Every Man Dies Alone (5 page)

But she says, full of shame and guilt, “I’ve gone and blabbed about the cell, and I swore I wouldn’t tell a soul about it!”

“Don’t worry, Trudel,” says Otto Quangel, and his calm is such as to immediately help to settle her agitation.” “You know, with Otto Quangel a thing goes in one ear and out the other. I can’t remember what you told me a moment ago.” With grim resolve he gazes at the poster. “I don’t care if the whole Gestapo turns up, I don’t know anything. And,” he adds, “if you want, and if it makes you feel more secure, then from this moment forth, we simply won’t know each other anymore. You don’t need to come tonight to see Anna, I’ll cook up some story for her.”

“No,” she replies, her confidence restored. “No. I’ll go and see Mother tonight. But I’ll have to tell the others that I blabbed, and maybe someone will come and see you, to see if you can be trusted.”

“Let them come,” says Otto Quangel menacingly. “I don’t know anything. Bye, Trudel. I probably won’t see you tonight. You know I’m rarely back before midnight.”

She shakes hands with him and heads off down the passage, back to her work. She is no longer so full of exuberant life, but she still radiates strength. Good girl! thinks Quangel. Brave woman!

Then Quangel is all alone in the corridor lined with posters gently flapping in the draft. He gets ready to go. But first, he does something that surprises himself: he nods meaningly at the poster in front of which Trudel was weeping—with a grim determination.

The next moment, he is ashamed of himself. How theatrical! And now, he has to hurry home. He is so pressed for time, he takes a streetcar, which, given his parsimony that borders sometimes on meanness, is something he hates to do.

Chapter 5

ENNO KLUGE’S HOMECOMING

Eva Kluge finished her delivery round at two o’clock. She then worked till four totting up newspaper rates and surcharges: if she was very tired, she got her numbers muddled up and she would have to start again. Finally, with sore feet and a painful vacancy in her brain, she set off home; she didn’t want to think about everything she had to do before getting to bed. On the way home, she shopped, using her ration cards. There was a long line at the butcher’s, and so it was almost six when she slowly climbed the steps to her apartment on Friedrichshain.

On her doorstep stood a little man in a light-colored raincoat and cap. He had a colorless and expressionless face, slightly inflamed eyelids, pale eyes—the sort of face you immediately forget.

“Is that you, Enno?” she exclaimed, and right away gripped her keys more tightly in her hand. “What are you doing here? I’ve got no money and nothing to eat, and I’m not letting you into the flat either.”

The little man made a dismissive gesture. “Don’t get upset, Eva. Don’t be cross with me. I just wanted to say hello. Hello, Eva. There you are!”

“Hello, Enno,” she said, reluctantly, having known her husband for many years. She waited a while, and then laughed briefly and sardonically.”
All right, we’ve said hello as you wanted, so why don’t you go? But it seems you’re not going, so what have you really come for?”

“See here, Evie,” he said. “You’re a sensible woman, you’re someone a man can talk to…” He embarked on a long and involved account of how he could no longer extend his sick leave, because he had been off for twenty-six weeks. He had to go back to work, otherwise they would pack him off back to the army, which had allowed him to go to the factory in the first place because he was a precision toolmaker and those were in short supply. “You see, the thing is,” he concluded his account, “that I have to have a fixed address for the next few days. And so I thought…”

She shook her head emphatically. She was so tired she could drop, and she was longing to be back in her flat, where much more work was waiting for her. But she wasn’t going to let him in, not if she had to stand outside half the night.

Quickly he added, in a tone that immediately struck her as insincere, “Don’t say no, Evie, I haven’t finished yet. I swear I want nothing from you, no money, no food, nothing. Just let me bed down on the sofa. No need for any sheets. I don’t want to be the least trouble to you.”

Again, she shook her head. If only he would stop talking; he really ought to know she didn’t believe a word of it. He had never kept a promise in his life.

She asked, “Why don’t you get one of your girlfriends to put you up? They usually come through for something like this!”

He shook his head. “No, Evie, I’m through with women, I can’t deal with them anymore, I want no more of them. If I think about it, you were always the best of them anyway, you know that. We had some good years back then, you know, when the kids were still small.”

In spite of herself, her face lit up at the recollection of their early married years. They really had been good years, when he was working as a machinist, taking home sixty marks a week, before he turned work shy.

Immediately Enno Kluge saw the chink. “You see, Evie, you see, you still have a bit of a soft spot for me, and that’s why you’ll let me sleep on the sofa. I promise I’ll be quick dealing with the management, I’m not bothered about the wages, I just want to go on sick leave again and stay out of the army. In ten days I’ll have my medical discharge, I promise!”

He paused and looked at her expectantly. This time she didn’t shake her head, but her expression was opaque. He went on, “I don’t want to do it with stomach ulcers this time, because then they don’t give you anything to eat when you’re in hospital. What I’m trying for this time is inflamed gall bladder. They can’t prove you’re lying, all they can do is X-ray you, but you don’t have to have gallstones to have the inflammation. You might, but you don’t have to. That’ll work. I’ll just have to clock in for ten days first.”

Once again she didn’t say a word, and he went on, because it was his belief that you could talk your way into or out of anything and that if you were persistent enough, in the end people would just give in. “I’ve got the address of a doctor on Frankfurter Allee, he writes medical excuses just like that, he just doesn’t want any trouble afterward. He’ll do it for me, I’m sure; in ten days I’ll be back in the hospital and you’ll be rid of me, Evie!”

Tired of all the chat, she spoke at last: “Look, Enno, I don’t care if you stay here till midnight talking, I’m not taking you back. I’m never doing that again; I don’t care what you say or what you do. I’m not going to let you wreck everything again with your laziness and your horses and your hussies. You’ve done it three times, and then a fourth, and then more, but I’ve reached my limit, and that’s it. I’m going to sit down on the steps, because I’m tired, I’ve been on my feet since six. If you want to, you can sit down, I don’t care. You can talk or not, that’s up to you: as I said, I don’t care. But you’re not setting foot in my apartment ever again!”

She sat down on the same step where he had stood and waited for her. And her words sounded so determined that he felt no amount of talking would change her mind. So he pulled his cap slightly askew and said: “Well, Evie, if that’s the way you feel about it, and you won’t even do me a little favor when you know I’m in trouble, the man you had five children with, three of them in the ground, and the other two away fighting for Führer and fatherland…” He broke off. He had been talking mechanically to himself, going on and on as he was used to doing in pubs, even though he had grasped that there was no point in it now. “All right then, Evie, I’m going. And let me tell you, I’ve no complaints against you, I’m no better than I ought to be, Evie, you know that, but at least I don’t bear grudges.”

“Because you don’t care about a thing in the world except your races,” she retorted, in spite of herself. “Because nothing else interests you, and because you don’t feel an ounce of affection for anything else, not even for yourself, Enno Kluge.” But she stopped right
away; she knew it was useless talking to this man. She waited a while, and then she said, “Weren’t you going to leave now?”

“I am going, Evie,” he said surprisingly. “Be a good girl. I don’t hold anything against you. Heil Hitler, Evie!”

She was still firmly convinced this leavetaking was a trick on his part, a prelude to a new and stupefying bout of talk. To her limitless surprise, he said nothing further, but really did start walking down the stairs.

For one or two minutes more she continued to sit on the stairs, as though numb. She couldn’t believe she had won. She heard his footfall on the bottom step, he hadn’t stopped anywhere to hide, he really was going! Then the front door banged shut. With trembling hand she unlocked her apartment door; she was so nervous, she couldn’t get the key into the keyhole. Once inside, she put on the chain and slumped into a kitchen chair. Her arms dropped; the struggle had taken the last of her strength. She had no more energy. If someone had prodded her with a finger, she would have fallen out of the chair.

Gradually, as she sat there, strength and life returned to her. She had done it at last, her willpower had defeated his obstinacy. She had successfully guarded her home, kept it for herself. He wouldn’t be sitting around here anymore, banging on about horses and stealing every mark and every piece of bread that crossed his path.

She leaped up now, full of renewed courage. This little bit of life was what remained to her. After the endless work for the post office, she needed these few hours here to herself. The delivery round was hard for her, harder with each passing day. Earlier in her life she had suffered from female troubles, and that was why her three youngest were all in the graveyard: they had all been born prematurely. Now her legs were giving her trouble. She wasn’t cut out to be a working woman was what it came down to—she should have been a housewife. But when her husband suddenly stopped working, she had been forced to go out and earn money. Back then, the two boys were only little. It was she who had brought them up, she who had kept this little home going: two rooms, kitchen and bedroom. And, on the side, as it were, she had pulled a man along as well, whenever he wasn’t staying over with one of his fancy women.

Of course, she could have divorced him long ago; he wasn’t exactly discreet about his adulteries. But divorce wouldn’t have changed anything. Divorced or not, Enno would have gone on clinging to her. He didn’t care—there really wasn’t a speck of pride in him anywhere.

She hadn’t thrown him out of the house until the boys had gone off to war. Till that time, she’d always believed she had to maintain some semblance of family life, even though the boys had a pretty shrewd idea what was going on. She was reluctant to let others in on her struggles. If someone asked after her husband, she would say he was off on some installation job. Even now, she paid the odd visit to Enno’s parents, took them something to eat or a few marks, to pay them back, so to speak, for the money that Enno filched from their pathetic pension.

But inwardly, she was long done with the man. Even if he had changed and started working again, and become what he was in the first years of their marriage, even then she wouldn’t have taken him back. She didn’t hate him—he was such a nonentity you couldn’t hate him—he was simply repulsive to her, like a spider or snake. He should have just left her in peace—all she wanted for her contentment was not to see him again!

While Eva Kluge was thinking of these things, she put her dinner on the hob and tidied up the kitchen—she did the bedroom in the morning before going to work. As she listened to the soup bubbling, and the good smell of it spread through the kitchen, she got out her darning basket—stockings were always such a bother; she ripped more of them in a day than she could mend. But for all that she didn’t resent the work, she loved those quiet half hours before supper, when she could sit snugly in the wicker chair in her felt slippers, her aching feet stretched out and crossed—that was how they seemed to rest most comfortably.

After dinner, she wanted to write to her favorite, older boy, Karlemann, who was in Poland. She had rather fallen out with him of late, especially since he had joined the SS. A lot of bad rumors were flying around about the SS. They were supposed to be terribly mean to the Jews, even raping and shooting Jewish girls. But she didn’t think he was like that, not the boy she had carried in her womb. Karlemann wouldn’t do that sort of thing! Where would he have got it from? She had never been rough or brutal in her life, and Enno was just a dishrag. But she would try to put some hint in her letter to him to remain decent. Of course it would have to be very subtly expressed, so that only Karlemann understood it. Otherwise, the letter would wind up with the censor, and he’d get in trouble. Well, she would come up with something—maybe she would remind him of something from his childhood, like the time he stole two marks from her and spent them on sweets, or, better yet, when he was thirteen and
went out with that little floozie, Walli. The trouble there had been then, to get him out of her clutches—he was capable of such rages, her Karlemann!

But she smiled as she thought of it. Everything to do with the boys’ childhood seemed lovely to her. Back then, she still had the strength, she would have defended her boys against the whole world, she worked day and night so that they didn’t have to go without what other children got from their fathers. But over the past few years, she had gotten steadily weaker, particularly since the two of them had gone off to the war.