and hair bristles, the rice-straw and millet and fibre for the various kinds of brushes and brooms, which I was to learn to make. I saw rolls of thick and thin wire, and a knife—no, I would never learn it! Nobody came, I was shut in my cell—now that I had so urgently begged the doctor to deliver me from Lexer, was I to make brushes without my instructor? I tried it, I seized a few bristles and tried to fasten them in the holes which were already bored. But they were too few, and they fell out again. The next time I took more, but now it was too many and when I tried to force them into the holes, some broke and the others fell to the floor. I bent down and quickly tried to tidy up the mess, the key rattled again, and in sprang little Lexer with his discoloured fangs, and seized me by the breast and cried shrilly: “What did you do with that razor-blade? You’re not going to shit on me, Sommer!”

  I tore myself away furiously and cried: “Keep your hands off me, I tell you! What have your lying tales got to do with me?”

  The little scoundrel looked at me for a moment, astonished and silenced, then he laughed again in an ugly way and said: “All right, just as you like. But one day, I’m going to shit on you!” (However he has mostly let me alone since then, as I have said.) And suddenly changing, he asked: “Haven’t you got a chew of tobacco for me, Sommer, just a little one?”

  I had none, and I told him so, and he said angrily: “There is nothing to be done with you. What did they want to shove a fellow like you in here for? Hang the wire up on the stand. No, not the thick wire, you ox, you’re supposed to make hand-brushes first, out of good bristle, they’re the easiest. Take the fine wire. Two hundred holes a day is your task for the first week, the work inspector will tell you, and if you don’t do it they put you in the cooler with the hard bed and make you get a move on! I can do a thousand holes a day, two thousand when I want to, but I don’t. Why should I? So the fat boys can make more out of us? We’d still have to go hungry! Look, first you pull the wire through the hole like this, so it makes a loop, and then you stick the bristles in, just as many as you can pick up with two fingers, that’s just right. And now you pull the loop tight, and there’s your bristles already fixed! That’s the whole knack, a kid could learn it in five minutes, and now you do it and show you can do as much as a kid!”

  And while Lexer had been breathlessly declaiming all this in his shrill voice so that the spittle stood on his lips, I had been watching with astonishment how his dirty fingers with their bitten nails had drawn the fine wire through the hole with incredible dexterity, had seized just enough bristles to fit exactly into the hole without any space between, and finally had gently and quickly pulled the loop tight. As he did it, it really seemed childishly simple to me too. But what happened when I tried this simple thing myself? My wire would not go into the hole, it buckled instead of making a loop, and I picked up too few or too many bristles, and scattered them on the floor. Meantime Lexer was abusing me ceaselessly and he pushed me and nudged me and splashed me with his spittle, till I threw the brush down and cried again furiously: “Leave me alone, I tell you!”

  So we worked the whole morning, I absolutely desperate over my clumsiness, and convinced I would never learn, and he all the time getting shriller, more triumphant, more overbearing. At the end of the morning we had finished only one single brush, of eighty holes, and it did not look right, as even I could see.

  “Stick this on the rubbish-heap yourself, Sommer!” yelled Lexer. “Pull the plug on it before the work inspector gets to see it, or he’ll put you under punishment for wasting material! I’m not coming back into this stinking hole this afternoon. You know now how it’s supposed to be done, and if you don’t do it, that’s your look-out, you’ll have to answer for it. I’m not going to have anything to do with it!”

  So after five hours I was free of my disgusting instructor and I could have saved myself that sudden outburst of antipathy that had been so ill-received by the doctor. But I was absolutely in despair over my brush-making that afternoon, and by evening I had not finished more than thirty-seven holes, and those badly done. That night for once I did not brood over myself and my adverse fate and Magda and the medical officer, but only about brush-making. But this must have been far more welcome to my head, for I fell asleep over it, and for the first time I had a fairly good night.

  51

  The days went by, one after another, and one day, before I had expected, I was a tolerable brush-maker. I had learned it, I made nailbrushes and hand-brushes and hair-brushes and dairy-brushes and windowsill-brushes. I could make brooms too, millet brooms and fine hair brooms. Eventually I learnt to make shaving-brushes and dusting-brushes and all kinds of paint-brushes. My fingers were now as skilled as Lexer’s, they took up just as many bristles as were necessary, neither more nor less, and the wire gave me no more trouble. Now when I met Lexer in the leisure-hour and he shouted at me in his shrill voice: “Well, Sommer, how many have you done?” I would answer: “Eight hundred holes,” or: “a thousand,” or even: “eleven hundred.”

  Then Lexer would pull an angry face and yell: “Are you trying to suck up to the bosses? You won’t get any better grub than the rest of us, you arse-creeper!”

  But I did not work so hard in order to curry favour, I worked for my own satisfaction. Work passed the time for me; before I expected it, the key would rattle and the keeper’s voice cried: “Lunch-time!”

  The days, long as they sometimes seemed to be individually, went quickly enough: a week, a month had passed, I said to myself: “Now I’ve been here a month already, now two, now nearly three.…”

  Now that my hands did the work of their own accord, now that I no longer had to think and worry about it all the time, my mind was free to reflect and brood on my own fate. But work imparted quite a different tone even to this brooding. Sometimes I stood for a while by the window and looked out over the country, in which they were already cutting the corn, then bringing it in, then ploughing the stubble, then mowing the hay. I had a good bright cell which, so they told me, kept warm even in winter. I looked out, and when my heart plagued and urged me to get out into freedom again, it was probably the work which made me say to myself: “Patience, it’ll all come right. For the time being, let’s get on with finishing this lot of washing-up brushes!”

  Yes, I enjoyed my work. It was humble work that, sure enough, any child and almost any of my feeble-minded companions could have done, but there is always consolation in a job well done, however insignificant it may be.

  I had no fear of the punishment-cells now, nor of the work inspector; he occasionally came into my cell to take the finished work away, and he never said a hard word to me, but often: “Good, good, Sommer.” Or perhaps: “You needn’t do more than your quota, Sommer, it’s not necessary.”

  And once he gave me a crust with jam on. When my first month’s work was finished, I lined up with the other workers outside the glass box and drew the tobacco which had been bought out of my “wages” (four pfennigs a day, one mark a month), namely, one packet of fine-cut and one packet of shag. Half the shag I swapped for a little pipe, for I did not want to roll cigarettes in newspaper like the others, it always either blazed up or else it charred and tasted horrible. The bowl of my pipe was quite small, it only held enough tobacco for ten or twelve pulls; that was fine, I could have five smokes a day and still last the whole month. Not that first month though, for I was still foolish and let myself be talked out of some of it, and lent some which I never saw again. I learnt, too, the dread which all property-owners have of thieves; nothing in the cells was safe from them, however cleverly it might be hidden. Constantly the agonised cry echoed through the building: “They’ve pinched my tobacco!”

  So we were obliged to carry all our belongings about with us in our pockets, even the spoon which was our only eating utensil, much to the annoyance of the head-keeper, who complained of all the bulges in our clothes. I got myself a small box in which I kept all my possessions
, a little salt, perhaps a saved-up piece of bread, my pipe and tobacco. I always had this by me, in the mess-room and the lavatory, in bed, and even on my visits to the doctor. Later, the kindly Qual who was working in the carpenter’s shop, made me a little wooden box with a sliding lid and a handle of string, and would take nothing for it. Yes, now I was really enrolled, I belonged, and to tell the truth, after those first few weeks of getting used to the place, I did not feel too bad about it. I became accustomed to starvation, constant quarrels, bad air and boils, and many of my companions who were unresponsive and dull I just did not notice any more. I belonged; and yet I did not quite belong, I was only “provisionally admitted”, and later I was merely “pending report”. One day, my hearing would be held, I would serve my sentence for uttering threats, and then—I hope, I hope!—I would be able to return to freedom. What I was going to do there, I did not know. It seemed fairly certain to me that I would not go home to Magda, nor did I want to work in my old business again.

  The time I spent in my cell, this constant isolation, had made me rather shy of my fellow-men, I preferred to be in the narrow room among my brushes, and I thought with aversion of the noisy crowded streets of my home town. I had the notion of going to some quiet village and spending the evening of my life there as an unknown, rapidly-ageing man, in a quiet room in which I could go on making brushes.…