Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf (16 page)

Our little hands go clap clap clap, our little feet go tap tap tap.

That evening Biberkopf no longer lived in that room. Meck could not find out where he had moved to. He took little Lüders, who was malignantly determined, into his cafe with the cattle dealers. They were to question Lüders about what had happened and what about that letter which the saloon-keeper had received. Lüders remained obstinate, he looked so spiteful, that they let the poor devil go. Meck said himself: “He’s got his all right.”

Meck ruminated: Franz, well, maybe Lina had deceived him, or he had got mad at Lüders, or something else. The cattle dealers said: “That fellow Lüders is a sharper, whatever he tells you there isn’t a word of truth in it. Maybe Biberkopf is crazy. Remember when he had those notions about that permit, when he didn’t even have any goods to sell. That’s the way they act when their dander’s up.” Meck insisted: “That might affect your gall but not your bean. Bean’s entirely out of the question. Why, he’s an athlete, a day-laborer, he was a first-class furniture-mover, pianos and so on, a fellow like that wouldn’t have any trouble with his head.” “He’s just the kind it does hit on the head. He’s sensitive, that one. It’s because his head works too little, and if it does work, off it goes.” “Well, and what about you fellows and your law-suits? Everything going all right?” “A cattle dealer has a hard skull. Believe me. If they once start getting mad at things, they could all go to the Herzberge Asylum. We don’t get mad at all. Ordering goods .and then getting the slip or not getting paid, that happens to fellows like us every day. Folks simply never seem to have any money.” “Or no ready cash.” “That, too.”

One of the cattle dealers looked at his dirty vest: “You know at home I drink coffee out of a saucer, tastes better, but it spills.” “Ought to tie a napkin around you.” “So my old woman could have a laugh. No, my hands get shaky, just look.”

Meek and Lina can’t find Franz Biberkopf. They run all around, through half of Berlin but they don’t find him.

FOURTH BOOK
Franz Biberkopf has not really met with an accident. The ordinary reader will be astonished and ask: What happened then? But Franz Biberkopf is no ordinary reader. He feels that his principle, simple though it be, must be defective somewhere. He does not know where, but the feeling that this is so plunges him into uttermost gloom.

Here you are going to see our man boozing, almost giving himself up for lost. But it wasn’t so bad after all, Franz Biberkopf is being spared for a harder fall.

A Handful of Men around the Alex

On the Alexanderplatz they are tearing up the road-bed for the subway. People walk on planks. The street-cars pass over the square up Alexanderstrasse through Münzstrasse to the Rosenthaler Tor. To the right and left are streets. House follows house along the streets. They are full of men and women from cellar to garret. On the ground floor are shops.

Liquor shops, restaurants, fruit and vegetable stores, groceries and delicatessen, moving business, painting and decorating, manufacture of ladies’ wear, flour and mill materials, automobile garage, extinguisher company: The superiority of the small motor .syringe lies in its simple construction, easy service, small weight, small size. -German fellow-citizens, never has a people been deceived more ignominiously, never has a nation been betrayed more ignominiously and more unjustly than the German people. Do you remember how Scheidemann promised us peace, liberty, and bread from the window of the Reichstag on November 9, 1918? And how has that promise been kept? -Drainage equipment, window-cleaning company, sleep is medicine, Steiner’s Paradise Bed - Book-shop, the library of the modern man, our collected works of leading poets and thinkers compose the library of the modern man. They are the great representatives of the intellectual life of Europe. -The Tenants’ Protection Law is a scrap of paper. Rents increase steadily. The professional middle-class is being put on the street and strangled, the sheriff has a rich harvest. We demand public credits up to 15,000 marks for the small tradesman, immediate prohibition of all public auctions in the case of small tradesmen.-To face her hour of travail well prepared is the desire and duty of every woman. Every thought and feeling of the expectant mother revolves around the unborn. Therefore the selection of the right drink for the mother-to-be is of especial importance. Genuine Engelhardt Stout and Ale possess, above all other drinks, the qualities of palatability, nutritiousness, digestibility, tonic vigor. -Provide for your child and your family by contracting a life insurance with a Swiss life insurance company, Life Annuities Office, Zürich. -Your heart is light! Your heart is light with joy, if you possess a home equipped with the famous Hoffner furniture. Everything you have dreamed of with regard to pleasant comfort is surpassed by an undreamed-of reality. Although the years may pass, it will always look well and its durability and practical wear will make you enjoy it continuously.

The Private Protective Agencies watch everything, they walk around buildings and through buildings, they look into buildings, control clocks, Automatic Alarms, Watch and Safeguard Service for Greater Berlin and environs, Germania Protective Agency, Greater Berlin Protective Agency, and former Watch and Ward Division of the Care Proprietors’ Association of the Society of Berlin House-Owners and Landlords, Associated Management, West Side. Central Watchmen’s Service, Watch and Protection Company, Sherlock Company, collected works on Sherlock Holmes by Conan Doyle, Watch and Protection Company for Berlin and adjacent towns, catch it in time, Watch on the Rhine, wash on the line, washing eliminated, Apollo Linen Renting Agency, Adler’s Wet-Wash Service, handles all household and body linen, specialty of fine gents’ and ladies’ washing.

Above and in back of the shops, however, there are dwellings, behind which there are courtyards, side-wings, cross-buildings, out-houses, garden-houses. Linienstrasse, there is the house where Franz Biberkopf sneaked off after the trouble with Lüders.

In front there is a nice shoe-business with four brilliant show-windows, six girls serve the customers, that is, when there are any, they receive around 80 marks per head and nose, and at the most, after they become gray, they get 100. This nice big shoe-business belongs to an old woman, who married her business manager, and since that time sleeps in the back, and things are going badly for her. He is a dashing man, has made the shop flourish, but he is under forty and that’s the trouble. When he comes home late, the old woman is still awake and unable to sleep for rage. -On the first floor, the gentleman of the law. Does the wild rabbit in the Duchy of Saxe-Altenburg fall under the heading of hunting-game? The defense contumaciously disputes the finding of the District Court that the wild rabbit in the Duchy of Saxe-Altenberg may be numbered among the game animals. The issue concerning which animals are subject to the Game Laws and which may be hunted without permit has been decided differently in Germany in the various provinces. In the absence of special rulings the law of custom decides it. In the bill for the game-control law of Feb. 24, ‘54, the wild rabbit had not yet been mentioned.-At six at night a charwoman begins her work in the office, sweeps, scrubs the linoleum in the reception-room. The lawyer hasn’t enough money for a vacuumcleaner, the stingy old thing, particularly as he is not even married, and Frau Zieske, who rants about being the houselady ought to know that. The charwoman scrubs and cleans with might and main, she is grotesquely thin, but supple, she slaves for her two children. The importance of fats for nutrition: fat covers the bone promontories and protects the underlying tissue against pressure and shocks, highly emaciated persons complain therefore of a pain in the sale while walking. But this is not the case with this charwoman.

At seven o’clock in the evening, Herr Löwenhund, Attorney at Law, is seated at his writing-desk, working by two lighted table-lamps. It so happens that the telephone is not busy. In the criminal case Gross A 8 780-27, I assume authority to act on behalf of the accused, Frau Gross, under the circumstances. I request that I may be authorized to enter into personal communication with the said accused. -To Frau Eugenie Gross, Berlin. Dear Frau Gross: It had been my intention for a long time to pay you another visit. Pressure of work and my indisposition have, however, made this impossible. I have every hope that I may be able to visit you next Wednesday and I beg you until then, to be patient. Faithfully yours. Letters, money-orders and parcel-post should bear the personal address as well as the prisoner’s number. As destination give Berlin N.W. 52, Moabit 12a.

-To Herr Tollmann. In your daughter’s affair. I feel obliged to ask for an additional fee, the sum of 200 marks, I leave you the choice of payment by installments. Secondly: resubmit. -My dear Attorney, as I desire to visit my unfortunate daughter in Moabit, but do not know to whom to apply, I ask you to be so kind as to arrange when I can go there. And also to arrange for me to send her a package of foodstuffs every fortnight. I await a reply by return mail, preferably at the end of this or the beginning of next week. Frau Tollmann (mother of Eugenie Gross). -Lawyer Löwenhund gets up. With a cigar in his mouth he looks through the curtain slit down upon the lighted Linienstrasse and thinks, shall I telephone her or not? Venereal diseases, a deserved misfortune, Superior District Court, Frankfurt 1, C. 5. One may think less severely of the moral delinquency of sexual intercourse on the part of unmarried men and yet admit that in a legal sense an offense is incurred, that extra-conjugal sexual intercourse, as Staub says, is a dangerous excess, and that he who indulges in such excesses must bear their consequences. And Plank, too, following this decision, regards a sickness caused by extra-conjugal sexual intercourse in the case of a man liable to military service as a malady due to gross negligence.-He takes off the receiver, Neukölln Office, please, ah, the number is changed to Earwald.

Second story: The manager and two stout couples, a brother with his wife and a sister with her husband, also a sick girl.

Third story: A man 64 years old, a furniture-polisher with a bald spot on his head. His daughter, a divorcee, keeps house for him. He crashes down the stairs every morning, his heart is bad, he will soon have himself put on the sick-list
(Coronarsclerosis, Nyodegeneratio cordis).
He was formerly a crack oarsman, what can he do now? Read papers in the evening, light his pipe, while the daughter, of course, stands gossiping in the hallway. His wife is not there, died at 45, she was alert and hot-blooded, could never get enough, you know what I mean, and so one day she went all to pieces, but said nothing; next year she probably would have had her change of life anyway, off she goes to one of them women, then to the hospital, and that’s the last of her.

Next-door a turner, around thirty, he has a little boy, a room, and a kitchen; his wife, too, is dead, consumption, he also coughs, the boy is in a day-nursery during the day, at night the man fetches him. When the boy has gone to sleep, the man prepares his weak tea, potters till late at night with his radio, is foreman in the radio union, cannot fall asleep until his tinkering has succeeded.

Then a waiter with a woman, room and kitchen nicely arranged, gas chandelier with glass pendants. The waiter is at home all day till two, he sleeps till then, and plays the zither, while lawyer Löwenhund in a black gown dashes around the District Court 1, 2, 3, through the halls, from one lawyer’s room to another, from one court to another, the case is postponed, I pray for a judgment for failure to appear against the defendant. The waiter’s girl-friend is supervisor in a department store. So she says. This waiter, during his married life, was disgracefully deceived by his wife.

But she was always able to console him until he finally walked out. He was nothing more than a bed-fellow, always running back to the woman, and was nevertheless finally declared the guilty party in the divorce trial, because he couldn’t prove anything and had shamefully deserted his wife. Then he got to know the present one in Hoppegarten, where she was out man-hunting. The same brand of woman as the first, only a bit cleverer. He doesn’t notice anything when his girl-friend goes off every few days on a so-called business trip, since when does a supervisor have to travel, well, it’s a confidential post. But now he is sitting on the sofa, with a wet towel on his head; he is crying and she has to wait on him. He slipped in the street and couldn’t get up. So he says. Somebody had pushed him. She doesn’t go to her so-called business. If he noticed anything it would be too bad, he’s certainly a nice, sweet boob. We’ll fix him up all right.

At the very top a tripe butcher, where of course there’s a bad smell and also the howling of children and alcohol. Next-door a baker’s apprentice with his wife, an employee in a printing-shop, she has inflammation of the ovaries. Wonder what those two get out of life? Well, first of all, they get each other, than last Sunday a vaudeville and a film, then this or that social meeting and a visit to his parents. Nothing else? Well now, don’t drop dead, sir. Add to that nice weather, bad weather, country picnics, standing in front of the stove, eating breakfast and so on. And what more do you get, you, captain, general, jockey, whoever you are? Don’t fool yourself.

Biberkopf in a Stupor. Franz sneaks off, Franz doesn’t want to look at Anything

Franz Biberkopf, watch out, how’s all this boozing going to end! Always lying around the dump, doing nothing but drinking and moping and moping!

Whose business is it what I’m doing? If I want to mope, I’ll mope in one spot till doomsday. He nibbles at his nails, groans, moves his head on the sweaty pillow, blows through his nose: I’ll lie like this till doomsday, if I want to. If that woman would only heat the room a bit. She sure is lazy, thinks about nothing but herself.

He turns his head away from the wall, there’s a mushy something on the floor, a puddle.-Puked. Must ‘a’ been me. The stuff a man carries around with him in his stomach. Phew! Spider webs in the gray corner, they can’t catch any mice. I’d like a drink of water. Whose business is that? My spine hurts too. Just come in, Frau Schmidt. Between the spider webs up above (black dress, long teeth). Some slut that one (comes from the ceiling). Phew! A fool says to me, why do you stay at home? In the first place, says t you fool, what right have you to ask me that, and in the second place, if I stay here from 8-12. And then in that stinking dump. He says he was joking. Nope, that’s no joke. Kaufmann also said, he can ask him, then. Maybe I can arrange it, so in February, in February or March I could, March is right-