Every Man Dies Alone (18 page)

Finally she’s on her feet. She takes the bunch of keys out of her handbag, reaches for the sapphire bracelet as if it were a talisman that could protect her—and slowly and uncertainly she makes her way out of the apartment. The door shuts behind her.

The judge, woken after long hesitation on the part of his cleaning woman, comes too late to keep his guest from this excursion into a too dangerous world.

He softly opens the outer door, stands for a while in the open doorway, listens above, listens below. Then, when he hears a sound, namely the swift energetic tramp of boots, he retreats into his apartment. But he doesn’t leave the peephole. If there’s a chance of saving the unhappy woman, he will open his door to her again, in spite of all the danger.

Frau Rosenthal isn’t even aware of passing anyone on her way up the stairs. She is driven by one thought, and one thought only, which is to reach the apartment and Siegfried as quickly as possible. But the
Hitler Youth commander Baldur Persicke, on his way to morning roll call, stands there open-mouthed with astonishment as the woman almost brushes past him. Frau Rosenthal, that Frau Rosenthal who has been missing so many days, up and about this Sunday morning, in a dark stitched blouse and
no star
, a bunch of keys and a bracelet in one hand, laboriously dragging herself up the banister with the other—that’s how drunk she is! Early on Sunday morning, and already drunk out of her skull.

For an instant, Baldur stays where he is, completely dumbfounded. But when Frau Rosenthal turns the corner of the stairs, his mental powers return to him, and his mouth snaps shut. He has the feeling that the moment has come—he mustn’t make a mistake now! No, this time he will take care of the thing himself, and no one, not his father or brothers or Borkhausen, is going to foul it up for him.

Baldur waits till he is sure Frau Rosenthal has reached the Quangels’ floor, then creeps quietly back into his parents’ flat. Everyone is still asleep, and the telephone is in the hallway. He picks up the receiver and dials, then asks for a particular number. He is in luck: even though it’s Sunday, he gets put through, and to the right man. He quickly says his piece, then moves a chair over to the door, opens the door a crack, and prepares to sit and wait for half an hour or an hour, to be sure the quarry doesn’t slip away again…

At the Quangels’ only Anna is up and about, quietly puttering around the flat. In between she looks in on Otto, who is still fast asleep. He looks tired and tormented, even now, in sleep. As though something is leaving him no peace. She stands there and looks thoughtfully at the face of the man she has lived with day after day for almost thirty years. She has long since grown used to the face, the sharp birdlike profile, the thin, almost always shut mouth—it no longer frightens her, any of it. He’s the man to whom she has given virtually her whole life. Looks aren’t important…

But this morning she gets the impression that the face has become even sharper, the mouth even thinner, the furrows on either side of the nose even more deeply etched. He is worried, deeply worried, and she neglected to talk to him in time, to help him carry his load. This Sunday morning, four days after she received the news of the death of her son, Anna Quangel is once again firmly convinced not only that she has to stick it out with this man, but that her obstinacy was wrong in the first place. She ought to have known him better: he always preferred silence to speech. She always had to encourage him to speak—the man would never say anything of his own free will.

Well, today he will speak to her. He said he would, last night,
on his return from work. Anna had had a bad day. When he ran off without any breakfast after she had spent hours waiting for him, and when he didn’t come home for dinner, when she realized that his shift had begun and he certainly wouldn’t come back until late, she had been in despair.

What had come over the man, ever since she let slip that unconsidered phrase? What drove him so remorselessly on? She knew him: ever since she’d said it, he’d been thinking only of how to prove to her that it was not “his” Führer at all. As if she had ever seriously meant it! She should have told him she had only said it in the first rush of grief and rage. She could have said quite other things about those crooks who had senselessly robbed her of her son’s life—but that happened to be the form of words that escaped her.

But now she had said it, and now he was here and there, running all sorts of risks to prove himself right and to show her, quite concretely if possible, how wrong she had been! Perhaps he wouldn’t be back. Perhaps he had already said or done something that got the factory direction or the Gestapo on his case—maybe he was already in prison! Restless as that calm man had been so early in the morning!

Anna Quangel can’t stand it, she can’t wait idly for him. She butters a couple of slices of bread, and sets off for the factory. She takes her wifely duties so seriously that even now, where every minute matters that will set her mind at rest, she doesn’t take the tram. No, she walks—saving their pennies, as he does.

From the gatekeeper at the furniture factory she learns that foreman Quangel had come in to work as punctually as ever. She has someone take him the bread and butter he “forgot,” and she waits for the person to return. “Well, what did he say?”

“What do you mean, what did he say? He never says anything!”

Now she can go home with her mind at rest. Nothing has happened yet, despite all the chaos this morning. And tonight she will speak to him…

He comes home. She can see from his face how tired he is.

“Otto,” she beseeches him, “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just somehing that slipped out during my immediate reaction. Please don’t be cross any more!”

“Me—cross with you? On account of something like that? Never!”

“But there’s something you want to do, I can sense it! Otto, don’t do it, don’t plunge yourself into misfortune over something like that! I could never forgive myself.”

He looks at her for a moment, nearly smiling. Then he quickly
lays both his hands on her shoulders. Quickly he takes them away again, as though ashamed of his spontaneous tenderness.

“What I want to do now is sleep! Tomorrow I’ll tell you what
we
are going to do.”

And now it’s tomorrow, and Quangel is still asleep. But another half hour or so doesn’t matter so much now. He is here with her, he can’t do anything that would get him into trouble, he is asleep.

She turns away from his bed and does a few little chores around the house.

By now Frau Rosenthal has reached her front door, in spite of her slow progress. She is not surprised to find the door locked—she unlocks it. She pays no attention to the wild disorder of the place, nor does she spend a lot of time in the flat looking for Siegfried, or calling to him; she has already forgotten that she came upstairs to follow her husband.

Her numbness is growing, growing all the time. You couldn’t say she was asleep, but she’s not awake either. Just as she can only move her heavy limbs slowly and clumsily, so, too, her mind feels heavy and numb. Pictures come up like snowflakes and dissolve before she can see what they are. She is sitting on the sofa, her feet resting on scattered linen, looking about her slowly and muzzily. In her hand she still has the keys and the sapphire bracelet Siegfried gave her at Eva’s birth. The takings of an entire week… She smiles faintly to herself.

Then she hears the front door being carefully opened, and she knows: That’s Siegfried. Here he is. That’s why I came up here. I’ll step out to meet him.

But she remains sitting where she is, a smile spread over the whole of her gray face. She will receive him here, sitting down, as though she had never been away, had always been sitting here to welcome him.

The door opens, but instead of the expected Siegfried, there are three men in the doorway. As soon as she sees a detested brown uniform among them, she knows: This isn’t Siegfried. Siegfried won’t be here. A slight fear stirs in her, but really only very slight. Now it’s time!

Slowly the smile disappears from her face, which changes color from gray to a greeny yellow.

The three men are directly in front of her. She hears a big, heavy man in a black cloak say, “Not drunk, my boy. Probably an overdose of sleeping pills. Let’s try to see what we can get out of her. Listen, are you Frau Rosenthal?”

She nods. “That’s right, gentlemen, Lore, or strictly speaking
Sara Rosenthal. My husband’s in prison in Moabit, I have two sons in the U.S.A., a daughter in Denmark, and another in England…”

“And how much money have you sent them?” Detective Inspector Rusch asks quickly.

“Money? Why money? They all have plenty of money! Why would I send them money?”

She nods seriously. Her children are all comfortably off. They could quite easily take responsibility for their parents as well. Suddenly she remembers something she has to say to these gentlemen. “It’s my fault,” she says with a clumsy tongue that feels heavier and heavier in her mouth, and starts to babble, “it’s all my fault. Siegfried wanted to flee Germany long ago. But I said to him, ‘Why leave all the lovely things behind, why sell the good business here for a pittance? We’ve done nothing to hurt anyone, they won’t do anything to us.’ I persuaded him, otherwise we would have been long gone!”

“And what have you done with the money?” the inspector asks, a little more impatiently.

“The money?” She tries to think. There was some left somewhere. Where did it get to? But concentrating is a strain for her, so she thinks of something else. She holds out the sapphire bracelet to the Inspector. “There!” she says simply. “There!”

Inspector Rusch casts a swift look at it, then looks round at his two companions, the alert Hitler Youth leader and his own regular number two, that sluggish lump Friedrich. He sees the two of them are watching him tensely. So he knocks the hand with the bracelet impatiently aside, takes the heavy woman by the shoulders, and shakes her hard. “Wake up, Frau Rosenthal!” he shouts. “That’s an order! I’m telling you to wake up!”

He lets her go, and her head lolls against the back of the sofa, her body sags—her tongue lisps something incomprehensible. This method of bringing her round seems not to have been the right one. For a while the three men look silently at the old woman slumped on the sofa, not recovering her consciousness.

The inspector suddenly whispers very quietly, “Why don’t you take her back to the kitchen with you, and wake her up!”

The assistant executioner Friedrich merely nods. He picks the heavy woman up with one arm and carefully clambers with her over the obstacles on the floor.

When he reaches the door, the inspector calls after him, “And keep it quiet, will you! I don’t want any noise on Sunday morning in
a tenement. Otherwise we’ll do it in Prinz Albrecht Strasse.
^*
I’ll be taking her back there later anyway.”

The door shuts behind them, and the inspector and Hitler Youth leader are alone.

Inspector Rusch stands by the window and looks down at the street below. “Quiet street, this,” he says. “A real play street, eh?”

Baldur Persicke affirms that it is indeed a quiet street.

The inspector is a little nervous, but not because of the business involving Friedrich and the old Jewess in the kitchen. Pah, worse things happen every day of the week. Rusch is a lawyer manqué, who made his way into the police service. Later, he graduated to the Gestapo. He likes his work. He would have liked his work under any regime, but the brisk methods of the present lot suit him down to the ground. “Don’t get sentimental,” he sometimes tells newcomers. “We have certain objectives. The way we get there doesn’t matter.”

No, the old Jewess doesn’t bother the inspector at all—he doesn’t have any of that sentimentality in him.

But this boy here, Hitler Youth leader Persicke, is cramping his style a bit. He doesn’t like outsiders present at any action; you never know how they’ll react. This one, admittedly, seems to be the right sort, but you really only know for sure when the job’s done.

“Did you notice, Inspector,” asks Baldur Persicke keenly—he tries to ignore the sounds coming from the kitchen, that’s their affair!—“did you notice she wasn’t wearing her Jewish star?”

“I noticed more than that,” the inspector says. “I noticed, for instance, that the woman’s shoes are clean, and it’s horrible weather outside.”

“Yes.” Baldur Persicke nods uncomprehendingly.

“So someone in the building must have been keeping her hidden since Wednesday, if she really hasn’t been up to her flat for as long as you say.”

“I’m fairly certain,” says Baldur Persicke, a little confused by the thoughtful gaze still being leveled at him.

“Fairly certain means nothing, my boy,” says the inspector contemptuously. “There’s no such thing.”

“I’m completely sure, then,” says Baldur quickly. “I am willing to testify on oath that Frau Rosenthal has not set foot in her flat since Wednesday.”

“All right, all right,” says the inspector, a little dismissively. “You must know, of course, that by yourself you couldn’t possibly have kept the flat under observation since Wednesday. No judge would take your word on that.”

“I have two brothers in the SS,” says Baldur Persicke eagerly.

“All right.” Inspector Rusch is content. “It’ll all take its course. But what I wanted to say to you is that I won’t be able to have the apartment searched till tonight. Perhaps you would continue to keep the place under observation? I take it you have keys?”

Baldur Persicke assures him happily that he’ll be delighted. His eyes shine with joy. Well, now—this was the other way, didn’t he know it, all perfectly legal and aboveboard.

“It would be nice,” the inspector drawls on, looking out of the window again, “if everything was left lying around like it is now. Of course, you’re not responsible for what’s in wardrobes and boxes, but other than that…”

Before Baldur can get out a reply, there is a high, shrill scream of terror from inside the apartment.

“Damn!” says the inspector, but he makes no move.