Every Man Dies Alone (73 page)

Quangel took the last few steps, reached out, and grabbed the little package, concealing it first in the palm of his hand, then in his trouser pocket. It had a firm feeling. He turned round and saw that the guards hadn’t remarked his absence. A door shut at the back of the public gallery, and the judge was gone.

Quangel started to wander back to his place. He was excited and his heart was pounding. It was so unlikely that this adventure was going to end well. What had seemed so important to the judge that he had risked so much in slipping it to him?

Quangel was only a few yards from his place when one of the guards finally noticed him. He gave a jump, looked in confusion at Quangel’s seat as though to confirm that the accused wasn’t actually sitting in it, and then he almost shouted in alarm, “What are you doing wandering around?”

The other guard spun round, too, and stared at Quangel. They both stood there, rooted to the spot in bewilderment; it didn’t even occur to them to lead the prisoner back.

“I want to be excused, officer!” said Quangel.

But while the guard growled, “Well, kindly ask, the next time! You don’t just go shuffling off by yourself!”—while the guard was still talking, Quangel suddenly thought that he didn’t want to be any
better off than Anna. Let them announce their verdict without the presence of the two principals—it would spoil their fun. He, Quangel, wasn’t in the least curious; he knew what was coming. But he was curious to learn what the judge had slipped him.

The guards had come up alongside Quangel and taken his arms, while he held up his trousers.

Quangel looked at them icily, and said, “Fuck Hitler!”

“What?” They were stunned, didn’t believe their ears.

And Quangel, very fast and very loud, “Fuck Hitler! Fuck Göring! Fuck Goebbels, you piece of shit! Fuck Streicher!”

A punch on the jaw prevented him from continuing with this litany. The two policemen lugged the unconscious Quangel out of the court.

And so it came about that Judge Freisler ended up passing sentence on the two accused in absentia. In vain had he ignored Quangel’s insulting behavior to his defense attorney. And Quangel was right: Freisler didn’t enjoy passing sentence without being able to look into the faces of the accused. He had thought up such fine insults.

Freisler was still speaking in court when Quangel opened his eyes in his cell. His chin hurt, his whole head hurt, he could barely remember what had happened. His hand slid into his trouser pocket. Thank God, the little package was still there.

He heard the footfall of the sentry in the corridor, and then it stopped, and there was a quiet scraping sound from the door: the peephole cover being slid aside. Quangel shut his eyes and remained stretched out as though still unconscious. After a seemingly endless interval, there was a second scraping sound, and then the renewed footfall of the sentry…

The peephole was shut; the sentry wouldn’t be looking in for another two or three minutes.

Quangel reached into his pocket and pulled out the little package. He slipped off the thread that tied it and unfolded the piece of paper to find a glass vial. On the paper was a typed note: “Cyanide, kills painlessly in seconds. Hide it in your mouth. Your wife will be similarly provided for. Destroy this note!”

Quangel smiled. The good old man! The lovely old man! He put the note in his mouth, chewed it until it was sodden with spittle, then swallowed it.

He gazed curiously at the vial, with its clear contents. Swift, painless death, he mused. Oh, if they knew! And Anna provided for as well. He really does think of everything. Good old man!

He put the glass vial in his mouth. After trying various places, he found he could best lodge it in his cheek beside his jawbone, like a plug of tobacco—many of the workers in the furniture factory had chewed. He felt his cheek. No, there was no bump there. And if they did spot something, he would crunch the glass and swallow before they could take it from him.

Quangel smiled again. Now he felt really free. Now they had no more power over him!

Chapter 66

THE DEATH HOUSE

The death house in Plötzensee is now Otto Quangel’s home. The solitary cell in the death house is his last address on earth.

Yes, he is in solitary now. There are no more cell mates for those sentenced to death, no Dr. Reichhardt, not even a “dog.” The only companion for those sentenced to death is Death: that’s the way the law wants it to be.

From the ghosts in the cells there isn’t a sound to be heard. The condemned are so quiet! Brought together from all corners of Europe: Germans, French, Dutch, Belgians, Norwegians, some of them little more than boys, and good characters, weak characters, bad characters—every temperament is represented, from sanguine to choleric to melancholic. In this establishment, distinctions are blurred, for everyone is so quiet; these men are no more than shadows of their former selves. Only rarely does Quangel hear someone sobbing at night, and then silence, silence… Silence…

He has always loved silence. These past few months, he has been forced to live a life against his own bent: never alone, continually forced to speak, when more than anything he hated speech. Now for one last time he is allowed to return to his own type of life: silence, patience. Dr. Reichhardt is a good man, he learned a lot from him, but now, so close to death, it is better to be without Dr. Reichhardt.

He has established (based on what he learned from Dr. Reichhardt) a regular routine here in the cell. Everything at the prescribed time: careful washing, a few calisthenics picked up from his former cell mate, an hour’s walk in the morning and one in the afternoon, thorough cleaning of the cell, eating, sleeping. There are books to read here too; each week he is allowed six books in his cell. But he hasn’t changed as much as all that, and he never looks at them. He is not about to start reading in the twilight of his life.

But there is one other thing he has picked up from Dr. Reichhardt: while he walks he hums to himself. He remembers nursery rhymes and folk songs from his school days and before. They well up in him from forgotten depths, verse after verse—what a brain he must have, remembering those things after forty years! And then the poems: “The Ring of Polycrates,” “The Pledge,” “The Ode to Joy,” “The Erlking.” Only for “The Bell” he can’t quite remember all the stanzas. Maybe he never had them all memorized in the first place; he can’t remember now…

A quiet life, with work, as ever, at the core of his day. Yes, he has to work here too. He has to sort batches of dried peas and pick out the wormy ones, the broken ones, stray seeds of this or that, blackish gray balls of vetch. He likes the work; his busy fingers sort peas hour after hour.

And it’s good, too, that he’s landed this particular job, because it keeps him fed. The good days when Dr. Reichhardt shared his meals with him are now well and truly over. What they give him in his cell now is poorly cooked, watery swill—glutinous bread with potatoes to stretch it—and it sits heavy in his gut.

But the peas help. He can’t take many because they’re weighed, but enough to satisfy his appetite. He takes the peas and softens them in water, and when they’ve swelled up he drops them in his soup to warm them through, and then he mashes them. This way he improves his food, of which it would have been true to say Not enough to live on and too much to die on.

He senses that the warders know what he’s up to, but they don’t say anything. And the reason they don’t is not because they want to make life easier for the condemned man, but because they’ve witnessed so much misery it has dulled their feelings.

They don’t talk themselves, lest their charges should. They don’t want to listen to any complaints; there’s nothing they can do about them anyway. Everything here takes its rigid course. They are cogs in a machine, iron cogs, steel cogs. If an iron cog happened to soften, it
would have to be replaced, and the cogs don’t want to be replaced—they want to be just the way they are.

They don’t provide any comfort because they don’t want to. They are as they are, which is to say indifferent, cold, lacking empathy.

When Otto Quangel was first brought to this cell from the solitary confinement to which Judge Freisler had sentenced him, he thought it would be for a day or two. He thought they would be in a hurry to carry out his sentence, and that would have been fine by him.

But gradually he comes to realize that it can take weeks or months for a sentence to be carried out, even a whole year. There are people sentenced to death who have been waiting for fully a year, who every night go to bed and don’t know whether they will be rudely awakened by the executioner; any night, any hour—while they are chewing their food, while they are sorting peas, while they are slopping out—at any moment the door might open, a hand beckon, a voice say, “All right! It’s time!”

There is a monstrous cruelty in the way fear is spun out over days, weeks, months. Nor is it just because of some legal formalities: it’s not just pleas for clemency waiting to be settled one way or another that cause this delay. Some people say the executioner has too much to do; he can’t keep up. The executioner only works here on Mondays and Thursdays. All the other days, he’s on the road; his services are in demand all over Germany; the executioner takes his work with him. But how can it be that in the case of, say, two men sentenced for the same thing at the same time, one is punished seven weeks before the other? No, it’s a question of cruelty, of sadism, of barbarism. They don’t beat you up in this establishment, don’t torture you physically; here the poison is dribbled imperceptibly into you. They don’t want to let your soul out of the clutches of death for a single minute.

Each Monday and Thursday there is commotion on death row. The night before, the ghosts begin to stir; they hunker in doorways, shaking; they listen to the sounds from the corridor. The sentry is still pacing back and forth; it’s only two in the morning. But soon… Maybe today. And they beg and pray, Just these three more days, or these four more days till the next scheduled executions, and I’ll go willingly, but not today, please! And they beg and pray and cajole.

The clock strikes four. Footfall, clank of tin dishes, murmurs. The sounds come closer. Your heart starts to beat; sweat breaks out all over your body. Suddenly a key grinds in the lock. Easy, easy, it’s next door—no, two doors away! Not your turn yet. A stifled “No! No! Help!” Feet scraping. Silence. The sentry’s regular pacing back
and forth, back and forth. Silence. Waiting. Terrified waiting. I can’t stand it…

And after an endless delay, after a gulph of fear, an unendurable period of waiting which nonetheless has to be endured, the murmurs, the noise of feet, the rattle of the key… Coming closer, closer, closer. O God, not today, not me! Just three more days. Clank! The keys—that’s my cell. No, yours! It’s next door, a few murmured words, they came for my neighbor. They get him out, the sound of footsteps receding…

Time here crumbles into myriad tiny pieces. Waiting. Nothing but waiting. And the footsteps of the sentries in the corridor. O God, today they’re just going from cell to cell, and I’m next. My—turn—next! In three hours I’ll be a corpse, this body will be stiff, these legs that can still carry me will be pegs, this hand that knew work, caresses, tenderness, sin, will be a rotting piece of meat! It can’t be, but it is!

Waiting—waiting—waiting! And suddenly the condemned man sees the gleam of light outside the window, he can hear the bell saying it’s time to get up. The day is at hand, another working day—and he’s been spared once more. He has another three days’ grace—or four, if it’s a Thursday. Fortune has smiled on him! He breathes more easily; at last he can breathe again—perhaps they’ll just let him live. Perhaps there’ll be a great victory and an amnesty and maybe his punishment will be commuted to life imprisonment!

An hour of breathing more easily!

And then fear begins again, and poisons these three days, or four: last time they stopped right outside my door. Next Monday, they’ll begin with me. Oh, what can I do? Nothing…

And always anew, always anew, culminating twice a week, but every day of the week, fear, every second, fear!

Month after month: deadly fear!

Sometimes Otto Quangel asks himself how he knows all this. He hasn’t talked to anyone, and no one has talked to him. A few mean words from the sentry: “Come! Get up! Work faster!” Perhaps while his tin dish was being filled, something like “seven this week,” more mouthed than whispered, and that was the size of it.

His senses had become hypernaturally acute: they guessed whatever he couldn’t see. His ears picked up every sound in the corridor: the scraps of conversation as sentries clocked on and off, a curse, a scream—everything revealed itself to him, nothing remained a secret. And then at night, in the long nights that according to regulations
went on for thirteen hours but that were never nights at all because a light was kept burning in each cell, then he would sometimes dare to clamber up to the window and hang there listening to the night outside. He knew that the sentries in the yard with their dogs had orders to shoot at any face that appeared in the window—and he heard shots, fairly regularly—but he did it anyway.