Wolf Among Wolves (2 page)

The iron doors crashed to.

VII

In Countess Mutzbauer’s apartments in the Bayerischen district of Berlin, the lady’s maid Sophie was already awake in spite of the early hour. The room which she shared with the still-sleeping cook was so narrow that, in addition to the two iron beds, there was space only for two chairs, and she had to write her letter on the window sill.

Sophie Kowalewski had beautifully manicured hands, but they guided their pencil awkwardly. Downstroke, upstroke, pothook, comma, upstroke, downstroke … Ah, she would like to say so much! How she missed him, how slowly time went, still three years to wait and hardly six months gone! But Sophie, daughter of the overseer at Neulohe, had not learned to express her feelings in writing. If Hans had been with her, if it had been a question of talking or touching, she could have expressed anything, have made him mad with a kiss, happy with an embrace. But as things were …

She looked into the distance. How she would like to convey her feelings to him through this letter! Out of the windowpane a reflected Sophie stared at her, and involuntarily she smiled. A dark curl or two fell loosely over her forehead. Under her eyes, also, the shadows were dark. She ought to be using these hours to sleep thoroughly—but was there time for this when everything faded away, everything decayed before it was completely clear? Live for the moment, then. Today you were still alive.

However tired she might be in the mornings, her feet painful, her mouth stale from the liquors, the wine, the kisses of the night before, by evening she was again attracted to the bars. Dance, drink, and riot! There were plenty of gentlemen, flabby as the 100,000-mark notes, each fifty times a maid’s wages, stuffed in their pockets. Last night, too, she had been with one of these gentlemen—but what did it matter? Time ran, flew, galloped. Perhaps in the repeated embraces, in the features which bent over her, greedy and restless as her own,
she was looking for Hans (now in prison).… But he, shining, swift, superior to them all, had no counterpart.

Sophie Kowalewski, who had escaped to the city from the hard work on the farm, was looking for—she didn’t exactly know what—something that would grip her even more. Life is unique, transient, she thought, when we die we are dead for a very long time, and when we get old—even over twenty-five—men will no longer look at us. Hans, oh Hans.… Sophie was wearing madam’s evening dress and didn’t care whether the cook saw it or not. Just as cook had her pickings from the tradespeople, so she, Sophie, lifted silk stockings and underwear from her mistress; neither could throw stones at the other.

It was nearly seven o’clock—so a quick finish. “And I remain, with passionate kisses, your ever-loving future wife, Sophie.” She did not attach any value to the word wife. She did not even know if she wanted to marry him, but she must use the word so that he would be given her letter in the penitentiary.

And the convict, Hans Liebschner, would get the letter, for he was not one of those who had been put into solitary confinement for roaring too madly. No, in spite of being scarcely half a year in prison, he had been promoted to orderly against all rules and regulations. And now he talked with particular conviction about harvest crews. He could do so. Neulohe, he knew, was not far from Meienburg, and Neulohe was the home of a nice girl called Sophie.

I’ll wangle it all right, he thought.

VIII

The girl had awakened.

She lay, her head propped on her hand, looking at the window; the dingy curtain did not move. She believed she could smell the reeking heat from the courtyard. She shuddered a little—not from the cold, but because of the horrible heat and the foul stench. She looked at her body. It was white and faultless; wonderful that anything could remain so white in such a corrupt atmosphere.

She had no idea what the time was; from the sounds it might be nine or ten, or even eleven o’clock—after eight the noises were very much alike. It was possible that the landlady, Frau Thumann, would come in soon with the morning coffee, and she sought, in accordance with Wolfgang’s wishes, to get up and dress decently and cover him up also. Very well, she would do it at once. Wolfgang had surprising fits of propriety.

“It doesn’t matter,” she had said. “The Thumann woman is used to such things—and worse. As long as she gets her money nothing worries her.”

Wolfgang had laughed affectionately. “Worry, when she sees you like that!” He looked at her. Such glances always made her tender—she would have liked
to draw him toward her, but he continued, more seriously: “It’s for our sakes, Peter, for our sakes. Even if we’re in the mud now, we would really be stuck in it if we let everything slide.”

“But clothes don’t make one either respectable or not respectable.”

“It isn’t a question of clothes,” he had replied, almost heatedly. “It’s something to remind us that we’re neither of us dirt. And when I’ve struck it lucky, it’ll be easier for us if we’ve refused to accept things here. We mustn’t come down to their level.” He was muttering by this time. Again he was thinking how he would “pull it off”; lost in his thoughts, as so often before. He was often miles away from her, his Peter.

“By the time you’ve brought it off I shan’t be with you,” she had once said, and there had been silence for a little while, till the meaning of her words penetrated his brooding.

“You’ll always be with me, Peter,” he had replied, “Always and always. Do you think I’ll forget how, night after night, you wait up for me? That I’ll forget how you sit here—in this hole—with nothing? Or forget that you never ask questions, and never nag me, however I come home? Peter”—and his eyes shone with a brightness which she did not like, for it was not kindled by her—“last night I almost brought it off. For one second a mountain of money lay before me.… I felt it was almost in my grasp. Only once or twice more.… No, I’ll not pretend to you. I wasn’t thinking of anything definite—not of a house or a garden or a car, not even of you.… It was like a sudden light in front of me. No—more like a beam of light in me. Life was as wide and clear as the sky at sunrise. Everything was pure … Then,” he hung his head, “a tart spoke to me, and from that moment everything went wrong.”

He had stood with bent head at the window. Taking his trembling hand between hers, she felt how young he was, how young in enthusiasm and despair, young and without any sense of responsibility.

“You’ll bring it off,” she said softly. “But when you do, I shan’t be with you.”

He pulled away his hand. “You’ll stay with me,” he said coldly. “I forget nothing.” And she knew then that he was thinking of his mother, who had once slapped her face; she hadn’t wanted to stay with him because of that. But now she would be staying with him forever. He hadn’t yet succeeded indeed, and she had known for a long time that he was not going the right way about it. But what did it matter? Though there could still be this dirty room and she couldn’t know from one day to another what they were going to live on, or whether they could have any clothes or furniture—from one o’clock this morning she would be tied to him.

She reached out for her stockings and began to slip them on.

Suddenly she was seized by a terrible anxiety. Everything might have gone wrong yesterday, utterly wrong; the last 1,000-mark note lost. But she dared not to get up to make sure. With burning eyes she looked at Wolfgang’s clothes hanging over the chair near the door, trying to guess the amount of money in them by the bulge in his right-hand coat pocket.

The fees have to be paid, she thought anxiously. If the fees aren’t paid it can’t happen.

It was fruitless, this study. Sometimes he kept his handkerchief in that pocket. Perhaps new notes had been issued—500,000-mark notes, 1,000,000-mark notes. And what would a civil marriage cost? One million? Two million? Five million? How could she know? Even if she had been brave enough to reach into the pocket and count, she would still know nothing! She never knew anything.

The pocket was not bulging enough.

Slowly, so that the bed springs did not creak, cautiously, anxiously, she turned to him.

“Good morning, Peter,” he said in a cheerful voice. His arm pulled her to his breast, and she put her mouth against his mouth. She did not want to hear what he said.

“I’m entirely broke, Peter. We haven’t a single mark left.”

In the silence that followed the fires of love grew brighter. The stale air of the room was purified by a white-hot flame. In spite of everything, merciful arms raise lovers from the struggle, the hunger and despair, the sin and wickedness, into the clean cool heaven of consummation.

Chapter Two
Berlin Slumps

I

Many streets round Schlesische Bahnhof are sinister. In 1923, to the dreariness of the facades, the evil smells, the misery of that barren stone desert, there was added a widespread shamelessness, the child of despair or indifference, lechery born of the itch to heighten a sense of living in a world which, in a mad rush, was carrying everyone toward an obscure fate.

Rittmeister von Prackwitz, in an over-elegant light-gray suit made to measure by a London tailor, looked almost too conspicuous with his lean figure, snow-white hair above a deeply tanned face, dark bushy eyebrows and bright eyes. He walked with fastidiously upright carriage, careful not to come into contact with others, his gaze directed to an imaginary point far down the street, so that he need not see anything or anybody. He would have liked to transport his hearing also, to, say, the rustling harvest-ripe cornfields in Neulohe, where reaping had scarcely started; he had tried not to listen to scorn and envy and greed calling after him.

It was as if he were back in the unhappy days of November 1918, when he and twenty comrades—the remainder of his squadron—went marching down a Berlin street in the neighborhood of the Reichstag and suddenly, from window, roof and dark entry, bullets had pelted down on the small party; an irregular, wild, cowardly sniping. They had marched on then as he now did, chin pushed out, lips compressed, staring at an imaginary point at the end of the street, a point they would possibly never reach.

The Rittmeister had the feeling that, in the five years of lunacy which followed, he had in reality always been marching on like this, eyes fixed on an imaginary point, waking as well as sleeping—because there was no sleeping without dreams during those years. Always a desolate street full of enmity, hatred, baseness, vulgarity; and if against all expectation one came to a turning, there opened up only another similar street, with the same hate and the same vulgarity. But there again was that point which had no real existence and was a mere figment of the imagination. Or was that point something which did not exist outside, but within himself, in his very own chest—let him be frank:
in his heart? And perhaps he marched on because a man must, without listening to hate and vulgarity, even though from a thousand windows ten thousand evil eyes are watching him, even though he is quite alone—for where were his comrades? Perhaps he marched on because only thus could a man fulfill himself and become what he had to be in this world—himself.

Here in Langestrasse near Schlesische Bahnhof in Berlin, accursed city, Rittmeister von Prackwitz was haunted by the sensation that, although confronted by ten blatant coffee-house signs advertising nothing but brothels, the goal of his march was at hand. He, who much against his will had come here to hunt up at least sixty laborers for the harvest, could soon lower his eyes, stand at ease and feel with the Lord God: “Behold, it was very good.”

Aye, a good, almost a bumper harvest stood in the fields, a harvest which those famished townspeople could very well do with, and he had had to leave it all in the charge of his bailiff, a somewhat dissipated young fellow, and go up to town to bed laborers. It was strange and utterly incomprehensible that the greater the misery in the city, the scarcer the food, and the more the country offered at least a sufficiency, the more people made for the city like moths attracted by a deadly flame.

The Rittmeister burst into a laugh. Yes, indeed, it really looked as if the heavenly rest after the sixth day of creation was near at hand. Or was it a
fata Morgana
, a mirage of an oasis, seen when thirst became unbearable?

The female in whose face he had unthinkingly laughed emptied behind him a pailful, a barrelful, nay, a whole vatful of filthy abuse. The Rittmeister, however, turned into a shop over which hung a dilapidated signboard with the words: “Berlin Harvesters’ Agency.”

II

The flame rises up and sinks; it is extinguished; happy the hearth that retains the glow. The glow dies down, but there is still warmth.

Wolfgang Pagel sat at the table in his field-gray tunic, now extremely worn and old. His hands rested on the bare oilcloth covering. “Madam Po has scented it,” he whispered, winking and nodding at the door.

“What?” asked Petra. “You’re not going to call Frau Thumann Madam Po, or she will throw us out,” she added.

“That’s certain,” he said. “There won’t be any breakfast today. She’s scented it.”

“Shall I ask her, Wolf?”

“Don’t bother. He who asks won’t get. Let’s wait.”

Wolgang tilted the chair, rocked back and started to whistle:
Arise, ye prisoners of starvation.…
He was quite unconcerned, unworried. Through the window—the curtain was now drawn—a gleam of sun entered the dreary gray room, or what is called sun in Berlin; all the light which the smoke-blanket lets through. As he rocked to and fro the sun lit up sometimes his wavy hair, sometimes his face with its sparkling gray-green eyes.

Petra, who had on only his shabby summer overcoat dating from pre-war times, looked at him. She was never tired of looking; she admired him. It was a wonder how he managed to wash in a little hand-basin with less than a pint of water and still look as if he scrubbed himself for an hour in a bath. She felt old and used up compared with him, although she was actually a year younger.

Abruptly he stopped whistling and listened to the door. “The enemy approaches. Will there be any coffee? I’m frightfully hungry.”