Little Man, What Now? (41 page)

‘It’s a tough job,’ he said. ‘Nine hours darning socks, and so little money!’

‘You have to include the food,’ she said. ‘I get plenty at the Kramers. I’ll bring some for you both this evening.’

‘You should eat your own food,’ said Pinneberg.

‘I get plenty at the Kramers,’ she repeated.

It was now completely light, the sun had risen. He blew out the lamp and they sat down at the table for coffee. The Shrimp alternated between his father’s lap and his mother’s. He drank his milk, he ate his bread, his eyes gleamed with pleasure at the arrival of a new day.

‘When you go into the town today,’ said Lammchen, ‘you
could bring him back a quarter of a pound of nice butter. I think it’s not good for him always having margarine. He’s having trouble cutting his teeth.’

‘I have to go and give Puttbreese his six marks too.’

‘Yes, you must. Don’t forget.’

‘And Heilbutt has to have his ten marks rent. The day after tomorrow is the first.’

‘Right,’ said Lammchen.

‘And then that’s the end of the dole. I’ll only have the fare left.’

‘I’ll give you five marks to take with you,’ said Lammchen. ‘I’m getting three more today. Then you can get the butter, and be sure to get some of the five pfennig-bananas on Alexanderplatz. The robbers here charge fifteen. Who’s going to pay that?’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Mind you don’t get in too late so that the boy isn’t alone so long.’

‘I’ll see what I can do. I may be back here by half-past five. You leave at one?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I have to be at the Labour Exchange at two.’

‘It’ll work out,’ she said. ‘It isn’t very nice having to leave him alone in the house. But it’s always worked out so far.’

‘So far,’ he said.

‘You mustn’t say that kind of thing,’ she said. ‘Why should we always be unlucky? Now I have the mending and the darning, we’re getting by.’

‘Getting by,’ he said slowly. ‘Yes we are, of course.’

‘Oh Sonny!’ she cried. ‘Things will be different. Just keep your pecker up. It will get better.’

‘I didn’t marry you,’ he said stubbornly, ‘for you to keep me.’

‘I don’t keep you,’ she said. ‘How could I on three marks? What nonsense!’ She reflected. ‘Listen, Sonny, you could do something to help me.’ She hesitated. ‘It isn’t pleasant, but it would be a great help to me.’

‘Yes, what?’ he said expectantly. ‘Anything.’

‘I did some mending at the Ruschs’ in Gartenstrasse three weeks ago. Two days: six marks. I still haven’t had the money.’

‘Do you want me to go?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But you mustn’t make a scene. Promise me.’

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I’ll be able to get the money.’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘That’s a weight off my mind. Now I must go. Cheers, Sonny love. Cheers, my little Shrimp.’

‘Cheers, my girl,’ he said, ‘Don’t overdo the darning. One pair of socks more or less won’t make any difference. Say bye-bye, Shrimp!’

‘Cheers, my little Shrimp!’ said she. ‘And this evening we must definitely make a plan for what we’re going to grow in the garden next spring. We want to have such a lot of vegetables! Think about it anyway.’

‘You’re great,’ he said. ‘You really are the greatest. Yes I will think about it. Cheers, wife.’

‘Cheers, husband.’

He held the child in his arms and they watched her as she went down the garden path. They shouted, laughed, waved. Then the garden gate squeaked. Lammchen went down the path between the allotments. Sometimes she disappeared behind a summer-house and then the Shrimp called: ‘Mum-Mum!’

‘Mum-Mum’s coming back soon,’ his father comforted him.

But finally she was no longer to be seen, and the two went into the house.

MAN AS WOMAN. NICE WATER AND A BLIND SHRIMP. A BATTLE OVER SIX MARKS

Pinneberg put the child on the ground and gave him a newspaper while he himself set about tidying the room. It was a big newspaper for such a small child, and he was a long time unfolding it. The
room was only small: three metres by three, and there was nothing in it but a bed, two chairs, a table and the dressing-table. That was everything.

The Shrimp had found the pictures inside the paper, and gave an eager ‘Pic!,’ followed by a joyful ‘Ei Ei!’

Pinneberg acknowledged the find. ‘Those are pictures, my Shrimp,’ he said. When the baby found someone he thought was a man he said ‘Dad-Dad’. All women were greeted with ‘Mum-Mum’. There were lots of them in the paper and he was bubbling with good humour.

Pinneberg put the feather-beds out of the window to air, tidied the room, then went next door into the kitchen. It was pocket-handkerchief-sized, three metres long by one and a half wide, and the stove was the smallest stove in existence, with only one burner. It was Lammchen’s greatest affliction. He tidied in the kitchen and washed up. He didn’t mind doing that, or mopping and sweeping. But his next task was the one he objected to: peeling potatoes for lunch and scrubbing carrots.

After a while Pinneberg had finished all his work, and he walked a while in the garden looking at the surrounding land. The minute size of the summer-house with its little glassed-in porch made the allotment around it seem all the bigger. It was almost a thousand metres square, but the ground wasn’t in good shape. Nothing had been done to it since Heilbutt inherited it three years back. It might be possible to rescue the strawberries, but it would mean a fearful amount of digging, as it was full of weeds, couchgrass and thistles.

The sky had cleared after the morning rain, it was fresh but it would do the Shrimp good to go out.

Pinneberg went inside. ‘Well, little Shrimp, now we’re going out,’ he said, dressing the little boy in his woollen jumper and grey leggings, and putting on his white woolly hat.

The Shrimp cried eagerly: ‘Ca-Ca!’ and his father gave his
cards to him. They had to go out with him. On every outing he had to have something in his hand. The boy’s little pushchair was standing on the veranda; they had exchanged it for the pram in the summer. ‘Get in, my Shrimp,’ said Pinneberg, and the Shrimp got in.

They set off slowly. Pinneberg went a different way from the usual. He didn’t want to go past Krymna’s summer-house today, there would only be trouble. In his present hopeless mood, Pinneberg would have preferred to get by without any trouble, but it was not always possible. The population of the huge group of allotments—three thousand in all—shrank to fifty people at most in winter. Anyone who was in any way able to scrape together the money for a room or who could find refuge with relations had fled from the cold, the dirt and the loneliness into town.

However those who had stayed behind, the poorest, the toughest and the bravest, felt they belonged together. The trouble was that they did not belong together: they were either Communists or Nazis, so there were continual arguments and fights.

Pinneberg had not yet been able to decide in favour of one or the other, and he had thought that would be the easiest way to slide through. But sometimes it actually seemed the most difficult.

There was vigorous sawing and chopping in some of the houses; that was the Communists who had been out on the night expedition with Krymna. They quickly cut the wood into bits, so that if the local constable did ever make a check there would be no proof. If Pinneberg said a polite ‘Good morning’ to them, they replied ‘Mornin”, briefly and sullenly, none of them really friendly. No doubt they were annoyed with him. Pinneberg was uneasy.

At last they came into the village itself with its long paved streets and rows of little villas. Pinneberg undid the strap of the pushchair and said to the Shrimp: ‘Get out! Get out!’ He glanced at his father with a mischievous look in his blue eyes.

‘Get out,’ repeated Pinneberg. ‘And push.’

The Shrimp looked at his father, stretched a leg out of the pushchair, smiled and withdrew it.

‘Get out, Shrimp,’ said Pinneberg in a warning tone.

The Shrimp lay back as though he wanted to go to sleep.

‘All right,’ said Pinneberg. ‘Then Dad-Dad’s going on alone.’

The Shrimp peeped at him but didn’t move.

Pinneberg went on slowly, leaving the little pushchair with the child in it behind him. He went ten steps, twenty steps: nothing. He went ten more steps, slowly, and then the child shouted: ‘Dad-Dad! Dad-Dad!’

Pinneberg turned round. The Shrimp had got out of the pushchair, but he made no move to follow his father, he held up the strap for Pinneberg to attach.

He went back and did as required. Now the little boy’s sense of order was satisfied. He pushed the pushchair along beside his father for some time. After a while they crossed a bridge over a wide, swift stream flowing through a field. On both sides of the bridge there was an embankment where you could get down into the field.

Pinneberg left the pushchair on the path, grasped the Shrimp by the hand and climbed with him down the embankment to the stream. The recent rain had filled the stream, it rushed murkily along its course churning up swirls of foam.

Holding the Shrimp by the hand, Pinneberg went to the edge of the stream, and they both looked long and silently at the hurrying water. After a while Pinneberg said: ‘That’s water, my Shrimp. Nice water.’

The child gave a small sound that betokened approval. Pinneberg repeated the sentence several times, to the Shrimp’s unfailing satisfaction.

It seemed ungracious to be standing dispensing information to the child from on high, so he squatted and said again ‘That’s water, nice, friendly water, Shrimp.’

When the child saw his father squatting, he thought that must be part of the activity and squatted too. And so they both looked at the water for a time in a squatting position. Then they went on. The Shrimp had got tired of pushing and went along by himself. He began by walking alongside his father and the pushchair, then he found things to look at: some hens, a shop window, an iron drain cover that caught his eye in the expanse of pavement. Pinneberg waited a while, then went slowly on, then stopped and called and beckoned to the Shrimp. He trotted eagerly ten steps in his father’s direction then laughed at him, turned around and went back to his drain cover.

This happened several times, until his father had got quite a way ahead: much too long a way it seemed to the Shrimp. He called to his father, but the latter just kept on going. The child stood stamping from one leg to the other getting very insistent. He grabbed the edge of his woolly hat and pulled it with one jerk down over his face, so that he couldn’t see. At the same time he cried out very loudly: ‘Dad-Dad!’

Pinneberg looked around. There stood his little son in the middle of the road, the hat completely covering his face, tottering this way and that, ready to fall at any moment. Pinneberg ran and ran to get there before it happened, his heart beating wildly, thinking to himself: ‘One and a half years old and he thought of that all on his own. He makes himself blind so that I have to fetch him.’

He pulled the hat off the child’s face; the Shrimp beamed at him. ‘What a noodle you are, Shrimp, what a noodle!’ he said over and over again, moved to tears.

Now they came to Gartenstrasse, where Rusch the factory-owner lived, whose wife had owed Lammchen six marks for three weeks now. Pinneberg inwardly repeated his promise not to make a scene and firmly resolved not to do so. He rang the bell.

The villa was set back from the road, with a front garden. It was a fine big villa with a fine big orchard behind, very much to
Pinneberg’s taste.

He surveyed the place in detail, gradually becoming aware that nobody was answering the bell. He rang it again.

This time a window in the villa opened, and a woman shouted to him: ‘What d’you want? We’ve nothing to give you.’

‘My wife did some mending for you,’ said Pinneberg. ‘I’ve come for the six marks.’

‘Come back tomorrow!’ shouted the woman in reply and shut the window.

Pinneberg stood for a while pondering how much latitude was permitted him by his promise to Lammchen. The Shrimp sat quite still in his pushchair, sensing no doubt that his father was cross.

Then Pinneberg pressed the bell-button again; at length. But nothing stirred. Pinneberg thought again. He was on the point of leaving when he reflected what eighteen hours of mending and darning meant, and he jammed his elbow on the bell-button. He stood there quite a long time and some passers-by stared at him. But he remained rooted to the spot, and the Shrimp didn’t utter a sound.

Finally the window did open again and the woman shouted: ‘Get away from the bell this instant or I’ll call the constable.’

Pinneberg took away his elbow and shouted back: ‘You do that! Then I’ll tell him …’

But the window had already shut. So Pinneberg began ringing again. He had always been a mild, peace-loving person, but enough was enough. It would in fact have been very undesirable for him to get mixed up with the police in his present situation, but he didn’t care. It was also altogether too cold to leave the Shrimp so long in his pushchair, but that didn’t deter him either. Insignificant he might be compared with the manufacturer Rusch, but he wanted his six marks and he was going to ring the bell till he got them.

The door opened and the woman headed straight for him in a
towering rage. She had two mastiffs on a lead, a black one and a grey one. Presumably they watched over the house and grounds at night. The animals had grasped that he was an enemy; they pulled at their leads and growled menacingly.

‘I’ll let the dogs loose,’ said the woman, ‘if you don’t get on your way this minute!’

‘When I get six marks,’ said Pinneberg.

The woman grew even more furious when she perceived that the threat of the dogs didn’t work, as she could not really let them loose. If she did, they would be over the railings in a minute and would have torn the man apart. And the man knew that just as well as she did.

‘You must be used to waiting,’ she said.

‘I am,’ said Pinneberg, and stayed put.

‘You’re unemployed,’ said the woman contemptuously. ‘One can see that. I’ll tell them about you. You have to declare what your wife earns on the side. That’s deception.’

‘Fine,’ said Pinneberg.